Nabokov's Butterflies.

Things come together, as always.  This week, we'll throw bioinformatics, Russian literature, and butterflies into the stew.  You're skeptical, I know, but it will taste delicious.

He's the kind of a man, needs the kind of a woman like me.

Today's entry felt too impersonal as an essay.  It needed a voice- any voice, apparently, because mine worked.  It was more true to how I came up with it, anyway.  Sometimes, you just need the pauses, inflections, and "um's". Sorry for the stuffy nose, and you might need to turn it up.

 

Also, the track barely discernible in the background. I discovered it through Sita Sings the Blues, which is a wonderful animated film that I urge you all to check out. One of my favorites.

Moanin' Low- Billie Holiday

P.S. I'm applying to be a writing consultant; hoping I get it.

One Word.

I started this blog so that I could write often.  Writing often is one of the most major parts of writing well, in my opinion.  So, when I stumbled upon oneword, I was obviously quite excited to give it a try.  I've been doing one a day for a few months now.  You should head over and write one. It only takes sixty seconds.

Here's my entry for today's word, radar.

Radar. Radar. Forwards and backwards, the same.  Forwards and backwards, but there were still no dots appearing in the grid.  Palindromes flooded my mind- shamefully, because you were lost somewhere in the dark waters.  With every fruitless blink of the screen, you grew farther and farther away. Visions of racecars at noon. You were probably gone by then. 

And, reader.

On the table, it was a maze of tiny dots.  His fingers navigated them effortlessly, tracing the tips along pathways that were invisible to me.  I imagined him suddenly shrunken to the size of the reader, running breathlessly through mountains of plastic.  His eyes, a gentle shade of dull blue, were useful only to me. They betrayed moments of brief discernment as his hands brushed particular spots of the page.  They flashed abruptly, and he quickly withdrew his hands.  I could tell that he had seen me. 

    

 I might be addicted. average.

His appearance was nearly average, but there was a warmth in the eyes.  The corners of his mouth gently coaxed his lips into a timid half-smile.  I liked the wringing hands.  Strangers to labor, I could tell. They looked soft, like two delicate things quarreling.  They gripped tighter. He exhaled his words effortlessly, maybe tenderly. My forced passivity grew more unbearable with every syllable.

lousy.

It fell. It collided rudely with objects on a reckless path towards the ground.  She could see its scornful shape as it sunk through the air. Her own words entered dutifully into battle, punching blindly as they also descended.  The hopeful victors met at her feet, but the assault had moved to her mind.  All of them lay still at the end of it- vile bodies born of crooked letters and ill intentions. 

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. "

This is a really excellent set of guidelines on writing technically.

I think it really highlights the importance of writing for an audience rather than yourself.  I mean, you (presumably) already understand what you're describing. Share the love.  Consider the reader's interests more than your own.

Carl Sagan says, "It's not all about you."

By the way, have you all seen this?  The Carl Sagan one is also excellent.

"Tenuousness at best."

I almost cannot contain my excitement at the moment.

I've been in a constant spiral of uncertainty for the past few weeks.  I found myself twirling my pencil in class, pretending for brief moments between lecture slides that it was my theoretical bachelor's in science.  Then, in flickering instants of terrorizing ambivalence, I transformed it into a degree in the humanities and sought any noticeable change in ease of hypothetical mind.  Each idea seemed equally plausible, yet neither seemed altogether preferable.    

I've always assumed that I'd find a lab somewhere and do what scientists presumably do.   

 Study and make bad puns?.

There are two immediate problems with this.
1. I don't know how much I'm meant for a lab.  I can't envision myself at this point creating experiments and dealing with potentially unexciting, unsatisfying results.
2. Goddammit, I just want to write.

Note: There is, however, no immediate problem with that pun.

Regardless, I'm an uncomfortable hybrid of literary and scientific tastes.  I saw a line scribbled on a wall last year that read, "I'm too creative for my science classes, and I'm too scientific for my art classes."  Vandals can be quite elegant, it seems.

I wrote a few days ago about my chemistry professor's suggestion that I consider technical writing. Not my thing.  But, what about science writing?  I offhandedly googled it today, and what I read left me in this current state of precarious excitement.

"By far the most important qualities needed by a prospective science writer are a fascination with science and a talent for writing clearly, accurately and with an interesting flair. Science writers must also possess a drive to continue learning throughout their professional lives, because unlike the case in many journalism specialties, each new science story can present new concepts and a new vocabulary to master. Also, like other journalists and PIOs, science writers will also increasingly have to learn to work in multimedia, using text, graphics, video and audio to communicate their stories."

I don't think that could possibly sound more like me.  A quick search for graduate programs turned up a hit at MIT, as well.  

The potential to be able to keep science near while simultaneously working to make it more accessible to the public is a very enticing thing for me.  I read so many articles with misleading information, and I think we could very much benefit from a stronger connection between scientists and the rest of the world.  All I need to do is look at the rest of my Genetics in the New Age class.  They find some of the articles to be very boring, and they don't get the full picture from some of them.  "They don't have to be boring!" is the thought bouncing around my mind.

I'm very serious about my writing, improving it and otherwise.  To me, failure to provide context is an unforgivable offense.  For instance, one of our class debates centered around unintended consequences of transgenic studies.  One paper cited a group of scientists (as if they were crazy) that grew functioning legs on Drosophila where antennae should have been.  The article somewhat implied that the researchers did this for funsies, and the class reacted negatively as such.  But the lack of context ignored the fact that this was probably more of an important study on homeotic gene expression than a case of scientists trying to play God.

 "Lolz! Alright, now let's do some real science."

Suggested solution? Become a writer.  At least I could work to decrease the rate of incidence  of misinformation at a microcosmic level. I would love to assist in responsibly spreading knowledge to others.  When so many people seem to stray from logic, I could work to bring it closer.  I may even be able to incorporate my love for philosophy (specifically, bioethics and epistemology).  This might just be the thing for me.  I'm heading over to my professor's office hours to discuss potential resources tomorrow, but we'll see what happens.



Also, here is the song that inspired the title of this post. This performance is beautiful, and I love Andrew Bird.

 

"Tenuosness at best was all he had to say when pressed about the rest of it, the world that is."

Unsolicited advice.

People ask me for advice in writing often. While I don't pretend to be an extraordinary writer, I have worked hard over the years to improve myself. All this time, I've been in the corner, hurriedly scribbling on a piece of paper.  It's woven from the fibers of all the other writers and essayists stored in my memory, and it's edited by all the teachers I've ever had.  At the end I found myself in possession of a carefully drawn map of the pitfalls I've encountered and the paths I've unearthed and created around them. I carry it with me at all times, but you can borrow it. Or better? Make your own.

 

Still less confusing than Port Authority city transit routes.

The most useful piece of advice I've ever received came from a professor at Princeton by the name of Jim Pryor, via my philosophy professor (who has been immensely helpful during my time here at Allegheny). Essentially, Pryor calls upon you to channel your inner Descartes and build yourself a strong foundation for your paper.

But before you go off in search of a piece of wax to examine for the next few hours, pull up a chair and grab hold of a bit of that crazy skepticism.

You thought you were writing this paper for the average reader, with a forgiving sense of compassion for all the interesting things you have to say? Pfft. You're writing for Descartes' evil daemon now.


He's mean.
He doesn't care what you have to say. Why should he? In fact, he delights in proving you wrong whenever he can.  He will pounce upon weak arguments and crush them into tiny, little bits.  Don't leave cracks in your argument, or you'll never hear the end of it. The daemon gets angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.

He's lazy.
Being an evil daemon is hard work, what with constantly deceiving everyone about everything day in and day out.  Do you think he has time for this shit?  He wants the shortest, most direct path to your argument daemonly possible.  Don't mess around with unnecessary verbiage and impertinent, tangential arguments.  Be clear and concise.   

He's stupid. 
He tells people that he could have passed that epistemology class if he had tried and that he enjoys his dead-end job in the department of deception, but the 'evil genius' moniker is just a facade.  A complicated argument will throw him into tangles of confusion.  You must ensure that every inference is guaranteed to be the one you intended. Leave no room for interpretation, and explain every point fully to avoid logical holes.  No need for an infinite regress madness (I'm looking at you, Achilles), but gaping holes aren't preferable either. 

If the daemon is sitting in the corner, crying in an existential heap, congratulations! You've written a great paper.  And if you've defeated the best, you've defeated the rest.  Base your paper on this hypothetical worst case scenario and, like Descartes, you'll be left with an incorrigible foundation upon which no dissonant argument can safely stand.  Your paper thinks, therefore it is...awesome.

 

The skeptical daemon, defeated.  

"You are soon going to change your present line of work."

I ordered Chinese the week before fall break, and a fortune cookie told me to seek a new line of work. I found this hilarious, because I happened to be on the brink of an academic breakdown. In case you haven't noticed, chemistry isn't my thing.

I was charged with the task of writing two essays and a lab report that week, and I had a bio exam in a few days. I had just declared my major/minor combination early a few weeks prior (biology and philosophy, if you were wondering). And here was this fucking fortune cookie.

As a memento of how absurd circumstances in my life tend to be, I pinned it to my desk.

I've since gotten my lab report back. After a vague speech by my professor about the general weaknesses of the class's reports, I was expecting the worst. But we did well. Very well. I was happy. Later in the day, he pulled me aside in the lab to tell me something.

I panicked at first, anticipating phrases like, "You are about to blow something up," and, "What would be the product of chemical X and Y?" Instead, it was something about how my lab partners had told him that I'd written the report and that he was impressed. He discussed the possibility of becoming a technical writer. Though I knew I'd grow bored writing procedures, I thanked him for bringing it up.

The truth is that after the multitude of issues I've faced in that course, I really needed to hear that I'd succeeded in at least one aspect of it. And it made me begin to think about how much I enjoy writing and how, apparently, it seems to be my one natural talent. So, who knows? While I don't think I could stand to be a technical writer, I might end up moving more towards the writing side of the sciences. They need people to explain, and I can do it. Because, sorry scientists...but you're not always the best at explaining things. The smarts that you have (and that maybe I lack in some ways), I can convey.

Touche, fortune cookie.

Silly writer, I am.

Also, those glasses are part of my Velma costume this Halloween. Have I really not been Velma before?