When Trying To Be Helpful Goes Wrong

"I saw a snake the other day. It was a small snake, at the back of the complex. On a gray box near some bushes. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it wasn't close to me. But it looked like it might be a coral snake."

"You know how to tell the difference, right?"

"What?"

"Between a king snake and a coral snake?"

"No. I'm going to treat every snake like a coral snake, so it doesn't matter."

"No, you need to know. There's a mnemonic. You need to know it just in case."

"I don't need to know...I am just going to treat..."

"Red on black, friend of Jack......ermm....black on yellow, poisonous fellow. Wait, no. Red on black friend of Jack. Red on yellow, poisonous fellow. Yeah. That's it. I think...yeah, that's it."

"I'm just going to treat every snake like a coral snake."

But We Can't Talk About It Now

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but I have seasonal tastes in music. The music I listen to in the spring [Funeral by The Arcade Fire] isn't the same as the summer [Red of Tooth and Nail by Murder by Death] or the winter [April by Vast, DECEMBERUNDERGROUND by AFI]. It's not that I don't listen to those albums other times in the year [I do], but they stick out more at those times of year. I'm much more likely to grasp for them, to play them over and over in loops.

I can't really say what it is about them that makes them seasonal--it has a lot to do with the general gestalt of the sound, the instruments and the beat, the lyrics. But also, I think, I associate each album with the season in which they first came to me, the season that wound around me as I fell, deeply, in love with each individual song.

It's November, of course, but our weather here has been described as "schizophrenic." Alternately rainy and balmy with bright and cool. Mild. Probably best described as mild.

The last few days have been positively brilliant for rolling down the windows of my car and listening to my autumn music. Here, this season, there are three albums:

1. Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes

I "discovered" Fleet Foxes last autumn, at the beginning of the school year. It became the easy backdrop for the last few months of 2008--winding around me in the car or as I made dinner. The sound was immediately drawing, a mix of the indie sound I love and the CSNY sound of the music my parents raised me on. I'm just waiting for the day I can go see these guys live.

My favorite songs on the album are, well, all of them. But I particularly like:

White Winter Hymnal

Tiger Mountain Peasant Song [as covered here by "First Aid Kit"]

He Doesn't Know Why

2. Kid A by Radiohead

Yes, I know, everyone and his mother started listening to Radiohead years ago. But last autumn, they fell into my hands for the first time.

Idioteque

3. Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie

Not the first songs I'd ever heard by Death Cab, but definitely my favorite. Autumn 2005 for 10/11 of the songs. A beautiful album, and almost perfect.

Lightness

Tiny Vessels

Then, in 2006--late in the year, when I was spinning and off. I discovered that one of the dangers of chronically pirating music is sometimes losing pieces of albums, that one single song that could bring everything home.

We Looked Like Giants

***

I think, honestly, that my autumn music is the most beautiful music in my cd case. It represents a depth and reflects the stark change that autumn can be. Music so deep and beautiful it hurts sometimes.

I know that the videos are jumbled--a mix of true videos, live performances and fan mixes. But I chose them for specific reasons--because they show the range of experiences these songs can reflect. And show a little bit of what they can mean to each person--even the people who wrote them.

Sometimes, in someone redoubling a song you've heard one hundred times, you find something new in it. And that can be just as enlightening as the first time you sat--in the car or in the dark--smiling or sobbing because of the way the song made you feel.

The Occasionally Unbearable Heaviness of Being

Three years ago, I wrote:

"There were razor blades stuck in between the shelves above her desk, and her blue veins had never shown so brightly against the white of her wrist."

Because there were razor blades in the shelves above my desk. Because there are razor blades in the shelves above my desk. They're all over the lab--stuck into crevices and sitting on ledges. A whole box of them in a drawer--individually wrapped in paper, shiny and sharp.

I use them, almost every day. I use them to cut packaging, to open up my sterilized filter pipette tips, to trim off clean lines of cortex from the kidneys of rats. Every day, I make a choice to pull one off the shelf, to use it, to put it back or throw it away into a sharps container. Every day, I have choice.

***

Every time I go to see him, the Android asks me if I have suicidal thoughts.

You'd think I would get used to it, people asking me if I want to kill myself. It's par for the course when you're in treatment for a mood disorder.

If asked if I ever thought about killing myself, I have to answer yes. But yes gets no relief--you have to elaborate. My first two years of medical treatment have taught me what they're looking for.

Plan. "What ways would you kill yourself?" Hanging, I might reply. Bridge jumping. Cutting.

Means. "Could you get the things that would allow you to kill yourself?" Ropes aren't that hard to find. I say. You can buy them anyway--the hardware store, Wal-Mart. Fuck, I could probably find one somewhere. And there are endless numbers of bridges here. And razors. There are razors stuck in the shelves of our lab.

***

I'm missing the third part. I'm missing the intent, the real desire.

But I haven't been to the Android lately. And when I do, I wonder what I'll say when he asks.

I wonder, every day--will I mention that one moment, when I was crossing the street on that bad bad week. I wonder if I'll tell him that a car almost came into the crosswalk, and for two seconds, I couldn't stop.

That instead of the normal "You better cut it out, asshole," that flashes in my head when someone goes too fast, I thought, please hit me.

I don't wish for death. I don't now, and I never really have. But I have wished for physical pain, for physical harm--I don't know why. I don't know if I expect it to give an outlet for the mental pain I sometimes have. Or if I expect it to make me slow down. Or if I expect it would be easier for people to relate, because people understand physical pain.

Or if it's just the memory of what a relief it can be, when you hurt inside and you accidentally slip a knife, and you are bleeding and sobbing, choking--but then, eventually it's over and you feel so much better.

***

I've never been a cutter. I've never physically harmed myself. But the idea is seductive, sometimes. You get the feeling, sometimes, that it's not as far from you as you think it is. That all it would take is a bad day, a bad week. Someone saying the wrong thing. And it's scary, because it would be so goddamned easy, to be inconsolable and to take the plunge, to sink that shiny blade into my upper arm or thigh, the fleshy skin of my hip.

***

I don't tell people these things. I don't talk about it. I don't want for people to think I'm some fleshy bag of emotions, liable to crack at the slightest affront. Even the people who are there to help, even the Android or the people who care for and love me. Even those who would want to be there, who would want to help.

So I delve into books, savor and search them. I pull out fragments of them, embed the words into my head. To pull out when I need them.

Some days, Donald Barthelme whispers in my ear:

"And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life?

And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life."

And yes, yes--I know. The Android is my psychiatrist, not Donald Barthelme. And maybe one shouldn't always take existential advice on the meaning of things from writers.

But if it makes me stop in my tracks for three minutes. If it pushes me past razor blades, safely through a crosswalk and into the evening, then it can't be that bad.

And writers and literature may always be my solace. But it's something. Even on the worst days, it's something.

Mid-NaBloPoMo Writer's Block and Exhaustion

My last few days as a "mitochondriac" have made me seriously exhausted. I am not at all cut out for these long days and evenings.

It's been truly fantastic--I've gotten the opportunity to meet such fantastic scientists and I've been so impressed. Some of the speakers are people who I've cited in different papers. It's so weird, like meeting a favorite author or a politician.

Perhaps even more than that, though, I've enjoyed spending more time interacting and getting to know the other people in the department. Much more than ever before, I really feel like I'm a part of something, like I fit in.

So, yes--exhausted. But strangely fulfilled too.

Meet Me At The Bar

I am fully exhausted from a 14 hour day at a conference being hosted by my department. The meeting site is a forty-five minute drive from my house and--although, I am thankfully carpooling with our post-doc--it's a long drive. To be there at 7:30 AM, we had to leave at 6:45; we left at 9:10, getting me home at 10-ish. So, I'm tired.

But, here are ten of my favorite things about scientific conferences:

10. The unmitigated dorkiness that goes on. Today, I met someone else who loves the Nobel prizes as much as me--it was so exciting!

9. The chance to meet and speak with the "rock stars" of your field.

8. When someone who is presenting simply answers a question with, "Oh yes--we answered that question in 1977. You should read our papers!"

7. When two people have discovered the same things twice in the past two years. And as one walks back to his seat, the other simply yells: "We should speak more often!"

6. How much more palatable data--good, bad or otherwise--becomes when you have a beer in your hand.

5. The sudden insights you have into your own work, when you start writing ideas frantically in your notebook.

4. The pained look on a moderator's face when the presenter is 10 minutes over and people are squirming in their chairs with impatience.

3. Watching a seasoned presenter give a talk and answer questions--seriously, it's so goddamned beautiful.

2. When arguments break out in the questions portion of the last presentation of the night, when it's 10:00 PM and 97% of the people in the room just want to go home...

1. And when those arguments are resolved by the presenter's flourished wave of the hand as he yells, "Just meet me at the bar!"

Linguistics Minutes

One of my favorite quotes:

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointments of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with the "hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar."
[Jeffrey Eugenides, from Middlesex ]

I think about this quote often, actually--when I feel any of the emotions Eugenides describes, yes, but also when I experience others that I think belong on the list.

Like, the amusement inherent in the arguments of two scientists at the same conference.

The clean smile you give to someone who truly understands you.

The exhaustion that comes from pretending you are something you are not.

The mortification that proceeds the realization you've been talking from your ass.

The frustration that arises when someone continues to ruin your speculative conversations with a smart phone and a data plan.

That feeling when you turn over in the night and someone places his hand on your side.

The first breath after 5 PM on a Friday.

The sudden sad knowledge that nothing will ever be this way again, that knowledge that comes at the end of things.

Because It's Only Fair...

Usually, when I'm done with the bucket of liquid nitrogen I use to snap freeze my tissue sections, I pour the excess into our cell culture freezer. It's a decent way to reduce waste and costs, because--

1) the excess I need to submerge the sections is used &

2) they don't have to pull more to put in cell culture

See, people! Green science.

However, when I come in on a Saturday--all bets are off. If I'm here on my weekend, then I sure as shit get to play like I want to. And since I have a partner in crime...