Decay

I finish all of my work in this class so quickly. It's easy work and I tell myself that it takes everyone else longer to complete it because they are less efficient workers. This is probably true, but not the whole truth, because there is another slight only partial truth: I work quickly because I do not care about the work. I can write an essay in minutes if its on a topic I care nothing for. It's the things that pique my interest and provoke me on some personal level, those are the things that take time to think about and to write about. Sometimes they take so long to think about that I get lost in the thinking and never get to the writing. I am convinced the writing is an essential compliment to the thinking and that one without the other leaves the mind with an open ended gaping wound on one end which can be filled quickly and quietly without you ever noticing and soon your forget that you were provoked in the first place.

I finished my work and I then I finished my book. I only had a handful of pages left and I didn't finish it last night. I'm not entirely sure why. I could have. The book, The Winter of Our Discontent, was almost finished, as I said, only a handful of pages left. I dog-eared it in the way I have been doing since I was eight years old, in the way that still feels new to me, as if I can't believe how clever I am to save my page without a bookmark, a childish fascination with childish ingenuity. I closed the book and placed it on my nightstand and I closed the blinds on the window and turned off the light in that empty room and it was very dark, like the bedrooms I remember from my youth. I sat in the dark in the cold sheets and I wept.

I woke up this morning and rode my motorcycle to class instead of taking the shuttle bus with the other students. A thunderstorm had rolled in the previous night, although I did not hear it, and when I turned off the main street onto the winding country road, a thick fog hang low in the trees and over the old houses, the remains that the storm had left behind like dying soldiers on a battlefield left by a retreating army. I imagined that there was Spanish moss hanging from the branches of the trees overhead, it was a Spanish moss type of fog.

After I finished my work this morning, I took out my book and finished that. I think I procrastinated the finishing of the book because I was scared of the ending. It was a good book, maybe the best book I've ever read, but I cannot say for sure.  The ending was probably nothing worthy of being scared of, but i was scared of it anyway and as I read it I felt my horror grow and grow and then slightly change and when I read the last line the horror wasn't there anymore and was replaced by the empty but powerful feeling in my stomach that I get whenever I finish a good book. The feeling of looking out over a lifeless immeasurable distance, the feeling of recognizing, with brief clarity, and only for a moment, the scope of my own life and its scale when weighed against the lives of all the people I have met and all the places I have been and yet been.

Here's a picture of the book because why the hell not.

Repair guide

I'm in Maryland, on a two-week professional development seminar in which I get to perform all variety of advanced science experiments and then reflect on the challenges that my students might face in performing those same tasks. Here's a reflection that I wrote two days ago, concerning a research project focused on the history of a biomedical innovation. I was assigned the toothbrush.

Reflection

In searching through PubMed and Google Scholar for journal articles on the biomedical innovation of my choice (the toothbrush), I encountered several issues which may be an obstacle for my students in completing their own research. First and foremost: search domain. The toothbrush is, not surprisingly, a rather common place object and is found as a tangential reference in an almost innumerable number of research articles. Think the toothbrush might not play a central role in modern scientific investigations? Think again. The toothbrush is everywhere. I was shocked. Flabbergasted, even. But determined to succeed, I strove onwards. I dived deeper into the ever-darkening layers of research, stumbling blindly through articles of increasing intellectual complexity, past heat-treatments of bristle nylon, brushing away hanging studies of the effectiveness of counter-stroking in removing plaque, narrowly avoiding the pitfalls of stess-tests on newly developed thermoplastics, before finally arriving at the deepest, darkest, and most convoluted toothbrush-related topic: strategies for microbial disinfectant. The destination reedeemed the journey. Here was the golden chalice of knowledge, held high above the glowing pewter altar of thesis defenses, shining brightly down on the grumbling, slithering, irrelevant malignancies of the undergraduate research world. Microbial disinfectant. Even now, my heart beats rapidly in excitement at the sound of those syllables; those ever smooth constants draped in the senseless and endless finery of vowels as smooth and forbidden as mother's silk gabardine. Microbial disinfectant. Surely this was the destination I had dreamed of, the draft that would satisfy my seemingly unquenchable toothbrush thirst.

But I was not the challenger to be. I was not the one assigned the heavy mantle of responsibility, not the carrier of the streaming standard of research and inquest, hoisted high above the flaming fields of academic ignorance and inevitable financial insolvency. No, I was the fervent lieutenant shouting words of encouragement across the trenches to those noble few whose obligation was absolute, whose task was clear: my students. It was they who would have to trudge through the increasing horrors of PubMed, following the thin trail of toothbrush bread-crumbs which narrowed in places to a knife's edge. How would they fare? How could they survive such calamity?

Again, the answer is domain. “Toothbrush” is too general, too vague. The jungle is too vast, and the search party too tiny. What they have in courage, they more than neutralize with their poor vocabulary skills, pitiful research experience, and predilection for distraction. They will take one step into the vast abyss and then retreat, their eyes searching wildly for some Drake-related succor, their hands fumbling blindly for their phones. No, the search would need to be narrowed to something far more specific. To ensure success, my students would need to focus on a specific aspect of the toothbrush (the handle or the bristles) and by focusing their efforts thus exponentially magnify their individual strengths.

To this, I will give them a special, secret, and additional weapon. Forged in the hot embers of the faculty lounge, I will give them: keywords. By including terms such as “biomedical”, “medical”, “health”, or “safety”, the path would be made smoothers, the dangers of the journey further tamed. These words would push the darkness away from the journeymen, and save our sacred fellowship. I know this, for I have tried myself.

It is with these strategies that I will aid my students in conquering that unknowable fear. The ominous and grating fear. The fear that resides deep in their hearts, and also in my own. The fear of PubMed.

Here's a picture of my bike at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike: