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:

Rage is back

I'm finally on summer vacation. It's been an unusual yet relaxing transition, from work to vacation. The final day of school for students and most teachers was eight days ago. I volunteered to come back every day this week for a few hours to work with a student who had missed a large segment of the semester due to a broken leg. Our school is not equipped with elevators, and my classroom is located on the third floor. She broke her leg in February, had reconstructive surgery in March, and was only cleared to walk up stairs on the third week of June. Crazy, huh? Well she is a really smart student, so I didn't mind coming in to teach her. Basically she ran her own experiments and worked on practice problems while I cleaned up my classroom and perused craigslist for used jeep cherokees.

My dad has a heart condition which worried my mother more than anyone else, mostly because my dad has a healthy distrust of doctors and probably doesn't take his own condition all that seriously. My mother loves doctors and hospitals and medical insurance. I thinks she sees in their bureaucratic complexities and excessive verbiage a sort of stability or safety. This is probably the same reason why she buys twice as many groceries every month as what we could possibly eat.

Anyway, my dad was excited to take his (mostly annual) summer trip to California. Usually he takes this trip by motorcycle, but my mom imposed her strong will on my dad and after lengthy coercion (she spoke with him once over dinner), convinced him to --- wait for it, because this gets good --- take his car. That's right. My mom convinced my dad, who views cars as a necessary but loathsome component of human living, to brush the dust of his old car and drive it to California.

I accompanied my dad to WalMart three weeks ago and helped him to buy his first smartphone. He had many questions, most of which were composite questions (unclear amalgamations with multiple worries, thoughts, and disjointed fragments stitched together in traditional Mr. Dad fashion), which I attempted to answer in as clear and precise of a manner as noisome and morally questionable environment of WalMart would allow me to do. He had spent the last two weeks sending me text message version of the ten minute rants he previously delivered over voice mail. I do not know if this is an improvement.

Halfway through the scheduled itinerary of his trip, my dad sent me a picture message of Mt. Rushmore. It was taken from a crazy angle, from the left and way way way beneath, so that the heads of the presidents appear tiny and in profile. At that angle my dad had effectively erased the presence of Theodore Roosevelt. I don't believe this was an intentional move on his part. Nevertheless, this picture message must have marked an important point in the trip for him, because he showed up back in town one week later, preceded by several days by a text message reading, and I so excitably quote, "All further points west have been canceled due to lack of enthusiasm driving automobiles." After spending twenty three years as a spectator to my dad's life, watching with incredulous fascination at his profound inability to flourish in the modern world, feeling not unlike a fan of the Detroit Lions watching the team play season after season while the city crumbles around them, I can honestly say for the first time that I know exactly what he is talking about.

I've been keeping up with my reading, in case you were wondering, although not to the extent of my friend Stephanie who has read over forty books this year. Forty books! I think I'm in the mid twenties, but I'm going to focus exclusively on small slim tomes for a few weeks and see what happens. I read Love, and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lillies of the Field by William Edmund Barrett, and Rage is Back by Adam Mansbach. I liked the last one the best, and I think it inspired me to re-read some of my favorite books from past years. I'll keep you in the loop.

Here is a photograph I recently took of a non-living dinosaur:

Worth living.

Love is frightening and exhausting.
I am jealous of people and their memories.
Sometimes I wake up in a terror.
My heart is powerful.
I am aching for the people I have hurt.
I am aching for the person I used to be.
Do other people dream of underwater forests?
Do other people dream of abandoned museums?
Has my entire life has been the gaping two second window between the injury and the pain?

This American Life

I traveled to Boston for a music festival and had a great time. The bands were talented and the fans were passionate. The location of the festival was perfect because I was able to easily walk to some of the historic areas of Boston. My urge to explore has only grown stronger as I have grown older. Extrapolating this trend, I predict that my life will culminate in the role of a geriatic interstellar traveler.

The weather was beautiful during the festival and has been beautiful ever since. I am growing some kale and peppers in small pots in my backyard. The kale has sprouted; tiny green leaves with thin red spines in bunches of three and four. I will wait until they get bigger to transplant them to their final containers.

My reading has slowed during the last week because I borrowed a book from the library which I didn't really like. I have not found the motivation to return to the library and exchange it for something better. I did read a wonderful book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez two weeks ago, but I will wait to describe it here until I have read at least a handful of other books, lest I appear too single-minded in my focus.

Here's a photograph I recently took at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, CT, USA:

The time I sold my car

I decided to sell my car. It just wasn’t worth it, in my mind. The calculations were not in my favor. There were many things wrong with it and I did not have enough money to fix it. A strange creaking noise emanated from the rear suspension, stopping whenever I craned my neck to look. A failed emissions test and then a failed retest. I vacuumed the car in the hopes that a clean interior might prompt a magical mechanical recovery. Broken window theory, etc. No dice. The old problems continued, and were joined by a new one: the creeping sense that given enough time, the litany of mechanical problems afflicting the car might jump ship and begin affecting other components of my life.

I’m not a superstitious person. My mother is very superstitious. I think this is the reason why I am not superstitious. I am afraid that if I become superstitious that I will become more like my mother. I try not to think about it too much. The mechanic from the garage by the beach called me up. He was a really tall black man. In the shop earlier, I had considered telling him that, beach-side or not, I had never before seen such a tall black man working at a garage before. He had asked me where I was from and when I told him, he was interested.

“Do you know Tony Colon?”

“No.”

“What about Kendall Williams?”

“No, sorry.”

“When did you graduate high school?”

“Two thousand and eight.”

“Oh, so you might know Erica Stevitz.”

“Nope.”

I had never heard of these people before. I don’t remember many of the people I went to high school with, but I think that the utterance of their names would prompt some basic cognitive recall. Maybe these people weren't real.

I left the shop thinking about Erica Stevitz. Who was she? Was she beautiful? Was my life less full because I didn’t know Erica Stevitz from high school? What if Erica Stevitz was meant to be my friend, neighbor, co-worker, or lover? What if I was missing out all because of some seemingly inconsequential error in high school registration data. I got sent to this school and my destiny got sent over there.

I was riding a bicycle back from the garage. I brought the bicycle in the back of my car and dropped my car off at the garage, and now I was riding my bicycle back. This is great, I thought to myself. I love riding this bicycle. I should do this more often.

I didn’t make it halfway before the tall black man from the garage called me.

“This car is scrap. The bottom is all rusted out. I wouldn’t drive this myself, for safety reasons.”

I rode my bicycle back to the garage and inspected the car and I nodded in agreeance, very unsafe. I didn’t mention anything about not being able to afford a replacement car. It just didn’t seem like the right time.

I loved the tall black man, he was so personable. I wanted to be his friend and stay up late at night and watch movies with him. Not wanting to scare him off with my enthusiasm and friendliness, I left very abruptly, taking car to drive the car slowly over bumps in the road. Potholes that before seemed like harmless nuisances now took on a menacing demeanor.

It took me about three days to sell the car. I was surprised by this. I put the car on craigslist with a very straightforward advertisement. My best friend from college, John, is a very straightforward person, so I wrote the advertisement from his point of view. How would John describe my car? I listed the statistics in a clear and concise bullet point format. My impressions of the car? Unsafe to drive. Low miles. Good interior. I took eight high quality photographs as well as a video to show that the car started up without issue and that the motor was in good shape. I double checked my spelling and grammar.

There are a lot of advertisements on craigslist with poor spelling and grammar.

Apparently this is not completely reflective of the consumer demographic, because I had a lot of calls interested in the car and even though I told them it was unsafe to drive, several people came out to look at the car and offer me money for it.

Eventually I sold it to a short man named Shawn. Shawn drove up from New York City to look at the car and He had an easily excitable face; he was always smiling with such force that a small island of spittle existed permanently at the corners of his lips. He bought it on the spot and payed me $800 for it in cash. I made him promise me that he would fix it before driving it very hard. He promised he would. He returned a week later in a taxi-cab and picked the car up. I left the key with my brother to give to Shawn when he picked up the car, as I was still at work.

Now I ride to work on my motorcycle. Riding to work on a motorcycle is not bad at all. It is very fun and exciting, and keeps my mind focused in the mornings. Still, it is inconvenient to do with a motorcycle all of the things you used to do with a car. For example, I cannot pick up anyone at the train station anymore. I cannot buy more than a handful of groceries at a time. Riding to the gym is inadvisable because of all the riding gear that I need to store away while exercising, so now I just walk or take my bicycle to the gym.

I tried to listen to music while riding. The earphones got caught on the inside of my helmet because they protrude every so slightly. In addition to being physically painful, listening to music is a nuisance in other ways. Volume, for one. I can’t adjust the volume of the music while riding nor can I change a song if I don’t like it. So I stopped listening to music. Instead I wear foam ear plugs to protect my ears from the roar of the engine and the high-pitched whistle of wind on the highway. Someone recently asked me, do you get bored when you ride the bike, especially on long trips? I said no. I said it was nice to be alone with my thoughts, which was not a lie.

Here's a photograph I recently took of my little brother's beagle, named Ollie.

Wishes, observations, and a review

I wish I was a master gardener.
I wish I knew all the best fishing spots.
I wish I knew more knots.
I wish I talked less.
I wish I loved more deeply and with less thought.
I wish I remembered more from the books I read.
I wish I read more poetry.
I wish I wrote more letters.
I wish I kept up with old professors.

My observation is that the nexus of my hypocrisy lies mainly in my inability to conquer my own materialism whilst simultaneously espousing a minimalist, anti-consumerist agenda.

In other words, I wish I bought less stuff. Happiness comes from experiences and interactions with loved ones, facilitated by a simple set of belongings which exhibit a set of practical and aesthetic characteristics in keeping with the personality of the belonger-to.

I also recently finished reading a book entitled A Sense of Ending by Julian Barnes. It was a really good book, and the ending shocked me in a way that I've come to associate more with movies than books. It's hard for the plot of a book to sneak up on you, I think, but this one did. Quite a good read!

I also recently finished reviewing my ex-girlfriend's thesis project for her Master's Degree in Epidemiology. Really more of a formality than anything else, she had already submitted it, and she has been and will continue to be much smarter than me anyway. Just like letting an old dog bark and pretend to be tough, it's good to allow outdated people to exercise their old tendencies. I found almost zero problems with it, but I did notice one detail which made me smile. When a city was named, the state and country were named after. So it would go; City, State, USA. Except it was the same city, state, and country every time. So the paper was full of USA. I laughed.

Here's a photograph I took at Shenandoah National Park, VA, USA: