An ominous storm is brewing...

I am sitting in the Academic Commons watching the rain pour down. This place has immense windows, so it's a bit like being underwater... Just sheets and sheets of it coming down from the sky. The thunder is rolling fairly constantly. Lightning keeps flashing in the corner of my eye. A little while ago, there was an announcement that there are multiple thunderstorm warnings and a tornado watch here in Worcester. The announcer said "If you have a safe place to go, I would go there."

Ha! Josh and I are sitting here editing and writing because the AC is an oasis of quiet and non-distraction. The weather simply makes it better in my opinion. Now I can't leave unless I want to get soaked. Write, the world says to me, write! Precipitation makes for wonderful writing weather.

I've decided to implement an interesting technique someone mentioned on the Absolute Write forums for getting solid writing down every day. I've made Write Or Die my home page, Every time I open my web browser, I am requiring myself to write for ten minutes before doing anything else. Hopefully this will jump start my goal of finishing a chapter of Face the Flames every week until I get the first draft (all 36 monstrous chapters of it) done.

Imagination

“There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.”

- Katherine Paterson

Me at 7 in one of my favorite places in the world - Point Lobos, CA

I started writing stories at the age of nine or so and haven't stopped since. I don't remember ever making the conscious decision to become a writer; it just became a natural part of my life. This was probably related to my heavy reading addiction; my parents read to me constantly when I was young, and I picked up the skill easily once I got to school. As much as I am always writing, I am also always reading. Usually several books. (Maybe that's why I can't focus on writing one novel at a time either?)

So there's the reading habit (which my brother and I naturally inherited from our very literate parents) which undoubtedly contributed to my becoming a writer. But there's also the fact that I never stopped living in the land of make believe and imagination. All kids know this land. I think I was just slower to outgrow it. Sometimes I feel like I never left it behind at all.

My younger brother and I grew up Army Brats and never lived in any neighborhood longer than two years until we were in high school. It follows that we became close friends, often the only companion we could rely on in a new place. Because we both had such wild imaginations, we began to build worlds of imaginary games for use in any situation. Outside, in the house, on the playground, during long car rides, on the way to school in the mornings... We had a game for every situation. Toys are material things that break and get lost. Friends move or are left behind. Imaginary worlds built between siblings? They last forever.

We were Californian bandits in the mountains who discovered a tappable source of superpowers. We flew as dragons across vast ice fields. We traveled the Oregon Trail. We built and lived in monasteries where the inhabitants were anything but celibate. We became animals dependent on the annual salmon run. We lived through floods and earthquakes and hurricanes. We performed on television. We worshiped a pantheon of animal gods and carved our weapons to keep us safe from mercenaries. We gathered food as native Americans. We lived as slaves. We got cholera and recovered. We wielded lightsabers and pokeballs with equal vehemence. We played out epic and twisted romances.

I'd been creating characters forever when I finally began to write some of them down. Soon I'd meet other friends who were doing the same thing and we'd begin to write together, feeding off each other's wild creativity to create some truly wonderful worlds and people.

And now it's to the point where I can't think of how to be happy unless this is the primary purpose in my life.

Incessantly Needing To Ponder

I find most people of college-age have heard of the Meyers-Briggs test at some point in their life. (If not, JFGI.) I became fascinated with this bit of statistic-ry foolishness back when I was a first year university student. To the surprise of no one who knows me, I tested then, and still test now, as an INTP.

Introverted iNtutive Thinking Percieving.

Basically, this means that I really suck at maintaining social relationships (because I don't do well with emotion, but also because I simply don't care much of the time and can't really be bothered). I am analytical to a fault about almost everything in my life. I have an idiosyncratic sense of humor. Once decided, I fall swiftly and irrevocably in love - and expect my partner to put up with various oddities to boot. Competency takes precedence to repeated experience in a subject. And stupidity in others is not only sneered at, but openly mocked and prodded with what I'm sure most people would see as a measure of arrogance abnormal to decent society.

Whee! Okay, so I have exaggerated faults and deficiencies. We're all unique and wonderful snowflakes, blah blah. INTP profiles really do describe me quite well, however, and I often find myself taking shelter in their conclusions when I feel guilty and/or ashamed of something I've done in relation to other people. I only wanted to bring this up now, because I'm sure it's something I'm going to reference a lot in an attempt to explain why I do the things I do. (And this is a habit I indulge often due to my analytical nature.)

This probably helps explain why I have a need to constantly jot down my random thoughts. And my smirks and cocked eyebrows when people take pictures of me.

Really I don't think of myself as arrogant at all. Elitist to a fault, sure. Most of that is the product of my excellent childhood and education from my parents. I am an incredibly self-confident individual, and make no apologies for it. Most of the time I find it difficult to understand why other people aren't on the same level when it comes to assurance in themselves. When I get taken down a peg though, it sure smarts. Heh.

This is just a post I've been meaning to put up for awhile. There will be more notes about it later.

The Purpose of Science is to Inform.

This will be an interesting follow-up to my last post. Despite my whining and groaning about grad school and all of that, I do actually care somewhat about the subject matter I am studying. Out of all of the genres of academia I could have chosen, I picked biology -- not only as something I feel deeply about, but also because I could (can? I'm not sure anymore) picture it as the dominant force in my working life.

Quick Preface: I did not take any real classes last semester. At the time, it was probably a good decision. I'm not sure I would've benefited from anything in the course listings last fall. However, this semester I decided I need even just a tiny bit of structure and signed up for a once-a-week seminar in issues facing forest ecology. We're coming up on our third week of real class discussions, and I have been struck by some of the things we keep circling back on. These are issues facing all scientists... and laymen. My class is rather small, 2-3 each of seniors, graduate students, and PhD students (as well as our professor), and whenever we talk about land management and the ethics involved, it is quite apparent that none of us really knows how to handle things. Specifically.

The title of this blog is something my professor said. I mostly agree with him. When a scientist lays out the facts colored by his/her opinion, how is the layman supposed to interpret? The primary purpose of science should be to find the facts such as they are and report them. If opinion and personal ethics get involved, results tend to be clouded. Objectivity is key. As Richard Feynman said, "...the idea is to try and give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another."

In this vein, I am particularly interested in what the non-scientist thinks of nature and how we as humans should manage it. Science can point us only so far. What we are actually willing to commit to in terms of politics and management is up to society and society's values.

Thoughts or ideas? I would really like to know what laymen and other scientists think. I've gotten a few opinions so far and I think I know a few issues that should be addressed (namely the differences between conservation and preservation, why there's been a focus on charismatic megafauna, why things like wildfires in CA happen...). I'll do individual posts for each subject I can think of to discuss and clarify.

Grad School.

I have come to a rather large conclusion in the past three weeks: I Do Not Like Grad School.

And I have a long list of reasons why. Call it venting or ranting, but I am going to term this post as a bit of Life Reflection. I have considered getting my so-called 'priorities' in order for awhile now, and writing some of these thoughts down might help steer me in that direction. At the very least, I will feel better for having straightened things out, filtered them out of my head, and putting them out there for others to use as evidence against me.

When I was a junior undergraduate student, the idea of graduate school seemed like anathema to me. I was having a horrible year (despite getting fantastic grades) riddled with clinical depression, social interaction issues, and a strong feeling that I would never be able to live the sort of life I really wanted. In short, I was having that college life crisis that seems to happen to many of us when we hit second semester of senior year and realize that life outside of academia is about to hit us hard.

It was during this time, that an adviser told me to apply to our school accelerated BA/MA program. Admittedly, when I was accepted to this school as an undergraduate, the 5th year program was a huge draw for me. If your grades are good enough, you are allowed to complete a MA degree in a fifth year after senior year tuition free. Pretty good deal. When junior year hit, I was no longer seriously contemplating it because I figured out that research science was not my cup of tea. All I wanted to do was write novels. My adviser, however, told me to send in the prelim application - just in case. And then she catered to my interests and set me up on a course for completing said MA by concentrating on science writing rather than research. Color me happy and sight more likely to complete the full application for 5th year. Which of course I did. And here I am. A 5th year MA student.

And now I come back to the conclusion that I had a junior. Graduate school is not making me happy because it's not something I really want. The work I am doing is not very important to me, nor something that I am really very interested in. As an idea, I like it. In practice, it's not enough to excite my passions and drive me forward. I knew two years ago that it would be difficult for me to complete a degree like this - because it requires you to know what you want, or at least to know how to operate under the self-hypnotizing lie that you are doing what you want.

The problem then, as now, is I do Know What I Want. I want to write! I am a writer. A novelist. This is what I want to do all the time. I don't want to solve the world's problems. I don't want to draft letters to Congress telling them why they don't understand the scientific things they claim they do. I don't even particularly want a day job that involves hobbies I am fond of... photography, hiking, traveling. If anything, I would want a boring day job where I rarely had to think -- so I could spend my time thinking about writing which is what I would really be concentrating on anyway.

Since I've officially become a graduate student, I've also experienced what I would consider some significant changes to my daily life. For the first time in my life -- I own a car, I cook for myself every day, I have a significant other that I spend the vast majority of my time with, I do not have an amount of money that I can know is just There... I've been a bit hung up on these changes and trying to assimilate them into my life. Deservedly so, I would say. Perhaps some would disagree with me, but it has been difficult for me trying to figure out out to balance my social interactions with personal maintenance with work. I probably need to compartmentalize more, but the significant other thing? Yeah, that's made me happier than I've been.. probably since I was about ten years old. So I've been reluctant to be serious about other serious things simply because of that one serious thing. My bad.

I feel that it is disappointing to learn that what I really want out of life is simple -- I want to love, be loved, and to do what I am truly passionate about. And all of these are such simple things. If I could go back in time and tell my sixteen year old self this, she might have laughed at me. Well, my eleven year old self certainly would have. My sixteen year old self might have given me a cynical smile and called me an idiot for not realizing this sooner.

At any rate, I have come to the not so minor decision that my life is essentially directionless and directed in about a hundred different directions all at once. It's discomfiting and exhilarating in a way that I am really not prepared for. I doubt anyone is ever really prepared for their life decisions. You just deal with them as they come.