I have this strange tendency to refer to inanimate objects as if they have the ability to feel, hear, hurt, love, and hate. My laptop isn’t broken, I once told a friend, it’s just sad because I left it in the car overnight.
This explanation made perfect sense to me. I’d be sad too if I’d spent all night locked in a chilly Toyota Camry–especially in the dead of winter.
Of course, my technology woes had nothing to do with the fact that I hadn’t cleaned unused files off my desktop in ages, and had let particules accumulate between the rows of the keyboard, reminding me of the dust balls I once swiffered up at a previous job.
Weeks later, I would be informed that my depressed, neglected laptop had a broken solder joint from a tumble off my bed. 75 dollars later, it was as good as new.
It’s much easier for me to understand my laptop being upset or pissed off than it is to fathom an issue that necessitates money or time or tools to be fixed. I guess in my world, those things are more difficult to come by than say, love or generosity.
But let’s start from the beginning: I am not a science person. You know those friends with a plethora of spontaneous wisdom. “How do planes fly? How do washers wash? How do bridges hold the weight of cars?”
These are the folk who can elaborate, drawing diagrams and utilizing only the correct terminology. It’s as if they read The Way Things Work from cover to cover–a book that probably rested on a shelf in our den for close to ten years, unopened and untouched.
(via Todd Huffman)
Let’s get something straight–I’m the person asking the questions, not answering them.
*
During my sophomore year of college, I enrolled in “Introduction to Psychology,” setting out to fulfill my math and science requirements. One month passed, two months passed, and a third. I still could not understand what a neuron was. I had read the definition hundreds of times in our textbook, researched the curious little buggers on the internet, asked friends majoring in psych, my own Professor, OTHER Professors, my father, a slew of strangers on the street.
The concept just wouldn’t register. If anything, I preferred to think of neurons as little pacmans rolling around inside me. Did they eat little dots? Or have a pretty pink bow in their hair? It’s unclear.
So…multiple Ms. Pacmans are inside of me (I guess they’re cells, right??) and THEY process information? I thought the only things inside me were organs, blood, bones, and maybe whatever I ate for lunch. Perhaps some emotions– happiness, sadness, excitement, enthusiasm, depending on the day–the real reason I am a feeling, thinking being.
Case in point.
*
That same semester, I also took a class for what would become my minor: “Writing Nonfiction 1.” Now this was my kind of learning. Each week, we were given a topic–our bodies, friends, a food, a place, an event–and crafted a short memoir concerning the chosen.
I wrote about driving my beat-up Camry to Philadelphia, my Dad’s pizza, painting my room green, mormons in Salt Lake City, celebrating Hanukkah with my cousins, the sadness of old age, watching a family gaze in horror as their house burned down.
We also read. A lot–David Foster Wallace. Autobiography of a Face. David Quamman.
“He is SUCH a rockstar,” a classmate said after Quamman visited our class for a Q&A.
At the time, Quamman was a contributing writer for National Geographic magazine. He writes. They pay. And he travels… just about everywhere–African safaris. Saudi oil decks. Antarctica.
But his piece, “Strawberries Under Ice,” was a bone-chilling wake up call to the left side of my brain:
1. The Gradient of Net Mass Balance
Antarctica is a gently domed continent squashed flat, like a dent in the roof of a Chevy, by the weight of its ice. That burden of ice amounts to seven million cubic miles. Melt it away and the Antarctic interior would bounce upward; Earth itself would change shape.
Pardon? He continues:
This grand cold fact has, to me, on the tiny and personal scale, a warm appeal. Take away ice and the topography of my own life changes drastically too.
Ah yes, a metaphor. I can do those. I may not understand science, but literary devices I can devour.
Yet Quamman dives back into a handful of scientific references, unearthing more about ice and its various technical qualities. What I probably should have said to myself upon finishing was, “CRAP!” If this was what it took to succeed as a travel writer, I had better just give up right then and there.
(via jurvetson)
By a few pages later, my heart was beating a rhythmic drum circle:
One formula scientists use to describe the relations between flow rate and those other factors is:
u = k1 sin3 ah4 + sin2 ah2
You see, to someone like me, this looks like: *Let’s scare the little creative girl with confusing numbers and symbols!*
The reality is, once I finished, “Strawberries Under Ice,” I was so impressed that I wanted to be David Quamman, not just read about him/worship him. His work links nature, science, and life through metaphor. What could be better? And it’s not as intimidating as I made it sound–especially after you have a kind professor and class full of aspiring writers to help dissect it.
The fact of the matter is, as writers/journalists/reporters/travelers, we need to be able to delve into the science of things to get to the bottom of them.
Maybe my scientific deficiency actually makes me a better writer–the fact that I can’t get what a solder joint is, even reading about it on the internet and wikipedia, and asking about 30 contenders for their own intimate encyclopedia submission on the subject .
Maybe instead of making me a sure-fire failure, this quality makes me dig deeper. Maybe this is why writers write–so we have a reason to learn, to brush away the dirt, or let the ice melt away, until something moves or changes, until we find out why it was there in the first place, until we thread the connections between how things function and how we as humans function.
