Back in Boland

I have dreams that have story lines. They don’t typically jump around—they follow the standard pattern of storytelling, they have clear conflict and resolutions. People do things in character.

The dream I had this weekend was based around a science experiment. In the dream, when I had moved into my dorm my freshman year of college I had signed paperwork agreeing to be part of a study on personal space. Our living on that dorm floor was conditional on us moving back into the same room with the same people 11 years later, when we were 29, and staying there for two weeks. Two weeks back in my freshman dorm room, with my freshman roommate. We had to take freshman classes. We were only allowed the same things we had when we moved in 10 years prior—if we didn’t have a cell phone then, we couldn’t have one now, if we didn’t have a car then, we couldn’t have one now—and we filled out surveys and had interviews talking about the experience. I think it was a study on perceptions of personal space, but I fully don’t recall. In the dream I was realizing how fascinating it truly was.

I hope the Woodchuck 32oz bottles come back too! Oh wait.

Now I can’t stop thinking about it. What would that be like? Would friendships rekindle or would we be insular after the years?And dear god, would we still buy Hooch?

Turbid

Very often I'll get a word or two in my head and they'll sort of tumble around in there until I can figure out why I'm thinking about them or I get distracted by something shiny. A few weeks ago the word was Turbid....interesting. I'd actually started to write something about it but it was absolute crap so I ditched it but I hadn't stopped thinking about it.

Last night I scribbled something down on a scrap piece of paper after some thoughts.

Turbid: (1) clouded, opaque or muddy, as a liquid. (2) confused, muddled.

When I was in AP Bio in high school we took a five day field trip and did coastal ecology experiments, one of which included testing the turbidity of the water. This uses a secchi disk that's dropped slowly into water; when it's no longer visible that depth is marked. The more turbid the water, the more contaminated it is (by runoff, algae blooms, science stuff). The visibility is low, things are lost. Ever tried to snorkel in a clouded lake? Sucks.

Turbidity...losing myself in a situation, hoping to fake it til it works, forcing a square peg in a round hole, shaving edges and boundaries...hoping to force an ends rather than living the means. Not just in relationships but expectation, occupation, even memory. Letting things get turbid; forsaking definition for comfort or the feeling of safety and losing the better parts of oneself in the process. Stirring up things that should've settled long before. Turbid: a sort of succubus preying on standards and boundaries. I'm astounded how turbid things have gotten recently, how I've let them get there. I wasn't just passive, I was permissive. Hoping clarity is coming.

Nose Knows

I work with a woman who has a habit of smelling everything. She has a nose that picks up traces of things I can't even register; she smells deeply where I smell nothing. Her olfactory skills constantly make self-conscious me worry that I may smell bad. Eh well. I started thinking about smells last week, when I was listening to Lucinda Williams and the song “Essence” came on the iPod. I started to think about the word and its definitions, because I actually do stuff like that. According to Websters, essence has three definitions:

(1) the distinctive characteristic of something
(2) the inward nature or true substance of something
(3) a liquid containing a substance in concentrated form, as a perfume.

To me, smell is the most underrated of our senses, because smells capture memories better than the four others. Smells have the ability to time travel to very specific moments and call them out. For example, when I smell a cedar trunk, I am five years old and it's my favorite hide-and-seek spot, sitting on the really ugly quilt and itchy Hudson Trader blankets that filled it. When I smell a cedar trunk I am warm, adventurous, itchy, scared and mildly diabolical. When I smell pipe tobacco I'm sitting in a red woolen rocking chair with my Boppa and his lap dog and I am safe. Smells have an emotive quality that astounds me. They communicate in a language so intimate and infinite its almost anybody's guess but everyone speaks it.

I got to smell the ocean the other day. I realized that in the past two months the only time I've left Buncombe County was to drive to and from the Charlotte airport. Not really what one would call a great adventure, and really I needed some adventure in my life. So three of us went and smelled the ocean for a day. What a smell it is, isn't it? It is somehow this amalgamation of teeming life and blatant decay, of danger, comfort, salty and sweet. The ocean's essence permeates everything in which it comes in contact. It restores and takes life. We were joking about what heaven would smell like (because I'll be sorely disappointed in there are no smells in heaven. I'd be very bored) and here are the things on my list:

• Freshly washed puppies
• Freshly mowed grass
• One of my ex-boyfriends (seriously, that guy smelled AMAZING. I just sniffed him all the time)
• Hemlocks in the Adirondacks
• The ocean in Maine
• Another ex-boyfriend (incidentally, they both had the same first name but very different smells)
• Freshly washed babies
• Caramelized onions (I actually hate onions, but love the smell of them cooking)
• Campfires
• A true love first thing in the morning
• The air right after a big rainstorm
• The first cold day in the fall when the frost has a smell
• GAIN detergent
• Old books
• Freshly baked bread

There is an essence to things living and it is smell. Then there is the essence of people, the scent that is both viciously carnal and wholly new that breathes life into something already living and adds a completely different view of them. Pheromones are said to dictate who we are attracted to and who we aren't, so smell isn't that strange—it's instinctual what it does for us. My pheromones apparently pick those that end up breaking my heart. My pheromones suck. As I think of heaven as smells, I asked two of my friends what hell would smell like if it were three smells. I had one friend say, “The breath of a man first thing in the morning that you just realized you do not love” and that broke my heart, because that truly is hell. Well, that and dentists offices. And urine. What would hell smell like if it had three smells for you? What about heaven? I am curious, which means none of you will answer this question.

Don't Drink the Water

Several years ago I began hearing reports of problems of pharmaceuticals in our water supplies; that is the prescriptions that we take for a myriad of problems--high cholesterol, birth control, anxiety, tranquilizers, chemotherapy, etc--aren't being removed from our water at treatment plants and thus are coming back in our drinking water. I heard these reports from scientist friends but surprisingly hadn't heard anything big in the news (one of the big issues on the science front has been the issue of trans-gendering fish. That is, hormones are causing male fish to become feminized and thus sterile. It's a much bigger deal than it sounds. Things start at the bottom of the food chain and work on up. Think DDT.)

Today the AP had this "Investigation" about it.
It's long, so here's some bits (though please consider reading it):
* "A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.
* But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.
* How? People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.
* The AP's investigation also indicates that watersheds, the natural sources of most of the nation's water supply, also are contaminated. Tests were conducted in the watersheds of 35 of the 62 major providers surveyed by the AP, and pharmaceuticals were detected in 28.
* Rural consumers who draw water from their own wells aren't in the clear either, experts say.
* Even users of bottled water and home filtration systems don't necessarily avoid exposure. Bottlers, some of which simply repackage tap water, do not typically treat or test for pharmaceuticals, according to the industry's main trade group. The same goes for the makers of home filtration systems.
* Another issue: There's evidence that adding chlorine, a common process in conventional drinking water treatment plants, makes some pharmaceuticals more toxic.
* Mary Buzby — director of environmental technology for drug maker Merck & Co. Inc. — said: "There's no doubt about it, pharmaceuticals are being detected in the environment and there is genuine concern that these compounds, in the small concentrations that they're at, could be causing impacts to human health or to aquatic organisms."
*There's growing concern in the scientific community, meanwhile, that certain drugs — or combinations of drugs — may harm humans over decades because water, unlike most specific foods, is consumed in sizable amounts every day.
* "These are chemicals that are designed to have very specific effects at very low concentrations. That's what pharmaceuticals do. So when they get out to the environment, it should not be a shock to people that they have effects," says zoologist John Sumpter at Brunel University in London, who has studied trace hormones, heart medicine and other drugs. "

Another Mystery

I'm still thinking about the wonder conversation I had with Nate the other day.

My junior year of college I spent much of my spare time at a house three doors down that was home to four of my girlfriends. Holly was a duel Physics/Philosophy major who probably had a headache 90% of the time—I mean, I would if I was trying to reconcile those two. We were out on the front porch one evening and she expressed the desire to keep wonder alive in her life—that, in spite of pursuit of understanding and insight, a sense of mystery was crucial. I couldn't agree more.

I've never been accused of being intentionally ignorant and hope to keep that fact for years to come. I have a Bachelor of Science degree—technically, I am a scientist. But there are many things in life that I don't want to know the science behind and I don't think that makes me “ignorant” I think that makes me selective. Creative processes, music, emotions, faith, touch: beautiful things made more beautiful by their mystery. I don't know why one person's touch can affect me more than anyone else's, I just know it does and in that it is a gift. I don't know why heartache can be literal, I just know what how it feels. There are things made predictable and safe by science—electricity, weather, seasons, gravity, chemicals—and then there are the muddled interactions that cannot be made predictable, that science only knows in shadow and theory. Often these are what make up what I love most in life.

Don't get me wrong—I love science. If you know me at all, you know this. But science and mystery are mutually crucial. Nate told me I was just holding onto childhood; I told him he was a condescending, cynical bastard. I'm not saying we should only live by our gut (Thank you, Stephen Colbert/George W. Bush for “truthiness”) but some mix of the two. Understand the place of science and the place of mystery.

There is a part in “Good Will Hunting” where Robin Williams' character rips into Will, saying, “So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that." It's the difference right there; the science and the mystery. Places for both.

Song of the Day: “These Friends of Mine”--Rosie Thomas. I love this song more and more each day.

Also: Found someone to go see Erin McKeown's Grey Eagle show with me...guess who is also a huge Erin fan? Doug. Whoa. Here's to you, D.

The Splits

Last week I had the chance to have dinner with two old friends I haven't seen in almost 6 years. They are both artists, and their house is full of creation, beauty, uniqueness and life. I didn't realize how much I missed creativity until I was around it again. It is what I think life looks like.

These past few years the decisions I've made have all been directed toward the stable, rather than life. Let me put it less dramatically: it is possible to have confidence in that which isn't life-giving, just as it is possible to be talented in a field in which confidence is lacking. Currently I feel torn between the two. My confidence is misaligned. Maybe it's just my two worlds smacking me in the face with a big cold fish. Being very Type-A and creative hasn't ever been a conducive mix to either school of thought—I want to create, but get so caught up in getting all the details right that very often I never get past the good idea stage; my need to be organized kills my need to create. Similar in my desire to serve and yet to live my own damn life. I've loved this time of serving others as a vocation, but am done at this point (Burned out? Maybe), I'm wanting my schedule and my tasks to be less tedious and more meaningful and, well, a bit more about me. I need more discussion and thinking and conversations more weighty in their width and breadth. I miss being with people passionate about the same things as me. I feel like I've let that part of me suffer for the “greater good” of my social life. As if I have to shut up about what I truly prioritize in order to fit in with the people around me, and there is something tragically wrong about that.

And that feeds into this tsunami of doubt that has thrown me to the sands and pebbles these past few weeks. My science background reminds me constantly how ridiculous it all is, while my faith (however feeble) reminds me to stay focused on the heart of the matter, rather than the delivery of it. But then the science side says, “So you are telling me to ignore the messenger but trust the message? What?” and I'm thrown for the loop again. Like today in worship time my boss was reading from Genesis where Eve was talking to the serpent and the whole time I was trying to find a way to rationalize such a fable from the lesson.

Maybe my Gemini birth has more of an affect on me than I've ever thought. But this being of two minds predicament has me exhausted at all this damned straddling I've been doing, between the social and the political, the real and the easy, the faith and the science, the servitude and the ambition. I've got decisions to make. 2007 is already shaping up to be one of those years...