Life Happens

This post has been a long time coming... there's really no other way to save it.  But as I sit here, contemplative, on the six-month 'anniversary' of my father's death, it only seems fitting to recap the profound changes the last half year has brought me.

I don't often think about whether December 21 and June 21 fall on the same day of this week, but this year I am.  And they do, for the record.  On a Tuesday just like any other day, I lost one of my best friends.  It's taken a lot of time to notice how profound of an effect my father's departure has had on me.  After all, how do you notice when something is slightly less there than it was?  We would only talk to each other over the phone, but we hadn't seen each other since December 2009... because I'd been off pursuing a degree that was making me miserable, living each day of the darkest portion of my life, just trying to muddle through and make it out the other end.

We didn't just talk occasionally.  It was every day, every spare second; if ever I were in the car driving alone, I'd call him just to chat.  If there were some random detail that reminded me of a conversation we'd once had - inside joke or not - it was his voice on the other line.

So I was buying a new jacket, called my mom to tell her, and instead found out Dad was dead - not immediately, of course, because where's the drama in that?  But my fiance and I hopped a plane to Oregon the next day.

And it was right then that something in me changed.  I'd spent the last two years of my life hideously depressed, feeling trapped and hopeless, like nothing in the world would ever be right.  Suddenly it wasn't, and my skewed perspective reset.  The quibbles and the trials were dwarfed in comparison; I sprang into action, an agent of change now myself.

It was profoundly moving to hear how he had impacted others' lives at the funeral.  Still, I didn't cry - everyone treated me like I was crazy or calloused, insensitive, unfeeling... but he wouldn't have wanted sadness over his departure, not really.  So I wrote his obituary and composed a 'eulogy' of sorts, infused it with the humor he so often incorporated into his life.  I coordinated arrangements to help Mom through it all, hacked e-mail accounts, tried to get all the proverbial ducks in a row - Dad had always taken care of finances and utilities and the like, but that would now need to be shifted into Mom's name.

Less than a month had passed when Mom informed me she'd be in a car accident in which her car was totaled; it was then I realized that ... someday, she too would pass on, that this would not be my only experience with a parental death.  It wasn't that I was morbidly obsessed with it - though genuinely a bit shaken - but rather a calm acceptance or realization of what was to come.  In many ways, I could empathize... yes, I'd lost my father, but she'd lost her soulmate, something I find utterly unthinkable.  She was now living alone in a life they'd built together, surrounded by reminders always taunting her about what she'd lost.  I began to make a more conscious effort to be there for her, to try to fill some of the companionship my father had provided: to listen to her vent when she'd had a bad day or at least to ask how her day had been.

The wedding was August 12 and we had scheduled a trip to meet with vendors toward the end of February.  It was bittersweet; we got much accomplished and were able to hone our ideas of what a wedding was to each of us, but with each new decision, Mom's wound was torn anew.  Then came March: a blitzkrieg tour of European universities for continuing education, me toward my Ph.D. and Andy toward a post-doc position.  The trip did not go nearly as planned, to say the least; there were myriad bumps on the road, and it was here that I first truly started to fear that the wedding shouldn't go through as planned.

I finally came to accept this shortly after we'd sent out invitations to all of our friends and loved ones.  We each had the exquisite pleasure of contacting them all to say, "No, we're really not going to get married so please don't show up."  Along with this decision, I decided not to go to Europe, not to continue toward a Ph.D.  In a matter of days, I had derailed my entire life plan and severed contact with one of my best friends, in the process inflicting great pain upon him.  And yet I was calm and self-assured that - difficult as it was - it was the right decision.

Oh, and one of my cats ran away.  People keep saying cats come back - he's not going to come back.

...so in the last six months, my life has changed more than I ever could have conceived... somewhat unexpectedly, a major part of this change is that I have gained a greater capacity for coping with life's little stresses and as such am no longer in counseling.  In fact, we have been tapering me off my crazy meds so that I am now relying on me for me...

I'm not the same girl I was six months ago when my father passed away, and it's largely because of him that I've been able to regain control of my life, to set it back on a path that is fitting for me.  The world did not end when my father died; it didn't even end on May 21, at least not the world as I perceive it.  In many ways, his death provided me the strength I needed to form a new life - for that I will always be grateful.

But I just wanted to take the time to say:

Daddy, I miss you.

Politically correct rantings of the incensed

At some point during my life, it became apparent that the things that were emphasized while growing up - compassion, teamwork, respectfulness - are not rights, but merely privileges of which others can/will deprive you at a moment's whim.  Now somehow it's the rhetoric - and not the truth - that matters.  Our political battlefield is exemplary in this right: if someone wants to reduce tax cuts on the rich, they're a socialist and decried as highly unpatriotic, an agent of the evil lurking in unknown caverns around the globe.  But what of our civic duty to seek the kernel of wisdom in all things and to nurture this kernel to fruition?

A grim view of the state of political discourse?

Most of my faith in the institutions instilled in me from my early childhood - largely due to a highly religious upbringing - has been eroded during the process of graduate school.  With very few exceptions, graduate students are expected to behave more as caged dogs than human beings, fighting and clawing our way over the backs of others to get the quintessential result to tout in front of the rest of the world as they gape in awe at our accomplishments.  Scarily, this dog-eat-dog nature is not just interlab, but often times intralab.

This is a perfectly natural phenomenon, when considered.  It's like sibling rivalry, except your parents are supposed to love you, whereas your advisor may remain perfectly apathetic, thereby retaining the option of encouraging the back-biting and undermining - all in the name of science.  It isn't hard to understand why science is misunderstood - even mistrusted - given the atmosphere of competition and 'survival of the fittest' so commonplace throughout the genre.  It's no wonder some scientists are driven to fraud, forging results just to alleviate the constant pressure to make something happen (make just one something happen).  According to Wikipedia:

Fabrication is the falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise. This includes making up citations to back up arguments or inventing quotations. Fabrication predominates in the natural sciences, where students sometimes falsify data to make experiments "work". It includes data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed, including selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data to generating bogus data.
Bibliographical references are often fabricated, especially when a certain minimum number of references is required or considered sufficient for the particular kind of paper. This type of fabrication can range from referring to works whose titles look relevant but which the student did not read, to making up bogus titles and authors.
There is also the practice of dry-labbing—which can occur in chemistry or other lab courses, in which the teacher clearly expects the experiment to yield certain results (which confirm established laws), so the student starts from the results and works backward, calculating what the experimental data should be, often adding variation to the data. In some cases, the lab report is written before the experiment is conducted—in some cases, the experiment is never carried out. In either case, the results are what the instructor expects.

And that's not even the worst outcome that's been seen.  (For the record, this is a link to a late-90's New York Times article on a graduate student at Harvard who committed suicide in an attempt to affect change in the graduate school system - no gruesome pictures, and a very interesting read if you're curious about the psychology that often plagues graduate students.)

So we try to rise above, try to turn the other cheek, remain aloof from the back alley dealings and machinations of Science, as we were once taught so emphatically to do.  The only problem is that distance often seems enough to fully eject us from the mainstream of science.  We lose our competitive edge, we lack comparative dedication, we seem unconcerned with science herself, rather than with the politics and bureaucracy pervading every niche.

The Grad Student Gap (AKA The Bane of My Existence, The Great Demoralizer, etc.)

And there it is - politics.  Is our method of political discourse what leads us astray, even as it spills into other fields?  In our winner-take-all system, compromise is a four-letter word.  To meet in the middle is to show weakness, abandon the interest of your constituents - someone has to lose or we've not done it correctly.  To demonstrate that 'our side' is more meritorious of getting their way, we keep prolific catalogs of every injustice, every mistake, never forgiving or forgetting as it would be disadvantageous to us getting our way.

I don't know about you, but I don't think my father would be proud if I acted like that in everyday situations.  Call me a hippie, but life - to me - is about the interconnections, between people and places and things and ideas.  That's why I find science so fascinating, seeing how everything fits together so perfectly; even the zombie-inducing fungus I mentioned in the last post is really a staggering caper of nature.

What's the use of being 'right' if in doing so we doom ourselves and our world?

So here's your homework assignment, kiddos: go out there and do what you think is right in the world.  Be the change, make a difference.  Try to see something from someone else's perspective.  Enjoy the experiences, whether victory, defeat, or somewhere in betwixt.  Meanwhile I'll sit here and rage against the machine, trying to lead by doing and words rather than just words.

Sci-fi buffet, episode I: Zombies are REAL

It's about time for me to actually start this series, though I do have a number of scientifically relevant things to discuss with you all, dear followers.  But for tonight, let us start with one that will rock your socks off: zombies are real.

For any fans of the Resident Evil series, this should rock your world.  Those of you that fantasize of the zombie apocalypse - or zombpocalypse, as it is know to the hardcore, at least in a phonetic sense - your moment of vindication has arrived.  And if your favorite book is "World War Z" - like Nathan Fillion, who is absolutely the best anything ever *sigh* - here is your proof.

courtesy of National Geographic

ZOMBIE ANTS!!!!!!!

Okay, perhaps not as frightening as the husk of a former human being lurching toward you with that hungry, vacant look in their now-soulless eyes, but we've all got to start somewhere, and it seems like zombie-ism has its foot in the door.

Now this ant is not a reindeer/elk/ant hybrid.  No, the stalks that you see in the picture above growing out of the ants head are in fact one of four species of fungus recently discovered in Brazil which can exert mind control over the host ant.  What this means is that the fungus, once exposed to its host, can take over the ant's brain and wait until the ant relocalizes to an ideal spot for fungal cultivation.  At this point, it then kills the host so that the fungus is able to proliferate and make a go at world domination.

David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State was quoted in the National Geographic article from whence the picture was borrowed as:

 This potentially means thousands of zombie fungi in tropical forests across the globe await discovery.

Of the four species yet discovered, each appears to be specifically adapted to a corresponding species of ant, over which it can exert optimal mind control.  If there are truly thousands of zombie fungi out there, what else may fall prey to these maniacal mushrooms?  (N.B.: Fungus is more than just mushrooms, so I'm a bad scientist for that alliteration)   Time is the only one who can tell, but let's all just hope that we don't end up pod people to an indigenous strain of fungus, bent on taking over the world.

Also particularly interesting, beyond simply specializing in what hosts to take over, the fungi apparently have evolved different mechanisms of transmission to further the spread of their particular fungi.  For example, some cause the host organism to develop long spines emanating from the thorax, which - upon contact with another ant of the same species - allows the fungi to move to a shiny new host.  Other fungi take a more grim approach, generating explosive spores in the body of fallen host ants which serve as a proximity mine; when any other ant gets too close, GO BOOM! and the spores take their rightful place as the new owners of the ant brain.

courtesy of National Geographic

The fungi continue to replicate and renew inside the ant carcasses until they eventually emerge.  See above for "before" and below for...

courtesy of National Geographic

AFTER!  Diabolical, no?  But highly effective as all the necessary resources for growth can be scavenged from the deceased host.  Life is a game of survival of the fittest, and this fungus is fit to be tied... but I don't want to have to touch it to tie it, so you do it.

The good news is that given how specialized the species of fungus discovered so far have been, we're relatively safe from swarms of zombie ants (so long as we don't live in Brazil's rain forests).  But evolution has a funny way, so imagine what things may come...

Actually, don't.  It's creepy!

Weddingpalooza 2011

General rule of thumb for future life decisions: if it seems like it will be utter lunacy, the likelihood is it will be.

As my fiancé and myself return from a Blitzkrieg campaign of wedding planning in Middle-of-Nowhere, Oregon, we find ourselves depleted of energy but alight with new ideas about the many wondrous things that can be done with this wondrous celebration of blissful love.  And then overly fatigued once more when we begin to think of how said celebration will tax our limited resources of time, money, etc.

After embarking to Oregon on an utterly ludicrous itinerary brought about by the cashing in of frequent flier miles (Champaign through Chicago through Dallas to Portland), we arrived at in the midst of a snowstorm – epically rare in the Willamette Valley and yet the second into which we’ve traveled in the last two months.  The drive from the airport to the quiet town in which my mother resides – though I should say ‘at the top of which my mother resides’ – was fraught with icy roads, hordes of snowplows, and low visibility, unnerving to say the least.  Eventually, fourteen hours after our initial departure, we arrived at a place where we could catch some shuteye.

Unfortunately, this brief respite was just that – all too brief.  Our plans for the following day were to head to the high desert of Oregon, which as you might imagine is at a higher elevation than that at which we denizens of the Willamette Valley reside.  And the snowstorm raged on.  In an effort to circumvent the snow, rolling in from the north, we headed south, to cross the Cascade Mountains not at the apex of Mount Hood but rather on a smaller state highway that crawls through a lower (less than 5000 feet elevation at the highest point) swath of the mountains.  This effort was in vain; the blizzard hounded us, obfuscating our view of the road, slowing down all the cars to just above a dull crawl, and lessening traction just enough to keep you – and your car – on your toes.

But we persisted to keep our rigorously regimented schedule of vendor interviews, attempting to maximize our efficiency during our sole pre-wedding trip to the destination.  After only one incident of less than optimal traction, we arrived safely at our first appointment.  The deluge of questions and counter-questions began in earnest.  What sort of colors did we envision for the wedding?  Were we more string lights or Chinese lantern type people?  Did we want to have all the traditional trappings of the wedding ceremony, like the tossing of the bouquets and garters?  Had we selected the music for the processional, the recessional, the first dance, the father-daughter dance, etc.?  Our brains began to feel numb and puddle-y, with good reason.

Amazingly, we were able to rally on our quest for plans and answers.  In a testament to our compatibility, we managed to have mostly coinciding answers under fire.  We felt somewhat relieved, but oh so fatigued.  Four appointments and a misplaced state-issued id – crucial to our ability to return home post-madness – later, we exhaustedly fell into our hotel beds, garish but inviting all the same.

Upon realizing that we had not considered libations for the reception, we rallied to go test out a local brewpub to sample their ales.  At the pub, there was standing room only – even that was in sparing quantities.  We unanimously decided against a 60-minute wait to be seated, and wandered around the downtown area to find another establishment to sate our hunger.  A directory conveniently located on the corner assisted us in finding a restaurant boasting fine Italian cuisine; something about the day we’d had so far really resonated with carbo-loading.  We were somewhat disheartened, then, when we entered to find that the place had been repurposed to a mishmash diner of sorts, serving only three Italian items, standard deli fare, and breakfast at all hours of the day or night.

Alas, sweet sleep, giving plenty of time for sufficient rest before our 8 am appointment the next morning.  But we had not set our alarms – mine principally due to the lack of screen visibility of my phone resulting from a recent laundering mishap – and so were awakened by a somewhat harried call from my fiancé at quarter till 8, asking if we were ready to depart as we surely should be.

We hurriedly gathered our supplies, readied the room for checkout and set off on our way.  In the hullabaloo, we conveniently misplaced the address for the meeting, which resulted in a scenic tour of the residential areas of town, eventually leading to the planned meeting place.  Another full day of meetings awaited; from our previous days’ ventures, portions of the journey seemed vaguely familiar.  Finally, all consultations concluded, so we picked up my id and headed off across the mountains again.  This time, the sky was graciously clear so that no snow impeded our view, but we wove in and out of the mountains in the darkness, flickering the high beams on and off as each dearth of traffic would permit.

The next appointment was to sample wedding cake flavors, a sacrifice we begrudgingly made for the sake of our special day.  Then we were off to a fourth grade basketball game, followed by milling about a mall for several hours to meet up with a few more vendors.  A one and a half hour wrap up with the planner helped us debrief after our frantic weekend campaign and we headed home to sleep.

We were so appreciative of our return itinerary – Portland through Dallas to Champaign – for its relative simplicity as compared to the flight out.  Unbeknownst to us, a storm had been brewing over the whole of Illinois.  Fifteen minutes before we were scheduled to land, we encountered some ‘weather’ so jarring that it allowed us to experience the sensation of zero gravity.  Admittedly, this could be cool, but generally in situations in which one gets to elect to have this experience.  After emerging from the heart-quickening turbulence, our captain announced that we would soon be landing – in Madison, WI.

The usual trials and tribulations of a cancelled and/or paused flight led us to queue for an hour or two to secure overnight shelter.  We exited to the shuttle loading station at which no shuttle had yet shown.  Hailing a taxi and inviting a friend or two from the halted plane allowed us to arrive at our hotel slightly earlier, quite fortuitous considering 57 people would soon be vying to get checked in and get some much coveted sleep.  We were also lucky enough to secure for ourselves a place on the 5:30 am shuttle back to the airport so that we would have ample time to pass through security and board our 7:00 am flight back to Champaign.

But five hours of rest seems far too cruel an amount when you are facing the prospect of emerging from a warm bed to stalk out into the wintry night.  Alas, we persevered, taking the last two seats on the shuttle; the ride was unsurprisingly quiet, full of half-zombified voyagers caressing their hot caffeinated beverages.  Much to the chagrin of many an experienced Madison traveler, our cadre of crewmates arrived at the lesser-known security checkpoint, veritably gumming up the works – which by all accounts were normally quite sleekly streamlined.

At 5:55 am at the Madison airport, there is not much in the way of libation and food options.  We procured a bagel with cream cheese and a coffee for my beloved, a giant sugary cinnamon roll for myself (so as to compensate for my aversion to the caffeinated beverage in an energy sense).  At the gate, we were somewhat amused to hear that the flight had been delayed an hour due to the fact that the crew would not be able to get sufficient quantities of sleep had they undergone the same process that all we weary travelers had.

But we made it.  We returned to Champaign, with better and more concrete ideas in our minds, having now a skeleton of something that vaguely resembles a wedding.  An exercise in fatigue, but fortuitously not in futility.  And after a full day of work, we’re really quite exhausted.

Don't you forget about me - a stream of consciousness exercise

As I teeter on the precipice of the mystical convergence currently attempting to sabotage my life, I find myself careening slowly down the slippery slope of sanity.  Okay, so the convergence isn't 'mystical' so much as the whole "when it rains, it pours" phenomenon that we all seem to encounter at one point or another in our lives.  At the moment, I can fully appreciate why the Mayas believed the world was going to end in 2012, and I may well be doing my part to accomplish this feat.

Luckily for all of us, I don't seem to be the only one attempting to bring about the end of the world as we know it.  I'm not usually a political person, but I do have strongly held beliefs about what is right and decent, many of which are currently at odds with the proposed budgets being bandied about in Washington.  Granted we all have our notions and our druthers about what works and what doesn't, but the Congress seems to be taking a fairly large swath of cut and run politics to try to tidy up our mounting national debt.

Don't get me wrong: yeah, I think balancing the budget is a great idea.  But doing it by cutting EPA funding to monitor greenhouse gas emissions seems a tad short-sighted.  I don't follow the news in great detail, but I have seen an OBSCENE amount of publications and reports lately about how climate change is going to affect the world, and I think it would be incredibly foolish of us not to act now to try to get things under control.  As jingoist as America tends to be and as much as we might like to occasionally pretend that while no man is an island, a country very well can be - it's not true.  As one who has long contemplated the indelible mark she is leaving on the world, I can attest to the fact that there are always ripples in the pond, always consequences of the wingbeats.  I also don't hold to a doom and gloom viewpoint, that no matter what we do we'll always make things worse.  But whatever happened to the philosophy that one should leave a place in as good of a condition - if not better - than how they found it?  And why would this be a bad policy to keep in mind as we make decisions that will ultimately affect the future of not only our progeny but mayhaps also our planet?

Among other things being cut to try to tidy up the bottom line: arts funding for things like the Public Broadcasting Company, money for organizations like Planned Parenthood, ... and a few more things from the EPA.  If you'd like to read more about the amendments to this proposed budget, the New York Times has been doing a great job keeping we, the American public, up to date.

The goal of these budget cutbacks is to regain $60 billion, a not insubstantial sum.  But according to the 2010 Census, American currently has on the order of 300 million citizens, which means that $200 more tax revenue from each citizen each year would offset all the cuts currently being made.  It seems logical to me that a two-pronged approach - cutting back on some things and increasing revenue - would make the most fiduciary sense in the long term.  I would rather pay an extra 5% tax than lose the EPA, and I don't think I'm alone.

Of course, thinking about the EPA reminds me of my currently delegated responsibility in my research lab: submitting waste solvent for disposal.  We do this on a weekly schedule so it's really not a hassle, but the amount of planning and effort that goes into this weekly event is staggering.  I don't often think so far outside of my post, but waste management is actually a very intriguing notion.  Imagine if you will working in a job where each week, you come pick up some mystery chemicals of which you have been tasked to dispose.  Some of these chemicals are best treated by reacting with another solution to neutralize them, some are buried, and some are burned.  ...and there it is.

Given the sheer number of explosive compounds in your average chemistry lab - ones that are prone to go boom without the addition of a spark - the idea of setting fire to said mystery chemicals is terrifying!  Therefore it is imperative that we identify the contents of our waste to the best of our abilities so as not to lead to unexpected havoc further down the line.  We sometimes refer to this as "not crossing the streams"... which they also advise not to do in Ghostbusters, unless you happen to be up against an all-too-large marshmallow man bent on the destruction of your town.  Hey, and in Ghostbusters, that ghoulie was only released because of non-compliance with an EPA-like agency!  Everything comes full circle.

Speaking of not crossing the streams, as I sit here in lab with a mixture of two clear liquids, I am finding myself fascinated with the fluid dynamics of miscible solvents.  It's truly beautiful, combining water with acetonitrile (Wiki linked here) and watching the wisps dance about the container walls, spinning and twirling this way and that, slowly becoming one despite initial resistance.

...in the end, I find it highly worth it to invest in the quality of our world, don't you?

Cataloging other digital publications

In addition to going for it via this blog, I have also sought forms of (pro bono) gainful employment.  Here are the links to other such writings that have been published on the web:

04/05/2011:  http://www.dailyillini.com/special/moms-day-guide-2011/2011/04/05/mothers-grandmothers-make-for-the-greatest-role-models
                     http://www.dailyillini.com/special/moms-day-guide-2011/2011/04/05/relationship-with-mom-undergoes-transformation-after-dad-pass


03/30/2011:  http://fwix.com/champaignil/share/7273bbe1ce/take_a_look_theyve_cooked_a_book

03/16/2011:  http://media.www.dailyillini.com/features/2011/03/16/asb-an-alternative-from-the-ordinary

03/08/2011:  http://www.dailyillini.com/features/2011/03/08/studying-abroad-no-obstacle-for-unofficial-celebrations

03/01/2011:  http://www.theurbn.com/2011/03/simulated-mars-mission-reaches-halfway-point-surface-walks/


02/14/2011:  http://www.theurbn.com/2011/02/study-probes-crew-effects-traveling-mars/

COMING SOON - Sci-fi buffet

Color me a geek, but I love me some good sci-fi television and/or video.  As my betrothed and I sit here tonight watching "Die Another Day", it occurs to me that there is an unrivaled amount of material for coverage that would be amazing.

In the coming days, I will highlight different productions and the kernels of science truth underlying them.  After all, the best science fiction is that with a tinge of possibility.