Yesterday, I fell into a migraine nap during a news bit on CRISPR. If you’ve ever heard any reporting on CRISPR, you know it’s impossible to make it through a segment without this two word phrase which seems to haunt genetic research: DESIGNER BABIES (a concept so horrific it must be text yelled).
Doesn’t matter if the piece has zip to do with germ line editing, those babies will make their way into that story by gum! They are resilient. Presumably, they’ve been bred to be.
My migraine dreams are always a bit odd, and the news story infiltrated the narrative…
I was part of a Designer Baby research team. My role involved standing at a huge blackboard and completing the largest Punnet Square I’ve ever seen. I do love a good Punnet Square but this seemed excessive. I mean predicting the possible genetic traits of Designer Babies is no small task.
Ultimately my findings were that the Babies would be manufactured by Jordache and sold exclusively at Up Against the Wall. That last bit might require you to be of a certain age and have resided in a specific geographic location to have any meaning.
But hey, I hear there’s this super advanced abacus on which you can search for things. I personally have no experience with this apparatus, as Punnet Squares take up all my time. But if you have this awesome abacus, slide the doo hickies into whatever configuration results in Jordache jeans and Up Against the Wall stores and there you have a snippet of my youth.
A note re: Jordache designer jeans – they came with all manner of wild back pocket designs which my mom would not let me have. Mom was always denying me things: sugar, that stuffed animal horse head on a stick that would have vastly improved my play time circa age six. Her excuse regarding the jeans: the pockets were ugly
Retrospectively, she was not wrong. But at age 10, in the era of parachute pants (denied again by mom) those pockets looked really classy. That’s not to say I never got my Jordache designer jeans. I got them, a little horse head (nonstuffed) logo in the place of a tricolored butterfly. And yes I got them at Up Against the Wall.
Designer Babies and ridiculous migraine dreams aside, CRISPR has some really cool implications for somatic cell editing. Worthy of an abacus session.
Big rethink
Every so often I write of my tentative plans for grad school. Recently, I’ve been considering the matter with the most realistic mindset since my graduation 6 years ago.
I’ve come to accept that what I want, and doing it in the way that I want simply isn’t realistic. I’d love to fall into academia, holding classes full of lively debate and thought provoking discussion. That’s what I loved about my undergrad experience. Ideally, I’d love to gift it to everyone.
Yet the fact that for every brilliant discussion and illuminating presentation, hundreds of hours are spent slogging through papers and discussion board topics (not all of them brilliant or inspired) can’t be ignored.
As much as I’d like to think I have the patience to make a career of teaching, I have to be honest with myself. I am impatient. Not an angry impatient, more the restless sort. So grad school’s been tabled, pending a career path that fits my need to feel fulfilled by my day job, while still permitting time to pursue my true vocation: music (and dance and photography and writing….).
So what’s the plan as my student loan debt shrinks into a lovely debt free oblivion? Travel. I’ve never left this hemisphere. I’ve seen lots of the U.S., but I crave adventures abroad (though not Antarctica, sorry ice continent). I have managed to narrow my scope a bit. There’s a chateau in France where you can stay and help in its restoration: Chateau de Gudanes.
I love that idea! It suits my need to be doing something, plus it’s so damn lovely. I’ve also looked into travel groups that cater to women who want to travel but are aren’t coupled up and don’t want to be the third wheel.
The prospects keep me from feeling utterly stuck. Though the feeling has never been stronger, I have to remind myself that chucking my life and running away from home only results in eventually feeling stuck, just in a different locale.
Now if only there were a trick to getting unstuck from your own mind (yes, I’ve tried vodka….makes my mind even stickier). Reading helps a bit, but it also makes me want to go back to school, and that whole loop starts again.
Tv distracts, but with The Americans over, I really only have Westworld. That show is constantly throwing out literary references and so again we’re back in the grad school loop (very meta). So I’ve gone back to watching Doogie Howser, which is pure nostalgia and the realization that Neil Patrick Harris hasn’t aged a bit.
Guitars, minivans and a dog named Bill Paxton
It might not seem obvious to those who know me, but sometimes I can be too pragmatic. Last night’s subconscious wanderings are a great example.
I dreamed I got to hang out with one of my major musician crushes. Hot, right? No, my brain knows the facts and won’t indulge me at all. This get together was totally platonic. Indeed, his wife was there the whole time and she was genuinely nice to me.
I also dreamed he had a dog named Bill Paxton and I asked if he was constantly being mistaken for the dog named Bill Pullman, because I am funny and my brain knows that, too.
At the end of the dream, he drove me home in a charmingly unassuming 1980s minivan. He asked what I was going to do when I got back to my place. Oh here we go, right? Nope, he’s married in the real world and doesn’t seem the sort to stray, which is oddly part of the attraction. So I respond:
“Probably stay up too late listening to music and dancing like a fool.”
Which both very accurately describes most of my free evenings, dream world or no, as well as highlights a benefit of living alone. He says he had a better idea (Just stop, he doesn’t even hold my hand. My super hot hand) gifts me with a guitar, yanks it back at the last minute, says:
“On the condition that you use it in front of people, coward.”
Damn, man.
(I still wonder if he has that tattoo on his ass in real life….hey I do have an imagination. Besides, it was backstage naked, not green room naked)
Wild. Fire.
For the first time in a long while I slept in my bed. I’d recently made a habit of sleeping on my couch for reasons of allergies and memories. Something about the couch seems to inhibit dreaming or at least my ability to recall dreams. So in my proper bed last night, my brain unleashed months of suppressed imagery. The meaning of which I’ve yet to suss out, if there’s any meaning to be had.
I dreamed in two parts. First, animals had escaped from parts unknown. I do know they were deemed “wild”, were in pursuit of me and a few strangers, and consisted of: dogs, tigers, and a whale. The whale had the ability to pop up through puddles and nip at our heels. It was a Blue Whale.
We took shelter in a tree located in the back yard of my childhood home. I remember thinking this was a bad idea as the tree had a little brick wall around the base, making it easier for predators to access. Less easy for the whale I suppose.
Eventually we moved to cots in the back yard. No explanation was given for this, and my request to set up some sort of perimeter alert was met with eye rolling. Okay, enjoy being a whale snack, random dream inhabitants!
I woke up a moment. Neighbor coming home. I fell back in to dreaming but without animals or strangers. In this dream, I was burning my hair. Deliberately burning it off with a vanilla scented candle. I was doing it out of self loathing, a feeling that was inescapable. Something compelled me to stop and I realized I had no choice but to simply cut off whatever remained. Yet, when I sought out scissors and a mirror, I discovered I had far more hair than I’d imagined.
(In the time between hair burning and scissor locating, my brain ran through the idea that this might not be so bad, maybe I’d look okay bald or find a nice wig that wasn’t too costly or uncomfortable).
Once realizing my hair might be salvageable, I set about in an attempt to cover the bald patches and discovered there were none. “Huh ” I thought. “Maybe you only dreamed of burning your hair….”
Then I glanced out the window into the back yard and down at the tree with the low brick wall around it.
Despite all
There’s been a trend on social media this week. In response to the rather overwhelming perception that 2016 was terrible, people are asking for positive recollections of the year decency forgot.
This is a tall order. Not solely due to the seemingly rampant loss of talent, the political strife and partisan anger at home, the various humanitarian crises around the world, but because so many people dear to me lost far too much. Maybe it’s about finding the light, however dim, in that darkness. To believe that with all the monsters out of the box, hope remains. Maybe.
I will attempt to mine the year for a few of those moments.
I’ll start with the totally material, first world of blessings. I got a “new to me” car. Now I can freely traverse the countryside without fear that my airbag will deploy and assault me. The new car (I’ve yet to name it) has the most important feature of all: Bluetooth compatibility. Now I can listen to all the music. All of it, and loud.
I’m fortunate enough to write and play music with the same awesome people. We even get paid a bit. I have a new tambourine with brass jingles and it’s vastly superior to its nickel jingled predecessor. I have become marginally better at bar chords. Still working on that B, but sometimes it rings out nicely.
I am employed by good people who do good things for other people. I get paid enough to be able to live alone.
I have a safe place to live. Drunken neighbors aside, I come home to a place where I am secure and at ease. This has not always been the case.
Despite the god awful hurt of it, I allowed my heart to open this year. Despite the god awful hurt of it, I allowed myself to be emotionally honest and feel things I thought were lost to me. Despite the god awful hurt of it, I have come to realize I am not the cure for, nor the cause of other people’s damage. Despite the god awful hurt of it, I have grown to know my own damage and the ways in which I am both cause and cure. Despite the god awful hurt of it, I am trying to be kinder to myself in those moments when I am so obviously the cause. Despite the god awful hurt of it, I do not regret my choice to be open, however closed I may be at this moment.
There is something to be said for being nearly broken. The ability to know that feeling at all is a sign of life. What happens from there is up to you. I know there must be a few folks walking around, relatively unscathed by life. I worry a bit for them, because no one gets out of this mess without scars. For some those scars run old and deep, others get wounded later in life. Both shape our world view, neither knows who has it better. All we can do is try to remember that we are all walking wounded, trying to make the best of life despite the god awful hurt of it.
American Tragedy
Ah two thousand and sixteen, the strife you’ve wrought. Here in the States, the political climate has left us a nation divided. Like a honeybadger/cobra chimera, our democratic process seems intent on rending itself from within. But I will not add to that divide here. This post is another great American tradition – the telling of one’s woes to anyone who will listen.
I have suffered my own tragedy and spoken little of it as the pain is still fresh, the wound deep. Only a few know my sorrow, but now I shall share it with you…
I have had three mealy Honeycrisp apples in as many weeks. I can barely type the words without welling up as I recall the anticipation of sweetness and joy, only to taste betrayal. How did these impostors gain the coveted sticker, the badge of superiority over all other Malus pumila? Are they decoys designed to fill the quota, are our Honeycrisp being cut and diluted with an inferior fruit? I have no answers. My faith is shaken, my trust lost. I can only speak to the character of the apple I once knew:
“Honeycrisp is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful apple I’ve ever known in my life.”
The great fault in our design: a body’s need and desire for sleep, paired with the mind’s wandering nature. A head strikes the pillow and is pulled forward and backward, worrying over what is to be and anxious over what came before. Now is never, the arrow of time moving away from any fixed point so that even the past becomes blurred and warped, shaped by the gravity of memories.
The memory was a mere smudge on glass. A sooty mark left after a bout of roughness. A stubborn blemish by no means permanent. And yet after wiping it away I would often catch sight of it lurking in the periphery, ghosting about only to vanish when confronted. So I began to scrub away at it and in the act created a scratch. The scratch I was sure could be smoothed by filing at its edges and in the act I split the glass and the vision of the world seen through it, and for this there was no fix.
The Canadian
Been a while I suppose. Not for lack of material or trying. The trouble comes when I set out to turn some life event into a worthy anecdote, and find myself asking: “who cares?”
That’s the crux of writing made public. The audacity to ask that question and arrive at an answer which reflects a positive number.
Math is not my subject.
So today I am writing for myself. In part to gather the incidents of last night’s dream lest I forget them, and to practice the art of not caring who cares.
So to The Dream:
It begins in a restaurant. An interior of fast-food red and yellow. No one seems to be eating. I’m with friends who immediately depart, leaving me with a mutual friend who’s visiting from somewhere outside the States. He doesn’t have a discernible accent, so I assume he’s Canadian. He’s unknown to me in the waking world, but I will say that he bares a strong resemblance to the character of Tom Branson on Downton Abbey. We sit in timid silence on the same side of the table. I am about to ask how he’s enjoying the States when two young women sit down on my right and proceed to flirt with my acquaintance as if I weren’t situated awkwardly in between. It seems the intent of the pair is to irritate me as much as it is to entice my dining companion into The Ultimate Dude Fantasy.
Since I barely know him and have no claim nor interest, I’m not bothered by their juvenile behavior. I also get the sense that The Canadian isn’t particularly interested in a menage a trois whose origins happen among molded plastic seating and cuisine that’s uniformly yellow. The Canadian and I depart the restaurant via the magic of tele-portation, which is generally the preferred mode of travel in the land of Nod.
My apartment now. Though not my waking world apartment. This one is large and lofty with floor to ceiling windows and an open floor plan charmingly sectioned off to permit a feeling of intimacy. The Canadian is here, still simply a friend. I am about to run errands which would bore him and so set him up with a book (David Sedaris). As I proceed to the door, something out of place catches my eye. Suddenly the simple act of straightening up turns into to a full on cleaning blitz. The more I clean, the more clutter appears until it becomes apparent that my apartment owes its lofty and spacious feel to the fact that it is actually a department store in Jackson Ward with heavy foot traffic and inventory that seems to multiply every time I turn around.
Here is where I learn I have roommates. They are of questionable hygiene and occupy a space near the front window. Their slovenly dwelling fully visible to passersby who often pause, possibly wondering if the contents on display might be some manner of a post-post modern art installation meant as a commentary on societal decay or the meaninglessness of material possessions.
In spite of the fact that the mess is not of my own making, the roommates proceed to blame me for the disarray of the apartment in general. In fact blame is coming at me from all sides. Why do I permit the inventory to languish in the stockroom? Why are the Spring lookbooks absent from the sales floor? Why haven’t I ordered the pizza my roommates requested?
Taking a deep breath, I set out to right all these wrongs, to organize the ever expanding space which has grown to include a hydroponic garden located just to the right of Electronics.
As I look over the DVD/VCR combos lining the shelf, The Canadian is suddenly next to me – a comforting feeling under the circumstances. I suddenly spot someone I know from the waking world! As I turn to greet him, I feel an odd sensation. It seems that The Canadian and I are attached at the hip. Or rather we are mutually impaled on a wooden dowel that runs through our joints. It dawns on me that this means we are dating (have fun unpacking that imagery, my psych friends).
Failing to catch up with my friend, I instead come face to face with the fast-food floozies. They inform me that they’ve posted a negative review on Yelp. Not of my apartment turned department store, but of me. There’s a Yelp for rating people and the two have taken it upon themselves to malign my character. The Canadian tells me not to worry, I have plenty of other positive reviews, though none are visible to me. I begin to question if The Canadian is lying to spare my feelings, or if I simply lack the ability to see anything other than my own flaws. Again – go to it psych majors.
Distracted, fretting over the Yelp review and the state of my apartment/store, it slowly dawns on me that The Canadian has migrated outside. He’s heading down the sidewalk and it’s my fault. As I make a full on rush towards the door and my Absent Canadian, a woman stops me with a basket of stamps and tells me I must chose one. I pick randomly and she places a coordinating wrist band on my arm. It reads: “What I Did for Love.” This is not a reference to the song from a “Chorus Line”, but rather the title of a novel whose artwork is the exact same as that of The Great Gatsby. You could argue that the same title could have worked in place of “Gatsby”, though it would have been a horrible and very literal choice.
One of my roommates returns bearing a note from The Canadian. It reads: “I only came here to see you and the aquarium….” This makes me wonder which aquarium, the one in Baltimore? The one at the beach?
I wake feeling overwrought with guilt knowing The Canadian has missed out.
On the aquarium.
Moving on…..
I was fast approaching the longest lease I’d held in many years. This June, would mark five turns of the Earth ’round the Sun since I’d moved in to my Soviet Bloc style building in a neighborhood beloved for its architecture. My rationale for staying was simple. Moving sucks, or rather the process of finding a new place to live sucks. The act of moving is easy. I’ve done it more times that I can count. Four times in one year has been the record so far. I became and remain very good at staying detached from places. The idea of “home” as a fixed, physical point means nothing to me. I want to be comfortable, yes, but there’s an odd impermanence to any place I live, even if that abode shelters me for years. And so it almost became another turn of the Earth when I received notice that my rent would remain unchanged for my lease’s upcoming renewal. Saints be praised, this never happens! So I decided staying would be preferable to the act of tramping around town, viewing apartments whilst trying to politely stifle my gag reflex.
Then another notice came. This one informed me that oh heavens! a mistake had been made and that after a walk through in which dollar signs rang up in the property owner’s eyes, my rent would be increasing by almost $100/month and that at some point I would be living without a kitchen as they planned to renovate while I was living there. Out of fairness, they would only charge me $250 a month to live without a kitchen and have people in my house for months on end. Oh of course, how could I turn down such an offer? The fact that they’d sent my renewal a week before the walk through didn’t seem to strike them as unethical or at all problematic. I retained a copy of said document, which I didn’t buy as having been “sent in error.” Naturally, my first reaction was to destroy the world by fire. But it’s not your fault landlords don’t live by the same code of secular humanism as I. So instead I cried. Then I got mad again but in that cold as ice sort of way. My anger has a decidedly Dante’s Inferno-esque quality to it. I called the leasing office. The receptionist’s voice made her sound as though you could gently nudge her and she’d simply topple. So topple her I did. Metaphorically speaking of course. I didn’t lay blame at her feet I simply made her feel guilty as sin for working there. She actually asked me who’d sent the letter, as if it may be some truly elaborate April fools prank writ on company letter head. The president of the company doesn’t seem the prankish sort. So after what seemed an eternity of listening to her sweat, she told me to email the leasing agent to let them know I had no plans of enduring their outer circle of hell.
And so began the hunt through the list of leasing agents I’d been eyeing since the start of the year, who I’d gratefully ignored after learning I might actually beat the cost of living for once. Unfortunately, all the places I’d mentally or physically bookmarked were under contract. Then on an off chance, I checked a site whose apartments are generally beyond my means, and there were not one but two that were just a tiny bump up in rent but a boon in location. I have an appointment to view them on Thursday, and if they are at all passable I will hand over money for one on the spot. Despite not having actually found a place, despite the fact that I could easily be disappointed on Thursday, I feel better. Sometimes life has to force you out. I didn’t love this place, but it was easy. I have already begun tossing things out. I look forward to that, ridding myself of things. I do it often enough, but a move is cathartic. The throwing out and leaving behind of things you no longer need. Not simply physical things, but memories. The idea of leaving that patch of hardwood which always creaks with the sound of: “here is where I said goodbye to you not knowing it at the time” or the front door handle from the most humiliating (and now most hilarious) break up in my history. It is saying goodbye to the wall I faced while typing well into the night as I pushed myself towards finally graduating college. Its twin across the room is where my guitar stands, where one night I picked up that ninety dollar gem and wrote my first whole song from beginning to end like it was just waiting (though I am still too chicken to play the thing by myself in public). Between them is where I lost all hope and regained it over and over again, it is where I thought I found love and was wrong until I was right. It is where I will turn 40. Which perhaps lends more significance to my departing just a month or so after. It seems only right that now I should be kicked from the nest, having finally completed the trials of childhood and youth, that I should be waiting to land somewhere new. Even if it is only temporary.
Applehearted 