(no subject)
I was standing in the Chemistry storeroom today and thinking.
I was thinking there is one really simple reason that I think I want to be a Chemist, or at least deal pretty directly in Chemistry as a job:
I don't think I ever want to be away from these chemicals. I don’t think I could take not being able to come and play around with them at whim. I know it sounds ridiculous, but they are honestly like friends of mine. I remember a quote that basically said that the way mathematicians feel about numbers is the same way. Every number has an identity. Everything is personal and specific. Chemicals are that way for me. They are like lovers.
I remember my first chemical. Copper (II) nitrate. The crystals are a gorgeous blue, which I measured and remeasured, weighed and reweighed. I had to add water and then zinc to get solid copper and a zinc nitrate solution. I spent every morning in that classroom, with a beaker and filter paper and the balance, trying to do this project, trying to understand how these things worked, trying to watch the cerulean blue swirl into a cloudy gray and settle on the bottom, trying to see zinc turn into copper as if it is doing the Houdini trick where it must untangle itself from its impossibly watery chains.
I began to see Chemistry in my shampoo, in my water, in my clothes. I learned how to value it and hunger for its complexities.
That is the biggest mistake people make in judging each other. Not many people are geniuses at something like Chemistry or writing or much of anything else. I walked into Chemistry the way everyone else does: with the pain of grades over your head and the confusion of dealing with something invisible. But somewhere I caught a hold of it and began to love it.
This is important. Love, first, not understanding.
There are simply people who love something and so they study it and play around with it and think about it. It’s a hobby not a talent. I don’t understand the jealousy some people feel about other’s hobbies. A hobby is just made of attention and time. I am not more apt to understand Chemistry, just as a gymnast does not know how to do double back flips as an infant. Maybe one child is more flexible than another. But that is not gymnastics.
And truthfully, when I think about it, I realize what people are really upset about is that they know they don’t really love anything. They are upset because they don’t want to put in the time to find out what they love and so they perch here, dangling on the edge of apathy. And I guess I’ve never understood that. Sure, I understand that place where you are good at basically a lot of things but you never actually treasure something. But I was always looking. It’s hard to feel pity for someone when they aren’t looking.
And when I found Chemistry, I knew immediately what every science teacher and every English teacher has failed to understand in my personality ever since. How could one choose chemistry and writing simultaneously, so thoroughly split between the two? The truth is, they are the same language, the same romanticism of interactions and colors and space.
And this is why, so often, after solutions are made, beakers are put back in place, and Ms. Cohlmia’s lectures are running into the aching haunches of afternoon, I sneak back into the storeroom, look up at the rows and rows of identical bottles, and read the titles of fictitious stories from the names on the rotting yellowed labels.