No Wonder I Dread My Statement of Purpose

I took some time to write my (excessively accomplished) best friend from college a long email today. She still lives up North.

Usually, I try not to be a downer. I write sassy, brilliantly entertaining letters in which I heroically manage to keep my chin up without dissolving into saccharine dishonesty. And today's letter started off okay. But it wound up ending like this:
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Yesterday my workaholic father got sick and stayed home from teaching ROTC while my worried mother went on her shift and my unemployed butt battled Kitchen Infestation II: Indianmeal Moth Caterpillars. (The first was of Argentine ants.) Semi-translucent white "worms", about three mm in length, and equipped with swiffering amber dots of heads, had been dropping from the ceiling and cupboards on silken threads like miniature paratroopers for a week and a half. With initially negligible but then escalating frequency. They liked to land on my head as well as on the dining table, whenever people had gathered to eat dinner and were just about to take a bite. They grossed my parents out, especially my fastidious dad.

"They're not maggots, are they?!" my dad had asked, in stark horror.

Well. This kind of sciency goodness is always my job. After my parents failed to locate The Nest, I examined a few specimens, conducted some online research, successfully identified them, and prepared for war. The critters had established a major canopy in a forgotten glass jar of peanut brittle, stoppered only with a cork that they could disgustingly wiggle around. They had gone on to colonize a few poorly secured bags and boxes of grain products. Getting rid of them took six hours, great quantities of dish soap and hot water, my powers of obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, too many garbage and recycling bags for a time of Bailouts and high food prices, and cheap vodka no one in this teetotaling household drinks. It also required me to take photos of larvae and pupae with my cell and send them without warning to Tiny One, who has hated and feared insects since that time in grade school when I gave her my chicken pox and she hallucinated a bedroom chock-full of creepy-crawlies, and who is thinking of flying home for a visit soon.

My dad eventually emerged to get an (untainted) lunch in a peaceful corner and watch the proceedings afterwards. I excitedly told him all about the caterpillars, how they had true legs and bristles if you looked at them closely, how they were common pantry pests all over the world and how they had probably been feeding in the deeps of the cupboards for weeks. He asked questions about my extermination process (which mostly came from a quintessentially Pacific Northwest website on holistic destruction of meal moths) and about how the things had gotten into the kitchen in the first place. He made the kind of half-exasperated, half-ridiculously-proud spousal quips that my parents have started to make to me, now that I'm old enough to hear spousal criticism in any form-- "Your mother; ever since I've been married to her, she just doesn't seal things. Maybe we can convince her now to seal things in the kitchen"-- and marveled along with me at the blessings of technology, which have relatively recently enabled us to refrigerate as many things as possible, thus protecting Bisquick and cornmeal from moths even when one has no storage canisters or heavy-duty Ziploc bags on hand.

"I always tell Mom," I chattered jovially, as I wiped a bottle of nutmeg, inspected and cleared for consumption, with a vodka-soaked cloth, "that, had I been born any earlier than, like, the 20th century, I simply would have starved to death. I'm already picky, and I get perfectly good food. I'd never stomach the vittles of a world ruled by boiled vegetables grown in human sewage or puddings kept on shelves overrun with mice."

"Nah," replied my father, eyeing my long assembly line of foodstuffs. "You would have been one of the ones who invented a way to make it safe to eat."

This flummoxed me. I had no idea that my dad thought I was that smart. Hell, I had no idea that anyone in this family thought I was smart anymore. I always get the feeling that almost no one has thought of me as smart since I underwowed everyone at Cal.

Later, in an effort to keep my interest piqued with science topics, my dad gave me an article he had received on a "non-lethal counter-personnel" device the Air Force has recently invented, which they call the "Active Denial System"--LOL--and which is delightfully like a Star Trek phaser set to stun. Okay, not totally, but it does focus "[an invisible] beam of millimeter waves occurring at the 94 GHz frequency" to effect "a rapid heating of the human target's (adversary's) skin that is extremely uncomfortable and ultimately prompts the individual to flee" without "[promoting] cancer or [causing] reproductive problems". Inside, I had the mixed reaction of fascination, pride and apprehension that comes of confronting military technology as both an Air Force Brat and a Berkeley skeptic who doesn't like to hurt people. Outside, I beamed like a little girl whose father tries to please her even though she doesn't understand football, talks too much, swears like a sailor, votes Democrat and isn't rich, famous, or popular, and though she isn't as overwhelmingly pretty as her younger sister, especially since she has chopped off her long hair.

Wow. This has turned into a long domestic story that frighteningly reveals my increasingly fragile self-esteem. YAY UNEMPLOYMENT! YAY LIVING WITH ONE'S PARENTS! YAY DILETTANTE SCIENTIST-HOOD! I'm totally stoked!

Dude. Could I get any more depressing? And who can sell herself in any Personal Statement with a shitty attitude like that? Maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself, trying to produce a zowzer of a Statement right this minute. Maybe I first need a major Adjustment, stat.

But I feel better, now that I've posted this. With a masochist's zeal. Forget about saving face in the blogosphere . . . what a mighty relief-- this one small step!