A recent development in my life may prevent me from returning to school next year. In fact, it may prevent me from returning to school until 2013. At least.
I can't let this happen. For fuck's sake. I'm Juniper Shoemaker. I may presently be an unmitigated loser, but I am still smarter than a lot of motherfuckers. I always have been, and I always will be. Moreover, I am perfectly free. I have no husband or children to factor into the equation, and I pretty much can do whatever the hell I manage to make happen. So I cannot let this happen to me. I cannot let myself become one of those people who only have dreams.
This morning, I woke and immediately wrote a frivolous story that I originally intended for an old post of Candid Engineer's. Don't ask me why. I just did it. I'm too gloomy to give you a clever reason. It got too long to inflict on her blog, though, so I am posting it here.
I will lose half my readership with this frivolous post. It matters to me, too, because I take blogging with unabashed seriousness. You may all be running labs and going to class and taking over the whole fucking world, but this is my only portal into an arena of scientists. No one in my real life begins to understand what the fuck it is that I want to do. Not lately. So I despise the prospect of degrading my foundering science blog.
I also think it's mercilessly bourgeoisie to tell "field stories". I can picture my sister rolling her eyes now.
Here goes:
Read more. . .
I did archaeological field work on Easter Island for six weeks in the summer of 2006. My professor intermittently ran a field school with one of his colleagues there, and students helped collect data for their research.
I had once before studied abroad in a location with far fewer amenities than my pampered American ass had at home. So I paid close attention to the advice of field school veterans. They unanimously warned me about food. "Bring food," they insisted. "Bring ground coffee and a French press, too. Or you'll be sorry."
Now, I have inherited my fastidious father's unsophisticated palate, which means there are only some six or seven foodstuffs in the world that I will heartily eat. My hotel charges allegedly covered three meals a day. Nevertheless, I filled my suitcase with ten pounds of trail mix, peanut butter, crackers, and 70% dark chocolate bars from Trader Joe's.
I forwent the French press only because I couldn't afford it. I had to buy Gortex hiking boots that withstood punishing lava rocks, you know. Anyway, I needed clothing. I gazed thoughtfully inside and figured, meh. I'll be as grown-up as I can, and, meanwhile, I won't starve.
So. I packed, and I arrived with my group on Easter Island. It was not long before I was presented with a "field sandwich", to pack for lunch. The field sandwich consisted of a carefully halved biscuit, generously buttered on each side and fitted with a perfectly round hot pink disc of Mystery Meat.
This last fascinated me and a friend more than the impossibility of keeping biscuits from molding before consumption on the most isolated (if most gorgeous) rainy rock on the planet. Meat of any kind is especially precious on Easter Island.
The island isn't self-sustaining, and it currently exists as a (marginalized) territory of decidedly non-Polynesian Chile.
(The entire community still invited every single one of us to an annual holiday feast, where a lot of beef and pork and chicken was grilled. By the way.)
Eventually, we investigated. On Rapa Nui's main street, we found our answer in a grocery store: a sausage-shaped package in a glass deli case, cartoonishly hot pink as ever inside the wrapper, identified by little more than the brand name, "Mortedello". Or something close to that.
"'Morte'?" I cracked. "Like, 'death'?"
It was a bad joke, as well as demonstrative of why I'm a twenty-nine-year-old without a career. Yet we burst into hysterical laughter. I had never tried to eat Death Meat anyhow. I usually traded my sandwiches to the boys for hard-boiled eggs they didn't want, so as not to waste them. Now, though, as we chortled, I knew my fate was sealed. I was going to work a ten-hour field day fueled by scarce more than instant coffee and bread rolls ingested at dawn, until we got back on the plane.
Did I mind? Honestly? Not overly much. I barely ate while I was in Ghana, and that was a much longer trip. Sure, I missed my chicken burritos. But I wasn't going to whine about it, like some titty-baby undergrads not blessed with my handy masochism and also afflicted by strange sexual compulsions that they didn't mind our professors rooming down the hall in our tiny hotel on an island that is deathly quiet at night knowing about. On all occasions but for that one day of crazy anomalous menstrual cramping, I loved Easter Island. Field work made up for the food. Being allowed by my favorite professor to participate in a lot of the very coolest fieldwork pretty much "made up" for everything.
Besides. Though dinner was frequently as bizarre as cilantro "soup" and excellent homemade pasta artistically drizzled with grape-flavored gel instead of sauce, I could stomach most of it. Twice, too, dinner was fresh ahi steaks, grilled and served with salad, and beyond delicious. Easter Island's shores are crystal clean, and an abundance of tuna regularly encircles the isle.
(You're going to ask why the hotel didn't just keep serving us tuna, right? Instead of numerous dishes of, say, "shepherd's pie", which is far more expensive to prepare on Rapa Nui, and which was always an unappetizing oily square unappetizingly drooled over with precious ketchup. Don't. To this day, no one has the answer to that question.)
Besides, anyone who didn't like the hotel food could buy French fries, gelato, decent chicken quesadillas and imported hard liquor on Main Street, any day of the week.
Besides, even though I purposefully teetotaled the whole time, and even though I paid my own way to Easter Island and therefore did not have the cash to spend thirty dollars on exorbitantly-expensive-'cause-exorbitantly-expensive-to-ship-over-thousands-of-miles-of-open-sea food each day, I had a mondoginormous plastic jar of Peanut Butter. A Staple Foodstuff Acceptable to Juniper.
BESIDES, I spent most of my time in Ghana sick with malaria as well as with my own egregious immaturity. I wasn't sick now. I had the appetite to gnaw through my suitcase full of food and keep my strength up for a paltry six weeks.
In general, too, the boys fared worse than the girls. They were much bigger, and they were used to larger portions-- even the ones who ate everything they were given and then bought some more. Eventually, they didn't want to trade their hard-boiled eggs anymore, but most of them accepted my sandwiches anyway. Thus I avoided the guilt of throwing them out. Or barfing.
Sure, it got a little hard after I burned through everything but the dark chocolate and peanut butter, only to relinquish this last to a devoted vegan grad student who was about to starve to death if someone didn't do something. However, lots of guavas grew on the island. As long as you watched out for the guava-loving wild stallions, which roamed the island at will, and which tended to bite and kick, and as long as you didn't trespass into private parts of the island where residents ran off nosy tourists with sawed-off rifles, you could pick and eat them. They're woolly inside, and they're a lot of work. The jewel-pink pulp within is very good, though.
Really, the genuine difficulty began one morning, with a sniffle at my breakfast table. It was our last week on the beautiful island.
"Oh, Juniper. You're getting it too."
"The stupid cold everyone's been getting one by one for a month? It's just a fucking cold."
"I've had it already. It's worse than you know. Here, have some of my Airborne. I really hope you feel better soon."
I couldn't find any leftover dinner rolls, and the marmalade crepes were really only for the professors and TAs. I stole back to my room to quickly eat a bar of dark chocolate. My face felt hot as I ate. Not in that way it does when a tall gorgeous blond thirty-something man whom I bump into on Second Street with inevitable klutziness stares approvingly at me for a loooooooong moment, either. In a bad way. My stomach churned, too, and my head ached. Dark Chocolate magically transmuted into a thick bittersweet bar of wax that just seemed like part of the curse. To this day, I have not recovered my erstwhile love of dark chocolate. It's milk chocolate or bust. Motherfuckers!
The final two days of our stay, our hotel manager moved students out of choicer rooms to make room for unexpected guests. I and two other girls moved to cots in the drafty equipment storage room. The healthy Juniper would have found this hilarious. The miserably sick Juniper just got miserably sicker. And hungrier.
As I helped my professor pack equipment, clear snot poured down my face, and my voice dried to a whisper. I couldn't help my heaving cough. It was terribly embarrassing. "Stupid fucking cold," my professor said sympathetically. In a disturbingly hoarse voice.
We stopped over in Tahiti, for three days. I've traveled a lot, because I'm a military brat. But Tahiti remains the only place that made me wish I were married, just for the sake of this verdant, aquamarine, white-sanded, coconutted honeymooners' absolute fantasy. (And I view marriage-- no, I view serious long-term romantic relationships-- as a dismal trap.) Nevertheless, my "cold" grew steadily worse. I did not eat much after my first lunch there, which consisted of a banana split sundae and a plate of French fries, and which cost twenty-four US dollars. And I didn't shower at my hostel, because I feared the mysterious hand-lettered signs everywhere that read: "CAUTION: SALMONELLA WATER".
However, I cleaned up a bit by swimming in the warm water with a lot of friendly and astonishingly colorful fishes flitting among the corals. I ate part of a fallen coconut, while many of the others enjoyed the beach and filled theirs with Bacardi. (I ate fallen coconuts on EI, too. It's not supposed to be warm enough that far south of the equator for the non-indigenous trees to bear fruit at any time, much less winter, but "climate change" has induced the production of coconut crops for several years now.) I bought some gifts, including a black pearl for my mom. I warmed to the Old World style that the French maintain in much of Papeete; it reminded me of my childhood. For a sick, hungry, unmedicated, neurotic, clinically depressed person, I was holding my own just super. It's hard to sulk on vacation in Tahiti.
I kept my chin up and looked forward to the plane home. I could brush my teeth and wash my face with bottled water, drink all the orange juice I wanted, and sleep undisturbed. I cheerfully fantasized about orange juice and sleep as I stood in a long line with my friends at Papeete International.
"What's this?"
A flyer from the US Department of Homeland Security. No travelers carrying more than 3 oz. of any given fluid would be permitted to enter the States. No plane carrying any of these travelers would be permitted to enter US airspace. Effective immediately. Peace out.
Dutifully, airport employees divested us of bottled water, bottled juices, face wash, Pepto-Bismol, and Argentine wines. Then they conferred among themselves. They returned after two hours. They began a slow, grueling process, in which passengers also lost prescription meds in tablet or gel form; Tylenol; Advil; face powder; mascara, lotion, lipstick, eye shadow, and pencil liners; food; Scotch tape; toothpaste; hand sanitizer; gum and any other item that might conceivably offend the Department of Homeland Security.
This hurt our wallets and our pride. Of course, this also delayed our plane.
By nine hours.
Overnight.
Papeete International is no LAX. When I was there, only one vendor sold food-- ham and cheese paninis and small bottles of water. Most of us had spent the last of our francs, but all of us received a complimentary snack. After they closed for the evening, we had only what we'd brought. Of course, what we'd brought was now in garbage cans that had been wheeled away. Bereft, we decided to substitute sleeping for eating.
Most of the chairs and sofas in the small, gazebo-like lounge were preoccupied. I sat on the edge of a brick planter for awhile, chattering and listening to the warm rain drip off the eaves. When my head split open, my fever increased and my voice disappeared completely, I found a space in a corner beside my professor's wife, who is now one of my favorite friends ever. She sympathetically kept me company-- leaving only to poke her ailing husband when he snored-- and rummaged around until she found a stray Tylenol in her bag. This miracle, I swallowed dry, as I could not drink the tap water, and neither could anyone else.
When I finally got on the plane, I was coughing so violently that no one wanted to have anything to do with me. And I was unbathed, uncombed and donning apparel that hadn't been washed in six weeks. But I didn't care. I just wanted to eat pancakes and drink orange juice. Airplane food never tasted so good in my life. I was willing to retool my opinion of the entire enterprise.
I have a month and a half to solve my motherfucking problem. Excuse me while I eat dinner and then hide in my room to cry with frustration and loneliness.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Wait a Minute. For Real?
Late at night, working feverishly to climb out of the abyss that is my current life, I skim my Google Alerts and stumble upon this gem:
"Gene Therapy Could Cure ED Permanently"
No. Surely they don't mean that ED.
JUNIPER!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Incidentally, in case you care, my categorized blogroll no longer necessarily represents a ranking of my favorite blogs. I'm just, you know, trying to make a science blog. For realsies. That is all my own.
"Gene Therapy Could Cure ED Permanently"
No. Surely they don't mean that ED.
JUNIPER!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Incidentally, in case you care, my categorized blogroll no longer necessarily represents a ranking of my favorite blogs. I'm just, you know, trying to make a science blog. For realsies. That is all my own.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
“I’ve Had Malaria Twice”: Musings on Lariam, Neurosis and A Wee Bit of “Genetic Engineering”
As an undergraduate, I studied abroad at the University of Ghana at Legon. Several weeks into this adventure, I got malaria. I recovered. Then I got it again.
My bouts with malaria were hardly the important part of my study abroad experience. They simply provide me with an excuse to take a science break today. Since I have not yet returned to school, I do not yet have the luxury of reading or writing texts that I don’t assign to myself—unlike many of my readers. My atrophied brain and my jealous heart seek solace. You will all have to deal with my decision to shelve “Your Notebook Is Too Old for You and Doesn’t Care About You or Your Academic Career to Boot” for now. That may have made for zestier reading, but the quality of this writer’s mercy is nevertheless presently strained.
(Besides. As woefully annoying self-help author Julia Cameron likes to say, “Jealousy is a compass”. Now, jealousy may feel like serrated fangs in your heart, but, really, it is merely one of the truest guides you have. Its reliability as a guide probably explains why I can live in Hollywood’s town envying the veritable flocks of beautiful starlets naught but their silk designer dresses and perfect teeth. (Fine. That and my impenetrable vanity. Okay?) It also explains why I can’t amble along, say, Charles E. Young Drive East without glowering at everyone in a white lab coat. But I digress.)
Read more. . .
Before I left the country, I saw a physician at an Air Force Base. I wanted her to prescribe mefloquine hydrochloride, or Lariam, to me. At the time, Lariam had a reputation as the rock star of malaria prophylaxes. Unlike its nearest rival, Malarone, it allegedly reduced a user’s chances of contracting malaria to “25%”. Wherever the fuck that statistic came from, it still impressed me. Lariam also tended to induce “lucid dreams”, which everyone knows are fun. All the UC Students Abroad in Ghana were doing it, you know. I wanted to do it, too.
“I can’t give you Lariam,” said my physician, firmly. “And it’s not just you. I no longer prescribe Lariam to any of my patients. I refuse to take the risk.”
“The risk of what?” I asked, like a petulant twenty-one-year-old.
“Psychological problems,” she answered. “A very rare side effect of Lariam, supposedly. A year ago, I had a healthy patient going to a malarious country . . . I checked this patient out. Everything was fine. I gave them Lariam, and they wound up committing suicide. You can’t imagine . . . I’m not, not, not giving you Lariam. I flat-out refuse to give you Lariam. I’m not giving you Malarone, either. I’m giving you doxycycline instead.”
“Doxycycline?!” I protested. I already took tetracyclines, in a futile attempt to control the miserable acne problem I had at the time. There was nothing sexy about tetracyclines! “What good will that do?”
“Oh,” she said, cheerful again, “it’ll help keep you from getting malaria—as much as Malarone or maybe even Lariam ever would, anyway. At any rate, you’re going to get it anyway—none of these are wonder drugs, and you’re going to be in West Africa for a long time.”
I sulked.
“You can’t expect me to give you something I have to worry about, anyway. I know the doxycycline has an incredibly low chance of hurting you.”
I played my last card: unmitigated whining. “There are fifty of us going, and I’m the only one who will be on doxycycline.”
My physician paused. “You have a history of depression, right?”
I gave up.
My physician tried to console me with the news that the search for my yellow fever shot was over. Most civilian hospitals in the US do not readily offer yellow fever vaccinations. However, the government of Ghana denies visas to any foreign traveler who hasn’t received one. I was an ex-Air Force Brat about to age out of the privilege of access to military services as her father’s dependent, and I didn’t frequent military clinics anymore. I’d had a hell of a time finding the yellow fever stuff. In addition to the yellow fever shot, she gave me Demulen, which I took to treat my acne problem and skip periods instead of getting frisky like a normal, sane adult. (Though, I suppose, I may have harbored some ludicrously vague intention to remedy this last. I wanted to be edgy, you see.) She was very nice. I wasn’t totally ungrateful. Then.
In retrospect, I am thoroughly grateful. I left for Ghana in 2001, before 9-11. The military already prescribed Lariam to soldiers and officers on tours of duty in the Middle East, though. These tours were not uncommon before the present wars; my dad went on one while I was in high school. Meanwhile, most Americans don’t visit “malarious countries”, and civilian doctors don’t prescribe Lariam as frequently as their military colleagues. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if concerned military doctors were some of the first scientists to notice odd correlations between use of Lariam and serious psychological problems. Only after roughly two years in Afghanistan and one in Iraq did enough military personnel attribute violent and suicidal ideation to Lariam for the public to pay attention.
I understand that I’m no doctor or physiologist and that my opinion doesn’t mean jackshit. I also have had it beaten into my aspiring scientist’s head that correlation doesn’t equal causation. However, on the strength of my merely anecdotal evidence, I still discourage the use of Lariam. Sure, the hype about Teh Awesomez Lucid Dreams proved true for several students:
“Juniper. You gotta switch to Lariam. ”
“It’d be too expensive for me to switch now. And troublesome.”
“No, but you gotta. You want to hear the amazing dream I had last night?”
“YES.”
“See, there was, like, this plateau. Against a blue sky. The sky was so, so blue. The grass around it was so, so green. I could feel the wind, Juniper. And, in front of me, there was this child. Like, a dark-skinned ten-year-old boy. And I think he was like my guide or something. To the plateau. And he motioned to me with his thin hand, but when I got near him, the bright, like, really bright sun just spilled over his face . . . which began to melt off. Like, his skin, you know? It just dripped away. And I could see every bone in his skull. I could see every vein. It was amazing. All those bones . His brain was so graphic and throbbing. I felt the blood on my fingertips. I reached out—“
My floormate from the end of the corridor, who took Lariam, and who still contracted malaria so grave she was hospitalized for it and placed on an IV drip not one month into our trip, arrived to announce that anyone who fancied fried bread and Milo for breakfast had better make haste for the café. My Lariam advocate actually told his story several more times; this is what I remember of it. I more clearly remember my greedy longing to have lucid dreams more than once in awhile. It really was a long time ago. I was a mystic then. Please stop laughing at me now.
Ahem. As weeks passed, however, some users enjoyed Lariam less and less. Some students grew depressed, attributed the depression to Lariam and illicitly ditched malaria prophylaxis altogether. Some students grew anxious, and they also attributed this development to Lariam. Lesser but not insignificant complains included continual nausea and sleeplessness.
The psychological toll possibly exacted by Lariam interests me as a particularly dangerous side-effect. I’ve battled clinical depression since age sixteen. Since I refused to treat my mental disorder until age twenty-six, my escape from my unhappy Berkeley relationships to Ghana changed very little. In fact, soon after I arrived, Demulen exacerbated my depression. I threw it out.
Still depressed, barely functional, I developed a moody and subtle recklessness. I drank water from questionable sources, smoked lots of equally dubious tobacco, roamed isolated streets and fields alone, and wept at night. Ghana offered no shortage of generous people and beautiful experiences. But I dwelled on negative circumstances and interactions: the white students, including my roommate, who squealed, “We’re just like celebrities!” and “Everyone wants us!” on every day trip; the superannuated white men seducing nubile black damsels on the beach near the highlife concerts I dined and danced at until four in the morning; the black tour guides at the “slave castles” in Cape Coast who insisted that Europeans had carefully taken the best and the brightest of the West Africans and left behind those who were not half as strong and persevering as the mosquitoes around them ; the attention young Ghanaian boarding school girls gave me for being “half-cast” (“You’re really pretty! And you have really pretty hair! There’s only one other girl in the whole school with hair like yours, because she’s half-cast like you, and she’s allowed to grow her hair long, while the rest of us have to keep it clipped very short.” It never matters that I have lifelong practice at receiving sinister compliments like these); the men who frowned disapprovingly whenever I drank Guinness or played pool; the taxicab in downtown Accra that exploded into a fireball with me and my friend in the backseat. . .
(Okay. Fine. The exploding taxicab was the funniest “Oh, shit!” moment of my life, and remains so to this day. The driver, who was already outside, had accidentally ignited everything under the hood of his ancient cab in a valiant attempt to get us moving again. Unharmed, he angrily contemplated what to do next, as my friend and I dove in unison through the unlocked passenger doors, like the heroes of an action flick. It was not funny. But it was. I was getting too solemn for a moment.)
Back to solemnity. I’d fought with my mom and stolen her credit card—thus estranging myself from her—clumsily stained the most presentable of my shabby clothes with Clearsil, borrowed my roommate’s CD Walkman without her permission, distressed said roommate by singing aloud, and channeled my various political frustrations into a bristling racism against white people. I either embarrassed or snubbed students to discourage their inexplicable and repeated attempts to accompany me anywhere. I spent my own money imprudently. I was very lonely. Sometimes, I wanted to kill myself, and I wondered why I hadn’t yet done it. I had three manic breakdowns before I returned to the States. No one in the state I was in as a twenty-one-year-old should fuck with Lariam. No one in a remotely similar state of mind should fuck with Lariam. I shudder to imagine what I would have been like on Lariam!
Malaria itself has a tendency to induce a peculiar neurosis. Alongside the fever, chills and leaden fatigue, it can make you paranoid. I found a malaria pamphlet that described “mild to serious psychological troubles” as a malaria symptom. I disbelieved this until it happened to me.
Here’s a mild example. On a day when I had our grim concrete balcony to myself, I dragged out an extension cord and cooked pasta with small and unsafe appliances without 220-volt adapters. Everyone cooked and washed clothes on their balconies—particularly the girls, who lived in nicer dorms, and who were largely expected to do it anyway. American students made lots of pasta, and a few held “dinner parties”, replete with Star beer and Guinness. (Plus weed. Sometimes, with more weed than pasta . . . though, as a lone wolf who never partook, I cannot say for sure . . .) I made sauce out of tomatoes, tomato paste and more powerful chili peppers than most of my (totally non-Korean) fellow students could stand, because I didn’t expect company.
Of course, my popular roommate and her entourage bustled in just as I strained the pasta over a bucket. She greeted me. The other girls eyed me and my undergraduate accoutrement before they gave me a halfhearted hello. Pleasantries exchanged, they returned to their ardent chat about what cloth they wanted to purchase at market, and which dressmakers they wanted to visit. No one paid me any mind. Normal Juniper would have been satisfied.
“Oh, my God,” I suddenly thought. “I don’t have enough pasta for seven people. I don’t have enough pasta for seven people! That scary Marigold is going to think I’m so rude . . .”
I flipped. Inside. I wanted desperately to crawl under our balcony table, but three girls were crowded around it, having a smoke. I bit my tongue and started to shake a little. Maybe, if I said nothing, they wouldn’t notice the pasta at all.
But there were so many chili peppers in it!
Goosebumps popped from my arms. It made alarming sense to me. I almost cried. No! Mustn’t be conspicuous! I hovered around the wall by my mattress, where I remained until my roommate and her companions swept away.
I continued to feel very unwell afterwards. I had a hard time walking from one end of the room to the other, and I did not feel like sightseeing or attending class. Shortly after this incident, my kind roommate took me to the unofficial expatriates’ hospital that most Ghanaians couldn’t afford to use. Us American students invariably did. Here, needles were guaranteed to be clean, and medicines came directly from France and Britain. A blood test confirmed my second contraction of “scanty” malaria. (The first began to manifest itself on September 11th, the day my horrified roommate ran onto the balcony at three pm to fetch me and the fever I forgot as we ran with the others to the only television set on campus.) At least I’m truly not that crazy.
Can you imagine what havoc Lariam might have wreaked on my malarial mind, though? In the end, how did Lariam stack up, anyway?
My next-door neighbor tallied the casualties. The vast majority of the fifty American students in the UC group took Lariam, while a handful took Malarone and I alone took doxycycline. All but four or five of our motley crew contracted malaria. About half got it twice. “Getting it twice” meant that you tested positive the first time, you submitted to the fourteen-day regimen that cured you, you tested unequivocally negative afterwards, and, a few weeks later, you felt awful and tested positive again. Most of the students who got it twice were Lariam users. Most of us, including myself, had not contracted serious strains of malaria in either case; this is probably due to our antimalarials, which, incidentally, are never completely worthless. Two students had, and they required hospitalization when their fevers surpassed 102 degrees Fahrenheit. One of these had quit Lariam because of an unprecedented onset of depression. I think one person got it three times, but this I can’t remember. In sum, Lariam users fared no better than I did, and, in terms of psychological struggles, some of them may have fared worse.
Malaria parasites have a notorious resistance to many drugs, regardless of whether those drugs are preventive or remedial. So, when Mrs. Method and Theory emailed to me a job advertisement for a laboratory assistant, I jumped from my seat when I discovered what the lab’s research entailed. Dr. Anthony James and his team at UC Irvine are working on a “novel and genetics-based” solution to the malaria problem. They want to genetically engineer mosquitoes that can’t host malaria parasites and introduce them into the wild, where, hypothetically, they will breed out the whole population’s ability to host.
Is this what you younger scientists mean by creativity? It takes my breath away. The idea alone is beautiful. For the sake of this kind of beauty, I have never objected to tinkering with genes. (NB: Ultimately, I have a hard time thinking in terms of “natural” vs. “artificial”, first because humans, despite their anthrocentrism, are a part of nature, and, second, because one can always describe things in terms of physics and chemistry, which aren’t constrained by this distinction.) Geneticists shouldn’t feel guilty about wanting carte blanche to do what they like. No one who honestly cares will tend to reckless experiments that result in bad data and unethical practices. Many geneticists dream of and work on replacing chemotherapy with a superhero version of the cancer patient’s own immune system, repairing brain cells and customizing medicine. They want to understand the instructions by which our biology constructs ourselves. They want practical solutions to real problems, and, yet, they can never divest their work of its potential to contribute to the evolution of our species in ways astronomically difficult to comprehend or predict . . . it’s like art. There’s nothing inherently perilous about this uncertainty. It is all beautiful to me.
Damn it. Now I crave my copy of Genetics in Medicine. Alas. I can’t. I must conserve energy and reduce our electricity bill by going to bed soon.
My bouts with malaria were hardly the important part of my study abroad experience. They simply provide me with an excuse to take a science break today. Since I have not yet returned to school, I do not yet have the luxury of reading or writing texts that I don’t assign to myself—unlike many of my readers. My atrophied brain and my jealous heart seek solace. You will all have to deal with my decision to shelve “Your Notebook Is Too Old for You and Doesn’t Care About You or Your Academic Career to Boot” for now. That may have made for zestier reading, but the quality of this writer’s mercy is nevertheless presently strained.
(Besides. As woefully annoying self-help author Julia Cameron likes to say, “Jealousy is a compass”. Now, jealousy may feel like serrated fangs in your heart, but, really, it is merely one of the truest guides you have. Its reliability as a guide probably explains why I can live in Hollywood’s town envying the veritable flocks of beautiful starlets naught but their silk designer dresses and perfect teeth. (Fine. That and my impenetrable vanity. Okay?) It also explains why I can’t amble along, say, Charles E. Young Drive East without glowering at everyone in a white lab coat. But I digress.)
Read more. . .
Before I left the country, I saw a physician at an Air Force Base. I wanted her to prescribe mefloquine hydrochloride, or Lariam, to me. At the time, Lariam had a reputation as the rock star of malaria prophylaxes. Unlike its nearest rival, Malarone, it allegedly reduced a user’s chances of contracting malaria to “25%”. Wherever the fuck that statistic came from, it still impressed me. Lariam also tended to induce “lucid dreams”, which everyone knows are fun. All the UC Students Abroad in Ghana were doing it, you know. I wanted to do it, too.
“I can’t give you Lariam,” said my physician, firmly. “And it’s not just you. I no longer prescribe Lariam to any of my patients. I refuse to take the risk.”
“The risk of what?” I asked, like a petulant twenty-one-year-old.
“Psychological problems,” she answered. “A very rare side effect of Lariam, supposedly. A year ago, I had a healthy patient going to a malarious country . . . I checked this patient out. Everything was fine. I gave them Lariam, and they wound up committing suicide. You can’t imagine . . . I’m not, not, not giving you Lariam. I flat-out refuse to give you Lariam. I’m not giving you Malarone, either. I’m giving you doxycycline instead.”
“Doxycycline?!” I protested. I already took tetracyclines, in a futile attempt to control the miserable acne problem I had at the time. There was nothing sexy about tetracyclines! “What good will that do?”
“Oh,” she said, cheerful again, “it’ll help keep you from getting malaria—as much as Malarone or maybe even Lariam ever would, anyway. At any rate, you’re going to get it anyway—none of these are wonder drugs, and you’re going to be in West Africa for a long time.”
I sulked.
“You can’t expect me to give you something I have to worry about, anyway. I know the doxycycline has an incredibly low chance of hurting you.”
I played my last card: unmitigated whining. “There are fifty of us going, and I’m the only one who will be on doxycycline.”
My physician paused. “You have a history of depression, right?”
I gave up.
My physician tried to console me with the news that the search for my yellow fever shot was over. Most civilian hospitals in the US do not readily offer yellow fever vaccinations. However, the government of Ghana denies visas to any foreign traveler who hasn’t received one. I was an ex-Air Force Brat about to age out of the privilege of access to military services as her father’s dependent, and I didn’t frequent military clinics anymore. I’d had a hell of a time finding the yellow fever stuff. In addition to the yellow fever shot, she gave me Demulen, which I took to treat my acne problem and skip periods instead of getting frisky like a normal, sane adult. (Though, I suppose, I may have harbored some ludicrously vague intention to remedy this last. I wanted to be edgy, you see.) She was very nice. I wasn’t totally ungrateful. Then.
In retrospect, I am thoroughly grateful. I left for Ghana in 2001, before 9-11. The military already prescribed Lariam to soldiers and officers on tours of duty in the Middle East, though. These tours were not uncommon before the present wars; my dad went on one while I was in high school. Meanwhile, most Americans don’t visit “malarious countries”, and civilian doctors don’t prescribe Lariam as frequently as their military colleagues. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if concerned military doctors were some of the first scientists to notice odd correlations between use of Lariam and serious psychological problems. Only after roughly two years in Afghanistan and one in Iraq did enough military personnel attribute violent and suicidal ideation to Lariam for the public to pay attention.
I understand that I’m no doctor or physiologist and that my opinion doesn’t mean jackshit. I also have had it beaten into my aspiring scientist’s head that correlation doesn’t equal causation. However, on the strength of my merely anecdotal evidence, I still discourage the use of Lariam. Sure, the hype about Teh Awesomez Lucid Dreams proved true for several students:
“Juniper. You gotta switch to Lariam. ”
“It’d be too expensive for me to switch now. And troublesome.”
“No, but you gotta. You want to hear the amazing dream I had last night?”
“YES.”
“See, there was, like, this plateau. Against a blue sky. The sky was so, so blue. The grass around it was so, so green. I could feel the wind, Juniper. And, in front of me, there was this child. Like, a dark-skinned ten-year-old boy. And I think he was like my guide or something. To the plateau. And he motioned to me with his thin hand, but when I got near him, the bright, like, really bright sun just spilled over his face . . . which began to melt off. Like, his skin, you know? It just dripped away. And I could see every bone in his skull. I could see every vein. It was amazing. All those bones . His brain was so graphic and throbbing. I felt the blood on my fingertips. I reached out—“
My floormate from the end of the corridor, who took Lariam, and who still contracted malaria so grave she was hospitalized for it and placed on an IV drip not one month into our trip, arrived to announce that anyone who fancied fried bread and Milo for breakfast had better make haste for the café. My Lariam advocate actually told his story several more times; this is what I remember of it. I more clearly remember my greedy longing to have lucid dreams more than once in awhile. It really was a long time ago. I was a mystic then. Please stop laughing at me now.
Ahem. As weeks passed, however, some users enjoyed Lariam less and less. Some students grew depressed, attributed the depression to Lariam and illicitly ditched malaria prophylaxis altogether. Some students grew anxious, and they also attributed this development to Lariam. Lesser but not insignificant complains included continual nausea and sleeplessness.
The psychological toll possibly exacted by Lariam interests me as a particularly dangerous side-effect. I’ve battled clinical depression since age sixteen. Since I refused to treat my mental disorder until age twenty-six, my escape from my unhappy Berkeley relationships to Ghana changed very little. In fact, soon after I arrived, Demulen exacerbated my depression. I threw it out.
Still depressed, barely functional, I developed a moody and subtle recklessness. I drank water from questionable sources, smoked lots of equally dubious tobacco, roamed isolated streets and fields alone, and wept at night. Ghana offered no shortage of generous people and beautiful experiences. But I dwelled on negative circumstances and interactions: the white students, including my roommate, who squealed, “We’re just like celebrities!” and “Everyone wants us!” on every day trip; the superannuated white men seducing nubile black damsels on the beach near the highlife concerts I dined and danced at until four in the morning; the black tour guides at the “slave castles” in Cape Coast who insisted that Europeans had carefully taken the best and the brightest of the West Africans and left behind those who were not half as strong and persevering as the mosquitoes around them ; the attention young Ghanaian boarding school girls gave me for being “half-cast” (“You’re really pretty! And you have really pretty hair! There’s only one other girl in the whole school with hair like yours, because she’s half-cast like you, and she’s allowed to grow her hair long, while the rest of us have to keep it clipped very short.” It never matters that I have lifelong practice at receiving sinister compliments like these); the men who frowned disapprovingly whenever I drank Guinness or played pool; the taxicab in downtown Accra that exploded into a fireball with me and my friend in the backseat. . .
(Okay. Fine. The exploding taxicab was the funniest “Oh, shit!” moment of my life, and remains so to this day. The driver, who was already outside, had accidentally ignited everything under the hood of his ancient cab in a valiant attempt to get us moving again. Unharmed, he angrily contemplated what to do next, as my friend and I dove in unison through the unlocked passenger doors, like the heroes of an action flick. It was not funny. But it was. I was getting too solemn for a moment.)
Back to solemnity. I’d fought with my mom and stolen her credit card—thus estranging myself from her—clumsily stained the most presentable of my shabby clothes with Clearsil, borrowed my roommate’s CD Walkman without her permission, distressed said roommate by singing aloud, and channeled my various political frustrations into a bristling racism against white people. I either embarrassed or snubbed students to discourage their inexplicable and repeated attempts to accompany me anywhere. I spent my own money imprudently. I was very lonely. Sometimes, I wanted to kill myself, and I wondered why I hadn’t yet done it. I had three manic breakdowns before I returned to the States. No one in the state I was in as a twenty-one-year-old should fuck with Lariam. No one in a remotely similar state of mind should fuck with Lariam. I shudder to imagine what I would have been like on Lariam!
Malaria itself has a tendency to induce a peculiar neurosis. Alongside the fever, chills and leaden fatigue, it can make you paranoid. I found a malaria pamphlet that described “mild to serious psychological troubles” as a malaria symptom. I disbelieved this until it happened to me.
Here’s a mild example. On a day when I had our grim concrete balcony to myself, I dragged out an extension cord and cooked pasta with small and unsafe appliances without 220-volt adapters. Everyone cooked and washed clothes on their balconies—particularly the girls, who lived in nicer dorms, and who were largely expected to do it anyway. American students made lots of pasta, and a few held “dinner parties”, replete with Star beer and Guinness. (Plus weed. Sometimes, with more weed than pasta . . . though, as a lone wolf who never partook, I cannot say for sure . . .) I made sauce out of tomatoes, tomato paste and more powerful chili peppers than most of my (totally non-Korean) fellow students could stand, because I didn’t expect company.
Of course, my popular roommate and her entourage bustled in just as I strained the pasta over a bucket. She greeted me. The other girls eyed me and my undergraduate accoutrement before they gave me a halfhearted hello. Pleasantries exchanged, they returned to their ardent chat about what cloth they wanted to purchase at market, and which dressmakers they wanted to visit. No one paid me any mind. Normal Juniper would have been satisfied.
“Oh, my God,” I suddenly thought. “I don’t have enough pasta for seven people. I don’t have enough pasta for seven people! That scary Marigold is going to think I’m so rude . . .”
I flipped. Inside. I wanted desperately to crawl under our balcony table, but three girls were crowded around it, having a smoke. I bit my tongue and started to shake a little. Maybe, if I said nothing, they wouldn’t notice the pasta at all.
But there were so many chili peppers in it!
Goosebumps popped from my arms. It made alarming sense to me. I almost cried. No! Mustn’t be conspicuous! I hovered around the wall by my mattress, where I remained until my roommate and her companions swept away.
I continued to feel very unwell afterwards. I had a hard time walking from one end of the room to the other, and I did not feel like sightseeing or attending class. Shortly after this incident, my kind roommate took me to the unofficial expatriates’ hospital that most Ghanaians couldn’t afford to use. Us American students invariably did. Here, needles were guaranteed to be clean, and medicines came directly from France and Britain. A blood test confirmed my second contraction of “scanty” malaria. (The first began to manifest itself on September 11th, the day my horrified roommate ran onto the balcony at three pm to fetch me and the fever I forgot as we ran with the others to the only television set on campus.) At least I’m truly not that crazy.
Can you imagine what havoc Lariam might have wreaked on my malarial mind, though? In the end, how did Lariam stack up, anyway?
My next-door neighbor tallied the casualties. The vast majority of the fifty American students in the UC group took Lariam, while a handful took Malarone and I alone took doxycycline. All but four or five of our motley crew contracted malaria. About half got it twice. “Getting it twice” meant that you tested positive the first time, you submitted to the fourteen-day regimen that cured you, you tested unequivocally negative afterwards, and, a few weeks later, you felt awful and tested positive again. Most of the students who got it twice were Lariam users. Most of us, including myself, had not contracted serious strains of malaria in either case; this is probably due to our antimalarials, which, incidentally, are never completely worthless. Two students had, and they required hospitalization when their fevers surpassed 102 degrees Fahrenheit. One of these had quit Lariam because of an unprecedented onset of depression. I think one person got it three times, but this I can’t remember. In sum, Lariam users fared no better than I did, and, in terms of psychological struggles, some of them may have fared worse.
Malaria parasites have a notorious resistance to many drugs, regardless of whether those drugs are preventive or remedial. So, when Mrs. Method and Theory emailed to me a job advertisement for a laboratory assistant, I jumped from my seat when I discovered what the lab’s research entailed. Dr. Anthony James and his team at UC Irvine are working on a “novel and genetics-based” solution to the malaria problem. They want to genetically engineer mosquitoes that can’t host malaria parasites and introduce them into the wild, where, hypothetically, they will breed out the whole population’s ability to host.
Is this what you younger scientists mean by creativity? It takes my breath away. The idea alone is beautiful. For the sake of this kind of beauty, I have never objected to tinkering with genes. (NB: Ultimately, I have a hard time thinking in terms of “natural” vs. “artificial”, first because humans, despite their anthrocentrism, are a part of nature, and, second, because one can always describe things in terms of physics and chemistry, which aren’t constrained by this distinction.) Geneticists shouldn’t feel guilty about wanting carte blanche to do what they like. No one who honestly cares will tend to reckless experiments that result in bad data and unethical practices. Many geneticists dream of and work on replacing chemotherapy with a superhero version of the cancer patient’s own immune system, repairing brain cells and customizing medicine. They want to understand the instructions by which our biology constructs ourselves. They want practical solutions to real problems, and, yet, they can never divest their work of its potential to contribute to the evolution of our species in ways astronomically difficult to comprehend or predict . . . it’s like art. There’s nothing inherently perilous about this uncertainty. It is all beautiful to me.
Damn it. Now I crave my copy of Genetics in Medicine. Alas. I can’t. I must conserve energy and reduce our electricity bill by going to bed soon.
Readers, I Love You All
I love you all. You are all so generous and supportive. It's all I can do not to respond to each of your comments now.
Please Assist a Budding Psychologist with His Wonderful Research, If You Haven't Already!
(Friend of the blog and favorite gentleman caller DuWayne Brayton of Traumatized by Truth has asked me to post this plea to participate in his research project. Frankly, I do not know why, since I'm positive that my influence over my beloved readership is laughably non-existent. But I see no harm in it. And I myself had fun trying to squish my unaided concept of addiction into two eloquent sentences . . . even though I failed . . .)
I would appreciate it if you could help me out with a research paper on addiction. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, addiction costs U.S. taxpayers more than five hundred billion dollars a year. Addiction affects more than sixty-three percent of Americans, either because they're an addict, or because their life is closely intertwined with that of an addict. Seems rather important, right?
Well as important as it is, we are trying to deal with it without a cohesive, coherent definition of the word "addiction." Language largely defines reality, yet when it comes to addiction, it seems to fail us. In my research, I have managed to find four contradictory definitions of addictions from the U.S. government alone - two from the same agency. Lest you think that this is just another example of government inadequacy, I have found the same problems in the real world.
So here is how you can help; Please give me your definition of "addiction." I am looking for one, maybe two sentence, concise definitions. What do you believe addiction means? You can leave them in comments (though if you do, please post it before reading anyone else's) or email me at duwayne.brayton (at) gmail (dot) com. I will be using the information I gather in a couple of research papers and will also write about it on my blog.
Thanks,
DuWayne
I would appreciate it if you could help me out with a research paper on addiction. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, addiction costs U.S. taxpayers more than five hundred billion dollars a year. Addiction affects more than sixty-three percent of Americans, either because they're an addict, or because their life is closely intertwined with that of an addict. Seems rather important, right?
Well as important as it is, we are trying to deal with it without a cohesive, coherent definition of the word "addiction." Language largely defines reality, yet when it comes to addiction, it seems to fail us. In my research, I have managed to find four contradictory definitions of addictions from the U.S. government alone - two from the same agency. Lest you think that this is just another example of government inadequacy, I have found the same problems in the real world.
So here is how you can help; Please give me your definition of "addiction." I am looking for one, maybe two sentence, concise definitions. What do you believe addiction means? You can leave them in comments (though if you do, please post it before reading anyone else's) or email me at duwayne.brayton (at) gmail (dot) com. I will be using the information I gather in a couple of research papers and will also write about it on my blog.
Thanks,
DuWayne
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Why the Fuck Would Generic Wellbutrin More Than Double in Price in a Mere Thirty Days?!
Did I miss something? Does this have to do with the economy, too?
ARRGGGHHH. I do NOT need this today. I want to cry.
P.S. I had more work to do than I anticipated, this week. Because I obviously have not yet mastered the art of time-management, I will refrain from telling you when I'll post next. Soon. I hope.
ARRGGGHHH. I do NOT need this today. I want to cry.
P.S. I had more work to do than I anticipated, this week. Because I obviously have not yet mastered the art of time-management, I will refrain from telling you when I'll post next. Soon. I hope.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
On Learning to Start Realizing My Ambitions As a Scientist (UPDATED)
I want to thank everyone who participated in the discussion of my last post. You guys generously responded to a thoughtlessly poised question. DrugMonkey, Comrade PhysioProf, Ms. PhD and Professor in Training, to name a few authors of blogs I frequent, have reached the same consensus that my working scientist readers have on the shortage and varying quality of available science jobs. They have dispensed advice and aired complaints accordingly:
Read more. . .
Discussion of one more reason why a job applicant's creativity dramatically increases her chances of landing one of the jobs that are acknowledged to be excruciatingly few in number, by Glamour Magz Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Brief note of the importance of "soft funding" to the existence of many science jobs, by Well-Respected Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion about how much time a postdoc contending for jobs as rare as hen's teeth has to prove her competitiveness in terms of grants, by Well-Respected Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion that makes me think tangentially about Ambivalent Academic's observations of "cheap labor" in academic science, by Well-Respected Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of the "pyramid structure" system that the dearth of science jobs (especially those that afford you meaningful independence) represents, an admonition to learn to work within this system to succeed, and one of my favorite posts ever despite several problems I spy in feeling this way, by Glamour Magz Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of whether or not men unfairly get what few jobs there are, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Disclosure of what it's like to conduct an unsuccessful search for one of these jobs that almost nobody has, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Reflection on what it takes in the first place to complete the training required for science jobs you aren't guaranteed to get, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Reflection on the availability of the industry jobs in science which are allegedly more plentiful than the academic ones, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Discussion of just how much your ability to publish, in addition to your publications themselves, matter to your job prospects, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Discussion of a guide to science careers for undergrads, grad students, and postdocs anxious about their lack of choices, by Rising Starlet PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of the role of luck in your landing a coveted and rare science job, by Rising Starlet PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Advice on how to approach the extremely competitive science job market, by Rising Starlet PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Here's a few more, by bloggers I did not name above:
Discussion of how much easier is it for one sex over the other to get one of these scarce jobs, by Level-Headed Crazy-Perceptive Postdoc Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of scientists surprisingly leaving those exalted academic posts for posts in industry and the possible effect of this on job quality, by Fashionista and Rising Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of the role of protectionism in American science job availability, by Fashionista and Rising Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System. *
I do want to pay my own serious attention to the availability and quality of science jobs, because I have yet to do my own substantial research. However, in my last post, the question represents a peripheral issue. I have really been nervous over whether I have the courage and maturity—the conscientiousness-- I’ll need to be the scientist I want to be.
Toaster Sunshine inspired a good conversation. Becca, Massimo and Ambivalent Academic have provided responses that I think deserve their own post. First, I’ll discuss them here, and, second, I’ll segue into an expose of the kind of person I’ve been, careerwise, for the last ten years. Wow. This unvarnished-truth blogging rocks! I love blogging about worries that may not make for enticing blog fodder! And I’ve been a little fond of sarcasm too, lately. So I’m ready to go.
Becca, a reader long possessed of snarky astuteness, pointed out my false dichotomy. I’m relieved. I hadn’t realized how cranky I’d gotten. I should have readily admitted that scientists may do science a service by dissuading the green and starry-eyed; only the joyfully devoted will answer the call. I’ve read recently that in the early twentieth-century, many academics, especially American ones, dismissed physics as a dead dog. “There’s nothing more to discover!” I hadn’t realized how scarce physics jobs were at this time. Physicists who found employment were willing to starve alone in caves just to do their work.
I should have also reminded myself that I do not let people tell me what to do for a living anymore. Nor do I shirk a challenge. Who wants a job that’s easy to get, anyway? Who really wants to be the big fish in the small pond? Yes. This is how you genuinely feel when you’ve grown up in a Republican family of nonpareil workaholics, and, despite the objections of the friends and acquaintances you most highly esteem, you still fancy yourself an updated, swarthy version of Dagny Taggart—minus John Galt and the rest of the unappetizing denouement to boot. Or when you simply prefer a difficult life to an empty one. Or when you’re me.
(Incidentally: No. This is not an endorsement of monomania. Not a full-throated one, anyway. Oh, Jasheebs. I can’t wait until I catch flack for my future discussion of that.)
Massimo has wisely reminded me to depend on quantitative data whenever I get it. Since I have to protect myself against my own dangerously impressionable mind, I welcome this reminder. He also reminded me that job stability doesn’t exist, not at a probability so high it’s worth prioritizing above my research interests. Then, too, I never stopped wanting to muster the courage to do the research I want to do.
Ambivalent Academic, with her usual perceptiveness, has reminded me to keep determining how closely I want to cooperate with “The System”. I’d planned a more careful post on this, but I am always willing to work within the system, and to strive to effect change from within. Too closely cooperating, though, can coax one to ignore the evil bonfires and eaten young. That’s a banal observation now. But it quickly won’t be, once I get going.
When will I get going?!
For the first time in my life, I know what I want to do. I think for myself, and I respect myself. I worship no one, however. I do not allow peers to pressure me into their interests. I do not change my plans for boys. I no longer want to marry, and I no longer want to have children. In place of an insufferably thoughtless tendency to make crushing emotional demands of my friends, I now fret over every possibility that I am asking for too much. Know what? That’s better. Not ideal, but better. That’s better than vampirizing people. I would rather give than take. I will talk brashly, but I proceed with caution. I listen and watch more than I talk. I do not demand attention from those who don’t want to pay attention to me, and I give more credit to those who do. I have learned to take my life seriously by taking myself less seriously. I take authentic risks and not posturing ones; I, the Chicken Hypersensitive, will clumsily but firmly risk rejection by any number of programs and people in place of disinterestedly and illegally climbing a hundred-foot fire escape after a disastrous idol drunk on Scotch because I don’t feel anything anymore and am too afraid to walk away. In work that demands creativity, I don’t confuse sloppiness with spontaneity or inspiration. I state what I want, and I allow myself to cringe and move on when I am told no. I do not make Bibles of novels. I no longer understand why anyone would want to live a life punctuated by insipid fairy-tale endings. This hodgepodge of personal miracles represents the making of the most ideal of my adventures. It also represents a person I’ve endured much pain to become.
I accept that I did myself no favors by refusing to treat my bipolar-spectrum depressive disorder for almost a decade, due to my mystic belief that “depressive disorders” were excuses for weakness and that Big Pharma antidepressants inevitably killed countless neurons, only to break down and take ecstasy twice. I accept that of all my youthful experiments, this is the one I wish I hadn’t done. I no longer fear my morbid curiosity about the brain damage I incurred both from the untreated depression and the euphoria induced by the MDMA, and I accept that, right now, the desire to understand it exceeds my worry about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. That’s just who I am now. I’m glad.
(Even as I write, I am gleefully wondering why Wellbutrin causes me to start seeing the “electrical showers” that my doctors told me I could ignore twelve hours after my last dose. Isn’t this stuff supposed to metabolize quickly out of the system? I have had a fascination with Wellbutrin for a year now, because I take it and because it’s pharmacologically mysterious and unique.)
I have transformed from someone who energetically drifted through her twenties into someone I like who has an authentic direction. I’ve never had this before. I’ve never said, “Come now, Juniper. What do you really want to do?” I’ve never before been happily strategic. I’ve certainly never been the kind of person who can say to a mentor, “I’m currenly drawn to articles about virology and prions, and, despite its tragically inauspicious start, I haven’t given up on the idea of gene therapy. I like the idea of hard science that gives people second and fifth chances.” It’s such a small thing, I know. So many of my peers have already become wildly successful people. But it’s mine, at last. I’m so happy I’m beginning not to care that I’ve received it “late”. I always wondered what it was like to do something because I wanted to do it, not because it impressed people or just because I could.
One of my top-choice pre-med post-baccalaureate programs—of the group willing to train both aspiring doctors and researchers—is in Northern California, where my sister and closest friend live. I like Northern California and I detest LA, and I have been largely planning to relocate near my old undergrad stomping grounds. However, I have not fully relinquished my eighteen-year-old’s dream of moving to New England, far out of my comfort zone and way too far for my parents to expect me to fly home on every holiday, and developing into an independent, warm woman with her own brand of intellectual glamour. (A post of PiT’s stirred my wistfulness again, several days ago.) And I do not want to tell you that I feel like an ignorant minor who has no clue how to actualize a grand plan like that. I’ve always just insisted on dreaming about it and remaining a baby-- without even realizing that I was doing that. Ugh. You have no idea how over it I am.
Have you read Arlenna’s post on conquering procrastination? Read it. I’m trying to take her advice. I’ve begun by making a giant timetable of goals that focus on baby steps to take over the next year and a half. I’m obsessive compulsive and I fare well with wonderfully organized lists of goals made achievable by dividing them into numerous tiny tasks. I have simply never tried it on this scale before. I want to include a lot of medical and human genetics reading, in addition to studying to take the GRE for the first time. I even want to meet some of the amateur scientists hacking genomes in their garages in this area. (Eppendork! I’m sorry! But it’s the truth.) Now, that would take My Fair Scientist to another level!
This is what has preoccupied me, and what’s been behind my thoughtless question about numbers of scientists and numbers of science jobs in America. I wanted to write you a brutally structured story with painstaking details. What the hell. It’s my blog.
P.S. It’s 2:31 am, Pacific Time. I will edit this and include the links I ought to have after I get some fucking sleep.
UPDATE:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is the LAST time my lazy ass publishes an unedited post! I think I'm trying to win the prize for irresponsibility, this week . . .
*Yes. I know that I don't really know anything for sure about these people's careers, and I am just taking their word for it. You guys have got to allow me some blogging poetic license, though.
Read more. . .
Discussion of one more reason why a job applicant's creativity dramatically increases her chances of landing one of the jobs that are acknowledged to be excruciatingly few in number, by Glamour Magz Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Brief note of the importance of "soft funding" to the existence of many science jobs, by Well-Respected Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion about how much time a postdoc contending for jobs as rare as hen's teeth has to prove her competitiveness in terms of grants, by Well-Respected Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion that makes me think tangentially about Ambivalent Academic's observations of "cheap labor" in academic science, by Well-Respected Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of the "pyramid structure" system that the dearth of science jobs (especially those that afford you meaningful independence) represents, an admonition to learn to work within this system to succeed, and one of my favorite posts ever despite several problems I spy in feeling this way, by Glamour Magz Rock Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of whether or not men unfairly get what few jobs there are, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Disclosure of what it's like to conduct an unsuccessful search for one of these jobs that almost nobody has, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Reflection on what it takes in the first place to complete the training required for science jobs you aren't guaranteed to get, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Reflection on the availability of the industry jobs in science which are allegedly more plentiful than the academic ones, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Discussion of just how much your ability to publish, in addition to your publications themselves, matter to your job prospects, by Experienced Postdoc for Whom the System Is Presently Failing.
Discussion of a guide to science careers for undergrads, grad students, and postdocs anxious about their lack of choices, by Rising Starlet PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of the role of luck in your landing a coveted and rare science job, by Rising Starlet PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Advice on how to approach the extremely competitive science job market, by Rising Starlet PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Here's a few more, by bloggers I did not name above:
Discussion of how much easier is it for one sex over the other to get one of these scarce jobs, by Level-Headed Crazy-Perceptive Postdoc Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of scientists surprisingly leaving those exalted academic posts for posts in industry and the possible effect of this on job quality, by Fashionista and Rising Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System.
Discussion of the role of protectionism in American science job availability, by Fashionista and Rising Star PI Who Is Succeeding Within the System. *
I do want to pay my own serious attention to the availability and quality of science jobs, because I have yet to do my own substantial research. However, in my last post, the question represents a peripheral issue. I have really been nervous over whether I have the courage and maturity—the conscientiousness-- I’ll need to be the scientist I want to be.
Toaster Sunshine inspired a good conversation. Becca, Massimo and Ambivalent Academic have provided responses that I think deserve their own post. First, I’ll discuss them here, and, second, I’ll segue into an expose of the kind of person I’ve been, careerwise, for the last ten years. Wow. This unvarnished-truth blogging rocks! I love blogging about worries that may not make for enticing blog fodder! And I’ve been a little fond of sarcasm too, lately. So I’m ready to go.
Becca, a reader long possessed of snarky astuteness, pointed out my false dichotomy. I’m relieved. I hadn’t realized how cranky I’d gotten. I should have readily admitted that scientists may do science a service by dissuading the green and starry-eyed; only the joyfully devoted will answer the call. I’ve read recently that in the early twentieth-century, many academics, especially American ones, dismissed physics as a dead dog. “There’s nothing more to discover!” I hadn’t realized how scarce physics jobs were at this time. Physicists who found employment were willing to starve alone in caves just to do their work.
I should have also reminded myself that I do not let people tell me what to do for a living anymore. Nor do I shirk a challenge. Who wants a job that’s easy to get, anyway? Who really wants to be the big fish in the small pond? Yes. This is how you genuinely feel when you’ve grown up in a Republican family of nonpareil workaholics, and, despite the objections of the friends and acquaintances you most highly esteem, you still fancy yourself an updated, swarthy version of Dagny Taggart—minus John Galt and the rest of the unappetizing denouement to boot. Or when you simply prefer a difficult life to an empty one. Or when you’re me.
(Incidentally: No. This is not an endorsement of monomania. Not a full-throated one, anyway. Oh, Jasheebs. I can’t wait until I catch flack for my future discussion of that.)
Massimo has wisely reminded me to depend on quantitative data whenever I get it. Since I have to protect myself against my own dangerously impressionable mind, I welcome this reminder. He also reminded me that job stability doesn’t exist, not at a probability so high it’s worth prioritizing above my research interests. Then, too, I never stopped wanting to muster the courage to do the research I want to do.
Ambivalent Academic, with her usual perceptiveness, has reminded me to keep determining how closely I want to cooperate with “The System”. I’d planned a more careful post on this, but I am always willing to work within the system, and to strive to effect change from within. Too closely cooperating, though, can coax one to ignore the evil bonfires and eaten young. That’s a banal observation now. But it quickly won’t be, once I get going.
When will I get going?!
For the first time in my life, I know what I want to do. I think for myself, and I respect myself. I worship no one, however. I do not allow peers to pressure me into their interests. I do not change my plans for boys. I no longer want to marry, and I no longer want to have children. In place of an insufferably thoughtless tendency to make crushing emotional demands of my friends, I now fret over every possibility that I am asking for too much. Know what? That’s better. Not ideal, but better. That’s better than vampirizing people. I would rather give than take. I will talk brashly, but I proceed with caution. I listen and watch more than I talk. I do not demand attention from those who don’t want to pay attention to me, and I give more credit to those who do. I have learned to take my life seriously by taking myself less seriously. I take authentic risks and not posturing ones; I, the Chicken Hypersensitive, will clumsily but firmly risk rejection by any number of programs and people in place of disinterestedly and illegally climbing a hundred-foot fire escape after a disastrous idol drunk on Scotch because I don’t feel anything anymore and am too afraid to walk away. In work that demands creativity, I don’t confuse sloppiness with spontaneity or inspiration. I state what I want, and I allow myself to cringe and move on when I am told no. I do not make Bibles of novels. I no longer understand why anyone would want to live a life punctuated by insipid fairy-tale endings. This hodgepodge of personal miracles represents the making of the most ideal of my adventures. It also represents a person I’ve endured much pain to become.
I accept that I did myself no favors by refusing to treat my bipolar-spectrum depressive disorder for almost a decade, due to my mystic belief that “depressive disorders” were excuses for weakness and that Big Pharma antidepressants inevitably killed countless neurons, only to break down and take ecstasy twice. I accept that of all my youthful experiments, this is the one I wish I hadn’t done. I no longer fear my morbid curiosity about the brain damage I incurred both from the untreated depression and the euphoria induced by the MDMA, and I accept that, right now, the desire to understand it exceeds my worry about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. That’s just who I am now. I’m glad.
(Even as I write, I am gleefully wondering why Wellbutrin causes me to start seeing the “electrical showers” that my doctors told me I could ignore twelve hours after my last dose. Isn’t this stuff supposed to metabolize quickly out of the system? I have had a fascination with Wellbutrin for a year now, because I take it and because it’s pharmacologically mysterious and unique.)
I have transformed from someone who energetically drifted through her twenties into someone I like who has an authentic direction. I’ve never had this before. I’ve never said, “Come now, Juniper. What do you really want to do?” I’ve never before been happily strategic. I’ve certainly never been the kind of person who can say to a mentor, “I’m currenly drawn to articles about virology and prions, and, despite its tragically inauspicious start, I haven’t given up on the idea of gene therapy. I like the idea of hard science that gives people second and fifth chances.” It’s such a small thing, I know. So many of my peers have already become wildly successful people. But it’s mine, at last. I’m so happy I’m beginning not to care that I’ve received it “late”. I always wondered what it was like to do something because I wanted to do it, not because it impressed people or just because I could.
One of my top-choice pre-med post-baccalaureate programs—of the group willing to train both aspiring doctors and researchers—is in Northern California, where my sister and closest friend live. I like Northern California and I detest LA, and I have been largely planning to relocate near my old undergrad stomping grounds. However, I have not fully relinquished my eighteen-year-old’s dream of moving to New England, far out of my comfort zone and way too far for my parents to expect me to fly home on every holiday, and developing into an independent, warm woman with her own brand of intellectual glamour. (A post of PiT’s stirred my wistfulness again, several days ago.) And I do not want to tell you that I feel like an ignorant minor who has no clue how to actualize a grand plan like that. I’ve always just insisted on dreaming about it and remaining a baby-- without even realizing that I was doing that. Ugh. You have no idea how over it I am.
Have you read Arlenna’s post on conquering procrastination? Read it. I’m trying to take her advice. I’ve begun by making a giant timetable of goals that focus on baby steps to take over the next year and a half. I’m obsessive compulsive and I fare well with wonderfully organized lists of goals made achievable by dividing them into numerous tiny tasks. I have simply never tried it on this scale before. I want to include a lot of medical and human genetics reading, in addition to studying to take the GRE for the first time. I even want to meet some of the amateur scientists hacking genomes in their garages in this area. (Eppendork! I’m sorry! But it’s the truth.) Now, that would take My Fair Scientist to another level!
This is what has preoccupied me, and what’s been behind my thoughtless question about numbers of scientists and numbers of science jobs in America. I wanted to write you a brutally structured story with painstaking details. What the hell. It’s my blog.
UPDATE:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is the LAST time my lazy ass publishes an unedited post! I think I'm trying to win the prize for irresponsibility, this week . . .
*Yes. I know that I don't really know anything for sure about these people's careers, and I am just taking their word for it. You guys have got to allow me some blogging poetic license, though.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
A Dearth of American Scientists, or A Dearth of American Science Jobs?
Sometime this year, I will definitively find out. Nearly daily chatter in the blogosphere makes me think that either scientists need to embark on a nationwide crusade to dissuade starry-eyed aspirants from entering careers in research, or I need to ignore the naysaying of bitter people, like my mama and papa taught me to.
P.S. Several substantive posts are coming within the next five days.
P.S. Several substantive posts are coming within the next five days.
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