Monthly Archives: May 2012

A Love Story

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This is a story about a boy and a girl who met on the Internet.  They were both nineteen; the girl had just finished her first year of college with less than perfect grades, and was browsing Tumblr one day in search of interesting scientific facts.  Meanwhile, the boy, while planning to leave within two months for the Navy, had posted an excerpt from The Hot Zone, a nonfiction book about a very special virus.

The girl found the post.  She hadn’t realized she missed the essence of BCB so much.  The beauty and intricacy had been lost in mounds of chemistry and calculus.  She shut down the computer and picked up her own copy of The Hot Zone, but not before she bookmarked the boy’s Tumblr for later.

This girl was a poet.  At least, she had once thought of herself as one.  She hadn’t written poetry for a very long time, though, and the part of her brain which dealt with creative writing was slowly starting to wither away.  She couldn’t imagine what would be worth writing about anymore, but when the boy started to post his own poetry, she scrolled through a few pieces and suddenly, impulsively, pulled out a pen.

He was so different from her, she thought.  He had his entire life planned out (so it seemed.)  He was a better poet than she was, a better student, and he was entering the armed forces, which made him the first person she had ever known to do that.  She felt awkward, talking to him – awkward and sad.  They lived only fifteen minutes apart, but it might as well have been light years.

One day, he made a post about not having enough money to go to college and become a viral pathologist like he’d always dreamed.  He wrote about UTMB, his dream school, and how he’d always had to work hard.  He wrote about his love for Ebola and the other Filoviridae.  She was amazed – she couldn’t believe anyone else could feel that way about Ebola, much less the other Filoviridae, Lassa and Marburg.

It was scary, how much their stories fit together.  Her family wasn’t a rich one.  They had pooled their meager resources, along with significant government assistance, to send her to her dream school.  And writing to him, all the passion came back.  She remembered why she had sacrificed so much and fought for so long to get to where she was.  She began to carry herself with pride, to hold her head up again.

She no longer thought her academic career was over.

This is a love story, although it is not about a love between a boy and a girl.  This is not even about friendship in the traditional sense, since for all I know this boy and girl may never meet.  It isn’t necessary that they meet, for the good has already been done.

This, dear reader, is a story about the love of a student for the subject they were meant to follow.  At times we all get weak and lose our way.  Some of us, unfortunately, may never regain the courage to continue our journey to its bittersweet end.  Some of us are lucky, though, and meet another apprentice in the same rigorous discipline, someone who steadies our load and gives us safety, if only for a moment.

This is for you, BC.  Thank you for giving me back my reason to keep going.

Basketball Saved My Life (No Really, It Did.)

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When I was in elementary school, I took dance classes.  I must have taken them for five or six years before I decided to drop them.  I can remember standing in front of the wall-to-floor mirror in the studio in my black leotard and tights (it was a jazz class.)  I had begun to develop earlier than most of my classmates, drawing taunts and sidewise glances from every corner.

(I guess now would be a good time to mention that I, like many other people, hear comments that are meant to be asides, but unlike many other people, I remember them.  So I clearly remember being measured for a costume one day and my hips being measured at 40 inches.  Forty inches? whispered another girl, whose slender prepubescent hips seemed to mock mine.)

I quit dance just in time for P.E. classes in middle school, which were another form of torture.  I dreaded being pushed out on the court and field.  The only thing I excelled at was weight lifting – I could bench more weight than any other girl in my class (70 pounds!)  The pretty, popular girls were the ones who could play with the boys, the ones who joined the cheer squad, the ones who weren’t afraid to wear Spankies and shorts.

(Later on in high school I assisted the middle school volleyball team despite having little experience in volleyball.  I was demonstrating a serve one day when the coach decided to work on my technique, and, exasperated, said something along the lines of “You’ve got those big hips, now use them!”  I quit the job.)

As I began high school, I had pretty much resigned myself to my fate.  I did well in school, despite having few friends, and I thought I was content to reign supreme in academics.  Until my dad begged me to join a sport.  You lead a sedentary life, he said.  It was true.  I didn’t walk or ride a bike.  I had no interest in my dad’s active lifestyle.  I preferred to stay home on the Internet, but his words conjured up an image of a 300-pound Amber being ostracized in her freshman year of college, so I agreed to join a varsity team.

Since the only sport I even remotely knew how to play was basketball, that’s what I joined.

The other girls who came to tryouts had all had experience in elementary and middle school.  They wore basketball shorts and slim-cut T-shirts, while I had come to tryouts in a yoga shirt and my school uniform skort.  I felt hopelessly depressed and idiotic.

I collapsed during my first set of suicides.  I lay there trying to convince my lungs to keep working while the coaches fussed over me and the other girls, I was sure, gossiped about my soft and unathletic physique.  That’s it, I thought.  I have failed tryouts and now I am destined for a life of sadness and pain.  

But I made it onto the team, because it was a small school and they needed people on the bench.  So I returned to that gym on Thursday, and every Monday and Thursday after that.

I can’t remember what we were doing when it happened.  It was some sort of drill, perhaps passing or lay-ups or whatnot, and I, as usual, was the worst out of all the girls.  We formed two lines waiting for our turn, and as I set off on my run, I clearly heard the girl behind me say to her friend, “She’s so bad.”

I had two options at that time: to admit that the girl was right and to quit the team forever, or to take horrific, savage umbrage at her remark and do everything in my power to prove her wrong.  For the first time in my life, I chose the second option.

The next three seasons were full of triumph and pain.  I got my first black eye.  I scored six points against the top-ranking team in the league.  I fell in love with a young man from the local Jewish high school, and when he unwisely discarded my affections I took great pleasure in fouling the girls on their basketball team.  One year we ranked fourth in the league.  I traveled to the ghetto and the res’ and the most exclusive neighborhoods in Scottsdale, gradually gaining confidence (and losing a little bit of weight, which wasn’t a bad thing either.)

Basketball was the first thing I had come across in which I was not automatically the best. Now that I am at Rice, there are many other things which I have not mastered and probably never will master.  But thanks to that one annoying girl who happened to be in line behind me, every time I see people pity me for my poor chemistry grade or hear someone invite everyone else in the room except me out for dinner, I only smile.  I invite myself out to dinner.  I throw myself on that chemistry so that no one might ever have cause to pity me again.

You see, in the grand scheme of things, you only have two options: to admit that you are not the best and give up, or to fight your way, tooth and claw, onward.

I am eternally glad that I chose the second option.

 

Why I Am A Science Major

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I love to write.  I love the English language so much.  It is such a bastard, a mixture of all the other languages in the world, and so it is probably rightful that we speak it in the United States, this worn-out little patchwork quilt of a country.

Unfortunately, I am not a writer.  I used to think I was, but after reading my friend’s recent blog posts I have realized that there is absolutely no way I could attain that level of perfection, and I really don’t want to try.

So what am I, exactly?  And why on earth did I choose BCB as my major, knowing full well it’s one of the most difficult majors at Rice?

This is why.

Ebola is a filovirus, one of the only viruses on earth that can knot itself into intricate twists and turns.  (Most viruses are round little fat things.)  It was first recognized in Yambuku, Zaire, in 1976, when a male teacher presented to a mission with what was initially assumed to be malaria.

Ebola is one of the most famous viruses in history, and rightfully so.  I won’t go into the details of what it does to people and other primates here in the interest of taste, but I will tell you that it is dangerous and gory and it is the absolute essence of wildness.

It’s beautiful.

Viruses can’t be tamed.  They are completely untouchable.  They have been here for hundreds and thousands and millions of years, and when you look at them under a microscope you get the feeling that you are looking into a perfect and crystalline world.

And that is why I chose BCB as my major.  That is why I subject myself to physics and Calc II and orgo, and moreover, why I subject myself to people thinking I am morbid because I love disease.  Because the stories of Ebola and hantavirus, among other viruses and bacteria, are tangled up in history and sociology and medicine.  Because they, more than any civilization or invention, shape our past and future.

I want to understand this world.  I want so badly to understand the chemicals and tiny creatures beneath my own skin.  After eighteen years, I’ve found a place where I belong.

 

In Which America Becomes Even Fatter and More Sad

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According to the Star-Telegram, one-third of all American adults are obese.  In about 15 years, that number will rise to 42%.

That’s really, really scary, especially in conjunction with another statistic: more than one in every ten Americans takes an antidepressant.

We’re getting fat.  Fat and sad.  Which is understandable.

I am inundated, every day, with healthy tips and tricks, workout motivations, too-perfect bodies, and it makes me hate myself.  Why?  Because I am normal.  My BMI is 21.  I’m not an athlete, but for a biochem major, perhaps that is to be expected.

What worries me about the increase in overweight and obese adults and teenagers is that very soon I expect to see a corresponding rise in eating disorders, low self-esteem, and yes, depression.

Here’s one reason: eating disorders don’t necessarily make you skinny.  Look, I know it’s a shock.  But many young people suffer from bulimia and BDD (body dysmorphic disorder – basically the binging without the purging of bulimia) and neither of those disorders automatically make you thin.  Even anorexics may be puffed up with edema and gas retention to the point of looking to be a normal weight.  The point is: you cannot judge the health of a person based on their appearance alone.

I’m going to relate to you a very common pathway towards BDD, obesity, and depression – one I fight every day, incidentally.  A young woman sees workout tips or skinny models or belittling media.  She goes on a strict diet-and-exercise regime, which, because she is only human, only lasts a few weeks.  She sees her failure, is depressed, and spends a night with Ben, Jerry, and Dr. Pepper.  The next day she looks in the mirror, thinks “God, I look disgusting,” and the whole cycle begins again.

I wish the media would put more of an emphasis on the fact that obesity, while a disease, is not a sin.  There is absolutely no reason to feel depressed about yourself, even if you are so large you cannot get up to go to the bathroom.  You are still alive and that means the fight is not over.  No obesity is irreversible.

We need a better support network in this society.  We need to spread a message of unconditional love, a message which has been sadly lacking in recent years, as evidenced by the weight and antidepressant statistics.

Better yet, we need the media to stop being so two-faced.  Stop showing us airbrushed models and then turning around and belittling us for being fat, media.  Good God, aren’t there enough problems in this country without you throwing this extra straw on our humped backs?