Acknowledgement  July 21st

The following statement might violate everything you ever knew about me, and everything that the name of this website implies:

Chemistry is not my first choice; it is merely my first practical choice.

I frequently say that I make all of my important decisions based on emotion and not logic, and I acknowledge that this is only partly true for my decision to go into chemistry.

Yes, I like and even love chemistry. But there is one path I would give it up for, and that is writing. It would be incredible if I make it in life by singularly pursuing this passion—working on my novel that might never be written; publishing the poetry that is raw and honest, but mediocre at best; and telling people about anything and everything that truly means something to me. Unfortunately, that’s not a hugely reasonable thing for a young up-and-coming adult in the “real world” to do, so instead, I try to do it on the side.

I have grown to enjoy chemistry quite a bit more than I ever expected. The decision to study chemistry in the first place was a sudden, emotional choice, as was my decision to pursue it further and quit the high school teaching track. I also think that chemistry has helped me develop new creative ideas and ways to express myself. However, sometimes I long to push the science aside for a while to satisfy what my heart has always desired.

On Monday, a guest from the Netherlands arrived at our lab to join us for the next month. Before she got here, the lab bossman was talking about various things, from his working vacation in Massachusetts to his windmill-hating father, and he eventually got to the topic of what our visitor is going to work on while she’s here. He had an idea for her involving the mechanistic interactions of the protein tyrosine kinases that I’ve been finding¹, and he casually threw out there, “Well, you’re a chemist—” so I might understand.

I told him that yes, I might like that; I might find that quite interesting. In fact, this is the assignment I was waiting for for the past eight and a half weeks!

Whether or not it proves to be as interesting as I hope, it is now my work to do. I am happier. This makes me much more excited than mindlessly writing Perl scripts and poring through protein databases to pop out numbers involving distances between specific amino acids. Perhaps, over the next week and a half, I will actually think about structure and molecular interactions. That is what the chemist in me wants to do and has wanted to do all summer.

Seeing as I mentioned my time frame for this project, I should probably mention this to the bossman, who I don’t think realizes how quickly the tenth week is approaching. In theory, I could show up for a few more days in what remains of my summer, but after Week 10, I am going to Ohio, and then I am doing all the annual doctor/dentist/whoever appointments that I need to do before heading back up to school.

1. Don’t worry, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, either. [↩]