Spontaneity, Speed, and Direction

and other lessons from chemistry

The month of July has been dedicated to an expedited reprisal of general chemistry, courtesy of CMU, who offers such courses for free (and also without credit). Ideal for me, who took these things in late 2000 and early 2001, and earned a B+ and B- respectively. A lot of the chemistry logic persists in my memory, while the requisite algebra skills are a bit evasive… but now, with the emergence of smart courses and free lectures on YouTube, as well as tutorials about how to use the iPhone to calculate logarithms, I’m making it through before I jump into the deep end of asynchronous distance learning For Credit.

While I’d like to blame science, or the block plan, or my mother (all who have a smidge in my previously tender success), what I’ve come to learn in the past seven or so years, is that my own adorable tendency and preciousness are truly at the center of my failure. Interestingly, it was my stand up comedy coach who helped me recognize this gnarly pattern with a blunt, cold plunge into reality.

I am so fucking precious.

At some point in my history, I decided that math (and by proxy, chemistry) was hard. It is hard, and maybe before all of the internet resources it was harder. Maybe I have some secret undiagnosed complexity in which I rearrange numbers in an unhelpful way, but I honestly think that math and phlebotomy hold hands in my little world. Both took me down, off the path, because I let microscopic normal failure sink the ship.

If you’ve been reading for awhile, you’ll recall that in December of 2022

I enrolled in a phlebotomy training as a necessary hurdle before paying for pre-med pre-recs. I once had a bad injection experience as a medical assistant, got precious, and quit. I quit medicine, diverted from nursing school to nonprofit management school because there were zero needles involved. I apparently seemed logical in this pivot to my parents who find me mysterious and perplexing in that biology is my chosen science versus Chemistry, Physics, and Math - what are commonly referred to as ‘the hard sciences.’