You Make Me Wanna

I feel I should preface this post with a disclaimer: It's kind of a long'un. But certain people have been complaining that I'm not writing often or long enough, so I finally decided to polish this one off after chipping away it it intermittently for about 6 weeks. Enjoy.

One night a few weeks ago, I was on my way home a little later than usual, so the train was fairly empty. I had a seat to myself...perpendicular to another woman with the seat to HERself...out of nowhere, this guy comes along and plops down in the empty seat between us, next to the other woman. There are plenty of empty seats in this mostly empty car, so the fact that this guy sits in the one available seat next to a single woman is...well...creepy. Headphones on...heavy mouth-breather...I'm fairly sketched out and don't blame the woman at all for immediately getting up and moving a safe distance away. After a moment, I realize that this guy has a pile of blank paper and a Sharpie and is drawing...gradually it dawns on me...hey, this guy isn't sketchy, he's sketching. Namely, he's sketching the guy directly across the car from him and doing a pretty good job of it, too. He had moved to that seat because he found a character he wanted to sketch, and that drive, combined with the headphones drowning out his surroundings, had probably made him oblivious to the fact that he was getting unnecessarily close to two unaccompanied women.

Inspiration is a difficult thing to get your head around. Years ago, when I was in undergrad, I was hanging out with a couple of my girlfriends, having what at that time they were calling an "affirmation session." Around that little table, we formed a sisterhood of sorts - one that included those girls with whom we felt a lasting and deep connection, even if we weren't quite sure what the source of that connection was. Later, we were trying to think of some sort of symbol to adopt to represent us and our identity as a group. We settled on the muses - they're all women, all beautiful, each infinitely inspirational in a unique way. We each chose an alter ego based on our own interests and tastes, and I still hold mine close to my heart.

Back to a few weeks ago: as the train moved further along, past the Eaton Centre, it became quite full with shoppers and people out enjoying the beautifully warm evening - the sketcher's view was obscured, but he finished his rendering of the odd little man seated across from him. A girl sat next to him, realized what he was doing, and became as engrossed as I was as he finished the sketch and moved to a blank page. He looked around for another subject and settled on the giddy young Asian girl standing in front of him - very pretty but with that air of entitlement that only those kids who Come From Money seem to possess. Eventually, she and her equally vapid friend figured out that she was being sketched. They giggled uncomfortably...stared at the man...stared at the sketch...and generally looked unsettled. I found it interesting that in the previous sketch he had spent a great deal of time on the details of the man's face, but in this sketch he started with her hair, left the face blank, and gave her figure his immediate attention. I had to change trains without finding out if he ever went back and added her face, but I was left with the strong impression that she was more beautiful and interesting to him before she knew he had noticed her.

The reason I was on the train post-rush hour that night was that it had been a beautiful, warm day and I had to take a friend of mine out for a couple of beers on a patio after work. That evening had been absolutely picture-perfect patio weather - just warm enough, nice breeze, sun hitting your face but low enough to not hurt your eyes or skin - perfect. Needless to say, the patio we were on was a busy and highly coveted space - it was pointed in just the right direction, and packed with a fascinating variety of people. I noticed a guy waiting in line for a table with a big camera with a big lens on it, pointed in my general direction, snapping candids of the crowd. I couldn't help but wonder if I was going to be in his photos...maybe I was part of the inspiration for them, maybe not. I've often seen candid photos and wondered if anyone has ever seen me and felt inspired to take my photo...draw a sketch...write about me...without my knowledge. The odds are greatly against it, but I think every woman has, at one point, fantasized about being the Girl With the Pearl Earring...the Mona Lisa...the nurse in the Alfred Eisenstadt photograph taken in Times Square on V-J Day that was so beautifully draped over that sailor's arm as he kissed her that he had to capture the moment. Anonymous, yet iconic muses all.

On any given day, I lose count of the number of times I say or think to myself, "How does somebody come up with this shit?"

But then again, people say the same thing about me whenever I present my silly little movies in group meeting. I know where I got the idea to set my experiments to music, but I have no idea why a particular movie NEEDS to be set to Superfly, or Bohemian Rhapsody, or When a Man Loves a Woman. But believe me when I tell you that it does. Last I checked, there was no Muse of digital microfluidics, enzymatic assays, or film soundtracks, so my only inspiration must be coming from within.

A few years ago, I went out on one date with a guy I had met online who was quite taken with me (unfortunately, the reverse was not true - this was the first of a series of experiences that are directly responsible for the fact that I no longer date and rarely even meet people in real life that I was introduced to on the interwebs). Both on the phone and in person, we'd get to talking, and hit on something that would flip the switch that makes my eyes light up and my gestures more emphatic, at which point he would say, "You're so inspiring! That's what I like about you." It was a unique compliment - I had never heard it before, and haven't heard it in so many words from anyone else since. When I want to, I can be a halfway decent actress, but in certain things I'll admit I can't help but wear my heart on my sleeve. In my first acting class in college, we had to do a group exercise a la the old game show To Tell the Truth - we each told a true story, then as a group picked one that we all had to pretend was our own while the class interrogated us to try to sniff out whose story it was. My group picked my story (about a kid I had worked with at a camp for special needs kids the summer before), and one of my classmates easily picked me out because of the way my eyes lit up when she asked if I liked working with the kids - I have a hard time containing myself when someone brings up something that truly excites me.

My date found me "inspiring" because I don't think he had ever felt that way about anything, let alone the wide variety of things that get ME genuinely excited. While I'm glad I inspired him in some way, I find the whole thing very sad - that he couldn't find in himself anything like what he saw in me. That's why there was never a second date - he was inspired by me, but offered nothing new to me in return. I've always been the sort of person who had a few really close friends rather than a horde of adoring masses, partly because I'm still a socially awkward goober at heart, but mostly because I'm only going to promote a person from acquaintance to friend or significant other if they are in some way an inspiration to me. Whether they make me want to try something new or to continue doing something I already love, if you're reading this and you are my friend, then know that you provide the regular kicks in the ass that inspire me to be the person I am.

I originally started writing this post the same week that I was going through my student evaluations. I didn't mention at the time that the comments that said I was "hot" were primarily in feminine handwriting. They weren't written by young men smitten with their prof or, for that matter, young women smitten with their prof. I'm much more inclined to think that those were more of a "you go girl" rather than an "I wanna do you." My students have already picked their majors - I'm not going to inspire them to become chemists, but I would like to inspire them by demonstrating that an intelligent, successful woman of science does not have to be either a raging bitch or a mousy dork. Stereotypes exist for a reason - most of the women in my field wear their hair tied in a knot on the back of their head, and those that wear makeup and skirts are typically dismissed as ditzy or merely "there to find a husband." While my official goal as an instructor may be to teach these kids some chemistry, I have a hidden agenda - to let them know (male and female alike) that it is possible for a woman to be young, wear cute clothes and makeup and high heels, and still command a presence. It feels slightly superficial, but I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to inspire a girl to be a scientist AND a woman - there are too many people out there trying to say you can't be both.

I may not know exactly who or what inspires me to do a lot of the things I do, but there is one person I credit for inspiring my choice of career: Don Herbert. Most Americans know him better as Mr. Wizard - from what I've seen, Canadians don't know him at all (even though his show was produced in Calgary and DID run on Canadian public TV according to my sources), which made it that much harder for me to explain why I was so sad when he passed away on June 12th. If you're a frequent reader, you'll remember that not long before (two months to the day, to be exact) I was mourning the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - it's been a bad year for my idols. They say these things come in threes, but since Jack Lemmon and Katharine Hepburn have both been gone for a while, I'd say I'm fresh out of idols (although please cut me some slack if I'm just a wee bit skittish when August 12th rolls around). At any rate, while Kurt may have inspired me to be a cynic and a smartass (and still does), Mr. Wizard inspires my softer side - my optimism, sense of wonder, and drive to share those with others. For those of you not familiar, Mr. Wizard began as a children's TV show on a Chicago station back in the early 1950's. He made his career out of impressing kids with really cool demonstrations, then explaining the simple principles of chemistry and physics that made them work. He had several TV reincarnations over the years - in 1983 he began making "Mr. Wizard's World" for Nickelodeon, and I watched it religiously every day after school. No matter how many times I had seen each episode, I never missed it, and it never stopped being fascinating. I clearly wasn't the only one - they stopped making new episodes in 1990, but Nickelodeon kept running reruns until 2000, making it the longest-running show in their history. I remember vividly the Christmas when I got "Mr. Wizard's Supermarket Science" (although, to be fair, that was also the Christmas I got my first camera, so it was the most extensively photographically-documented Christmas I've ever had) and started rounding up the supplies I needed to do the experiments myself. The principles I learned from those experiments are the exact same ones I teach to my students now.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved science, and it would have taken me years to figure that out had I had only the things we did in school to go on. We never got our hands into anything in elementary school, never got to Make Science Happen unless you were lucky enough to be in the gifted program once a month or to have a parent smart and creative enough to come up with good ideas for the Science Fair (I was lucky enough to have both). I decided at a very young age that I wasn't just going to go to college, I was going to go to grad school, and I was pretty much set on chemistry long before I actually took a chemistry class. I had already figured out that my favorite Mr. Wizard experiments were the ones where he mixed one thing with another thing and it bubbled or smoked or changed color or exploded. I mean, who cares about how a siren or the Doppler Effect or a Mobius strip or static electricity works when you could blow shit up? And he wasn't just a TV show - there were the aforementioned books, programs and materials for teachers, and a traveling stage show that visited school auditoriums (it came to my school in 6th grade and I recognized every experiment that they did because they were all straight from the TV show). Don Herbert had been a theater geek in high school, college, and community theater, just like me. He flew bombing missions over Europe in World War II. And he dedicated his life to helping kids figure out that they loved science. That is worthy of admiration. I'm not going to say that he is the reason I'm a teacher (my mom deserves a whopping load of the credit/blame there, as well as my brother and any number of great and lousy teachers I've had in the many, many years I've spent in school), but he is directly responsible for my teaching style, my attitude toward science, and my love of working with kids. My college friends remember well that when people used to ask me what I wanted to do with my degree, my answer was always, "I want to be Mr. Wizard." When I was in grad school, I spent a year as the outreach coordinator for a chemistry honor society, which put me in charge of our National Chemistry Week program, where we sent volunteers out to the local elementary schools to do a hands-on experiment with classes. The organization was a pain in the ass, but at the end of a 45-minute session with 25 4th-graders who have just solved a mystery with paper chromatography and are screaming, "I did it! I wrote the ransom note - I'm the thief!!!" I'm on top of the world. Some of these schools would go 3 years before they came back up in our rotation to get a NCW visit, and I would run into 4th-graders who not only remembered having had something like that before, but could tell me in detail what they did in their 1st-grade class. These kids didn't have Mr. Wizard - they had Bill Nye the Science Guy, or Beakman's World, or maybe even just me. But they wouldn't have had any of those things if Bill, Beakman, and I didn't have Don Herbert to look up to. The day I stop wanting to be Mr. Wizard is the day I need to retire.

True inspiration is with us every minute of every day. It's what makes us who we are, what makes us do the things we do, and what keeps us going when everything in our lives has gone to shit. It's been said that the unexamined life isn't worth living (a mantra of bloggers), but examination is highly overrated. I'd like to think it's far more important to create than to reflect on the pre-existing. It's the uninspired life that is truly not worth living.