Chemical Shift

Its been a long time since I’ve done or found something that geniunely made me happy, except my wife of course. We discussed this a few moments ago, after I was looking up the latest status of what people have been doing with their Sega Dreamcast. Melissa wanted to know why I feel the need to make older stuff useful again, like my old computers, and that it seemed more like a compulsion than a passion.

Thinking back, I got into computers as a kid because that is what my older brother liked, and I guess I figured that if I did too, then he would like me more, and hopefully torture me less. The first one we had was a TI 99/4A, I think. Later on, I remember calling him a lot, to ask him computer related questions, when my parents sent him to live in Orlando for a while after he graduated from high school. I would call him to ask how to do things with our CoCo 2 (Radio Shack Color Computer II), when he had a CoCo 3 down there. It was a chance, I guess, to do something related, to have something in common, other than being just brothers. A few years later, when he was working in the local community college computer lab, I used to visit a lot to play games on the computers and to work on homework assignments. I remember one time when his supervisor asked if I was planning on coming to school there, my brother made a comment that he thought I was better than that, which made me feel good that he might have been proud of me.

I remember picking on my younger brother, much like how my older brother picked on me. I am deeply sorry for that now and wish things would have been different. I haven’t seen either of my brothers since I left for grad school, didn’t part on the best of terms, for the most part due to the drama in our lives at the time. I spoken to them by phone on a few occasions recently, but kind of feel that we’ve grown in different directions.

School-wise, I remember my older brother didn’t do very well, the classic “not applying himself” complex, or maybe just laziness. He definitely wasn’t stupid, but for the most part, I don’t think he cared all that much about school. He read voraciously and watched documentaries and educational television, way before I wanted to watch such shows. I think he did well with logic puzzles and always liked to play games, especially ones where strategy was involved.

My younger brother did ok in school and was even in some “gifted” programs. He did well until he screwed up towards the end, but it was again partly due to the drama in our lives at the time. I hope he does well in whatever he chooses to do.

I, on the other hand, did ok in school, and more often than not, did really well. I didn’t care to read that much, except for sporadic fits of reading a bunch of books, not on the “summer reading lists”, a few of the summers during high school. I didn’t care to read, especially when I felt forced to do so, in my english courses. I liked watching cartoons and reading comic books. I was lucky to have most of the information in my classes just come to me without much effort, with some exceptions.

I went to Catholic schools from kindergarten through the first half of 5th. My parents didn’t like how the school was doing something while I was in 5th, I think it was something that incovenienced them, so they took me out and sent me to public school. I immediately did much better in public school, than in private, making straight A’s from 5th through 6th, except for one B in 6th. In 6th, I was even Captain of the Sixth Sense Team, which went to local competitions to compete in trivia and “brain brawl”-type contests. We usually fared well, but I still remember that a judge accepted the opposing team’s “botanology” answer, instead of “botany” which I was about to give.

In the summers between 5th and 6th and 6th and 7th, I was in the county’s summer school program called the Superintendant’s Junior University, where I was able to take classes such as Latin and Egyptology / Heiroglyphics, and I think a few other things.

I went to a high school that was 7 through 12, but turned to 9 through 12 in my junior or senior year. I wasn’t all that into science in high school, probably again being felt forced to do science projects every year, which looking back now, helped me out a bit. Math, too, wasn’t very fun, even though I got through Calculus I. I enjoyed the foreign language classes that I took: Latin I-IV and French I-V, and thought about linguistics and being a translator, or at least living in a foreign country. I took some art courses, too. In 7th grade, I took an Intro to Art course, where we drew, painted, a little bit of art history, and the like. In the summer between 10th and 11th, I took a Commercial / Industrial Art class at one of the county’s trade high schools. We had to take an art course in the 9th to 12th grade in order to graduate, but my schedule was packed every year. I had to take a Geometry course in the summer between 8th and 9th in order to take the math courses I thought I wanted. In either the 9th or 10th grade, I had the opportunity to take some kind of test the county was giving as an entrance exam for another county program for extra schooling through a series of seminars, either a humanities series or science series. I passed the test for the humanities branch. It was kind of neat to be in an exclusive (yet nerdy) club from 10th to 12th grade where we usually met in one of the auditoriums at the Museum of Science & History to hear a guest speaker talk about Jazz piano, dance, or art. We also were able to go to the symphony several times. I must admit though, that large part of the fun of going to the meetings was that I sat next to a girl from my high school that I had a crush on. I wanted to ask her out, but I felt ashamed of how messy home was for most of my life, and to some degree, my parents, and of course, me being fat.

My parents, for as long as I can remember, kept a very cluttered house. My mom was, among other things, a manic depressive, or had bipolar disorder as it is called now. So, in her manic fits she spent a lot of money on stuff that wasn’t needed or really wanted. My dad clung on to every scrap of paper or object that might have some importance later on, which ended up being just about everything. Along the way, it taught us that objects equals love which didn’t help matters any. Trying to organize the house and reduce the clutter never lasted long, and was always overwhelming.

Well, when I went to undergrad, I planned on studying Computer Science, since I liked working with computers so much, and my older brother studied it earlier. I had him help me with some of the early programming courses, but I figured out that programming was not for me and that was the focus of the program there. I was more interested in the hardware side, but that meant I would most likely would have to take an engineering program that wasn’t offered at my school. I had already taken several chemistry courses there and liked the professors, so I figured that I would change my major to Chemistry. I figured with a background in chemistry, I would have the fundamental knoweldge and skills to do work in nearly all fields, be it business, technology, medicine, etc. When I told my older brother that I changed majors, I think he was kind of disappointed, but I knew that it was best for me to make that shift.

I generally did well in the chemistry courses, ok in the physics, but not so great in Calc 2 and 3, until I had one professor for Calc 3 who helped things click in my brain. After my friends graduated a year before I would have, the chemistry courses really clicked and I did exceptionally well, even making the Dean’s List. Physical Chemistry 1 & 2 clicked so well, that at the time, I felt I had some window into how the universe worked and how all energy flowed from one form to another. I did so well, the professor asked me if I would do research with him, which I turned him down because I had decided to do research with another professor in Analytical Chemistry. That research was very preliminary and I probably would have gotten more out of the process with the P. Chem prof. I remember during the graduation ceremony, after I walked off stage and going past where the professors sat, both of them stood up to shake my hand. The Analytical prof, jokingly told me to “not let it go to my head,” and the P. Chem prof quickly added, “no, no, let it go to your head, you deserve it.” That made me feel really good.

I stuck around the chemistry department after graduation and tried to continue some of the research for the Analytical prof. I didn’t get the reaction conditions right on some of the polymerizations I was trying to run, so the solutions kept blowing up and coating the small fume hood with a lot of stinky powder. One of the days, I found out about an opening at the Mayo Clinic nearby, where they needed someone to do organic chemistry. I contacted Mayo and got an interview, which went extraordinarily well, and aced it. It was a nice job at an impressive facility, where most of the time, I felt out of place, that I wasn’t good enough for this place. One day I talked to my boss to see if there should be more I was doing, and he told me he was very pleased with my work.

I just have to remember what Stuart Smalley (Al Franken) once said: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.”