Refraction

I’ve had this song stuck in my head for the last couple of days:

And everyone’s new and everyone glows
with something I had never seen
It’s like the secret
They are telling me that makes my heart go
Oh oh, oh oh, oh oh, oh….

“Sympathetic Vibrations”, The Paper Raincoat

*kind of wants to make a mix based off this one song alone*
*kind of doesn’t want to do that because she needs to prep a presentation*
*will keep humming this all weekend*

I’m a traditionalist in maybe one sense of the word: I believe in the continued use of Traditional Chinese characters. This is mostly due to the fact that I grew up on Traditional Chinese media as well some some issues I have with the aesthetics of Simplified characters.
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I hate writing my thesis because I HAVE NO CONCLUSIVE RESULTS and MY COMPLEXES HATE ME and REFUSE TO BE MADE. Then, when I do make them, THEY DON’T REACT THE WAY I WANT THEM TO.

This is science, I know. As I found on the French Wikipedia Chemistry Portal: Cherchez, et vous trouverez…. autre chose. (Look, and you will find… something else. –Jean Jacques)

On the other hand, seriously, I think I might have missed my calling, folks. I complained a lot about Rousseau (and a little less about Zola) but I honestly did really well on both of my French lit papers. I think I can pretty much just show up to the final, write my name, and pass the course. That’s good because I don’t really plan on studying for it that much.

(ON THE OTHER HAND: I think I might die from the stress sometime between now and the 29th. THAT WOULD NOT BE GOOD.)

I expect you’re all tired of hearing this, but I’m not a great chemist. I think I’ve been researched-out, honestly. One can only take so many failed experiments before one’s morale drops to abysmal levels. I’m in that abyss, and I’ve been here for quite a while. I can’t actually remember the last time an experiment worked.

My thesis write-up so far is full of the phrase “mixture of products.” “Complex mixture.” I’m worried I haven’t done enough work for it, and so I don’t have very much to write about; what’s more, all the stuff I did try didn’t work. Do you have any idea how unsatisfying that is? “I tried” doesn’t really cut it for something like this; you need results.

A few weeks ago, I caught myself thinking: “Once I’m done this experiment I can go and do what I really like.” And then it hit me: chemistry has never really been “that thing I like.” My supervisor lives to work. I’d rather work to live. Don’t get me wrong; I like chemistry well enough, but I also want to be able to leave work at work and have a life outside of the lab. This is at the core of why I don’t want to go into academia. The pressure to publish and produce results is incredible (at least until you have tenure.)

People tell me that with my French, I can easily get a job in the federal government (let’s ignore for the moment that English is the lingua franca of the scientific world, and any scientific position I find will not require me to use French in Canada). I’ve worked for the government. Not a whole lot gets done. I’m not sure how happy I would be in a situation like that. I know one thing, though, that I haven’t been happy with my research for a long, long time. I think it’s time to move on.

I’m almost cracking now; thesis is due in a week and a half, and I have an exam next Tuesday. I’m not sure how I’m going to fit all of this in, and I’m driving myself mad.

Taking a break from the horror that is the undergrad thesis. I present, in no particular order, thoughts which have been percolating in my brain lately:

• I’m growing increasingly dissatisfied with the local rag. At first, there was this sensationalist reporter whose articles I read with a general kind of distaste. Then, the sports pages (this is how I follow sports) caught the same bug; one writer consistently abuses the cadences and vocabulary of a casual register. OK, I’m being a bit judgmental here. And maybe it’s my objective scientist training coming to the fore. But is it so much to ask for a little professionalism? Not every piece needs to have your personality written all over it. If I wanted that, I’d read a column.
• In the same vein: I’d like to take a second job as a copy editor for said paper. Then I too can make money while doing nothing. (I’m not sure people will ever spell Sarah McLachlan’s surname correctly. I recently read an article where it was spelled two different ways. Incorrectly, both times.)
• The cherries are blooming, finally. I’m glad the weather is nice and they can last for at least a day or two–but I’m already seeing petals on the ground.
• I’ve been looking at more indie music lately. I kind of–I’m not sure how I feel about it. Looking for indie music seems like an oxymoron; if a musician is truly indie you’ll never have heard of them. If you haven’t heard of them… you can’t look for them. Simple as that. Surprisingly, I’ve discovered that Dallas Green does manage to pull off his City and Colour act quite well, and I do rather like Sometimes. Bring Me Your Love is a little vanilla, even for my tastes. Other groups which have caught my fancy lately: Stars, Hallelujah the Hills, Broken Social Scene.
• I have my last undergraduate lectures tomorrow. Strange. I don’t really have a sense of things ending, like I did in high school. Perhaps that’s just the stress of the thesis talking.

I’m not really sure how I feel about the First Lady of France. After her supermodel career, she turned to singing, and though it’s often the case that crossovers of this kind end badly, she seems to be doing quite well for herself.
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Okay, one more. I can’t help it; I just heard this song on TV and it’s simply charming.
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Still procrastinating, thesis write up this time. I’ve translated all the easy songs off IT, I think, except this one.

(And even this one’s not that easy: how to fully express the meaning of “watershed” both as the geological feature and the idiomatic meaning of “turning point”? I don’t think I can.)
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Things are a bit different around here because Earth Hour is going on tonight–and yep, I’ll be turning my lights off at 8:30 and doing my organometallic problem set by candlelight. Or something. So… this blog will effectively shut down for an hour, too. Get off your computer. 🙂

I could throw in some cynical stuff here about how it’s really just a token gesture and that my extinguished lights do little, but the point is just to raise awareness on the way to saving the planet. Worked for me last year, anyway.

Over at Language Log there’s a post about being terrified at not being able to read in a foreign country (in this case, Hong Kong SAR). One of the commenters points out:

I had gathered that the “ideogram” thing was a myth — that Chinese script is really a syllabary, and that Cantonese speakers said to read “Chinese” are really bilingual, and reading transcribed Mandarin.

I don’t know how much I agree with the first part (written Chinese as a syllabary? You’re going to have to dredge up a bit more evidence for that one) but the second part is true, true, true.

Now I realize why I only learned to recognize characters in Chinese school, and not to write–I would have had to learn a whole other language.

That said, I admit to having the same fear (apropos de journal articles, for example). It’s terrifying to look at a page of text and realize you can’t read it and have no idea what it says.