Fort Worth Renaissance

It’s nice out today, sunny and breezy and cool. Next week is spring break, and this week is quickly becoming the “week that would never end” for most people who, like myself, are very much keen on their vacation.

We had a quiz today in O-Chem, a surprise since we had one on Monday. “What the heck, Sergei?” as Charles said. I think he’s trying to mess with us. That class has been pretty interesting – we have been going over concepts from last semester, but in more depth, and using lots of Hammett plotts. Don’t ask any of us about Rho values. It won’t go over well.

Chem Lab is the official Gripe Class of the sophomore-year pre-meds. Don’t mention unknowns, please, nor NMR. Definitely leave the concept of “derivatives” out of any conversation with one of us. Jokes about 190-proof ethanol solvent are still up for grabs, and reminders of how nice methyl benzoate smells (whether that’s a sign it will kill you or make you high, we’re not yet sure). Don’t ask which unknown I am on – “let’s not and say we did!”

Last week we had a Cell Bio test; comments about that have been censored down to the following:

“That…test….pain.”

I will choose to not report on this week’s sexual puns in O-Chem. Don’t ask me why one can make so many innuendo-ridden jokes about aliphatic substitution. Well, I know the answer, but don’t all the same. Elimination has not proved to be as fertile ground, but trust me, that doesn’t stop anybody.

Yeah…speaking of Cell and Chem, I noticed that the ranks have thinned between last week’s tests and tomorrow’s drop date. I can’t make any comments; this time last year I was dropping Cell as I had made a total of a 100 points – between the first and second tests. Ouch.

Anyways, I have to go pick up a quiz, drop off a lecture recording, and check to see if I got my first unknown right. Then, it’s back to the library to carefully write out Bio cards and maybe see if I can find the CRC to look up melting points of various liquid nitro-anisoles. Sigh. Spring break, please arrive.

By the way, according to my friend Clay, I should not call this a “blog” because “every idiot has a blog.” I thought about calling it an online journal, but that’s too many syllables, so I will continue to call it a blog and hope that once people read it they will at least regulate me to some of the wittier ranks of blogging morons.

A Brown Bat

As you may well have figured out, one of my favorite past times is poking some loving fun at my older sister.

Yesterday I was having a conversation with my that very person, Firnafth. I was griping about the fact that every time I take the Myer’s-Brigg’s personality test, as explicated in the book Please Understand Me II, I get a different personality type. Her answer was to “get a large spectrum by taking the test regularly, say every week for the next two years to get 100 responses, and make a probability distribution of the results.”

L.O.L.

“Make a probability distribution.”

I guess that’s what I get for having an ecologist/mammalogist sibling whose idea of the epitome of fun is going out in the field, tagging mice, and coming back to spend eons making a careful map/chart/graph/list of all the data she collected, poring over it, and memorizing some scientific names while she’s at it. While waiting for emails from her advisor, she’ll sit and doodle some creatures of the order chiroptera – very cute, according to her, especially the ones with crazy fuzz on their heads and weird, buggy eyes.

Now, don’t make me remind you of the vole skeleton in the pizza box, the “barn” that was her bedroom in high school (four guinea pigs, five chickens, and a dog), the insistence that, even when driving on a highway through middle-of-nowhere-Arizona in her car, myself and my friend were to follow the speed limit. The bat costume? One year she made a huge cardboard bug for Halloween, spray-painted a drab color and everything. Leatherman? Always. Wallet? Not so much. Haircut? Only when absolutely necessary. Dragons? All twenty kinds. Throw in some elaborately drawn pencilings of dogs/fantastic creatures/mice, a golf polo, a pair of thick-soled (so she can be taller than 5 foot) hiking boots from R.E.I – the most expensive pair every time, though of course she doesn’t mean to – that set her gait as they are so heavy, an invitation to the next Aikido conference, and a nasty right cross, and you have my sister. Hard as nails and soft as butter she is – you don’t want to get on her bad side, let me tell you.

I recently talked with my grandfather about “writing about what you know.” I know myself, true, but I also know her. Somewhat hard not to, when one has shared so many life-shaping events…

Once when I was about 11, we were climbing some very tall trees in our neighborhood; they were in the university-housing complex next to ours, big lofty suckers that have thick, knobby limbs that are large and flat enough to climb for ages, and a top so large that once you climb into it, you can stand up and walk, insulated from the world, the sounds of the city filtered like the light, falling in specks all around, and the birds and squirrels and scraping of bare foot on bark become all there is. I wandered out on a long branch that stuck out; I was so high up I could look down into another tree below me. Then, I heard a crack, and the branch began to swing, earthbound. Naturally, being a reasonable person, I screamed bloody murder and clung to the precipitous twig with all my might. My sister, ever-ready to come to my aid, swung over, and moved out as far as possible on a limb with slightly more integrity, and, as my perch groaned and creaked and moved in a southernly direction, coaxed me back, slowly, inch by inch, until just in time I was back on solid ground, er, wood. I’m pretty sure she saved my life, or possibly a very large number of broken bones. To tell the truth, I have no idea anymore how truly high we were, but trust me, we were flying in the sky those days.

Those days when shoes were optional and “studying” often occurred in the grass, under a blue sky. When red foxes and rapidly-reproducing guinea pigs made up an entire world, when the bushes could lead one into Narnia. When all the movies were Star Trek and days could be spent on bicycles, one riding and one dragging behind on roller blades. When one could spend their whole GDP for the week on a pack of Pokemon cards, and Napster was more than a myth. When costumes were real, and the unknown everywhere, and a summer day could very well be spent at the public pool, in a contest to see who could tread water longest. When the future was one white canvas, with only specks of speculation, and could hold anything, everything. When we bought all those Saltillo tiles, and carefully pulled out all the ones with animal prints. When we painted our room neon green. When the future was just beginning.

Around here at the Fort Worth Renaissance household, we have a tendency to do things most people wouldn’t consider – own three Basenjis, wage a war against processed food, watch too much Star Trek. However, our tendencies, whether backwards, forwards, or counter-culture, are most evident in road trips. Note the map above.  This is the round trip my mother and I are planning on taking over spring break. Why? Well, we’re somewhat desperate to get out of Texas, albeit briefly, and if we have a week in which to do it, that’ll have to do. Our budget is, of course, paltry at best; I’ve got a feeling copious amounts of PB and J and homemade granola are in my future. We are thinking of taking A, the six-year old.

The truth is, this isn’t that weird for us; two summers ago we drove on a nearly 4,000 mile road trip over the course of two weeks, in which we camped every night but one, and somehow managed to keep eight people in a car that long without any getting killed, maimed, or event taken to the ER. They tried, of course; dissent among the ranks was evident quickly (don’t remind anyone of the first, mosquito-ridden night in Louisiana that will permanently color my siblings and my vision of that state). The part where a person who will not be named left the car and decided to walk several miles back to our campsite? Perhaps it was getting lost in Arlington and narrowly missing going the wrong way down a frontage road. And don’t forget the 24 straight hours of driving to get home, because really, the concept of sleeping on the ground a fifteenth time had no one excited.

But man, the things we saw! Washington DC, Furman, our grandfather, neoclassical paintings, Atlanta, Stone Mountain, fireworks, Suellen getting on a bus in no-where, Missouri…

Don’t do the math about the mileage, please, because I don’t want to think of all the driving. I do want to think, however, of seeing the “homeland” again. Even if it’s only for a week. Because these type of trips are grueling – halfway through, either the concept of Hostess Donuts will make your day or break it, and neither is good – but man, the things you can see!

Our destination is San Fransisco. Northern California. The editor is very excited – this will be her first time back in five years. Determination is our partner, adventure our guide. Estimated time of departure is 4am, March 13th. Heckyes.

After watching College Girl pretty much take over the blog in the last two weeks, I have to try to assert my presence as someone who does more than takes fire for watching Shah Rukh Khan movies and being afraid of the plague. What I’d like to tell you is that the plague squirrel story wasn’t actually over this morning, because half of that animal was discovered in the middle of the yard, not far from the barbecue. Yes, it was the half that has the tail. The dogs, apparently unconcerned about the dangers of plague, rabies, or anything else (perhaps they know there’s antibiotics and that they’ve been vaccinated) apparently consumed the other half.

I carefully waited until College Girl came home from the store and then alerted her to the need for “clean up on aisle 7.” But when she got there, the squirrel wasn’t there. Apparently her 13 year old brother and his friend had tossed it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Or so she claimed. “Which neighbor?” I did not ask. I assume they meant the 90 year old lady with the forest in her huge back yard that runs all along our back fence. She never comes out, so there’s no danger of her getting the plague. Nevertheless, I did feel a little bit sheepish about the whole affair.

It’s all a sign of what I told an old friend the other day: when you live with other people, there’s bound to be some chaos.

Oh, and yeah, I saw that mug featured below the other day in Ross and had to buy it for College Girl as a gag gift. She accepted it graciously, as you see, which probably means she’s not really that bitter after all.

No comment.

I’m going to plead the fifth on this one.

This morning, I opened a letter which had, of all things, a check inside. It was from my previous employer, CVS Pharmacy, but the check was unrelated to my work there: it was my compensation for a class action lawsuit, in which the Federal Trade Commission sued CVS for false advertising. I was getting repaid for my previous purchase of CVS Air Shield, those fizzy vitamin tablets that supposedly “improved your immune system.” Not that I bought them with ideas of such, I mostly just liked the taste and didn’t think vitamins were going to do any harm.

Anyways, as I was reveling in my eleven dollars and forty four cents, it occurred to me that they somehow tracked down my purchases, verified them, found my address and name, and sent a check. This must be because when I bought them, I used me “CVS Extracare card,” which I am quite familiar with because I spent several years behind a counter asking people if they had one, if they wanted one, and whether or not being asked again made them want to punch me. Well, as you may know, after saying “Hello! Do you have a CVS card?” all afternoon, I often wanted to punch myself. But I digress.

Was it possible that the record-keeping mechanism of these cards, which mostly serves, I am sure, to enable them to advertise and promote for effectively could have a real benefit for the consumer – assuming that they would get the same sales either way? I suppose in this case they did. After years of getting me to buy things on sale, sending mailers and person-specific emails, I finally got mine. It is somewhat amazing to think of it; without this system, there might have been some advertisements about “getting your share,” but I’ve got a feeling the receipts and so on are long past decomposed in a landfill somewhere. Yet, instead, an automated system doled out the cash, without me moving a finger – except to tear along the dotted line, and depositing.

Mostly what I think of is, oooh, CVS, that’s gotta hurt. I wonder how much they paid out? I guess I should have taken more vitamins after all.

PS: The irony that I stole the picture of the card off of their site, which promotes the darn things? Wonderful.

Recently, certain members of the FWR household have been waging a war of attrition. I will name no names, and definitely will not name any topics of debate, but I will tell you about how attrition is the way to go.

There are many ways to debate, to argue, and, in theory, to win an argument. There is of course the lie/cheat/steal option, which works especially well for the unscrupulous. However, if you are scrupulous enough to not do any of those devious activities, yet ruthless enough to want to win, dangit, then here are your options.

1. Logic. Doesn’t work too well with the unreasonable. If you are like myself, there are far too many people in your life who are irrational for this option to work reliably. Logos: 0; Oppositional Defiance: ∞.

2. Emotional Appeal. This can be very effective; however, your antagonist might catch on eventually and set up some very thick walls that will not be dissuaded by any number of tears, trembling lower-lips, or tales of woe. Pathos might not work the best for those with too much pride, anyways.

3. Appeal to Your Own Credibility: You see, I understand this better; take my word for it.Besides, I’m such a great person. Likely to not work for the same reasons as 1 and 2. Ethos: shot down.

Well, I’ve run out of Greek words to describe types of appeal, but let us not digress and move on!

4. Flattery. Doesn’t work well with your pride. May be helpful if the other person is as in 1, irrational.

5. Violence. Effective if you are dealing with siblings and/or are under the age of 18. After that, this gets tricky.

6. Emotional Blackmail. Incredibly efficient. Unfortunately, goes against the whole “I have a conscience thing.” When dealing with family members, this isn’t such a big deal – you do it all the time already, trust me. Just hope you aren’t giving anyone a complex while you’re at it – those take a while to go away.

7. Bulldozer. In this argument method, one disregards the other’s feelings on the matter and charges forward on all thrusters: “I will leave you, damnit, I swear, I will leave you: I will take this trip and I will come back, get my things, and leave you!”

8. Attrition. And here we arrive. Attrition has so many things on its side, but let us summarize. First off, it is the part of the scheming, conniving, and clever – not in a bad way, of course. It takes stamina. Only a truly heroic character is capable of keeping up such a war for long. The war of attrition involves a) refusing to go away b)reinstating your argument quietly and insistently, and c) waiting for the opposition to crack. And they will, if you can keep it up long enough. You see, in a regular old war, one side has to deliver, as my high school APUSH teacher explained, “the knockout punch.” In one swift blow, the opposition must be crippled. Attrition ignores all of those rules, and just hangs around, and keeps churning, until finally the day when they can raise the victory flag.

Of course, this is all projection. The attrition-ers of the FWR household have some battles won (most by technique 7), but they have yet to win the war. Oh, but they will.

So, true story.

Shortly after I came home last night, my stepfather enlightened me to the exploits of my dogs that day.

“The pups killed a squirrel in the backyard. You might need to clean it up.”

“Yeah,” said the editor, “that thing could have rabies.”

Myself: “….did you know that plague is endemic to the squirrel population in Texas?”

“What?!” Her eyes got very large. “Yeah, sometimes people catch it.”

“I think the pups ate the whole thing.” said V, who had just walked in.

The editor mused, “well, if it is rabid, I think if we leave it out for 24 hours it won’t be contagious anymore…”

“And if it has plague, the fleas might have died, as that is how it’s transferred…” I added.

Needless to say, at this point, nine pm at night, no one was going out in the dark to search out some mutilated squirrel carcass. The threat of getting a fourteenth-century illness (actually, plague has been around longer than that), coupled with cold kept everyone in for the time being.

Now, I will tell you, I was not being entirely factual about the whole plague thing. That’s the great part about having a little information – one can misconstrue it, misrepresent it, and yes, convince their mother that the Black Death could be hanging out on the porch.

Rock Squirrel © James H. Robinson

The truth is, plague is a zoonotic disease that is endemic to some rodent populations on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.  However, it is more common in rural areas, further southwest, and likely in ground squirrels, like the Rock Squirrel, spermophilus variegatus. (so says the CDC, my new best friend) And, cases are quite rare – around a dozen a year in the US.

Still, gotta love it. In case you are interested in similarly freaking people out with slightly erroneous arcane information, follow these handy steps:

1. Learn something esoteric enough that your current audience has no reliable knowledge on the subject. (this is why the media is so good at messing up scientific information for the general public: what the general public understands about science would not fill page of printer paper) It helps if you are an “expert” – the house pre-med student or a widely respected news outlet.

2. Exaggerate choice details so that the example applies to your audience.

3. Say it in an ominous or casual way.

4. Enjoy the reaction, and pat yourself on the back for encouraging the misinformation of the populace.

5. If you have no sense of ethics, repeat.

Meanwhile, I would like to let you know that my older sister, being a mammalogist who studies mice, is likely to die from Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome – “a febrile illness characterized by bilateral interstitial pulmonary infiltrates and respiratory compromise usually requiring supplemental oxygen and clinically resembling acute respiratory disease syndrome (ARDS).” And that awesome last sentence is exactly why I am going to medical school someday.

Alright, you can accuse this blog of being a bit egocentric (hey, it’s about me again!). Lets count how many times the word “I” shows up in the following…

I admit, it seems somewhat of a cop-out to re-post something, but oh well. I think it is fascinating; a blog I wrote over a year ago, where I considered my impending transfer to TCU. I ran across it in the archives, as it were. It appears unfinished; somewhat indicative of the moment, as I was in the middle: things had just begun, and were not yet complete. Somewhat like life overall.

This was originally posted on December 9, 2008, which was, I believe, during finals week. About to leave Southwestern, where I had been for a semester, I would soon return home, and begin at TCU. There are a few points which, looking back, are very poignant. And, I notice, my writing style hasn’t changed much; it’s still verbose and has way too many commas and semicolons; it’s still hyperbolic and, yes, still has way too many movie/book/TV/music references.

So, in one episode of The Office, Jim looks at his high school yearbook photo, and says “Oh, young Jim, there are so many things I wish I could warn you about!” Looking back at myself at this time, I put my arm around young Tonia and say “Oh, young Tonia, it’s going to be alright!”

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Listening to (for about the fiftieth time): Love Story by Taylor Swift. (From the playlist I made for the Admin of this site, my mother, who requests popular music from me for the listening pleasure of herself when she sits at her desk in the dark, wee hours pouring ink onto pages)

I write this on the brink of a move, a transfer, and a holiday; in the midst of finals, pre-Christmas preparations, and the winding down of the semester. Upon leaving work, the circulation department of the campus library, today, I was greeted by a phone call, whereupon I was called upon to produce a blog “by midnight, preferably three hundred to five hundred words.”

“I’ll get right to it” – despite the fact that I spent almost every hour from noon to eight today translating Horace (Latin poetry).

The truth is, I don’t mind. I am tired, but I have just returned from adoration and am ahead of schedule for studying – a rarity, at best.

So, I shall speak about my impending transfer to TCU, which has enabled me to write for this blog as Fort Worth College Girl. I attended Southwestern University this fall, a small (twelve hundred students) liberal arts school in Georgetown, TX, which is about thirty miles north of Austin. I could go into the reasons for leaving for a while, but it boils down to a desire to be on a larger campus, and one that is closer to home.

So, I made the decision last week, quite late into the semester. It has been weird telling people about it – as one can imagine, it is a bit awkward to admit that one is rejecting the school that was previously shared by both the members of the conversation. However, I have rummaged up the courage, and, surprisingly to me, have been greeted with a fair amount of understanding, and sadness – being somewhat of a fiercely independent, loner sort much of the time, I didn’t realize I had many friends. It is a pleasant realization and one I will take with me as I go on, in regard to both the friends here and the ones I will make.

I have received kind letters, notes on the dry-erase board outside my room by all my hall-mates (organized by my roommate). Groups want to see me before we all leave. It is all quite bewildering – and a little sad. But, that is the story of life.

One realization I have made is that this is one of the first choices I have made as an adult, one largely on my own, an idea of my own making and a process maneuvered by myself. These are the decisions that make differences. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Chiyo is described as having a personality full of “water” which “flows from place to place quickly and always finds a crack the spill through.” I am not sure if my character is such – my eyes are blue, like Chiyo’s – but whether or not, I am flowing along the current of life, and though the decisions are my own, I feel I am floating on the life force of the world, sometimes gliding on a shimmering lake, sometimes playing atop a gurgling creek, and, sometimes, rushing along atop a cascading river.

This week we have been talking about cancer in my cell biology class. My interest was piqued; we had a bar graph in one of our powerpoint slides that showed some cancers and their relative incidence/death rates (that is, how many are diagnosed yearly compared to deaths that year). I decided to do a google search for a more comprehensive chart, and what did I find..

Well, most interestingly, a 72 page report by the American Cancer Society, giving cancer statistics for 2009 – relative rates of recovery based on the last year, new cases, etc. “Ooooh” says College Girl. “Now all I need is to find a way to print out that many pages without running out of ink/paper…”

The other thing I found was a link to the CDCs – specifically, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control’s – data from 1999 forward detailing leading causes of death by age. So, I pulled up a chart: top ten causes of death by age group. It sounds morbid, I know, but that didn’t occur to me until just now. Anyways, the obvious thing to do was pore over this information and make an Excel sheet, thereby wasting a large chunk of my afternoon – I did take a break to listen to a conversation by some of my peers, who were discussing possible reasons for our Chemistry professors’ marital statuses – lol.

So, here it is. I made two charts; one so the information for the lower ages is clear, and the higher ages aren’t skewing the data, and one that shows data all through age 65 and up.

Causes of Death from ages less than 1 to 54.

I know, it looks pretty confusing. But let me clear some things up. First, an explanation of the causes.

Congenital abnormalities are going to be genetic disorders – defined at the website as “Congenital malformations, deformations, and chromosomal abnormalities.” A wide array of things fall under this category, from major defects that cause neonatal death all the way to disorders such as Down Syndrome (caused by an extra Chromosome 21) which one can live with far into adulthood.

Malignant Neoplasm is a fancy way of saying cancer. “Neoplasm” means “new growth” and malignant means that it is spreading, as compared to a benign tumor which is growing has not metastasized to other parts of the body. Tumors become much more dangerous when they begin to spread.

Influenza and Pneumonia include different types of the flu; I am guessing most of these, especially in older people, are a result of a hospital stay or are only dangerous because of an underlying condition, such as cancer or heart disease.

Septicemia is, roughly said, blood poisoning; it refers to an infection that has spread throughout the body through the blood. This is, again, a result of other conditions, and not something that will likely occur unless the person has other trauma going on.

Finally, Diabetes Mellitus is just a fancy way of saying Diabetes.

So, interesting things to note. Cancer and heart disease incidence is closely correlated with age. Homicide, however, is not; those in middle age are most affected by this. Suicide, however, not so much – this takes a gentle rise over time, though it is not an issue very much before young adulthood. Note also that deaths by diabetes appear past middle age. This is a condition associated with lifestyle, like heart disease.

Note that after the first year, causes of death in children stay low and constant; its once we get to be adults that issues arise. Note the huge increase in death by accidents in the 20-year group.

Causes of death, all ages

Here is the chart, including the 55-64 and 65+ groups. The colors have changed, sorry. I don’t know how to fix that yet.

Note that cancer and heart disease shoot up after 65. Most other causes rise, but not nearly to the same extent. These are two areas of medicine in which great strides are likely to take place in the next few decades, especially due to the greater expanse of information we now have about preventing those diseases.

I find this fascinating. Morbid, I guess, but fascinating. Besides, it was something to do instead of copying my history notes and making a million more flashcards. I guess I’ll go do that now.

Thanks for reading.