the poet and the scientist
I was thinking more on the previous entry about the eco-gothic and found myself perusing through those writing scrapbooks that have been sitting here next to my desk for the last couple months. When I was in high school, I wrote nearly two dozen editorials and articles on the ocean and its perilous state (which was, of course, not as perilous as it is today.) At the time, there was a sense of hope that science and environmental activists would turn around the terrible ticking clock. When I am feeling especially helpless given recent (and even not so recent news) I think of those other lives I may have lived. Those careers I steadily shed as the years of young adulthood waned on. When I was 14, I remember wanting to be an interior designer.
This was even before my HGTV obsession in the 90s. I loved helping my mother redecorate, something she did on the regular. This was even before I developed a love of thrifting in college. I know, however, that being a designer involved being a people-ey person in a way I was beginning to think I was most definitely not. We all took a career survey around the same time, one which came back telling me I should be a journalist, so for a while, I considered that as an option. Of course, considering how I make money now, the early teen version would be impressed that it happened, me being, for all intensive purposes, a journalist who writes about decor and design. It's delightfully surprising even now, even though by the time I was 17, I had moved on and badly wanted to be a marine scientist.
Part of it was the urge to save the environment, back when it was still salvageable. Part was a best friend at he time with similar plans (who did become an environmental scientist but sadly died a few years ago at way too young an age.) I also fell under the spell of a charismatic AP Bio teacher, who while one of the harder teachers and classes I experience in high school, became a favorite and urged us on. Looking back, I know I was not particularly suited for science, especially given some extreme dyscalculia that was undiagnosed, but still a guiding factor in why my grades were excellent in every subject but math. That semester in North Carolina, while I loved studying oceanography, it became readily apparent that my math skills would prevent an easy path (if not an impossible one.) It was a dream that was easy to give up, no doubt, since I had a lot of options. I considered being a writer, teaching, law school. Even with that thwarted scientific career, the future still laid out like a giant book of options in a way it never really did again.
When I think of career choices, I always think of Sylvia and her fig tree. The options didn't fall off the tree necessarily, but my being in reach of them did. I considered law school, though my interest was in primarily First Amendment law, and at the time, it seemed like you'd only be defending assholes with that (don't doubt I now realize, given the current state of affairs, the joke is one me. I did not, could note even, foresee this world we live in now. ) Law school seemed a little boring, but I think I would have done well enough. I considered studying psychology or psychiatry, the classes devoted to which I always loved. Theater was also a possibility, mostly with an eye toward stage design. Sometime around the second year at RC, I settled on teaching, either high school or college, and began to make plans for grad school. Which of course would have worked out had the specter of a future teaching career related to lit and writing not filled me with dread about the middle of my first semester at DePaul. The nail in the coffin, of course, the professor who told me if I was going to go, I needed to go big, and apply at more big name program schools lest I be swallowed by the adjunct trap. Around that time, the poems were coming heavy and hard. I decided that I just wanted a nice and quiet bookish job that would allow me to write but also survive paycheck to paycheck. Thus, a year or so later, I ended up in libraries (first an elementary school, then a college) and stayed there for over two decades before jumping ship and forging out on my own as a freelancer.
Perhaps that scientist still lives inside me a little, even though her math is bad and she probably has forgotten more than half of what she's learned in the 30 odd years since high school. She loves research and learning new things about the natural world. The names of birds and plants, varieties or trees and flowers. She doesn't write about dolphins or whales (not usually) but does write about mermaids more than she should. But perhaps its less like science and more a tiny religion of sorts. That's what drives the poems sometimes, especially the ones that inhabit the natural world more fully.
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