This has not turned me off of windsurfing

Day three of a four day heat wave, high of 93 degrees. Around here, a common gripe is that there’s no spring. Clearly there’s some truth to that. Less than a week before, a low of thirty-some degrees had me running my space heater all night. Then, a sudden, catastrophic, mid-week break in season and I was scrambling for summer clothes, rummaging through the dusty storage basement for my set of floor fans, and sleeping splay-legged on a bare memory-foam mattress, my comforter and sheets in a heap on the side of the bed. Indeed, if spring is defined as California weather- a string of 70 degree days like pearls on a necklace one after the next- there’s no spring to be had here.

Day three of the four day heat wave, a week ago exactly, nearly broke me. And thus began one of the more pronounced events of my life.

 

Number one favorite thing about the emergency room: heated blankets. In my wet bathing suit, having been fished out of the Charles River an hour earlier, and without my shoes, I was shivering uncontrollably.

“Would you like a warm blanket?” asked a nurse, passing by.

“I have a blanket,” I said.

“A warm one,” he repeated. “from the oven.”

“Wait, what?!”

 
Second favorite thing about the emergency room: it’s totally cool, even encouraged, to bleed absolutely everywhere. On their floors, on their blankets, on the chairs, on the beds. Nobody thinks you’re a freak; nobody’s concerned about their furniture; they just smile and pull on a pair of gloves. You don’t have to apologize; you don’t even have to clean up after yourself. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that kind of freedom with my personal fluids.

 

2pm, earlier that day, I blinked in the bright sun, my feet treading water. I was a bobbing head. All around me, the Charles River heaved and sparkled.

“Does it look bad?” I asked a pair in a canoe. They’d stopped about 10 feet from me.

I looked at them earnestly. They looked at each other.

“Does it look bad?” I asked again.

I’d been in the water for about five minutes. And it was the only thought I had. “How bad is it?” ran in a loop in my head. “How bad?”

My face felt unfamiliar. I kept touching it. I kept touching it and getting blood on my hands and washing them off in the water and then washing my face with the river and touching my face again and thinking, “how bad is it how bad is it.” I let the board and sail drift downstream away from me. I treaded water in place and looked down the river and was completely occupied by the memory– which felt unreal but yet so vivid it was almost physical– of a few minutes ago when I was whole and unbroken and learning to windsurf and the day was hot and wet and beautiful and life was neverending.

My desire to inhabit that memory ached worse than my nose.

 

CL > boston > boston/camb/brook > personals > missed connections
Posting ID: 3844761278 Posted: 2013-06-02, 1:52PM EDT

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gentleman stranger who went to get me water (Cambridge)

I’m sorry, the ambulance came. You went to get me water at the hotel down the road while I waited in the grass. No one was there when you got back probably.

I was the girl with my face smashed by a mast on the Charles yesterday.

I just wanted to say thanks for your kindness, I was really thirsty.

L

 

Around hour three in the emergency room, while waiting for my x-ray results, it suddenly occurred to me how much all this was going to cost. I looked up a ride in the ambulance, a stay in the emergency room, x-rays, stitches… The pain in my nose had worn off, replaced by a numbness, and with it the shock and instinct for self-preservation. I felt, all at once, a desperate need to avoid further costs. I didn’t have any brain trauma; my life wasn’t in danger. What if it wasn’t broken? I thought. What if this had all been an overreaction? Will my insurance pay?

Then, the doctor came in. My nose was broken on the right side, he said. I was sad but weirdly relieved.

Then: actually, it’s broken on both sides. Our radiologist is looking at it.

OK.

Later: actually, your nose is in 5 pieces. Here’s the number for plastic surgery.

Well then.

That dizzy feeling came back.

 

Me: I’ll just tell them I was in a bar fight.
Mom: haha or that your boyfriend beat you up.
Me: can’t make that joke in this country, mom.

 

I listened as my mom went through various stages of grief and shock.

“Hi mom, I just got home from the ER, I broke my nose windsurfing.”

NO. WHAT. WHEN.

“It was this afternoon, around 2pm.”

I can’t believe you didn’t call me earlier?!

Truthfully, I wasn’t ready for her freak-out on top of my own. “I was in the ER, mom, they would have called you if I was going to die.”

I told her what I thought to be true: It’s going to be ok; they’ll fix me up, I promised her.

This had the intended effect.

“Maybe they can make your nose prettier while they’re at it,” she laughed.

My mom’s never much liked my nose.

 

Lies I’ve told about my nose:

• Kicked by a horse
• Bobbing for apples
• Bar fight; you should see the other guy
• Dog ate it
• Nose job, it was too big
• It’s an ironic hipster band aid I’m wearing
• An accident. Involving a bear. And a school bus full of children.
• Honestly, I have no idea

 

Thursday I learned that they won’t be able to put me back. Not the way I was. For me, this was the biggest shock since the hit five days before.

I asked what about the dent and the bump.

“It’s an imprecise procedure,” was the plastic surgeon’s reply, talking about closed reduction.

They would put me under, prop my nose up, and try to snap the bones back into place. The chances of it being better after the resetting? 30%. Given it looks pretty straight already. The chances of it being worse? About 10%. The chances of it being put back to the way it was? “Zero,” he said. Can’t erase the past.

In an attempt to regain my sense of humor about this whole thing, I posted a series of photos on Facebook.

Thursday 8:49pm

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The fun thing about having an asymmetric nose is I get to look different now depending on which way I’m facing #reconstructivesurgeryyesorno

I didn’t smile in the photos, because I didn’t feel very happy.

 

I ran into Dr. Hillel’s clinic friday morning for a second opinion around 9:55am, 10 minutes late as usual to all my appointments.

“You must be Lulu.”

I apologized profusely.

“Let’s get you in there, the doctor will want to pack your nose right away.”

“He’ll want to what my nose?”

Thinking back, I guess if I was going to have an all-too-conscious and not-enough-novocaine resetting of my nose, this is the way I’d want it to happen: an old, congenial, but no-nonsense doctor; a complete surprise.

The first indication that something very different was happening from what I expected, was the heavy touch when the doctor examined my nose. He was feeling for the exact position of the bone fragments. He chatted to me about windsurfing (he’s an avid windsurfer) while he stuffed my nose full of novocaine-soaked rags.

He placed a bib around my neck to catch any blood, picked up a metal implement resembling the back end of a spoon, and said that I may hear some clicks from bones popping back into place. I had the vague sensation I was in some kind of mafia movie.

Getting ready, he told me he’d broken his nose three times in his life. The last time being kneed by his brother in a swimming pool.

“Did you put your nose back yourself?” I asked.

He laughed. Then leaned my chair back.

The clicks, when they came, were merciful– three in all.

The Marriage Plot

Presently, Billy had one hand sensitively in the back pocket of Madeleine’s jeans. She had her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. They were moving along like that, each cupping a handful of the other. In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everyone who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

pg. 77

This is a book that dares you to judge its characters. And at another point in my life, I might have. I might have found Leonard’s posturing childish, or Madeleine’s neediness ugly, or Mitchell’s fawning sad and pathetic. In this book there are no superheroes, just people we know- or maybe we are. Their problems (with the exception of mental illness) are painfully banal. They’re weak and flawed and failing in predictable, embarrassing ways.

Nothing much happens either, plot-wise. No one dies. No one really surprises us. Things end more or less how they begin.

Nor does the book try to teach us anything. The big questions that come up– and there are many– go largely unanswered. Like: to what extent is love a selfish act? Such as: what is goodness? And: so what?

But in the end I do like it. It’s done just right. It’s a sensitive examination of a kind of neuroticism that comes with being young and intelligent in our current society where youth and intelligence are so loved and hated and envied and scrutinized. And the author handles his characters with such skill, too, that he manages to be all story, with his own views, if he has them, skillfully hidden behind the prose.

Recently, we read Gulliver’s Travels in book club, and in the discussion we concluded that the author’s own opinions are similarly inscrutible in that case. But unlike Jonathan Swift, whose puzzling neutrality is built from a pathological cynicism where he mocks his characters for their blemishes and then mocks his own mockery of them, and so on, Eugenides seems to accomplish the same by doing the opposite: withholding judgment entirely.

It does seem to be a feature of modern literature that it speaks by holding up a mirror to society. I’m sure there are English majors that can tell you way more about that.

Op Ed Piece: Edit 2

Outreach. The word itself suggests a kind of uneasy exertion of the body. It reminds us that bringing scientific knowledge to the public, far from natural or straightforward, is an exercise demanding all manners of contortions.

So, like a particularly eccentric yoga pose, “outreach”–it’s believed in the science community–is not for everyone.

In 2009 I was finishing up my physics degree at MIT. The atmosphere, for a bunch of normally very serious physics students, was something I can only describe as “giddy”. Here, finally, was the chance to mark our heights against the wall. The seniors traded GRE test scores, lists of target schools, and daydreams about new lives in sunny California. Anticipation hung like a haze; it was the air we breathed. When I mentioned I was interested in science writing, the gentle suggestion came that I might be capable of “more”.

It’s important to remember that, historically, science was a hobby of the rich and curious. Well-to-do white men with lots of leisure time were our proper founding fathers, so it’s unsurprising that a bit of elitism, insularity, remains. To say that the divide between the “scientist” and the “layman” has grown would be inaccurate. I can only say that, in this age of access and informational wealth, it remains disconcertingly large.

For the emergence of the anti-science movement, for the shifting of the political winds that has resulted in massive, targeted, funding cuts in certain disciplines, and for the continued proliferation of falsehoods and misinformation, scientists have to take some blame. But so do journalists. It’s partly the result of ineffective communication.

In 2010, I was selected as a AAAS Mass Media Fellow and got to be an intern science writer for a newspaper in California. I arrived early summer at an interesting time. Black oil was still pouring out of the Macondo well in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, but the around-the-clock news coverage of the gulf oil spill had somewhat abated. This was the time for a lot of opinions, and a local university professor became entangled in a public debate about whether oiled birds could be saved through rehabilitation. The professor, a wildlife expert who had devoted most of his life to oiled animal rescue and recovery, of course, believed these efforts should continue, but his opponents said they didn’t do any good at all.

The more I read of this controversy in the media, the more confused I became. A typical news article began by informing me of a lack of consensus, then I got fed some quotes: Scientist A said no, while Scientist B said yes, somehow both sides had studies that seemed to rule in their favor, and none of it got me any closer to understanding the truth. My question was this: how can rational people disagree about facts?

It took me a week to research and write this story. The first time I called, as expected, the professor pointed me to studies, he regurgitated the same old points, and even had some colorful language for the other scientists. But a few days later, when I got him on the phone again, with a potential answer for why the studies disagreed, he listened: I pointed out the different species of birds they sampled, the decades that separated them, their disparate methods of measurement, and others. Then there was a pause on the line.

I learned the truth was that survival depended on the species, depended on their sizes and their habits, how much oil they’ve ingested, whether their homes were destroyed. I learned that in recent years, his university had poured millions into improving their methods, and there’s evidence this effort has paid off in terms of decreased mortality rates. Now this was happening, he said, and he feared a public outcry would spell the end of yet another thing that did good in the world. When I called the others with this information, they agreed, it was not their intention to halt these efforts, they said, they had simply felt that the effectiveness of these programs had been misrepresented in the media.

This experience left an impression. I understood why the scientists had exaggerated, bent the truth a little. They had come to regard the media with suspicion, as a threat.

Science is not quick or glamorous, and we don’t need to make it that way. It’s the piecemeal assembly of reality, fact by painstaking fact, and that is beautiful enough. Every time incremental progress is reported as revolutionary a disservice is done. How many times can we prove and disprove and prove again relativity, quantum mechanics? I think good judgment, and the will to exercise it, is the best quality a science writer can have. Because in a disagreement I can trust her to stand, not squarely in the middle, but as near as she can to the truth, and in science, there are no two versions of it.

Whether it’s fear of being labeled a self-promoter, of appearing unfocused in one’s work, or it’s just hard to find the time, many scientists choose to take very little ownership of their research in the way it’s delivered to the public. So, non-scientists, rather than feeling like participants in the endeavor, feel as if they’re being taken for a ride. And scientists, rather than just normal people deeply interested and informed about a particular subject, acquire an untrustworthy quality of “otherness”.

How do we break down this divide? To start, we have to examine how it arises.

I think it happened something like this: sometime in sixth or seventh grade, I excelled at doing some menial task–perhaps memorizing a table or dropping some liquid into a beaker–and heard the word “talented”. Someone else failed in this task. Then in tenth grade, a difficult concept arose, the most challenging yet. So I went home, trusting in my ability, and eventually made the connection. This other person did not. Maybe he gave up too quickly, or was not given the intuition appropriate to him, but he began to believe himself ungifted for science, a non-participant.

What he didn’t know, and I’ve never told anybody, is the night I took that difficult concept home for the first time, I cried. Alone in my room, I read the section over and over in the book and stared at a picture until my tears blurred it. I threw my notebook; I threw my stuffed animals; I threw a tantrum at my mom when she came to check on me. I yelled I was stupid, that chemistry was stupid, that I hated it all.

I wonder how many people who go on to become scientists have stories like this. We don’t talk about it, these moments of “weakness”, because then we would have to admit that science is hard for us, too, is hard for everyone.

Newly Discovered Super Earth, GJ 1214b, is Likely a Water World

In a collaborative effort between members of five institutions, scientists have discovered the most promising Earth-like exoplanet to date. The nearly Earth-sized planet, projected to live within the habitable zone of its dim, red parent star, and to be composed of 75% ice or liquid water enveloped in a substantial atmosphere, may be the first known water world in existence. GJ 1214b, as it is called, is the product of an on-going survey project poised to yield further groundbreaking results in the search for life.

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A physical reality was born out of the stuff of imagination when a little less than fifteen years ago the first planet was discovered outside of our solar system—an “exoplanet”, so it was termed, short for “extrasolar planet”, suspended in deep space and gravitationally bound to a faraway star. It was the spark that touched off a modern explosion of progress in an age old quest. The same impetus which had once set us afloat the unknown open seas has now trained our eyes on the sky. We’re looking for movement. A tiny flicker of a star which might give away the existence of another world like ours.

The biggest and closest planets were the first to be discovered. This is natural given our current methods of detection, largely indirect, which depend on recognizing gravitational or visual aberrations due to the presence of these dark bodies. “Hot Jupiters”, they were called– huge, gaseous planets which gravitate so near to their host stars that a complete orbit is made every few days. A fascinating find, but with surface temperatures of a few thousand degrees Celsius, these planets are unsupportive of life as we understand it to be.

As we tuned our instruments, painstakingly improving their precision, more planets came into view. This next generation of exoplanets were termed “Super Earths”. They were smaller, denser, with radii and masses only exceeding those of Earth by several fold. Their surfaces were sometimes solid or fluid. They inched ever closer to the all-important habitable zone, the narrow region around a star where water, the solvent for all carbon-based lifeforms, can exist in its liquid form.

GJ 1214b belongs in this category of exoplanets. Slightly larger than Earth, in the constellation Ophiuchus, it emerges as the most promising candidate yet in the ongoing search for life.

Earlier, using similar detection and analysis techniques, two such Super Earths had made headlines. Gliese 581D, which orbits a dim, red star and Corot-7b which belongs to a yellow star much like our Sun. The first is estimated to be gaseous, and to reside, despite its close proximity, inside a habitable zone, due to the low temperature of slow-burning red dwarf stars. The latter is the smallest exoplanet ever discovered, with a radius only 1.7 times that of Earth and a density which hints at a mostly iron composition. But the search for life on these two planets is stinted by several factors. Gliese 581D’s plane of orbit is inclined relative to our line of sight, which not only hinders precise determinations of its mass and size but also precludes direct or indirect study of its composition and atmosphere. On the other hand, Corot-7b, due to its close proximity to its bright sun, is conjectured to be essentially a big ball of lava.

The new kid on the block, the planet GJ 1214b, with a mass 6.5 times the mass of Earth and a radius 2.7 times Earth’s radius, belongs to another dim, red star. Current data predicts an average density comparable to that of water, a little lighter, possibly indicative of a substantial gaseous atmosphere. On top of that, the planet, though tightly bound to its sun with an orbital period of only a day and a half, is potentially habitable. It is not inconceivable that on this planet under a huge red sun, some or all of that water may be in its liquid form.

GJ 1214b was discovered by the transit method of exoplanet detection. This is made possible only by GJ 1214b’s special orbit, which takes it periodically in front of its parent star as seen from the Earth. Each time it crosses our line of sight to the star, the small planet occults a portion of the star’s light. This is perceived by the instruments as a slight dip in the star’s intensity. Measured over several orbits, these flutters, as shallow as 1% in depth, allude to the presence of a dark orbiting body. Follow up measurements that detect very slight wobbles in the position of the parent star due to the gravitational effects of the orbiting planet then confirm its existence. The magnitude of the first effect is proportional to the size of the planet, for the second, to its mass. Given the parent star’s estimated size and mass, the planet’s measurements can be computed to appropriate uncertainties.

But that’s not all. The light that reaches our telescopes, having reflected off or passed through the gaseous envelope of GJ 1214b, can be analyzed to reveal the content of its atmosphere. Each element, when present on the planet, is responsible for emitting and absorbing a signature set of wavelengths of light. Is the air thick with carbon dioxide, like Venus? Full of nitrogen, like Earth? Mostly water? Or something else altogether?

This promising research continues on. Even now, the MEarth Project is scanning the skies for other transiting planets around dim, red stars, as our most profound expectations are still waiting to be met. We push ever closer to the final generation of exoplanets: Earths.

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An old piece: from 2010

In Boston

They didn’t lock down Somerville. It’s one town away from where they set up the perimeter. So, although Suspect 2′s apartment was just to the south, in Inman Square, on the border of Somerville and Cambridge, here, half a mile north, people are walking their dogs. People are sitting on porches. The trash got picked up. Though about seven hours late.

Around 11pm last night, I got an alert about a potential situation at MIT. It was very similar to the alert about the gunman on campus a while back that put the school into lock down mode. That time, it turned out to be a hoax. But, pretty soon, this started looking like something different. “Shots fired”, this alert reported. Then, “officer down.” There was a robbery at the 7-11 in Kendall Square, was the next piece of information. Gunman on the loose, the advisory said, has fled. Avoid the Stata Center. Avoid Vassar St. About an hour later, Harvard sends out its alerts. They were of a different tone, reflective of the feeling of distance and relative safety at the time, perhaps. An incident at MIT, injuries reported, avoid the area, it said, no threat to Harvard. At this point, it was still an isolated incident. Posts started appearing on Facebook about “Oy this week.”

Then, a few minutes after midnight, word came that the officer died. The mood changed, then. Death, now that was something permanent. Members of the MIT community started changing their Facebook pictures to this:

Then, something like 15 police cars flew by my house, in a mad bevy, sirens and lights on. They were going south and west on Washington Ave. They were dispatching from the police station next door as well. Sirens continued.

All I thought I had to worry about this weekend was finishing my talk for the MIT group, how to weave that in before (during?) and after my camping trip. The original weekend plan was this: I would leave for the MITOC trip to New Hampshire Saturday morning at 4am, so I could see a concert Friday night at Symphony Hall. So Friday into Saturday, I wasn’t expecting much sleep. I wanted to stock up on some first, Thursday night. So I was thinking about going to bed when my friend writes me that there’s some crazy stuff going down in Watertown.

Grenades. Explosives. A carjacked vehicle.

Finally, that’s where it started coming together. What carjacker carries around IEDs?

The rest, is well-trodden territory. A 20 x 20 block area in Watertown has just now been fully combed by law enforcement and special forces, 15 hours later. One suspect is dead, apparently by gunshot wounds and a bomb vest. No sign of the escaped suspect, though. He has an automatic weapon, maybe grenades, but probably no bombs on him, except for what he’s wearing. About when the police decided to hold their perimeter and wait til daylight to begin their search, I fell asleep on my open lap top.

My mom called me at 7:30am to alert me of the developing situation. I discovered my school closing, the multi-city lock down, when I opened my email. Last night I slept two hours. Today I drank 3 cups of coffee.

Lovely day though. Looks like rain.

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View downtown from the castle on Prospect Hill (Somerville, MA) – 3pm

 
 

View towards Cambridge from the castle on Prospect Hill (Somerville, MA) – 3pm