I’m tempted, as Dan has, to apologize for not writing more, but instead I decided to give a list of justifications, or perhaps excuses, which may also serve to let everyone know that Palo Alto hasn’t been a total intellectual desert.
I’m realizing it’s tough to spend all day in front of a computer writing and then come home only to sit in front of a computer and write some more. I’m realizing that the sometimes tedious pace of labwork lent itself to writing and otherwise daydreaming during an incubation or while waiting for a protein to elute from a column. More likely, I was probably not ambitious enough to try to fill that downtime with more experiments. But I have done a remarkably good job of limiting my personal distractions at work. It helps when you share a very small office with someone else who was hired a week after you were, and you are both still trying to impress everyone else at the office.
I’ve also been trying to decide what path this journal will take. It’s silly to have such an excellently coined pseudonym as “ignoscient” only to have my real identity exposed in the site’s very URL. So as much as I would like to spout off on my various paranoias, fantasies, beliefs and other mental wanderings, I have to take care not to have the philosophical equivalent of the overly personal MySpace page, especially when considering my hopes of future employment as a writer. Is it more fun to have an anonymous space where one can reveal one’s true thoughts without fear of repercussion, or to have a space that can publicly be claimed as one’s own? Vanity, unfortunately, has been for me as much a source of paralysis as one of motivation.
I’m also hesitant to write without having settled on a final, more personalized look for the site. The current banner picture is a nice analogy for the glass through which we peer darkly, but I was hoping for something a bit more optimistic, like Carpaccio’s Vision of St. Augustine. An essay in Harper’s (while claiming that the subject was more likely St. Jerome) observed that this painting is an analogy for the saint’s own brain–a repository of diverse interests and knowledge inhabited by a hermit-like observer-will, with a window for an eye. While I make no claim to being a saint, I do empathize with the clutter and disorganization, but also with the generality, of the mind/study depicted.
So, dear readers, I beg a little more indulgence. There are many tensions in my life, but as a friend told me, these tensions are actually a source of creative energy. For the first time in my life, I am beginning to feel that my choices are actually meaningful, but that I am more well-equipped than ever to handle them.
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