frowned upon

i am currently reading a short history of nearly everything, which is basically science for dummies. still, patronized as i am by the catering-to-dummies tone, i find most of the information thus far neatly encapsulated, making pithy sense out of the nearly senseless. or mining from the unfathomable the nearly fathomable. it is this nearly aspect that frustrates the most, though. everything is nearly, but not quite, or nearly, but far from it. although when boiled down to their basic elements, i can make sense out of quantum physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, and other scientific inquiries i have yet to encounter in the book, i am still confounded on the larger scale of what it all means, personally, and even to some effect, globally. i have read reviews of the book (unfair, i know, as i haven't even finished half yet) which cite the chiding and apocalyptic tone bryson infuses the facts with as a major flaw. i can't really fault him for that, as the facts don't lie: we have created a huge fucking mess of our own which will probably be our undoing. rather than steep in denial and say "oh, he's so negative; why doesn't he try and focus on the positive" it's better to see the situation clearly and not from behind a cloud. that doesn't mean, however, that there is no reason not to try to fix our wrongs; and perhaps that is where the book fails to venture. i have also read in some reviews that certain things that bryson passes for truth are erroneous-- however, as i have no specialist knowledge there, i will have to either accept his word at face value, or investigate further. i also assume, perhaps falsely, that they are minor errors rather than huge gaping ones, which is (a lot) more forgivable.

peppered with factoids that any layperson will find interesting (for instance, when we sit on a chair, we actually hover above it by some infinitesimal measure as a function of gravity, or rather that our gravity resists the chair's, or that certain scientists discovered important concepts long before the ones credited with the discovery did, etc), bryson waters science down to something much more palatable than the dry stuff of textbooks. in doing so, he gains an audience far larger than a scientist could ever hope for. the sheer comprehensiveness (we are talking about billions of years) that is covered boggles the mind.

i haven't felt rigorously intellectually challenged thus far, and that is perhaps the book's most fatal flaw. of course he is directing it towards a general audience, but one who presumably can grasp difficult concepts and/or who has been college educated. he gives select examples from 'real' scientists' papers of difficult language trying to explicate a concept, but only in a novelty kind of way -- "look at how incomprehensible this passage is!", not in such a way or in examples where we actually could wrap our heads around it, if we put forth a little effort. most science is above our heads in a big way, but it is this condescension that stops us from even trying. of course i realize bryson himself is not condescending to us from an expert point of view, but in a concerned father, "don't bother or you'll end up hurting yourself" way. so it seems we have two extremes on our hands: the simplified, travelogue writer's version of science which states the facts or hypotheses jocularly and at times too simplistically, or the real stuff filled with equations, obscure terms, and even more abstract language. is there a middle ground? perhaps other "common" science writers others have mentioned do straddle both approaches; i haven't read them and don't know.

reading outside of my comfy fiction/lit bubble is uncharacteristic of me, but i am trying to test my boundaries. it has demonstrably given me other things to think about, other than writing style, plot structure, word choice, and so forth. it's a bit like cheating on a boyfriend, though: the newness and illicitness are satisfying and refreshing....for now at least.

i am completely fucking exhausted. from dating unsucessfully, from languishing in the too hot to go out, too cold in the ac to move from under my blankets, from reading portnoy's complaint, from hearing my roommate's cats mew and meow because oops last night the wind slammed the door to the room where their litterbox and food are, to wanting emails from people i know but not wanting to write the ones i know i should, to looking disgustedly at the piles of clothing heaped like dogshit in my room, to not washing the dishes leftover from three nights ago, to cleaning the accumulated hair from the haircatcher in the bathtub....
this is a laundry list of grievances...

comfort me with apples for i am sick of love. so sayeth the bible. a book which i have no intention of ever quoting again in my right mind. though there is some pretty poetry in song of solomon. and some creep me out the end of the world is coming rhetoric in revelations. and some pretty goth references to the devil and hell and whatnot.

woah. the walls in my officespace just seemed to move of their own volition. i think it's time for me to leave or risk being caved in on by these crappy carpeted cutouts that pass for walls. i'm in a fan-tas-tic mood today. and a headache is flowering behind my eyes' irises.