Oh, what a pang of homesickness I got when I went to check out ecology books at the SMC library and found out I could only have them for two weeks at a time! I miss you my old pal the Ivory Tower of yesteryear, with your term-long loans and virtually no penalties for flakiness. On the other hand, with you I spent four years fucking around, finally learning nothing more than that no matter what grand policy any government may enact in the hopes of making people be nice to each other, it never will work. Which I guess is a pretty good lesson to have learned by 22.
The real challenge for today will be studying for my bio exam thursday. Because even though I can read and enjoy and understand, like whatever evo-devo morphometrics levels of selection complex system wave action vertical zonation math science gobbeldygook, I’m still like “duh, what’s an energy activation barrier?” Those damn little molecules are just so TINY and I don’t understand where their capacity to do work comes from! Like, when ATP is converted into ADP all of a sudden I’m able to go on with my day? And not that I’m questioning the truth of this, but feedback inhibitor proteins and the production of certain psychoactive hormones in my pituitary makes the difference between me sitting in a chair crying all day and me getting up at five a.m. three days a week to bike 13 miles to school and back and LIKING IT? (Actually, what makes all the difference there is the coffee, though I’m trying hard to lay off that one).
Even a protist–all of whose chemical pathways has been or can be understood down to the last disulphide bridge in the rarest pathological quaternary structure protein–is in the final summation an unpredictable, spontaneous, dynamic, alive creature, whose existence is inexplicable and without logic. We can read the length of its entire DNA, we can map its cytoskeleton and track the motion of its motor proteins. We know about feedback inhibition of all sorts and we know that recognition and communication between them depends on nothing more than the shapes of their glycoproteins. And we know that these pathways and these structures are in their essence constant for every form of life on planet Earth, with only slight modifications and additions, yet there I am standing at the register at pinkberry, spending $10 I don’t have on soft serve with fruit for myself and Kelly, and there is no explanation for why. I understand that all life is, is the increasingly complex obedience to chemical signals. These chemical signals are math, they make sense, they are easy to model, and even to link to one another in a web, but somewhere down the column of figures there is a break, the system is no longer computable, the reasons are lost, the strings are cut and we start maybe wondering if this God person isn’t such a ridiculous idea after all.
I know I’m not going to get an A in my class by getting hung up on mystical questions, but for some reason I can’t get myself to understand molecules without them.
