The Iron Ring

OK.

Its been a while.

And I have no excuse. I am reminded of an article I read (in the Times? Who knows? Couldn’t find a link) about people who start twittering and end up only writing one tweet. Like “looking for pie”. Or “is anyone out there?”. I suppose my blog constituted more than just dead tweets but still, I abandoned it in April of 2008.

A lot has happened since April 2008. Too much for one post I think. The links to the right are to other dead blogs. “The Engaged Guy” is now the “Married Dad”.  In any case, its time to start writing again.

When I was in graduate school I could not see the forest for the trees. In fact, I couldn’t even see the damn trees most of the time I just saw dirt and sometimes leaves and I had a vague idea that the sun was up there somewhere but something was blocking it. I know it sounds crazy but I figured I would be a graduate student for the rest of my life, sitting at my desk underground in the leaky lab listening to the hum of the window unit waiting for the door to fly open in a rage. At some point during a visit to my parents I ran into my high school English teacher who asked what I was up to and said something nice about how she was sure I was a great scientist and all but she was surprised I wasn’t writing. And then I saw Robert Bazell on NBC and I thought “whats with that stupid journalist thinking he knows something about science”. And then I googled. Sorry Dr. Bazell! Kind of legit actually! In any case, I started thinking about writing. I went to an NASW conference. I met Ivan Oransky. I got paid to write some stuff for him. I got a column in the DP. I felt professional and legitimate. I am convinced that these writing experiences are the only reason I finished my PhD (whether that was a good or bad thing remains to be seen but more on that later).

This blog started as a writing outlet because I had exhausted my more ‘official’ writing outlets (The Scientist, The Daily Pennsylvanian) and I knew I needed to keep writing one way or another. But the last year of graduate school swallowed me up whole and spit me out or at least spit out my insides leaving me a shell of a person too terrified to even ask my new boss a question or breathe a word to anyone at work that was anything other than positive. More on that later. Point is, writing a 400-page thesis often leaves one unable to write other things for quite some time. Or see straight.

And now I am in need of a writing outlet once again. A lot has changed. I’m a genuine P-H-D now and have added professional editing to my CV. I work for a brilliant and understanding scientist. I’m a mom (yeah yeah more on that later too). I have some decisions ahead of me and I think that writing, and perhaps reinvigorating this blog, might help. Its going to be a lot more personal. That’s because I’ve realized I’m no longer reading popular media pieces about broad scientific discoveries and forming opinions, I’m actually reading about ALL kind of people and events and politics and forming all kinds of new ways of looking at them and placing them into context. I’m out of the forest and the trees and the valley and the continent and I’m glimpsing the earth through a tiny window in my space shuttle. At some point I will have to choose a spot to land comfortably but for now I’m enjoying the view and I’m going to share it. My apologies if you were hoping for more writing on research ethics, in fact, shout out to anonymous poster #1 (the comment that is not spam) on April 24, 2008. I appreciate the positive feedback but we are taking this blog in a new direction. Sit tight.