I'm a lucky woman!

I have to keep telling myself this, because after a two year leave of absence, I have been talking to my professors about withdrawing from the biochemistry graduate program. This has made today very difficult for me, so let's focus on something positive, shall we?

I have a sexy husband who not only goes to work every day while my invalid ass convalesces, but he also does great cooking shirtless!

Ok, now that I've shared this, I suppose it's only fair I share bikini-clad soup-making pictures of me.

Electronic music and constructing womanhood (and a little physics)

Anyone who gets to know me a little bit will discover that I'm a huge fan of VNV Nation. I drew heavily from my experiences with their music in writing about my fictional band Rupture Effect, when I wrote that their words have a way of describing everything about the world that thrills and disgusts me, as well as everything I hope for it. Their words can grind my heart into the dirt with their bitterness, then lift it - dust still falling from it like rain - with a call to stand up, endure, and help create a world worth living in. When I want to dramatically enhance my life experience - whether it's creating, celebrating, wallowing, contemplating, working, playing, whatever - I often turn to VNV Nation. What they have achieved is the reason anyone should strive to create art - they make life better. To make a long story short, I'm a huge fangirl.

(Quick side note: I posted a link to "The Concert" mostly to let people know or remind them that I'm very slowly writing a work of fiction. If you choose to read it, keep in mind that it's still pretty rough. I think it needs a serious overhaul.)

Anyone who gets to know me a little bit more will know that I also love singing. I enjoy listening to a good song as much as the next person, but I really enjoy it when I can sing along with a favorite. And lucky me, VNV Nation has some great songs for singing along! The down side is that VNV Nation singer Ronan Harris and I have different sets of pipes; namely, thanks to all the testosterone, his are pitched a little lower than mine. I have a deep enough voice that I can sing with him most of the time, but occasionally he hits a low note and loses me.

Physics to the rescue (which is only right, since physics got me into this predicament in the first place)! As it happens, if one wave has a frequency that is a power of two times that of another wave, those two waves have a special relationship. They still have different properties granted by their respective frequencies, but certain parts of their oscillations line up. What this means for sound waves is that if you play two such waves together it doesn't sound like crap, but neither does it have the complexity of two waves that create a pleasing interference pattern. In fact, the two waves sound very similar - so similar that musicians give them the same note name and call the frequency interval between them an octave. So yes, I could have just told you that I resolved this issue of vocal range by taking parts of VNV Nation's music "up an octave," but where would be the fun in that?

This solution was disappointing and unsatisfying. The power that infuses VNV Nation's music was gone. I sounded wimpy, and in a small way I cursed myself for being a woman.

At this point I want to state very clearly that I don't believe the female voice is incapable of being powerful. The opera world is full of powerful female voices! I'm not even saying that in a more modern context the female voice is incapable of being powerful. I'm not nearly as big a fan of Within Temptation as my husband is, but I still have to admire their power. What I'm saying is that most female singers express a different kind of power from what is expressed in the VNV Nation songs, and that's what I completely failed to capture.

As I tend to do when I run into an obstacle, I analyzed and intellectualized. While Ronan Harris's singing voice is very masculine, his poetic voice is not. At no point in listening to VNV Nation music do I feel excluded from the experience by being a woman. I never think to myself, "That was obviously written by a man," or, "You must need to be a man to 'get' this part." The words call out to my humanity, not my gender.

This realization gave me hope. If the power of VNV Nation resonates with me, it is in a sense my power as well. There should be a way I can claim it as such. That is now one of the challenges I have set for myself whenever I sing along to a VNV Nation song. The goal is not to sound exactly like Ronan Harris (because physics says no), but to capture that power with my voice - a woman's voice. And in the process, I am incorporating that power into my version of womanhood, just as it is part of Ronan Harris's version of manhood.

Writing and focusing on the positive

I've been trying to participate in the Google+ hashtag movement #Saturdayscenes, in which writers post a scene (usually from a work in progress or a work they're trying to generate an interest in) and people have the opportunity to read them. I'm very excited about participating in this, but because of my lack of stamina it doesn't look like I'm going to have a scene ready every week. For me it might be every other week. In the interest of maintaining a positive attitude, though, I've decided to share what I did accomplish this week!

• Decided that my protagonist, Ariana, has a hammock in her lab, and the image of her lounging on it is quite striking (I'm so envious!)
• Drafted a very rough explanation of how a centrifuge works, as discussed by Ariana and her husband Dorian
• Attempted to predict where a new fraction containing nanomachines would show up in a centrifuged sample of blood
• Reviewed the limits of the features that can be resolved with light microscopy
• Looked up a history virology on Wikipedia
• Looked up tests for detecting the presence of proteins in a sample
• Decided that Dorian needs to have ∞% more bean bags launched at him

When I put it this way, I feel pretty good about myself and this story!