It's been almost a week since my last posting here, which is a longer interval of non-communication than I am accustomed to. This is due to a number of factors, the first of it being technical difficulties as a new server gets installed. The next factors are personal, involving me. My mother has been seriously ill, and one of the reasons I remained in New England for a week after Worldcon was to visit her and do some of the work around the house that she couldn't do. She is now recovering slowly, and in a rehabilitation program.

I returned home from New England really tired, so tired that I could not do either math or art. I have still not unpacked some of the bags of stuff I brought back from my parents' house, but all the important bags with books, equipment, and clothes in them have been unpacked. I'm back at work doing retail graphics for Trader Joe's, and as always am well-fed by their gourmet goodies. But I'm still tired, not only physically but emotionally, from Worldcon and family illness and New England and so forth.

I imagine scientists the way they have been stereotypically portrayed in the media and in anecdotes in many of the books I read. They live in sublime masculine abstractness, indifferent to effeminate fripperies such as clothing, interior design, costuming, graphics, or even color other than in a spectrograph. They feel no need to give cute names to either their computers or their cars. They never decorate any of their possessions, or write in journal-books with colorful covers. They can work for endless hours and sleep in their laboratory if necessary, all without losing any quality in their work, and no one in their field thinks this is unusual. If they have families, they are secondary to their work, and their loving wives patiently do all the practical things that Mr. Scientist ignores. I have heard a tale about the wife of a Nobel-prize-winning physicist (herself a computer science professor) who accompanied her husband to events like lectures, to make sure that the absent-minded genius did not forget basic things like socks or lecture notes.

Now we all know that this is just a stereotype, because even I know scientists who don't at all fit that description. They play fantasy role-playing games, wear costumes to science fiction conventions, name their computers clever names, and actually go home to their families once in a while and….even do housework! However, I wish that I were more like the stereotype. I'd like to have that tireless abstract austerity that the stereotypical big guys have, able to rise above ordinary life's troubles into the world of particles and equations and energies, beyond house dust and ailing parents and piles of clutter. I'd live on junk food in my laboratory or office and never get tired or discouraged.

Tonight in my studio I finally re-assembled and re-filled my desktop fountain. (Another thing Mr. Stereotypical Abstract Scientist wouldn't bother with.) Now that that is running I can put back the glass sculptures, which frees up table space for art and math. I've got my White Book open and have done a few logarithm problems (with a calculator). There is watercolor to be done. By the way, I never use the water in the fountain for painting.

Posted at 2:19 am | link