Warm fuzzies

Finally! I have a moment to sit and type.

A hectic weekend bred a hectic week, with barely a moment to pause. We went to the Rocky Mountains, to Drumheller and the Royal Tyrell palaeontology museum, then to Canmore and a husky kennel tour, and finally up the Icefields Parkway to walk on a glacier and generally marvel at the mountains. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond out control, I had to drive the whole weekend, and I am a horrible driver, left side of the road or right. So I won't dwell on the weekend.

I've had a couple more articles in the student newspaper, both of which I'm reasonably proud of. The first was a piece about dopamine's role in spatial learning. There was an odd thing about it when it got printed though, as you notice there's a picture of 'cocaine' with the article. The researcher I interviewed was pretty ticked off about it, and emailed me saying that while my article was interesting the picture was inappropriate. I passed it on to my editors and relinquished responsibility. I asked the Ed today what happened about it, and she said she basically told the guy to suck it up. News is a strange place! But still, I was pleased with my article, and even more pleased that it got picked up as a feature sci/tech story on the Canadian University Press newswire - a website that collects the best new stories from student papers across Canada.

The next story was just a lot of fun. A very prestigious dinosaur guy (reportedly one of the models for the lead character in Jurassic Park) who is a professor at the U of A won the Province's top award: the Alberta Order of Excellence. So I just had to interview him and do a sort of profile. He was a lot of fun to interview and so entertaining, especially when there was a photographer with me and he started opening drawers of beautiful fossils right there in his office. Brain cases, jawbones with impressive teeth, a tiny complete hand, it was all incredible. As he looked around his office and into our delighted eyes he grinned and said "Here's the boy that never grew up."

This week I also went to a 'Science Communication Career Explorer', which was basically a lunchtime panel with four people variously involved in science communication. There was an outreach person from Alberta Innovates (mostly health-related), the environment reporter from the Edmonton Journal newspaper, the science communicator for the National Institute of Nanotechnology on campus and finally one of the co-founders of 'Science in Seconds', a web-based blog/video/podcast-athon created by U of A grads. I was most intrigued by the Edmonton Journal lady (not least because I remembered her from my original epiphany; she was part of that first workshop a year ago), and went to have a chat with her afterwards. We were discussing balance in the media, and I was trying to figure out when expressing 'both sides' no longer becomes necessary, in the case of extremely likely science (i.e. nobody would now gives both points of view when discussing a heliocentric solar system, and more recently global warming is increasingly gaining this vantage point). During the panel she was talking about the Alberta Oil Sands (it takes up a lot of her reporting time...), and talked about a feature she did about a native community downstream from the Sands. They have been complaining that the water has been falling, and that it contains pollutants that have caused them to become very ill. I asked her how far away we were then from proclaiming the Oil Sands as universally 'bad' and not paying any lip service to the 'official' standpoint that they are harmless. It appears a long way. I can understand from the point of this community, so far the evidence is just anecdotal, but she said it was partly due to the negligence of the official environmental investigators to conduct proper research.

It seems I have a lot more to learn about the Oil Sands. I also have a lot to learn about where I fit into this whole journalism thing. Impartiality and balance is fine to a point, but often it seems so forced. Well, the ultimate goal is writing my own popular science books, and then at least I would have to answer to no-one (except my critics).

In good news, I met with the Alumni people this week in their offices and discussed a couple of articles. One is a look back at the history of the student newspaper, The Gateway, since it will turn 100 in November. There should be a lot of good little stories in there, talking with old writers and editors and looking into the archives. I also got another assignment from them, quite serendipitously. The Alumni Association is running a trip to Iceland next summer, and they needed someone to write a travel piece about the place. So they needed someone who had spent some time in Iceland... luckily, when I was first contacted by them I sent my Iceland blog piece as an example of my writing, so there I was, the perfect candidate! I will write a travel piece for their magazine, 1500 words and some photos, and I'll get paid $400! It was the warmest, fuzziest feeling too, when, as I was leaving, one of the women said "It's nice for me to work with someone who knows how to write, so I'm excited!"

The warm and fuzzies didn't end there either. I finally got back my mark from that first essay for my writing class. I was very nervous, having not done any academic English for a good many years. But I got B+/A-, which the lecturer said was a very good mark for the first essay (the highest in the class was A-), and was closer to an A- but just less due to a few awkward sentences and grammar errors. Fine, those are things I can work on and fix. What filled me with joy was she said my writing itself was good, engaging and with good detail, but to the point. If I at least have some sort of natural talent, then I'm a lot closer to being a professional, I have a little less work to do, which is good news since I started this whole new career relatively 'late'.

Finally, tonight I went to a talk by Ben Radford, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. He has also been a paranormal investigator for over 10 years, and gave an engaging talk about how he goes about his investigations. What was novel about his approach was how much he was prepared to engage with paranormal believers, and his mandate was to understand what they are experiencing rather than ridiculing and flat-out debunking. When someone asked him what is the best way to gain converts, his immediate answer was "Not being a dick."

Nobody calls me silly about science

Did I ever tell you that the Edmonton Sun printed my comment about the shoddy climate change article? Well they did, although with a bit of editing, and I missed it actually in print, which means I can't collect it for my clippings book, oh well.

I read a lot of the online comments on my comment (what an age we live in), but decided not to respond. Most of them didn't make a lot of sense anyway... Well, the Edmonton Sun isn't what I'd usually pick up, let's put it that way.

However, in a recent article I wrote for the student newspaper, I couldn't help but comment on a comment! Nobody calls me silly about science and gets away with it...

It seems my Alumni Assoc. article has now been published, though oddly I didn't hear from the Assoc. itself, and no mention of pay... ahh.... http://www.alumni.ualberta.ca/StayConnected/Etrail/ResearchSpotlight9

My feelings about the stuffiness of news writing and how I'd love to delve deeper have been strengthened by the recent viral spoof-science-article and its follow-up. It's a long follow-up, all well-worth reading, but I especially recommend the section 'Five ways to improve science journalism'. My favourite bits:

"Challenge and analyse. If you can free some of your journalists from the rat race of inane reporting on stuff that everyone else has already covered, then maybe you can use those people to do something more worthwhile, something that adds real value: proper analysis and insight. Let those people cover less, in more depth.

Nurture talent. If you have talented writers, then nurture them and allow them to experiment with the form. If you're lacking a decent and diverse pool of talent, then leverage the community of fantastic science writers working in the blogosphere."

Um, is anybody out there? I want this to be me. Friends, don't rest nagging until this is me!

Finally, a non-science writing finish. I promised I'd post the final draft of my non-fiction writing class essay about a person, so here it is. I like some parts of it, but I know it could be better. Skills will sharpen. Enjoy!

__________

W i l l

Will’s blue eyes bulged.

“Sixty-four!” he exclaimed.

“Yup,” I said, filling in the blanks of the hangman game we were playing, “you got it. It’s my lucky number.”

“But, but,” spluttered Will, “that’s my lucky number!”

I think that’s how we saw our relationship in the beginning: as some kind of magical destiny. More than just coincidence and similar interests, we saw our coming together as an alignment of the planets. Will was the boy-next-door, although we didn’t get to know each other until we were sixteen. His house was full of music, disorder and activity, much like the mind that lay snuggled beneath his fleece of curly brown hair. Hugging him in the clear bright nights of our youth, I could wrap my arms around his skinny waist so that the tips of my fingers cupped my elbows.

Will loved me with all his energy. He wrote letters to me and songs for me. When he had the choice between answering his cell and kissing me, he threw his phone away. He spent time making me feel like the only girl in the world, his angel standing alone in a beam of sunlight. Once, after a heavy night of drinking, I found he’d drawn a picture of me as the heroine of The Flaming Lips’ song “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”, assuring the world that I wouldn’t let those evil robots defeat him.

Our formative fairytale didn’t last long though; the pitfalls of teenage dating caught up with us and other relationships bled into our tapestry. Our threads were interwoven with those of new friends and lovers, but Will never changed, and eventually we grew back together. We were grown-ups now, but the sense of celestial destiny hadn’t waned for either of us.

We both moved to Bristol for university and Will’s creative personality thrived there, among friends who encouraged his quirky sense of humour and placed him centre stage. He grew more self-assured with every play, with each comedy slot and whenever surrounded by all of his friends that played music with him for hours. He no longer needed me to make him feel like he was worth something. Together, alone, we were happy but apart we belonged to different worlds.

On my twentieth birthday, I held a barbeque in the happy post-exam haze of June. All my friends came and many of Will’s as well. It happened to be the finale of Big Brother and many of my guests wanted to watch it. I was happy to let people enjoy themselves however they wanted to, and we crammed into the living room of the house I shared with three others. Will and his friends hung around on the stairs just outside, apart from the party. They convinced him that watching Big Brother was a far too plebeian thing to do, and not how a birthday should be celebrated. I know this because he barged into the room and announced this to all of my bemused friends as he switched off the TV. I was mad that he couldn’t see that it was my birthday and I didn’t care what his arty friends thought.

“Will!” I snarled. He faltered. Everyone stared. No-one had ever heard a raised voice between us. Will fled and I turned the TV back on.

We spent that summer in separate towns; he stayed in Bristol working and I went back to our hometown. We arranged a romantic weekend in Oxford where we could wander the river banks and gasp as we opened each new drawer of treasures in the Pitt Rivers museum. Pitt Rivers was a 19^th-Century archaeologist and ethnologist, a kindred spirit to Will, who I always thought would have been perfectly at home in The Lost World or as a turn-of-the-century Indiana Jones. The weekend passed blissfully, and as we made ready to depart back to our respective towns I wept and begged him to come to our hometown with me, just for a day or two. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He told me he had a lot of commitments in Bristol, but I knew he didn’t have to work and instead his commitments were to his friends there. I was no longer his Queen of the Nile, his Boudicca conquering the world for him.

After the summer it was time for me to go on the exchange year that was part of my degree program. I left for Iceland at the end of August with Will in my heart but with a deep worry about what the distance would do to us. I thought back to when we lived in Bristol and I’d walked to his work place one evening just to check he was still alive, having not heard from him in a week. Will was always losing his cell phone or forgetting to check his email. Communication of that kind wasn’t his strong point, and now we would be oceans apart.

By November, Will professed he missed me too much and flew to Iceland on a whim to spend a couple of days with me. Most people found it romantic, but while I was happy to see him, it didn’t make up for the days on end I wouldn’t hear from him.

Finally, when I returned to England for Christmas, we came apart at the seams. He told me he realized our relationship couldn’t work at that time. I knew it wouldn’t work at any time.

The last time we met was New Year’s Eve, three years later, at the funeral of a friend we’d known at different stages of his life. He’d committed suicide. We wept side-by-side and our hands found each other’s. As we turned, I looked into his oceanic eyes and saw reflected in them the same sorrowful smile I felt on my lips. Young love had passed, adult love had caused us to slide past each other, but in our long lives ahead we knew we’d always be connected.

__________