The Cloying Scent of Death

Just in case you, like my mother, didn't already have enough things to be paranoid about, the Environmental Working Group has created Skin Deep, a searchable database of health and beauty products. It lists their ingredients and rates them on their potential harmfulness to humans, the premise being that many perfectly legal substances are possible carcinogens, neurotoxins, etc. Many of their ratings are based on just a few studies, but they always list their "data gap" so you can judge for yourself what you think is worth worrying about. I did a couple of searches on the products sitting around my bathroom - both my shampoo and soap scored a 9/10 for potential hazard. The culprit? Fragrance. One major concern is that "fragrance" essentially tells you nothing about the actual ingredients. Another is that the chemicals and preservatives used in many fragrances have been identified as neurotoxins and immunotoxins. Scary, right? I'll be thinking twice before I buy anything just because it smells good.

Do What You Love

Life is full of pithy but overly simplistic bits of advice like the above. How do you know what it is you love? What if you love too many things? I had more than a few crises as I neared the end of my first year of college (I can't believe I've finished a year of college), but I finally made up my mind to double major in French, which was basically a given (and on the practical end of liberal arts), and math, because I really think it's what I love. I realize many people find math unlovable. I loathed it through middle school, was skeptical through pre-calculus, and only really started to appreciate it when I got to calculus. They don't usually teach you the cool stuff, like linear algebra, in high school. Remember chemistry class when your teacher told you the only way to balance chemical reactions was an educated version of guess-and-check? Actually, there's a simple, foolproof method involving matrix reduction that will give you every possible way to balance an equation every time, including some solutions it would be basically impossible to arrive at by the eyeballing method. Nifty. Well, a lot of subjects have cool tricks up their sleeves. How do I know math is what I want to do for the next three years of my life? It was a small clue when my first meeting with my potential adviser turned into an hour-long lecture on the braid group and I didn't get bored. That evolved into my going to office hours on the (legitimate) pretense of getting homework help, but really just so I could sit and listen to the math professors talk. I heard rants ranging from how the sciences are corrupting pure math, to how math in movies is invariably wrong (and how the professors here invariably know the people hired to be math consultants in said movies), interspersed with mini-lectures about arcane principles of mathematics. As terrifically nerdy as it sounds, those were some of the best conversations I had all semester, and those are the people I want to spend the next three years learning from. I will leave you with a joke that, even if you never find mathematics lovable, you have to admit is pretty hilarious:

Q: What do you get if you cross a mosquito with an elephant?
A: (mosquito)(elephant)(sinθ)

Q: What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
A: Trick question. You can't cross a vector with a scaler.

Literary Regression

I'll be doing some work in my high school's library later this summer, a revisitation of my senior project, in which I got to play at being a librarian. One of the best parts of the job was buying and cataloging (and often reading) new books, mainly young adult and children's fiction. You wouldn't know it from glancing at a display in the teen section of Barnes & Noble, but there are some really good books still being written for that age group. I'm long past the time when those books were technically at my reading level, but one of the qualities that makes these books good is that I still enjoy reading them for the first time, unaided by nostalgia. I think many authors make the mistake of dumbing down their prose in all the wrong ways, assuming that teens won't understand complex structures or rhetorical devices; basically, writing with any stylistic depth (by depth I don't mean Faulkner; plain good writing is fine by me). Consequently we get a lot of books full of stilted dialogue and simplistic narration. Really, I think teens are capable of understanding the English language as well as the average adult, though maybe with smaller vocabularies (and what better way to broaden them than by reading?). Content-wise, very few things are off-limits in teen fiction these days, and young people are the best audience for fantasy, myths, and generally imaginative stories. My point is, there isn't really a good reason why young adult literature shouldn't be one of the best genres available. Think of Philip Pullman, for example, whose (amazing) His Dark Materials trilogy is just as likely to appeal to adults as children. My other point is, the number of books out there is absolutely staggering. Even in my comparatively tiny high school library of 3000 books, I haven't read an appreciable fraction of them. I missed a lot of great books during the time I was theoretically supposed to read them, but that's not going to stop me from catching up now.

In conclusion, a short list of books I came to late but enjoyed:

You & You & You by Per Nilsson, tr. Tara Chace
The Realm of Possibility by Devid Levithan
The First Part Last by Angela Johnson
Zigzag by Ellen Wittlinger
Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Any favorites of your own? Please share!

Motivation and Justification

Why do we do the things we do? (This isn't an existentially angsty post.) I started thinking about this after our senior week Chamber Singers concert. We chose an ambitious amount of music to learn, worked hard at it, and generally agreed that we pulled it off as well as could be expected. But I think most of us didn't really enjoy giving imperfect performances of songs we could probably have learned nearly flawlessly with more time. Who did it benefit then? The audience? If so, why do we always thank our friends for coming in a slightly apologetic tone of voice? And why does half the audience fall asleep? Maybe it benefited our conductor, then. I know he appreciated all the work and effort we put it, but judging by his repertoire of expressions ranging from anxious to stricken, he was relieved we made it through the concert without any train wrecks. I would bet that the reigning sentiment in that concert hall at the end of the program was relief. So what possible justification did we have for creating an experience that was slightly uncomfortable for everyone involved?

I feel similarly about the new Ayres CD (and the old one, for that matter). Now, I think it's really cool that I'm on a CD, and recording it was a fun if exhausting experience. But it's not like I sit down and listen to it. I would far rather be singing those songs than hearing them. And I have to wonder who actually does listen to our CD. Madrigals have a limited audience anyway, and when you could be listening to the King's Singers, why would you listen to the Middlebury Mountain Ayres? Yes, we're quite good for a college a cappella group, but I'm fully aware that there are better versions of those songs out there in the world. Most of my friends have bought CDs, but I have no expectation that they're going to end up on their iTunes most played lists. Basically, we've created a product of very little actual usefulness to anyone, rather like those little knicknacks that are so cute you just have to have them but end up sitting around collecting dust.

Please don't get me wrong. I love singing in Chambers and recording a CD was a neat opportunity. Sometimes I just have to stop and wonder what purpose all these things have.

Moral Ambiguity

You encounter a lot of new things at college. Middlebury in particular promotes diversity and the value of difference, be it racial, religious, socioeconomic, or simply a difference of opinions. I've run into all these in my nine months at Midd, and for the most part I've appreciated the new perspectives and ideas I got out of such encounters. But a few things have occurred that caused me to stop and wonder: at what point are you allowed to stop appreciating ideas that differ from your own? Do I have to accept a diversity of values and moral standards? Are right and wrong really relative? (If you think I'm going to answer this question in one blog post, you're going to be sadly disappointed.) In theory, I think it's fine for people to have personally defined moral codes. In practice, I hate it when people do things that I consider wrong. It's a different sort of discomfort than when I'm confronted with an opinion that disagrees with my own. Opinions aren't necessarily fundamental; I consider them more thoughts than feelings. My most basic values aren't going anywhere, and I'm not sure I could explain all of them rationally. There are things I do and things I don't do. (Anyone read Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga? It plays with that question quite a bit.) So while I'm all for my opinions and ideas being broadened by diversity, I don't consider it necessary or even right for my values to be "broadened" or changed. Does that make me close-minded?