reading: dancing naked in the mind field kary mullis
listening: mirrorball sarah mclachlan
surfing: brand x

1999 july 09

strange genius

i've been reading a fabulous book lately: dancing naked in the mind field.

kari mullis, the nobel prize winning chemist and author, is a total trip. he surfs, drops acid, believes he may have been abducted by aliens, and invented the polymerase chain reaction which rocked the world of genetics and dna; don't ask me to explain that last one because even with his simple overview i don't comprehend much beyond the fact it is a system to replicate dna.

my favourite passage so far:

....I say that everything, bar nothing, being a possibility, we are placing our bets right now on the wrong tables, exploring regions of reality where our senses are not reliably sensitive, when there are obvious things needing our attention right now, where our senses are reliable. Let's look out for long-term comets and straying asteroids. Let's go to Mars. Let's do biochemistry. Let's think about the what kinds of senses people have and how they can use them to their advantage. Let's not spend our time and resources thinking about things that are so little or so large that all they really do for us is puff us up and make us feel like gods. We are mammals, and we have not exhausted the annoying little problems of being mammals.

i am mammal girl, with all her attendant mammal problems.

i finally hooked up with doctor d yesterday afternoon.

the boy looked so good, and was so genuinely happy to see me that i couldn't chastise him too severely about not arriving in time for his mother's surgery. we talked a bit about s ["how's your mom?" "she's got a deadly brain cancer, what else can i say."], a bit about theodore ["you still have dreams about him?" "yep, and i'm afraid to throw out the tshirts he gave me, even though they are ratty beyond belief"] but mostly about him and his wife and how happy he is to be back home and working in a less stressful job.

it will take him a while to adjust to how much slower we live life here these days. he still goes out four or five times a week to bars and dance clubs and concerts and parties. he likes living in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city. gene and i, jerry and joy, even alan and kay all prefer quiet evenings at home, small intimate gatherings where we sit around talking with maybe a beer or two. last tuesday he started calling around at 10pm, wanting all of us to hop over to a little bar he'd discovered. i think it discomfited him that two of the couples had children in bed and gene and i were actually in bed ourselves when he called; he still thinks of us all as young twentysomethings.

he does, however, have a happy little mercedes convertible, and it is hard to deny him things when he is tooling you around the city, your hair streaming in the wind, sun shining on your face. therefore, we will be going out with he and nikki some time next week and i even promised to stay out past dark.

genius is just another way of saying "what a strange little man", claire

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