This is cinnamaldehyde, an attractive little molecule, also known as oil of cinnamon. It’s what gives cinnamon its pungent scent and flavor and is one of my favorite spices. Each molecule of stuff, whether it’s cinnamaldehyde, water, or sucrose, tells a story about how the atoms in that molecule interact with each other and the world. There are love stories, break-ups, long-standing friendships and entrenched feuds. Everything we see, are, and touch, is a bunch of molecules knocking into each other, breaking chemical bonds and forming new ones at unimaginable speed, driven by electrical charges that attract or repulse each other. We experience those forces as sound, heat, and light, among other things.
My beloved friend Heidi changes the energy of a room by just walking into it. I laugh more and say witty things when she’s in vicinity. The first time I saw my husband, the rest of world went out of focus and I could only see him, the bright spot in the middle of a sea of fuzz. When I told Smart Emily I was taking chemistry, she sent me Chemical Party, a delightful short video that portrays the elements as people. It cracks me up to attribute human motivations to chemical interactions. The noble gases are awesome, but hydrogen and carbon steal the show.
When I first started learning Russian as a college freshman, I was frustrated to tears trying to read Cyrillic. It looked like a bunch of twigs smashed together. Example:
Все счастли́вые се́мьи похо́жи друг на дру́га, ка́ждая несчастли́вая семья́ несчастли́ва по-сво́ему.
This is the opening of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I was totally hooked by that line, I needed to know what happened next. I read it in English at 15 and was inspired to declare myself a Russian lit major. Years later I re-read it and thought, Anna, why do you have to make everything so fraught? Maybe when I read it again in my dotage I’ll like it again.
Reading Russian actually isn’t that hard. It’s just another alphabet, once you get the letters you can sound out anything. Piecing them together is where the trouble starts in earnest. The Foreign Service Institute ranks languages according to the number of hours it takes an English speaker to be proficient in reading and speaking. Russian gets a 4 out of 5, as do Pashto, Urdu, and Vietnamese. Category 4 languages take about 1,100 hours. For comparison, French and Italian are category 1 (at 600 hours) and Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are category 5 (a whopping 2,200 hours).
So Russian wasn’t a walk in park, and neither is o chem. I don’t think there is a chemistry equivalent to the Foreign Service language rating, but I think o chem ranks far below physical chemistry, which is more like physics thermodynamics, which sounds more like Chinese in terms of thousands of hours of study. My UW instructor wasn’t concerned with us knowing the nomenclature of different molecules, but I found that the nomenclature was crucial to understanding chemical reactions. Kind of like learning Cyrillic letters, or like learning how to conjugate the verb “to be” in any language—tedious memorization, but once it’s done it frees you to move around conversations with alacrity.
The point of learning a language is to communicate and we all do that one way or another. In that sense, I think there’s an intuitive element to the study of a foreign language. No matter how badly you butcher a language, if you manage to get your point across to a native speaker, you succeed and it’s thrilling. You can use your eyes, your charm, tone of voice, and hand gestures to ask for directions, find food, or find friends. Charm gets you nowhere in o chem. I find nothing intuitive about it, nothing comes for free, so every leap in understanding is an unexpected pleasure.
My final for o chem is in 3 and half weeks and I am not a happy test-taker. My heart rate goes up and I offer suffer from brain freeze if I don’t immediately see my way around a reaction. I sat next to a girl this summer who was a nervous wreck before our first exam. In an attempt to help her restore perspective, I said, “What’s the worst that can happen? You fail, life goes on.” She blanched. “If I fail, I can’t get into my major. If I can’t get into my major, I won’t have the career I want.” Dear god, is she right? I shut up after wishing her luck.
My lizard brain goes into overdrive during exams. I wish I could turn it off and behave optimally at all times, but where would be the fun in that? I de-stress by watching the series Ray Donovan (Ray is played by the fabulous Liev Schreiber) while tenderizing my hamstrings on foam roller. It’s set in my hometown of LA and I’m envious of the way the characters flit around the various neighborhoods as though they exist in a traffic-free universe. If they were really driving from Calabasas to Hollywood to Malibu and back, the action would take days, not hours. Jon Voight plays Mickey, Ray’s father, and I think Mickey is exactly my mom’s kind of guy–charming, feckless, and amoral. The dialogue is full of f-bombs delivered in broad South-Boston accents. Are they accurate? I don’t know, but they inspire Patrick, who is making food in the kitchen, to start screeching “Where’s my goddam bagel? Why can’t I open the fuckin’ fridge?” His accent then wanders over London before landing in what I assume is Scotland, all the while berating his bagel and condiments. I find this very relaxing and will miss him when he goes off to college next year.
Successive Approximation 