It's one of the paradoxes of my life that I love science, but don't have the mental computing power for it. I'm endlessly fascinated with gadgetry, with machines, with engineering and technical achievement, and I can't get enough of it. Yet, stubbornly, my understanding of such things remains mostly intuitive. I'm one of those folks who absolutely cleaned up on the verbal portion of the SAT, but stunk up the joint when it came to the math; in college, I dropped the basic-level Math course once and only ended up barely passing it when it was a summer school offering. I loved the lab portion of college-level Chemistry, but fumbled through the lectures and exams.
And yet I'm absolutely fascinated by the things that are so math-centric, and daydream about all the stuff I'd love to be doing if only my brain didn't go running in fright from the room when it saw numbers. I'd love to have the brain needed to be proficient at computer science, or something dealing with physics, or something else. Or I daydream about being a science journalist, with my dream job there being science editor for a newspaper or television network. Given that my gifts are verbal rather than scientific, I find it interesting that I can name very few literary figures who inspire me, but I'll readily name Richard Feynman and Admiral Rickover among my heroes (and even some of the writers I admire are people known for science fiction, such as Ray Bradbury). I'm not sure if I admire Feynman and Rickover and folks like that for their iconoclasm, or because they're folks the likes of which we'll never see again, or because their lives contained so many great stories and adventures, or if I look up to them because I recognize in them capabilities I don't have, but wish I did. (It's also funny because I'm fully aware that had I ever met Feynman or Rickover, I'd have been scared to death. Few things would be worse in my mind than saying something foolish, even by accident, before either, and I'm certain Rickover would have eaten me alive.)
Don't get me wrong; I dearly appreciate the gifts I have. I routinely have people praise as "eloquent" and 'beautiful" sentences and concepts that effortlessly fly from the top of my head. I can write without thinking (and, to be honest, some of the stuff I've written on this blog over the years definitely seems like it was written without thinking). I've come to embrace the fact my powers are overwhelmingly on the "humanistic" end of the scale, and I've used those powers to my advantage and make a decent (though far from luxurious) living with those gifts.
Still, sometimes I wonder what it would be like had the "scientific" end of the scale had a little more on it. That said, I'm not sure I'd want it to come at the expense of what I have now.
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