Feb. 16th, 2018 06:08 pm
Etched in my memory
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nightengaleskndEvery day, I attempt the New York Times crossword puzzle online. I say “attempt” rather than “do” or “solve” because I am not often able to complete the puzzle. For those unfamiliar, the puzzles increase in difficulty throughout the week from Monday to Saturday. Sunday’s puzzle is bigger and often involves complex wordplay but is not objectively more difficult than Saturday. It’s probably about a Wednesday.
I can virtually always complete a Monday puzzle. Rarely, there is a letter or two I can’t get, such as a sports star crossed with a rock band. I can usually complete Tuesday and often Wednesday. I may have managed a Thursday once or twice, but overall, the end of the week remains beyond me. Friday and Saturday, I put in a few words and shrug. I don’t even know if the words are correct because they don’t typically intersect with each other. I rely on the Saturday Times to keep me humble.
Once every two or three weeks, I enter the word “etch” into a puzzle. It’s a good crossword puzzle word, what with an E and a T in a neat package of four letters, and can be clued in several different ways. So I put it in.
And there I am. Transported back twenty-two years.
Some scientists report that scents are the most strongly attached to memories. I, and many others, create strong memory associations with certain songs. But I haven’t seen a lot written about the associations made in the mind with specific words.
It was my sophomore year of college. I was failing Organic chemistry, a class I needed to continue as a biology major. A class I needed to go on with my goal of becoming a doctor. A class I had been looking forward to taking. Everyone told me how much memorization there was in Orgo, as a warning. I had always been good at memorizing.
But I couldn’t find anything to memorize. The subject was full of detailed drawings of chemicals, with electrons that moved around willy-nilly. I couldn’t necessarily see the difference between one drawing and the next. I had (have) an undiagnosed learning disability in visual processing. And I couldn’t take notes very well, due to an undiagnosed disability affecting handwriting. I typed my notes for most of my classes, but there were too many drawings to type. A year later, I retook the course and found a way to take notes, copying only the drawings into my notebook with a gifted stencil, and then typing up descriptions for each step of the chemical reaction. Later, I could memorize the verbal descriptions of the drawings.
And the biggest problem was the lab. I had previously excelled in lab settings but this one seemed specially designed to torture me. First of all, I reacted poorly to many of the chemicals. In fact, I joke that I remember my first year of college better than my second due to spending so much of my sophomore year in the lab environment. Acetone was used, literally, as liberally as water. The day we used ether, I sat on my stool and said in a singsong voice, “I think I’m becoming anesthetized” until they sent me outside for a walk. One day I showed up for dinner still wearing my gloves, my apron, my goggles. I had removed my glasses and walked across campus without them. When asked about dinner I said, over and over, “All I want are dry socks and a cup of cocoa.” After that, a few friends met me at the door of the lab and escorted me to a dining hall, where they placed food in front of me. Also, that was the year I started carrying dry socks around in my bag.
Then there were bottles of chemicals I couldn’t lift. We were supposed to pour out our own amounts from a centralized supply, and I couldn’t lift the full containers well enough to pour them. See: undiagnosed disability affecting hand strength. And most weeks we built distillation apparati where we connected glass parts with tubes and the tightened wires around the tubes to prevent leaks. I couldn’t use the pliers well enough to tighten the wires. See: undiagnosed. . . .you get the idea. After a few breakdowns, the professor had smaller amounts of chemicals supplied for me and asked the TA to tighten my wires. So I would be muddling through as best I could, and my TA would come over and say “Hurry up because I have to tighten your wires!”
Because rushing a person who is struggling with manual tasks is really a stellar strategy. She and I had a great relationship. All the rushing and pressure in lab, plus the chemical fumes, and the long, hungry hours in a cold room, usually with wet socks, led me to be slower and clumsier. Also, they charged you for broken glassware. I broke something most weeks. Two years later I took 20 hours a week of credit for my biology thesis, in a program that did not charge for broken glassware. Over the entire year, I broke one flask trying to fit it into a clamp and had dropped nothing.
So I prepared for lab the only way I knew how, what I would later refer to as the Hermione Granger approach to problem-solving. When in doubt, read more.
This was all pre-internet. In 1996, we had e-mail, and we had a new web browser that loaded pages in something under a minute, which was a marked improvement over the prior web browser. When my biology professor asked us to mate virtual fruit flies, he had to give us instructions on how to enter a URL and click on a web link. Google hadn’t been invented. We didn’t have internet in our dorm rooms.
So today, I would google for further information of things I didn’t understand, and would likely find two or three online lab manuals, a few YouTube demonstration videos and maybe even a discussion forum or two.
What I had was, the lab manual and the textbook.
But at least, I could prepare for lab by reading the directions over and over and over. I was a pretty good cook, and one of my strategies was to read the same recipes over and over, as well as reading different recipes for the same dish.
And there it was in step one of the directions. “Etch the glass”
I didn’t know how to etch glass.
No further description or explanation of the process. No other explanation or description elsewhere in the lab manual. Nothing in the textbook.
Before lab, we had a brief preparatory lecture. Nothing was mentioned about etching glass.
So I asked the TA, “How do you etch glass?”
She roared at me, “Is that RELEVANT to what we’re doing today?”
“Well,” I stuttered, “it’s in the first step of the directions.”
“We’re not doing that step,” she dismissed me.
So I never learned how to etch glass. It never came up again. It didn’t come up that time. It turned out to be a step we could skip without any impact on the subsequent steps. I suspect the directions were a relic from a previous version of the lab manual. The professor didn’t review it prior to the lab to tell us about the change in the plan. The TA hadn’t read it either.
What I keep thinking about, twenty-two years later, is not about the professor, or even the TA, although I’m still angry with her, very angry. It’s the other students, the 30 or so other students in my lab section, who came into the lab and bustled around starting with step two. None of them tried to do step one. None of them. I looked around in confusion then, and I’m thinking about it still in confusion now. How did they know?
It’s my autistic memory that brings me so vividly back to that lab, that conversation, that feeling. And it’s the most autistic feeling, to look around at a room of people in the same situation you are, who clearly know something you don’t, even though you theoretically had access to all the same information.
How did they know?
And that’s what replays in my head, every time I put the word “etch” into another crossword puzzle. The panicked reading of the lab manual, the voice of my TA, and my scan around the room trying to figure out how everyone else knew.
Etched in my memory.
I can virtually always complete a Monday puzzle. Rarely, there is a letter or two I can’t get, such as a sports star crossed with a rock band. I can usually complete Tuesday and often Wednesday. I may have managed a Thursday once or twice, but overall, the end of the week remains beyond me. Friday and Saturday, I put in a few words and shrug. I don’t even know if the words are correct because they don’t typically intersect with each other. I rely on the Saturday Times to keep me humble.
Once every two or three weeks, I enter the word “etch” into a puzzle. It’s a good crossword puzzle word, what with an E and a T in a neat package of four letters, and can be clued in several different ways. So I put it in.
And there I am. Transported back twenty-two years.
Some scientists report that scents are the most strongly attached to memories. I, and many others, create strong memory associations with certain songs. But I haven’t seen a lot written about the associations made in the mind with specific words.
It was my sophomore year of college. I was failing Organic chemistry, a class I needed to continue as a biology major. A class I needed to go on with my goal of becoming a doctor. A class I had been looking forward to taking. Everyone told me how much memorization there was in Orgo, as a warning. I had always been good at memorizing.
But I couldn’t find anything to memorize. The subject was full of detailed drawings of chemicals, with electrons that moved around willy-nilly. I couldn’t necessarily see the difference between one drawing and the next. I had (have) an undiagnosed learning disability in visual processing. And I couldn’t take notes very well, due to an undiagnosed disability affecting handwriting. I typed my notes for most of my classes, but there were too many drawings to type. A year later, I retook the course and found a way to take notes, copying only the drawings into my notebook with a gifted stencil, and then typing up descriptions for each step of the chemical reaction. Later, I could memorize the verbal descriptions of the drawings.
And the biggest problem was the lab. I had previously excelled in lab settings but this one seemed specially designed to torture me. First of all, I reacted poorly to many of the chemicals. In fact, I joke that I remember my first year of college better than my second due to spending so much of my sophomore year in the lab environment. Acetone was used, literally, as liberally as water. The day we used ether, I sat on my stool and said in a singsong voice, “I think I’m becoming anesthetized” until they sent me outside for a walk. One day I showed up for dinner still wearing my gloves, my apron, my goggles. I had removed my glasses and walked across campus without them. When asked about dinner I said, over and over, “All I want are dry socks and a cup of cocoa.” After that, a few friends met me at the door of the lab and escorted me to a dining hall, where they placed food in front of me. Also, that was the year I started carrying dry socks around in my bag.
Then there were bottles of chemicals I couldn’t lift. We were supposed to pour out our own amounts from a centralized supply, and I couldn’t lift the full containers well enough to pour them. See: undiagnosed disability affecting hand strength. And most weeks we built distillation apparati where we connected glass parts with tubes and the tightened wires around the tubes to prevent leaks. I couldn’t use the pliers well enough to tighten the wires. See: undiagnosed. . . .you get the idea. After a few breakdowns, the professor had smaller amounts of chemicals supplied for me and asked the TA to tighten my wires. So I would be muddling through as best I could, and my TA would come over and say “Hurry up because I have to tighten your wires!”
Because rushing a person who is struggling with manual tasks is really a stellar strategy. She and I had a great relationship. All the rushing and pressure in lab, plus the chemical fumes, and the long, hungry hours in a cold room, usually with wet socks, led me to be slower and clumsier. Also, they charged you for broken glassware. I broke something most weeks. Two years later I took 20 hours a week of credit for my biology thesis, in a program that did not charge for broken glassware. Over the entire year, I broke one flask trying to fit it into a clamp and had dropped nothing.
So I prepared for lab the only way I knew how, what I would later refer to as the Hermione Granger approach to problem-solving. When in doubt, read more.
This was all pre-internet. In 1996, we had e-mail, and we had a new web browser that loaded pages in something under a minute, which was a marked improvement over the prior web browser. When my biology professor asked us to mate virtual fruit flies, he had to give us instructions on how to enter a URL and click on a web link. Google hadn’t been invented. We didn’t have internet in our dorm rooms.
So today, I would google for further information of things I didn’t understand, and would likely find two or three online lab manuals, a few YouTube demonstration videos and maybe even a discussion forum or two.
What I had was, the lab manual and the textbook.
But at least, I could prepare for lab by reading the directions over and over and over. I was a pretty good cook, and one of my strategies was to read the same recipes over and over, as well as reading different recipes for the same dish.
And there it was in step one of the directions. “Etch the glass”
I didn’t know how to etch glass.
No further description or explanation of the process. No other explanation or description elsewhere in the lab manual. Nothing in the textbook.
Before lab, we had a brief preparatory lecture. Nothing was mentioned about etching glass.
So I asked the TA, “How do you etch glass?”
She roared at me, “Is that RELEVANT to what we’re doing today?”
“Well,” I stuttered, “it’s in the first step of the directions.”
“We’re not doing that step,” she dismissed me.
So I never learned how to etch glass. It never came up again. It didn’t come up that time. It turned out to be a step we could skip without any impact on the subsequent steps. I suspect the directions were a relic from a previous version of the lab manual. The professor didn’t review it prior to the lab to tell us about the change in the plan. The TA hadn’t read it either.
What I keep thinking about, twenty-two years later, is not about the professor, or even the TA, although I’m still angry with her, very angry. It’s the other students, the 30 or so other students in my lab section, who came into the lab and bustled around starting with step two. None of them tried to do step one. None of them. I looked around in confusion then, and I’m thinking about it still in confusion now. How did they know?
It’s my autistic memory that brings me so vividly back to that lab, that conversation, that feeling. And it’s the most autistic feeling, to look around at a room of people in the same situation you are, who clearly know something you don’t, even though you theoretically had access to all the same information.
How did they know?
And that’s what replays in my head, every time I put the word “etch” into another crossword puzzle. The panicked reading of the lab manual, the voice of my TA, and my scan around the room trying to figure out how everyone else knew.
Etched in my memory.