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Gay man shot dead in Village after gunman shouted homophobic slurs: authorities

When you’re leaving work after 9, again, and you’re draggling your lipstick-smudged self and sack of ersatz vin en vrac up some stairs at Union Square only to emerge upon a statuesque man wearing only high-heeled sandals, one of those shrug sweaters that is basically 90% sleeves, and a pair of galaxy leggings that have warped a bit white near the seams like a water bottle crushed past its limits, throwing his arms out wide and valiantly lip-synching to what you are pretty sure is a techno cover of Aerosmith’s Dream On.  And you look over your shoulder as you track towards the L train and your only thought is “god, I have those pants, and I think he looks better in them,” and there’s a sad little part of you that congratulates yourself in that adoptive-child-of-New-York way for not making a fuss about it (oh, was that [celebrity] I did not even notice!), and a (possibly even sadder) part that misses the almost innocent instinct to gawk, and so you go ahead and settle on the part that just wants to get home and pour a glass of passable rosé, and ruffle the hair at the nape of your boyfriend’s neck in passing, and possibly throw out those fucking leggings, before you have to emerge tomorrow and do all of these things and think all of these things again, and again, and again.

Better Living Through Chemistry Sets

It turns out that if you run out of Grand Marnier and add a little bit of blue curaçao to your chipotle-infused margarita it turns a virulent grass green.  I swirled it around in my glass, looking at this color that really should not occur in a liquid with no passing acquaintance to either spinach or spirulina, but instead of looking disturbing it looked oddly familiar to me.  Later it comes to me: my childhood chemistry set.

I used to put on “chemistry magic shows” for my parents and occasionally their unfortunate guests, shepherding them all onto our couch while I prepared my little ampoules and test tubes.  Picture: canary-blonde hair coaxed into ringlets, maybe a scrunchie depending on how ‘90’s-ward we’ve gotten; dress probably some horribly twee smocked thing. And then a collection of curious vials lined up crooked on the coffee table, Sodium Bicarbonate and Ammonium Hydroxide set apart as other from the baking soda and ammonia languishing all pedestrian beneath the sink by their amber glass and IUPAC names.  I’d eyedropper the combinations prescribed by the booklet and hold them up to the light as they made a precipitate: Behold! as two clear liquids transmogrify to white, or brown, or blue.  My parents would obligingly ooh and aah, and I would clutch my vials and beam and bow.

It was a late night at lab but I’m not ready to go to bed yet, so I sip my copper (ii) sulfate margarita and I think about how it’s entirely possible that I got more of a sense of accomplishment out of mixing together two colorless liquids and getting a color than I have from any actual science I’ve done recently. I think about the blooming of that violent, startling green, that green taking its cues not from the classroom color wheel but from some distant logic I could sense but that was still out of my reach.  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” said Arthur C. Clark, but I knew even then that it wasn’t magic, exactly, even as I was mugging in front of the couch one top hat and some iron salts away from a middle school talent show scarf trick. 

I still do things today, 22, 23 years later, that rely on colorimetric tricks: protein-measuring assays that bruise purplish-brown out of a pale green solution, pH strips that look kind of like paint swatches from a 1970’s remodel.  Some are helpful, others gratuitous, but right now they hold about the same joy as typing shit into an Excel spreadsheet.  I look at them turn with a cold eye and frown and hike my pants back up. #DIV/0, motherfuckers.

Of course it’s that, back then, science was one of the marvelously obscure things that signified being grown-up, like the possibility of eating ice cream for dinner, or knowing how to put on mascara, hinted at by simulacra before we were put firmly to bed at 8 with a favorite bear and footy pyjamas.  Of course this sort of unkind comparison isn’t specific to science, or to myself. But tonight what I think I miss is that synaptic gap between knowing and knowing, the giddy space when you’ve an idea that something’s true but don’t yet have to know why, the pure wonder you get from watching something that’s clear simply - almost, if not quite, miraculously - turn green.