Currently Listening Pretty. Odd. By Panic at the Disco see related

         Webster’s dictionary was the bedtime story of my childhood.

         I didn’t even have the benefit of hearing my parents’ voices lull me to sleep with such soothing prose as “hullabaloo, n. A confused noise; uproar; tumult.” No; I had to plod through it by myself, a minimum of five pages a night that my dad would helpfully quiz me on the following morning. I’m sure he meant well, but he couldn’t have more effectively put me off of the written word than if he had demanded that I recite the whole thing back to him from Z to A.

         When this little thing called Harry Potter made its first big splash in the U.S., my dad practically had to twist my arm out of its socket to get me to read it. I had developed a (rather reasonable) habit of refusing to do anything he said, simply so that I could exert what little power I had in denying him the satisfaction of domestic tyranny. Poor Harry sat on my piano for at least a month until I finally picked him up, but not before glancing furtively around to make sure my dad wasn’t watching.

         I think Harry Potter saved my life. Before J. K. Rowling cast her spell on me, I recall never being passionate about anything more thrilling than successfully wheedling my way out of another Friday night at the chess club. I found myself rereading entire passages, for the sheer pleasure of being bathed again and again in this evocative symphony of linguistic prowess. Never had words seemed so enchanting. The only trouble was that I felt irrevocably dubious of my own ability to mold them into something even remotely akin to magic.

         My first big screen movie experience, in the winter of 1997 (ironically around the same time I met Harry), would change that. Jack and Rose captivated the hearts of many, including that fellow named Oscar, but Titanic was more than just an epic love story to me. I emerged from the theatre a newly converted pop culture fanatic, and suddenly doors opened to a world I never knew existed. Unfortunately, my already limited access to whatever lay on the other side of my own front door put me at a slight disadvantage. Because my parents excelled at hiding the key, I had to make the world come to me in the most unusual way.

         Maybe I was a compulsive magazine subscriber. I know our postman at least certainly thought so. The fact of the matter, though, was that my brain starved for intellectual sustenance, and the internet was not yet at my fingertips. The mailbox was perpetually stuffed with the latest issues – as well as some stragglers – of Entertainment Weekly; Rolling Stone; People; Vanity Fair; Newsweek. I also tried a variety of women’s interest magazines, but their disappointing and insubstantial obsession with superficiality propelled me in the other direction. I would take GQ over Cosmopolitan any day.

         I found myself drawn to not just what messages (subliminal or otherwise) magazines and the rest of the media-centric world were trying to convey, but how they attempted to attract, cater to, persuade, mislead, misinform, even swindle the masses… and how oh how we eat it up. With little compunction or care for preserving my self-dignity, I shamelessly drank in everything I read and saw. (It happens to the best of us. At least I am willing to admit it.) I was a planet, or maybe even just a Pluto, and pop culture was my sun; photographic persuasion was my moon; breaking news headlines were my stars. But words, first and foremost, were my universe.

         If my long-standing dream was to balance a permanent spot on the New York Times Bestsellers List with the editor-in-chief position of a highbrow magazine, then college was my wake-up call (a personal hullabaloo, if you will). I read too slowly to keep up in class, perusing the same sentence over and over not as a result of mental drifting but to chew on and savor its meaning. My writing, according to some professors, left much to be desired. The Chronicle rebuffed the worth of my opinions in their precious editorial pages. I never got over that one.

         So here I am now. The voice of cold, hard reality (which, interestingly enough, sounds a lot like my parents) keeps telling me to leave my writing ambitions in dreamland where they belong, with the flying broomsticks and the archetypal star-crossed lovers. But as much as I adore organic chemistry – and I actually do, believe it or not – I will never be satisfied in whatever hospital, research lab, or university I end up in without having first endeavored to prove that voice wrong.