Among things that I shouldn’t do when I find myself awake late at night: listen to music, think too much about… anything, eat or drink anything, play video games, or mope around in the dark about everything.
Number of things I’m doing currently, put of this list: 4. Ugh.
I find myself much more reticent to blog (generally and specifically) earlier in the day. And fortunately, most nights, I fall asleep before I have the chance to get my brain going. And even then, I’m generally good about wrangling my brain and stopping the unnecessary mad thoughts that tend to spring up.
Tonight… I’m slightly less successful. So instead of focusing on those things… I’ve decided I’m going to write about books I’ve read and\or am currently reading in the hopes that by the time I’ve finished… I’ll either be asleep, or awake enough to do something slightly more constructive.
The first thing I’ve been reading is some of my grandfather’s poetry. This is made more difficult by the fact that a) he never seems to have published much under the Wilcox name (his pen name was Gray Fox) and b) when he was published it seems like it was locally in either Berkshire County or the Capital region of New York.
Of course, much of my information comes second- or third-hand and this makes it even more difficult to find anything out. I have several poems published locally (a couple I’m looking to print up professionally on broadsides, even), but the number of full poems at my disposal is about 10.
I think I should also take a moment to mention that a professor on our local NPR station once mentioned my grandfather in the same breath as Charles Bukowski, for which I am endlessly proud.
I’m also finishing up The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Once I finish this book, I’ll have doubled my normal output for non-fiction. So far… a good read. The book tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose cells have stayed alive since her death in the 1950s. Her cells helped to contribute to nearly uncountable numbers of scientific advances over the last half-century, but she is widely unrecognized and her family continues to live in near-poverty.
The book bounces between Henrietta’s life and the work that Skloot did to try to track down information on Henrietta, her cells (known as HeLa cells), and the Lacks family. Overall, the tone is very fluid and conversational and most of the medical stuff is told in a layman voice. The book also makes many good connections to what was happening with Henrietta’s cell in conjunction with the plight of African-Americans at the same time (for instance, the Tuskegee Institute was continuing to infect African-American men with syphilis and not treating them to study the disease when the first HeLa cells were being grown and distributed in and around Johns Hopkins).
The book also talks about the rights that one has to ones own cells (or lack thereof) and other frightening things that I would hate to mention because… well, you really should just read it for yourself. A good human interest story, a good science story, and much better non-fiction than The Ghost Map (ugh).
Well… that’s it, for now (I think). I’m gonna turn on some Futurama and try to wait until June for the new episodes. G’night, y’all!
