Writing music and writing prose are reciprocals for me. For music, I have the song in my head, often more than just a little snippet of melody: fully orchestrated scores that go on and on. But I have no skill, either with recognizing notes or playing them out. If I pick up my violin or sit at my keyboard and try to bang out the notes, I can't even find the first one. It's trapped in my head; I can't get it out. I can't sing, can't transcribe directly to notation, nothing. Eventually I lose my train of thought and it gets lost by the wayside.

For writing, I feel like I can pick out the words I need and arrange them in some more than simply functional way. I have just enough organization, clarity, and brevity I think... but I have no narrative. I can't design a plot further than a backdrop and perhaps a one-dimensional character; I can sometimes string together pleasant words, but they have no real context; I get bogged down in style without a plan for where I'm going with it. In short, I have nothing to write about: no great life lesson or enlightenment, no personal journey of discovery or coming-of-age, no real concept of a life lived outside academia and my home and friends. They say you write what you know, and I want to write about more than science. But I have to live something else first, and that's where it falls off.

Music and writing. My dysfunctional yin and yang.  ¶ 1:10 AM