The Last Word On Nothing

I continue to have nothing good to say about Baltimore in August. In fact, if anything it’s getting worse though it’s incrementally-worse from already-bad. Like, the recent run of feels-like temps from 105 to 110 and I don’t even look at the numbers after that. And then once the temps get that high, afternoon storms kick in along with high winds and blown fuses on transformers. I’m sorry to be so grumpy right when we probably all need cool rationality and calm. This first ran August 17, 2022.

I have nothing good to say about Baltimore in August. Ok, the farmers’ market is moving into high season, peaches & tomatoes, also okra — that’s good. Digression: I spent childhood on a small farm in the midwest making internal proclamations and declarations about freezing corn and canning applesauce in a hot kitchen, like, if I ever get outa here I’m never doing this again, not me. Until decades later, I ran into the irrevocable fact that peaches and tomatoes have a few-weeks’ season and the rest of the year aren’t worth eating, so now I’m freezing peach crisp and tomato sauce and apologizing to the sweaty irritated young Ann. Anyway, I think that’s it for anything good about Baltimore in August.

The sun is out, temperatures are in the 90s and dew points are in the 70s, dew points being the temperature at which water condenses out of the air so that was 20 degrees ago — meaning that gills would have been the better evolutionary option here because the air is 52.76% water. At these dew points, the air is holding all the water it can so you can’t cool by sweating; these dew points, says our beloved Capital Weather Gang, are not just oppressive but offensive and “very gross.” Digression: I asked a neighbor who was a public health scientist just back from equatorial Africa what it was like there and she said, “About like here.”

Nights might get down to the upper 70s, same dew points; another neighbor had a friend visiting from California ask when the evening would cool off, and the neighbor just snorted. Digression: once I asked my gyn when I was going to stop having hot flashes and she too just snorted. So anyhow, that’s the Baltimore days and nights.

The afternoons, however, are terrifying, due to a hair-raising alliance between physics and chemistry. More heat means more action in the air and less density, meaning as we all know, that hot air rises. More water — for chemistry reasons having to do with molecular weight that I don’t understand — also means less density, also rising.

So whooop, up she goes, wet hot air, rising rising, juicing up the atmosphere, and the more juice, the more convective instability — digression: I read that phrase first as “collective instability” which, yes, we are, aren’t we — which is measured as CAPE, Convective Available Potential Energy, the operative words being “potential energy.” Because that wet hot air rises up into the high atmosphere where it’s cooler, then condenses and carries all that juicy potential energy into thunderheads which grow crazy big, bigger every minute, blooming over the city like an alien invasion.

And inside those thunderheads, all the molecules and things get charged and the electric fields get more intense and the energy that’s been potential now just lets loose, the fields discharge and become lightning, also in a way I don’t understand but neither do scientists. Lightning heats the air to 55,000 degrees until the air explodes into thunder, and the closer in time the lightning is to the thunder, the more it seems personal. Digression: a neighbor and I were on his porch, the neighbor holding his cat, and a simultaneous lightning/thunder hit, CRACK BAM, and the cat exploded like thunder out of my neighbor’s hands, and the rest of my life I’ll remember that cat, feet outstretched, hanging like a bat in the air above us.

Anyway, afternoons in Baltimore: watchful anxiety, the thunderheads get bigger, the chances of storms go up and up until finally and with some probability all hell breaks loose, physics and chemistry unconstrained by human convenience.

Windows rattle, transformers blow up, trees crash down, the power goes out — recently for days — and so does the AC, and you sit there in the dark in a puddle of your own sweat if you can even sweat. Streets flood, and the Capital Weather Gang repeatedly tweets TURN AROUND DON’T DROWN; flights are delayed, then cancelled, then you can’t get home until the afternoon of next Thursday when thunderstorms will again be likely — these weather patterns are stable — and flights will be cancelled again.

The best you can say about Baltimore is that it’s not in the midwest where cells of convection become supercells and your house gets blown into the next county. So I guess that’s a second good thing about August in Baltimore — catastrophes here, as with so much else, are not sensational; here we have only unassuming Armageddons.

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Chuck Patch via Flickr Creative Commons: Baltimore’s Artscape, when it’s so routinely hot and/or rainy, it’s called Artscape weather.
Yianni Mathioudakis, also Flickr Creative Commons: also Baltimore

This post first ran in 2021, but I’ve been thinking of it a lot lately — ever since a new family moved into my friend Mona’s house. Mona lived in my neighborhood and we walked our dogs together most mornings. She died of cancer in 2017, and I still think of her every time I pass by her house, which is every time I leave my house. I miss her on a daily basis. The new family in her house has somehow made me miss her more, because I have such a strong impulse to want to tell her about the news. Seven years after her departure, I’m still wanting to share things with her on a weekly basis, and it hurts so much that she’s not here for it.

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On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow but would call me again before that. She really wanted to connect.

I am notoriously terrible about clearing out my voice mails. I can’t bear to erase them. I have a habit of keeping at least one at all times from the people I love most. The content of the message isn’t important. It’s that I can hear their voice, catch them in the midst of ordinary life, before they are dead. I’ve learned that you never know when someone will be dead.

I once heard a story about a phone booth in Japan where people who lost friends and family in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake go to talk to their lost loved ones. I would use a phone booth like that.

I still occasionally listen to the voice mail I saved from my friend Mona before she died several years ago. I have heard her say that she’s just returned from Tai Chi class dozens of times. In the months after she died, I also texted her more than once. Sometimes I would forget, if only for a split second, that she was dead and feel compelled to follow through on my impulse to tell her something on my mind. Other times, I just needed to pretend for a moment that she wasn’t really gone. 

When I got the news that Kristina had died, I had just placed a letter to her in my mailbox. A few days earlier, a loved one had sent a message out saying that Kristina was turning inward and it was now best to send wishes and love by mail rather than text or phone. This was my second note to her in the previous two weeks, and I’m not sure if she ever read the first. After I received the news that she had passed, I stood on the front porch and stared at the little red flag raised on my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I could not make myself go retrieve the letter. 

Last autumn, Microsoft made a subtle change to its Excel spreadsheets, one which flew under the radar for normal mortals. Unlike many other software tweaks, this one made it easier to stop the software automating certain tasks. Specifically, its tendency to automatically convert input into dates. One major reason for the change was the havoc this automation had wreaked on geneticists needing to populate Excel with gene names like MARCH 1 and SEPT1. “Stop helping me,” one commenter pleaded in the Verge writeup: “Never automate anything without providing an easily discoverable means to de-automate it.” From your lips to god’s ear, mate.

This change from Microsoft was a welcome olive branch, as the human genome has had more than enough problems getting its naming conventions into the 21st century. Here’s my writeup about that from a couple of years ago.

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Look, no one is trying to get a dick joke into the human genome. If it happens, it won’t be by design. No one even really thought it was a possibility until the late 1990s, when the physical chemistry professor Paul W. May was having a beer with some other science friends and they got around to talking about funny molecules. Everyone knew about the ring-shaped molecule called Arsole. It didn’t take long to conjure up several more funny science terms. May began to collect these, and soon had so many that he turned the collection into a blog. By 2008 the blog had become a book. (NB: both blog and book are written in Comic Sans. And he commits to the bit. Main text, table of contents, acknowledgments, and references – all Comic Sans. References!) The book has a whole separate section on gene names, and here you will find some of the spiciest names in science. By the time the book was published, however, some of them were already out of date – the Human Genome Nomenclature Committee had begun to take a keen interest in what geneticists were calling their new genes, and by 2006 had put the kibosh on 10 names deemed the most offensive. But if they thought their work was done, they didn’t know how much stranger it could get.

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I was in Assateague, Virginia, some weeks back, doing the summer beach thing. The wild horses, standing hoof-deep in the chilly saltwash, were lovely, as they always are. They’re one of the truly special things about this national seashore. The horseshoe crabs? Lovely in their own way, I suppose, and definitely special. Especially this one, with its crustacean backpack. The host was deceased, unfortunately, but its riders were still with us, holding on tight.

I knew a few things about horseshoe crabs before spotting this one, including that they’ve been around for more than 400 million years, that they haven’t changed much in that time, and that their blood–which happens to be blue because of a copper-based respiratory pigment called hemocyanin–is used in human medicine. Why/how that last bit? I looked up the details: Scientists discovered a protein in the crab’s blood called limulus amebocyte lysate that clots when it come into contact with endotoxins (toxic bacteria). So the substance can be used as a toxin-detection system that helps ensure vaccines, drugs, and medical devices aren’t contaminated before they’re put inside people.

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I’m not on TikTok, so I had to be told about pregnancy nose. Whereas in the 1960s, women sat down together and discovered the political underpinnings of their personal struggles, now we do things like congregate online and discover, via selfies, phenomena we were never told to expect in ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”

The same hormones that orchestrate a whole new placenta and get the blood flowing there also dilate blood vessels and produce fluid retention elsewhere. It can lead to a giant, unrecognizable nose. Perhaps we didn’t notice before because weight gain can, itself, reshape the face, but taken together on TikTok, it’s clear: pregnancy nose is a thing.

What about the more permanent effects of pregnancy? Our society tends to pathologize these, or rather, to focus on the pathologies that arise. But I wish someone had told me sooner about the coolest permanent change. It happens whether you carry the baby to term or suffer a miscarriage or abortion. It persists for decades, until you die.

You become a chimera.

 For as long as a little one and a mother share a body, they are exchanging cells. The fetal cells that circulate in a mother’s blood cross the blood-brain barrier (which is more permeable at that time) and stay in our brains. They don’t just accrete there like so much flotsam, either. They properly differentiate into neurons, colonize the heart and help it beat, and regenerate the liver. Sometimes when they reach a new organ, the baby’s cells fuse with the mothers’.

Studies often look for the clearest indication of this—cells with male chromosomes in women who have had sons—but you can also get those indirectly from an older male sibling, because your mother can pass them back to you in the womb.

The whole idea is just beautiful to me, that both my son and my brother quite literally live in me forever. I find meaning in it. And it makes me wonder what other magic is at work when we bring our ancestors to life, through birth.