I’ve never required much help in eliminating options from my life. Chemistry was like that. Lab work and I don’t get along as a general rule. I quickly learned in high school that I am not particularly fond of cutting up long dead frogs pickled in formaldehyde or mixing chemicals that smell worse than an old dog’s fart. But there is more to it than that: I am convinced that good lab technicians enjoy putting things together, taking them apart, tinkering, and fixing things. As a general rule, I don’t. 

For example, I knew kids in high school who loved working on automobiles.  Ask them anything about carburetors, water pumps, generators, horsepower or timing and they had a ready answer. They couldn’t wait to get their hands covered in grease. I admired them for it, but my interest in carburetors was zilch. My primary interest in automobiles was that they get me from point A to point B without breaking down. Still is

My hobbies as a kid reflected this. Building model ships, airplanes, cars, trains, etc. had no interest for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the results, some were mind-blowing in their detail and realistic look, but my concept of a great hobby was rock collecting. I would pick up interesting rocks on my excursions into the surrounding country until all four pockets were bulging and my pants about to fall off. I would then go home and smash them apart with a hammer to figure out what I had found. Geology became a life-long interest.

I do understand the arguments for being able to fix things: saving money, being self-sufficient, and obtaining satisfaction from a job well done, not to mention being manly. These same arguments, however, apply to going out in the pasture, shooting Elsie the Cow, skinning and gutting her, bringing home the meat, grinding it up, and throwing it on the grill. Just think of the satisfaction involved and dollars saved! Or you can go to the local fast-food joint and help employ a kid who might otherwise turn to a life of crime.

Now, back to chemistry and lab work. One day we had to shove little glass tubes through rubber stoppers. Apparently, this is an important skill for budding chemists. It’s not a difficult task if you ignore the fact that the holes in the stoppers are significantly smaller than the diameter of the glass tubes and, more importantly, have a gallon of Vaseline. I was half way through my first masterpiece when the damn tube broke and ended up jabbed into my hand. Bleeding like a speared mammoth, I was carted off to the emergency room of the local hospital and sewn up. 

My attitude toward chemistry was already iffy. With the accident, it dropped faster than it took me to hit the ground in my fall from the pear tree. Higher math created another challenge.

There’s an old adage that we are supposed to work hard at those things we find difficult, that it gives us character. My belief is that I already have plenty of character. If I had any more, little men in white coats would be chasing me with nets. I prefer to spend my energy on things I enjoy, like reading a good book or hiking in the wilderness. Or writing. I have little tolerance for doing things that I don’t do well or fail to interest me. In other words, the Protestant Ethic and I have serious compatibility problems.

But I can be stubborn. Math is a good example. In the fourth grade I discovered that long division was nasty. I got beyond that, but word problems gave me a complex. Two trains are hurtling at each other on the same track with Train A going 90 miles per hour and Train B going 70. They are 252.5296 miles apart. How long will it be before the Train A engineer says, “Ooooh shit!”

“At the same time as the Train B engineer does,” was my answer.

But not nearly as soon as I did. My own expletive arrived on my lips .0000001 seconds after seeing the problem on the blackboard. I concentrated on sending the teacher vibes. “Curt is not here today. You do not see Curt. You will not call on Curt.” But I continued plugging away at math and did fine in grade school. I even managed to ace Algebra I and Geometry. Algebra II was different. That’s when I ran head on into Miss Kaste. It was not a pleasant experience.

Miss Kaste, according to those who were seriously into math, was very good at what she did. Students leaving her class were reputed to have a solid foundation in the basics and be well prepared to move on to the ethereal worlds of calculus and trigonometry.

Basics, I quickly learned, meant that there was one way of coming up with answers and that way was chiseled in stone. One did not diverge from accepted formulas or leave out steps. Right answers obtained the wrong way were wrong answers. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

This created a problem. I had a true talent for coming up with right answers in my own way and this brought me unwanted attention. I could have lived with that except for another problem, Miss Kaste’s teaching technique. She oozed sarcasm. She made people cry. My response was to freeze up or act like a clown. I couldn’t tolerate it— or her. Math was eliminated from my future.

Once again, it speaks to the power of teachers to turn students on, or off, to various subjects. I wasn’t a total dunce at math. Ironically, I scored in the 95^th percentile on the Iowa Test in math the same year. Theoretically, that placed me in the top five percent of math students. I wasn’t a genius, but I could have/should have done better.

There was plenty of time while sitting in ER bleeding to contemplate my future as a scientist. My conclusion: there wasn’t one. Even though I enjoyed botany and geology, I decided that the best way to avoid long-dead animals, smelly chemicals, labs and math would be to choose a career that depended on subjects I enjoyed, and made use of my verbal ability and organizational skills.

Looking back, (hindsight, mind you), I am not too surprised about the paths I chose to follow in my life. They were right for me. No regrets. But given I’ve always found science enjoyable from a lay perspective as an adult, I sometimes regret I didn’t obtain a better background in high school and college. My bad.