Lessons in Chemistry

Several months ago there was a contestant on Jeopardy, David Erb, who revealed in his contestant interview segment that his wife was the acclaimed author Bonnie Garmus, author of "Lessons in Chemistry." I'd heard of the book and the TV show, but didn't know much about the content of the book.... until today, in which I finally went to an independent bookstore (the best way to support authors and the entire writing industry, I'm told by a friend who was an aspiring author) and came home with the paperback (I've always had a mental block about buying a hard cover, perhaps the cheap side of me kicking in thinking a book is a book, why do I need to pay more for the binding) that has the red cover with chemical elements displayed, a way to at least remember a random assortment of the elemnts on the periodic table, like Curium (Cm, No. 96) and Nitrogen is 7 (that's actually a big one, squeezed right between No. 6 carbon and No. 8 oxygen). NOT the cover that I've seen around every bookstore with a blonde woman peeking behind sunglasses, after reading the book I felt that depiction is pretty far off from who the main character was except for the pencil in her hair; it looked like Sydney Sweeny in one of her romantic comedies. I was a little disappointed a book called "Lessons in Chemistry" doesn't have much chemistry in it, it's more about......romantic chemistry, but also about life and the challenges women face getting into traditionally "men" fields (which was almost all academic and high-earning fields) in the 1950s. If you left reading Lessons in Chemistry feeling that white men always feel like they run the world and get all the benefits, that's because they were.....at least in the 1950s, based on lack of laws against sexual discrimination, and the culture. You can still feel that to this day, or at least I felt it coming of age in White America in big law firms and working for judges, law professors, and just among some in the "elite fields...." there's a sort of entitlement that's definitely not confined only to white men, but definitely does exist in the "elite fields...." so I sense the frustration that Garmus's main character Elizabeth Zott must have felt. I've steered clear of fiction pretty much in the last 5 years, but when I do get into a good story, I flip the pages quickly and consistently, and for once am engaged enough to stay off the phone checking baseball scores: It's like I'm in a zone of focus normally reserved only for highly competitive endeavors like chess and dodgeball. I find getting through a book is MUCH more enjoyable when unplugging everything and not responding to any emails or distractions: it's like the old days when I was 10 years old lying down on the carpet fully engrossed in a book while my dad was cooking dinner or grandpa was watching TV.....there were no phones back then, no text messages, it was just me and the book, free for me to fall completely in that world, like having chemistry with the pages or the writer: the writer writes the words, I absorb the words and understand the pace of the book and brim with anticipation of where the book is going. YIL (Yesterday I learned) that Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were known for their involvement with the United Farm Workers but also in something called the "Delano Grape Boycott, started in 1965 where the farmers union encouraged consumers not to buy non-union grapes. I never even thought of grapes being non-union, but I wonder what kind of grapes I buy from Costco- union or non-union? Usually I only have to make the difficult choice of "red" or "green," apparently red has more antioxidants due to its deeper color, but green often has a more fresher, simpler flavor that agrees with me, red has more inclination to be sour and have more a tarte flavor. If I'm REALLY adventurous I'll get the black grapes or the cotton candy grapes, but my plain vanilla personality usually just defers to one of the standard non-adventurous flavors. I guess even in 1965 there were ways to influence corpoorate control and enforce rights, so maybe in 2025 we can still influence policy and business behavior through boycotting goods? The obvious example is Tesla cars which has driven sales of Tesla way down (but weirdly not necessarily the stock price) but also......can we change behavior of Costco's chicken policy by not buying their perpetually $4.99 rotisseries chicken? MJ and I briskly march past the rotisserie chicken ovens every time where there and try to avert our gaze to the rows and rows of chickens strung up on a spit and dripping with oils, which looks tasty after they roast it but probably not as appealing when they killed the chickens and raised them specifically fro killing. Perhaps vegan activism or at least supporting vegan restaurants will make some restaurants consider more meatless options and decrease their orders of chickens? That's the hope at least. More and more after reading books like "Soul of the Octopus" by Montgomery Sy or "Book of Eels" by Patrik Svenson (a pun on Book of Kells, maybe?) I get the sense that we should be learning from these animals, not eating them. Even ast tasty as they are. Maybe even have to examine my substitute for meat, shrimp....do they feel pain too? I tried vegan dim sum today in my latest experiment to eat every kind of normal dish in a vegan way: the shrimp rice roll can be replaced with some sort of seitan that makes it feel and taste like shrimp, and somehow they've replaced xiaolongbao soup dumplings with a vegan option. It's magic, maybe even a lesson in (food) chemistry.