Glaciers, mammoths, wastelands. That’s how this story I’m reading starts out, and that’s what my brain feels full of after working on a research poster all weekend. The story is by Evgeniy Zamyatin (don’t worry, no one will ever make you pronounce that), and it’s called “The Cave”. My poster is called “The Relationship Among Hopelessness, Thwarted Belongingness, and Perceived Burdensomeness in a Sample of United States Air Force Suicide Decedents” and no one will ever make you pronounce that either.
Weirdly, it’s calming to torture my brain by reading a story in Russian after torturing my brain with data and analyses. I guess balancing the creative and scientific parts of your brain make you feel good. Or I’m just totally messed up from the glass of wine I had three hours ago (settle down, I usually drink beer — no, make that whiskey…and raw meat too..actually I just eat livestock and drink lighter fluid). Ahem, where was I?
“And no one knows who trumpets at night along the stony path among the rocks; and, sniffing out the path, blows about the white snowdust. Perhaps it is a graytrunked mammoth; perhaps the wind; but perhaps — the wind is the icy roar of some super-mammothy mammoth.”
Quote from the Cave. Yeah, it’s about people living in a cave. And yeah, I just threw that in there because anyone who says “super-mammothy mammoth” is awesome.
So now I have supermammoths rollicking around in my brain and they’re being their obnoxious, prehistoric selves (are they prehistoric? what does that even mean? whatever), but it was worth it. I squeezed some significant results out of a bunch of numbers and I am content. Plus, maybe in some tiny infinitesimal way I contributed some tiny baby-sized amount of information to a body of work that tries to keep people from killing themselves, so that’s good too. All in all, not a bad weekend, although I spent entirely too much time indoors…
And I guess it was good for another reason, too. Those mammoths and glaciers and whatnot got me to finally write on this damn blog.
So, recap:
Mammoths = tasty
Glaciers = will sink your ship no matter how many handsome people are on it
Wasteland = a poem by T.S. Eliot that people seem to really like
Actually, that made me look up the Wasteland right now and the first line is “April is the cruellest month”. Fucking taxes.
Shantih shantih shantih.