Sunlit Room

Mike here.

At the North Kingstown library, since it's a quiet place where I can get out of the condo for a while and read. The sunny, tree-filled view of the lagoon behind Wickford Village doesn't hurt either. I may turn this into my surrogate office for a while, since my grad office at URI feels a bit like a prison cell at times.

I don't like belaboring things, so I won't go into fears of joblessness again--I covered that well enough a few posts ago. I will add, that the cycle of optimisim-to-fear, and back again, isn't much fun. It's like the old saying with wood, that if it stays dry, or stays wet, it'll be fine--but rot sets in when it alternates between the two. Bouncing between fear and hope is much the most tiring, and even angering, aspect of looking for and not finding work (and even having a few legit prospects isn't much comfort).

So I'm trying to put those thoughts aside (unsuccessfully, since I'm typing a blog about it) and return to work on my dissertation, on the formation of Narragansett Bay after the North American ice sheet melted back, between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. With the disappearance of the ice, many things happened, but two stand out: first, the water which had formerly been frozen into the ice, returned to the ocean (where it had originally come from in the form of vapor and then snow), raising sea levels by nearly 400 feet. Second, once the ice left, the weight of the ice sheet no longer pressed down on the earth's crust, or surface, and the surface then rose. Think of a grown man stepping out of a dinghy. Without his weight, the dinghy rises up by several inches in the water. Same thing happened to the entire area (to various degrees) where the ice sheet had once lain.

See, I like writing about science, even in the simplest of terms. I enjoy figuring out a riddle of evidence, and then ordering and describing that riddle so that it's no longer a riddle (I don't particularly enjoy telling riddles). Perhaps it's my fear of theoretical physics (which helped drive me to geology and archeology), but I insist on describing things in the simplest terms I can conceive. And even as Katie and I contemplate the possibility of our unemployment benefits running out, and as we apply for food stamps, perhaps turning back to my scientific riddles is the best way I have through this (aside from pumping iron at the Y and getting hyoooge).