Phonon

On turning 30, gloomy holidays and revisiting 2021

Thanks for reading my newsletter! This is a special end-of-the-year edition that features a short personal essay and a podcast-like recording of a conversation I had with Adam Fortais, a cherished Internet friend, as a sort of last minute attempt at a longtime planned collaborative creative project before another year gets away from us. 

If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Tweets about teaching or my Instagrams about cooking, you may not be interested in every piece of content in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common. In the meantime, find me on Twitter and Instagram.

PHONON*

During the week before Christmas, each day I spent two or three hours waiting in line for a COVID-19 test. We ate dinner late and I worked out even later because the long, winding, freezing lines took precedence over everything I may have wanted to schedule for my after-work hours instead. Most nights my phone pinged and lit up with rapid test results while I was still on the train where I was yet again exposing myself to strangers and the potentiality of the virus they had come to represent on my way home. I held my breath, clenched my jaw and hoped really hard for a negative. I lucked out every time despite an alarming number of my students testing positive throughout the week and the fact that coming to school itself meant spending more time on crowded public transit. 

After the last full day of classes, I was on a testing line in Jamaica, Queens, ready to go meet my mom at the airport. She was about to fly in from Croatia to spend the holidays with my husband and me. Last time when she was in Brooklyn, I was still living in Illinois and we all stayed in my in-law’s basement. Now, I was looking forward to showing her our very own apartment and plunge her into my new routines and the sense of freedom New York has given me in the last two years. To get to that, however, I felt like I needed to invest in our safety as much as possible, including testing right before we meet up, an event that would certainly not pass without some less-than-six-feet contact. I was turning this all over in my mind while my toes were going numb, nearing the end of the first hour of waiting to be called into the small makeshift clinic for a 30 second nose swab that could change everything. The line was chattier than many I had previously waited in in Manhattan and I soon learned that the two aspiring test subjects on each side of me had had an even worse week than I had. One admitted to having flu-like symptoms and the other shared that they had had COVID-19 just a week ago. Underneath my suddenly flimsy-feeling cloth mask, I was terrified. If going to school had somehow miraculously not made me sick, this line just might. 

The next day me, my mom, and six other members of my family met up at a cabin in the Poconos after all repeatedly testing negative. We were getting ready to actually have a family Christmas in the sense of the word nearing the way we talked about holidays in the “before times”. It felt a little like we had all won the lottery, or some other game with traditionally awful odds for victory. And then I spent the next two days in a bad mood. 

I anxiously paced around the kitchen and expressed opinions about veggie chili and premade mashed potatoes with too much ardor. I sulked on one of the many leather couches in the cabin in front of screens filled with the fire log channel, annoyed by the crackling of the fake fire instead of being soothed by it. I refused to go into the hot tub or play pool in the basement and ate chocolates my mom had brought from Croatia until I felt disgusted by the gurgling, and the pain in my lower stomach where my body stores stress whenever my shoulders cannot get any more stiff and knotty than they already are. The day after Christmas, while we were getting ready to return to Brooklyn, my husband asked how exactly I expected to have a good time when I came in with so much wallowing in my heart and mind. As he so often does, he saw right through me. 

Christmas season is also birthday season for me (I am turning 30 today) and being so explicitly and publicly confronted with the passage of time has for the past few years felt like being drawn into a fight. A fight with expectations, with memories, with checklists, with best-of’s, with steps walked, pounds gained, hours worked. I have been having a very tiring year and the transition from work to the holidays felt abrupt and dissonant. With less than a day between my last class and Christmas Eve I was unable to forget about that sinking, tired feeling in my body and my mind as the tune of my inner monologues was supposed to change from anxious school chatter to chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Facing a round birthday, the three-oh, in a mostly empty city that has once again become the center of disease and disease-related panic,while staying away from friends to keep them safe (everyone who works from home is by default much safer than a high school teacher), weighed heavily on me. I never really snapped out of it, to be quite honest. Returning to our home in Brooklyn just softened the edges of my sourness and iciness because there is a steady baseline of comfort and safety I associate with our apartment. The leftover anxiety of the past few weeks and the inklings of upcoming anxiety about going back to work in less than a week are still lodged in my chest, in the same place where I expect the virus to reveal itself any day now. This is not the feeling I want to cultivate in my 30s, but it has been a reality for the culminating years of my 20s. I am trying to learn how to sit with it without letting it consume me completely. 

The conversation that you can listen to above, graciously hosted and spearheaded by my friend Adam Fortais, reflects some of the anxieties that bubble up for me around the holidays, but also features me in a more optimistic, self-reflective but still cheerful, mood. It is presumably a conversation about the year 2021, but it is really a meandering back-and-forth about the process of figuring things out whether those things be finding a job or the mythos around some beloved movie. It is also a conversation about the Internet, a fitting throughline for our mainly digital friendship and this newsletter as a medium in which I stretch myself the most emotionally and intellectually.

Both Adam and I have completed PhDs in physics which makes us, whether we want it or not, trained problem solvers and analytical thinkers. We gravitate towards taking things apart and asking many “why”, “how” and “in what way” questions. As we discuss, this can be very enjoyable, but it can also lead to a feeling of incompleteness or severely unfinished business when whatever is happening in our lives does not follow a clear breakdown or an easily labeled timeline. I realize that part of my fear of turning 30 stems from this - I feel such a strong urge to tabulate and rank and weigh everything I have done so far. Listening back to my and Adam’s conversation, however, I heard a completely different wish in my voice too, a wish to let go more and more often. I’m taking today off to set the right tone for this, playing into a small superstitious belief that I can pre-determine some of the year to come by structuring this day correctly. I’m running, I’m eating the cake I made for myself yesterday, I’m letting my mom and husband tag-team dinner, and I’m thinking about how much I love all the friends I’d be spending today with under different circumstances. 

I count many of my readers here among those friends and want to thank you for bearing with me through the gloom and grind of this year. I hope you’ll stick around for whatever is about to happen now that my 20s are officially over, and that you’ll enjoy some of my rambling about the year I am now ready to put to bed.

Best,

Karmela 

*In condensed matter physics, a phonon is a particle-like excitation in solids and some liquids. If a photon is a “chunk” of light, then a phonon can be best described as a “chunk” of sound or a sort of a narrow packet of vibration. Phonons are ubiquitous in studies of quantum fluids, where their behavior exemplifies how different these fluids are from classical liquids like water, and in many quantum devices, where they usually mean trouble in the sense of energy being inappropriately wasted on shaking and vibrating instead of whatever the device is designed for.

Photo by @bigbabyintoyland