The Leidenfrost Effect

On embracing a cliche here and there (and how thinking about gender helped me dance in the rain)

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

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THE LEIDENFROST EFFECT*

It seems unavoidable to sometimes find yourself living the kind of life that reads as a cliche. 

Like spending a Saturday afternoon dancing in the rain at a courtyard party in Brooklyn. Or tearing up at a stadium show where the whole crowd sings every word as if it had been written strictly about them. Or taking a Valentine's Day staycation in a hotel room that is mostly a bathtub with a nice view of a storied city. Or drawing a big heart on your partner’s lunchbox and texting them “I love you” once you know they’ve settled at their desk.

Living in New York lends itself to moments that feel like they could be, or even should be, in a movie. Because the city has been a character in so many works of fiction, as you move through it some of that history and that feeling get stuck to you too. Spend enough time here and you either start to hate it and develop a temper or you start to think that people who gave up on treating themselves as main characters have it wrong. Do you ever listen to an unreasonably upbeat pop song on an early morning train commute to work? It makes me feel like I am in the opening credits of a television show about my very niche journalism job, like if Carrie Bradshaw was nonbinary and wrote about atoms instead of sex.

The thought is sort of ridiculous, but it is not always unhelpful, and the ridiculousness of it makes it easier to dismiss. The other stuff, the dancing in the rain and the romantic getaways, are more difficult to parse as it feels that most of my identity as a young person was centered on rejecting them. 

Partly, the idea of wanting to be different, or to be more blunt, wanting to be better than the average person by rejecting the thing that they like came from my parents. My father had always considered himself to simultaneously have been a rebel and a person of great taste because he opted to be a heavy metal fan instead of liking disco and dance music in the 1980s. My mother never really wanted to be like the other girls either and taught me the same: for years before I started attending the school where she worked, she disdainfully told me about all the girls who were airheaded and only cared about makeup and boys. Between the two of them I started to understand that I could hold myself in higher esteem, even at the price of occasionally being bullied, if I rejected my peers' interests as frivolous and unrefined, especially if they were women.

And it’s not that I never liked heavy metal, because I still do, and it is not that I never got to wear makeup, because I certainly still do that too, but I did use these things to tell myself a story of who I am and who I would grow up to become that made my world fairly black-and-white, an us-versus-them kind of paradigm that could make me feel vindicated whenever I got confused or lonely. For a few years, these ideas did help me get by. I made friends who had chosen similar interests that were not very mainstream, and I was such a devoted fan of things that I did find worthy of my fandom that it was rather difficult for me to be bored. 

Me as a senior in high school, on an amusement park field trip

But as I did have to keep growing up, being a tomboy first and an over-the-top metalhead later started to become unsustainable. My parents, who had wanted me to be different started to realize that just like they grew up to live more conventional lives so I should too. All of a sudden I was made to shave my legs and field questions about why I do not have a boyfriend. The weird friends I had made were seen as a quirk that would pass by instead of an attempt to actually build companionship. Even my fandom of metal music became a point of contention as my father did not actually like the newer, more extreme genres that my friends and I now gravitated towards.

Though the whole thing felt like a deeply personal instance of growing pains, and very narrowly limited to me, I was almost certainly a part of a very capitalistic ecosystem of teenage rebellion. Because I lived in Croatia, buying t-shirts from Swedish death metal bands took some ingenuity and more cash than it would take me now, but a big part of my being different did hinge on buying the correct clothes and being seen at the correct bars and concert venues. 

When I moved to the United States, the buying part became easier, and I had become even more of a monetizable audience and a demographic for a certain kind of product. It has been somewhat ironic to watch H&M sell band t-shirts and clothes in the style of Hot Topic come back into fashion, or goth filters pop up on TikTok over the years. They have all repeatedly confirmed my suspicion that rejecting mainstream cliches only lands you into another brand of cliche, and a well-defined market exists for all of them.

And no matter how much you try, you cannot buy yourself a sense of cool or anything like the kind of individualism that a store will try to sell you. On one of my first blogs in college, I wrote about this incessantly - have record stores really killed punk or is there still a way to subvert the system even if you get your Ramones fix at a Barnes and Noble? I had read books about the philosophical and psychological foundations of style and the self and my mind worked overtime to try and integrate them all into the way I was trying to live. After a few years of my living abroad by myself, my parents only grew more confused as to who I was trying to be and whether I was growing up at all. But I dated boys and wore short skirts and shaved my legs here and there so we could maintain something of a stable status quo, or at least focus on other points of conflict.

I was reminded of the limits of store-bought identity again this summer when Target decided to remove much of their Pride-themed merchandise from stores that had received lots of conservative hate. For a few years, it felt like acceptance of queer people had progressed enough that we were now seen as a marketable demographic. Pride got corporatized and national chains began to recognize it as a business opportunity.

But companies are rarely selling you anything other than a product and what values you imbue that product with depends on what you want to see in it and how much effort they put into pitching you on some new version of yourself. It’s a collaborative effort of self-deceit in which they always profit and you stand a good chance of being duped. Target probably lost profits by removing all those products, but they could justify it by appeasing the market in the long term because it was never at all about representing queer people anyway.

I do still own many of the band t-shirts I had bought in high school, but I barely ever wear them. Something about having performed my fandom for years instead of allowing myself to be more complex has soured the act of displaying it all across my body. In retrospect, being a fan of metal was a perfect set up for a person like me. 

As the genre was dominated by male performers and masculine themes when I was a teenager, embracing it allowed me to reject traditional femininity, which has always scared me, and find excuses to be more butch, substituting combat boots and oversized tops for language that I only now have for my gender. As a metalhead, I could be “one of the boys” and since I was for a very long time more intimidated by the prospect of sex with men than anything else, I could complain about how they never saw me as a potential “hot goth girlfriend” without actually having to risk any sort of fearsome engagement.

I have never wanted to be a man, or felt like one at all, but in 2005 Croatia there were no words for being nonbinary and even bisexuality was seen as a cry for attention. Dyeing your hair black, wearing too much eyeliner, drinking while underage and screaming along to dark and violent lyrics, on the other hand, was something people could file away as familiar and easily digestible, even if it was at times unsavory. 

In college, on top of all of these trappings, I tried to swing the other way quite hard and become a hot girl that crushed on boys. This would make my father happy because I would be feminine, but still like the things that he liked. And it would make my mother happy because I would be growing into a woman without being an airhead. Later, when I learned about internalized misogyny, I could somewhat understand how it applied to me, and how it had been driving some of my conceptions of self. However, it was unclear to me how to replace it with self-love and empowerment since being whatever it was that people call “a woman” felt completely unnatural. It would take me a long time to work out that if feeling like a woman feels like a task that I have to work at or a puzzle that I need to solve instead of something innate, then that is just not who I am. 

Me, in Croatia, during one of my college summers

Coming to terms with this, and finding the language of nonbinary gender, has also made it easier for me to look back and notice that so many ways in which I wanted to be different involved rejecting traditional femininity and traditionally feminine interests. I was not trying to avoid the mainstream as much as I was trying to avoid being a mainstream girl, and I was not so much trying to avoid cliches as much as I was trying to avoid cliches that an average girl would like. My parents encouraged this when it suited them and discouraged it when I crossed the lines of heteronormative and cisnormative behaviors that I was nevertheless expected to grow into. These days, I can put on Barbie-pink make up and dance in the rain all Saturday, or gush about a band of girls on the Internet, exactly because I had stopped trying to reject the things that I am not, and commit to those that I feel like I both am and could still become.

This is not to say that there is not a place for being critical of mainstream culture and the way it is often shaped by ideas that stem from whiteness, maleness and anything but genuine queerness. There are, of course, artists and movie stars who are not straight, white, cisgendered men, but we still talk about them differently and hold them up to different standards. While queer people have always been pioneers of culture, the mainstream still rewards folks who imitate and borrow from queerness more than queer people themselves. 

I still believe that one should mostly reject the mainstream, or at least question it with vigilance, but I have also come to understand that sometimes an imperfect thing that makes you feel a little more joy is better than rejecting so much just to gain a false sense of purity and an awful lot of self-hate. More often than not, there is little that is inherently virtuous about avoiding being a cliche because that avoidance is really pointed at avoiding a type of person or identity that we are scared of seeing within ourselves.

In the era of “content creator” being a career, individuality and personality are, probably more than ever, things that are manufactured and put up for sale. Many of us arrive at the contradiction of wanting to be critical of what we are being fed, but also slurp a lot of it up because it will make us feel more authentically full. There is also something very intrinsically American in trying to be different from everybody else, a sort of rugged social individualism, with the Internet being an especially rich frontier for prioritizing difference. Sitting within the contradictions of it all does seem to be possible, especially if one takes steps to be anything but chronically online, but it is not always the easiest choice. 

I am lucky in that my lifelong obsession with the physical world has given me a chance to sometimes step away from myself and consider what the world is like outside of my head. Spending so much time reading and writing about the physical world has helped me understand that complete individuality and absolute sameness are not the only two choices and that both nature itself and the way we have come to think of it heavily underlines this. 

Most days it is a part of my job as a science journalist to scan through hundreds of titles of new academic works and pick out those that stand out. Except that after a little over a year on the job I am seeing more patterns and similarities than I am seeing true outliers. Scientists do make new discoveries all the time, but most can be compared to something we already know or classified alongside some similar previous discovery. Conversely, our efforts to fully define any system often fail as it, whether it is a material or just a bunch of atoms, quickly displays something unexpected. 

There are materials that are so similar to all others that are called metals that we have not come up with a better word for them, but when the conditions get to be just right, like when they are extremely cold, they behave oddly, like conducting electricity better than all experience and theory suggest that they should. However, this is not strange enough to strip the category of metal from them so physicists have made “strange metal” into a technical term, sort of like for a kid who rejects a mainstream cliche to accept a more alternative one. 

There are crystals that can be neatly classified and broken down into a formula because they look like perfectly repeating grids of atoms or molecules. But since the 1980s, researchers have also engineered 100s of quasicrystals which look like they are made of regularly repeating elements but if you look closer you realize that their patterns are actually irregular and unpredictable. They share so much with proper, uniform materials we call crystals that they claim some of the name, yet not enough to drop the prefix “quasi”. 

And then there are things like supersolids which are in two very extreme phases, that of superfluidity and solidity, at once, mixing two cliches as different as that Barbie-and-goth house meme. My favorite, however, may be graphene, an atomically thin layer of carbon atoms that researchers have been calling a wonder material for years. There is in many ways nothing more cliche than claiming that graphene will be the next big thing in condensed matter and materials physics, to such an extent that some of my reporter colleagues simply roll their eyes at the idea of having to write about this material yet again. But we have, at the same time, somehow collectively not run out of things to discover about it, out of little oddities that make it less basic and more interesting again. As I am writing this, scientific reports on multiple such new discoveries are crowding my inbox at work. 

Nature loves cliches in that it gives us so much repetition, similarity, and opportunities to engage the parts of our brain that seek out patterns. But when we overdo it, it also reminds us that a cliche is rarely the end of the story about some object or system. Describing something with a cliche rarely actually subtracts from the richness of all its other possible behaviors.

One of the things that have made the last few years of my life so much better than most of my teens and twenties has been forgiving myself for sometimes wanting to be like other people and for sometimes doing the thing that everyone else does. Whether it’s putting blush on my nose because I saw it on TikTok or having that one haircut that all of my other nonbinary friends have, these things have both made me feel like being myself is less of a minefield of doubt and helped me recognize myself more in people whom I adore. 

The opposite of self-hate is curiosity and tenderness, and the opposite of rugged individualism is letting small moments of personality and life-story overlap grow into being in community. And being comfortable with yourself does mean sometimes living out cliches, and doing so with joy.

Best,

Karmela 

*The Leidenfrost effect refers to a phenomenon where droplets of water “dance” over a surface that is hotter than their boiling point. This happens because a layer of insulating vapor forms first and prevents the droplets that hit the surface afterwards from touching it and immediately evaporating. Sometimes you can see this effect when water droplets skitter and shuffle across a very hot pan.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

Taking a slight detour from what I usually write about, I reported on a study on how octopuses sleep. The findings of the study are rather remarkable as it showed that they have REM sleep similar to ours even though our last shared ancestor was probably some tiny, worm-like organism swimming in the ocean hundreds of millions of years ago. Yet, this was a fairly difficult story to report because the animals had to undergo a rather invasive procedure which included their arms being surgically shortened before their sleeping brains could be scanned. Some of that gruesomeness did not make it into print, and the video that the researchers shared of the sleeping, and possibly dreaming, octopus are stunning, but I kept thinking about whether scientific progress really necessitates pain - and I am still not quite sure what to make of it.

I also reported a story that one of my supervisors characterized as “so Karmela” and I think that I was meant to take that as a compliment. It was about an experiment where a team of researchers used a weak laser and the fact that empty space is not actually empty but filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles that flicker in and out of existence to try and build a new kind of light-based computer. I had some really fascinating conversations about the fundamentals of quantum theory while I was writing this story, and I guess that part is indeed very like me. 

I also made a brief appearance on the New Scientist weekly podcast to discuss a new version of quantum LiDAR and what it may do for autonomous vehicles in the future.

READING

This rather creative and rather insightful essay by science reporter Dan Garisto on how difficult it has become to write about quantum computing, even if you do understand the basics of the science involved. As someone who often finds themselves in this position, and someone who has become highly aware of how dishonest the public relations apparatus this particular type of research comes with can be, I appreciated both the case study and the general commentary here.

This essay by Elda Maria Roman in the Rumpus that discusses what she calls “psychic cartographies.” She sets the premise up by writing 

“What would our psyches reveal if they showed these terrains of fear? If the psyche could be thought of as a landscape, a psychic cartography, the following is just one way to map one out. It would have fences, barbed wire, open fields, and landmines.

The fences would be of varying heights, and would be used to guard against and deflect threats posed by people, feelings, and uncertain situations. We’re tempted to think these fences are invisible to others, since they’re internal. (Sometimes they remain hidden even to ourselves.) But they can be perceived. Most strongly, felt. Those around us may register them as character traits. A person is Reserved. Cold. Aloof. Closed. Maybe always, or it’s apparent only when we react, readied for defense, raising our posts.

My fence was built in childhood. But it does have a door, and I’ve been working on opening and walking through.”

I found the exploration of the idea that follows, illustrated by a number of examples from her life, to be intriguing and emotionally resonant.

LISTENING

I’m a few months late, but I finally listened to The Age of Pleasure by Janelle Monae and though I quite liked it, it did not grip me as strongly as some of the artist’s past works. Monae is a long time favorite and one of the musicians that opened me up to both more pop-sounding music and queer art so I am always excited when they produce something new. Her past record, Dirty Computer, resonated with me and I listened to it over and over through my last few years of graduate school and most of the training for my first half-marathon. Though I enjoy The Age of Pleasure, I put it down much more quickly. This is a fun, liberated and libertine record dripping with summer and just the right amount of cheeky eroticism. As a rebrand of Monae from the robotic, black-and-white figure from a decade ago to something of a sensual party deity it does really work. Yet, there is a bit of depth or a complication of some sort missing, something to anchor it beyond being just upbeat and non-trivially frothy. After listening to it a few times, I found myself going back to Red Moon in Venus by Kali Uchis, another sensual record that is somehow just a little more thorny and a little less likely to fade from memory.

WATCHING

We finished the first season of the big-wave surfing documentary series 100 Foot Wave on Max and I feel fairly lukewarm about it. This is a documentary series that follows a few extreme athletes and it looks and sounds exactly like you would imagine such a series to look and sound. It has that polished and dramatic docuseries feeling, but earnestness is missing and typical sports tropes too easily recognizable. There is something interesting and genuine about the stories of people who feel a strong urge to put themselves in danger repeatedly, and every surfer that is featured does at some point get very, very injured and traumatized, but the packaging of the show makes it seem just a little too finessed to be fully relatable. It certainly does not help that this series mostly follows men who are dealing with emotional issues by letting the ocean hurt them, and one wife-turned-manager who seems to be doing almost all of the serious work in the story.

On a whim, we watched John Woo’s 1997 Nick Cage and John Travolata extravaganza Face/Off and I was truly stunned by how much more unhinged this movie is than I remember from when I was six years old. For some reason, trailers for this movie were always playing on Croatian TV when I was young so I assumed that it was a film similar to any other action thriller the local station could afford to replay. This re-watch showed me that I was very wrong. Face/Off is high camp, it’s a cyberpunk action story, it’s highly choreographed fight overload, and it is filled to the brim with offensive depictions of women and relationships, and wildly unrealistic portrayals of children. Cage and Travolta are both doing some of their most not quite good but certainly intense acting, or they are both very intoxicated, and everyone else in the film is trying to match their energy within a script that only barely makes sense. My partner and I watched this movie with our mouths open, unsure whether to laugh or feel bad about sinking our Friday evening into it.

EATING

I sold some cakes and baked goods at my first ever vegan market and that made for a very fun day of baking, hanging out with my partner, and meeting lots of new people that like to eat. I was especially touched by how popular the jam-filled yeasted buns I started making years ago because they reminded me of my grandma’s baking were. I have shared a sketch of the recipe for them, as well as the chocolate cake that I was also selling, here and here as part of a vegan January series a few years ago.

I make a vegan version of these burger buns every time when we have an excuse to grill, even if that just means throwing plant-based patties on a grill pan at home. The ones I made for 4th of July reminded me of why I am so loyal to this recipe and they are fairly easy to make, especially if you can substitute a Kitchenaid dough hook for elbow grease.

Mushrooms are one of my biggest and most regular farmer’s market splurges and I wrote a little on how I’ve been liking preparing them very simply here.

Finally, my husband and I managed to gather enough patience to wait for a table at the new Superiority Burger location on the Lower East Side and not only was it absolutely worth it, but I could eat the yuba and green sandwich and the peanut butter pie every day for the rest of my life and not be bored by their exquisite flavors.