I was described to someone, right in front of me, as “…the sort of person who educates people involuntarily.”

Friends started to make bets that within 5 minutes of any conversation, I’ll perk up and say excitedly, “I researched that!” And then bring up obscure, detailed facts. I don’t like that I can be so predictable… But wait, you ask, did the three fates have names? Well, I only know the Greek version, but there were Roman fates, fates in other cultures, woah, that made me think of Romulus and Remus for some reason, I read a fascinating book about them… 2 minutes later we are talking about the rise and fall of Rome, and the geopolitical realities of some obscure eastern European country in the spring of 1654.

The saddest thing is that as I get older, I find my recall starting to fail. I’m struggling more and more to pull facts I know that I know. The deluge of information coming from my yammering maw is increasingly choppy and punctuated by trying to remember exact bits of info.

My nicknane was “walking encyclopedia” when I was a kid so that tracks.

In my undergrad I went from being a chemistry/physics double major to a biochemist and finally finished my chemistry degree. (I am not far from having 3 degrees) I studied ASL, German and Japanese, modded video games and competed in a semiprofessional starcraft league. I wrote instrument guides and procedures for undergrads, contributed to papers on bioremediation, synthesized nanoparticles using genetically engineered enzymes. I developed a method for a plant alkaloid assay and a new way to reduce noise in an experiment designed to measure the rate of certain reactions that occur in extremely diluted systems. i.e single or double digit number of molecules in the entire sample.

Now I tutor college students in chemistry, physics, math and biology and work on computational chemistry projects.