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I suspect we’ve all seen it: women flock around gay men.

I saw other evidence as well. Women complained constantly about men – that they ogled women, reveled in juvenile sexual explicitness, were emotionally insensitive, and otherwise acted “straight.” I had a pretty dim view of men myself, so I was happy to try to be different from the average.

I had a crush on a coworker of mine, so I tried to emulate her gay male friends. I avoided all references to any attraction to women, swapped recipes with her, dove into women’s issues. One friend told me I was a woman trapped in a man’s body; another, female, called me an “honorary woman.” I was faaaabulous, snap, snap, snap. I figured when she found out I was straight, she would happily go for me.

I was born and reared to age eighteen in the town of Huntsville, AL. Werner Von Braun, the Nazi rocket engineer, had settled there after having been captured by the Allies at the end of WWII. That was long before I was born; I only knew him as the town hero, whom the civic center was named for. And he wasn’t the only one. So many Germans lived in our town during that time that all the speed limit signs were posted in both miles and kilometers. They worked at the Marshall Space Flight Center, where astronauts were trained and rockets tested. A few of their wives opened a German cuisine restaurant, The Old Heidelberg Kitchen, that was very popular.

Whitney Houston is an irrevocably divisive figure. First, I think discussions like the one I will attempt to describe could only occur in college. Second, this is certainly based on a true story; you can't make up stuff like this.

I went to school in the heart of the Bible Belt in Georgia. The anti-evolution crusader Duane Gish once visited our school on invitation to explain why evolution was unscientific. Being a budding physicist and a skeptic of religious fundamentalism, I saw what I thought were lots of problems in his thinking. I laid them out in a letter I sent to the editor of the school paper.

A review of The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin

Physics, according to Smolin, has hit a wall. The last time a fundamental theory of physics successfully explained a new observation from the real world was 1981. No twenty-five-year period in the past two hundred years, by Smolin’s reckoning, has been as fallow for physics as the one we’ve just lived through. Having spent several years of my career in elementary particle physics, the field from which Smolin harkens, I know he’s right.

I was on vacation visiting a friend, and had spent several days in a row in the company of my friend’s best friend, a woman I was starting to really like a lot. However, I was intimidated by her because she seemed so much more romantically and sexually experienced than I was. She was also smart, cool and self-confident, and had plenty of guys interested in her, so I figured she would never go for me, nor even much care what I thought of her.

Near the end of my visit we had an unusually hot day for April, and none of us had clothes for it. She and I separated from the others to stop at a boutique so she could get a sun dress. I browsed while she chose a few pieces to try on.

At 10 years old, there was a period of a few months when I became obsessed with exploring caves. After watching a documentary about a group of spelunkers who get lost in a Mexican cave during a flood, I fell in love with the idea of miner's headlamps and clever rope tricks used to drag yourself through narrow crevices and junctions. I searched my neighborhood for any place I could find that looked cave-like. I crouched down and scuttled around the crawl space underneath our house with my father's oversized work flashlight for hours until the battery died. My father worked nights at the rail yard and for several years wondered if his eyesight was failing because his flashlight always seemed to be dimmer than that of his coworkers.

In the fall of 1998, I was given 17 minutes of warning before the plane left. I was going to be sent to Mississippi to be a real-world medic for a 4 day exercise. The “battle” was going to be taking place right in the middle of “Tropical Storm Francis”, so for 4 days, troops would be contested against each other in the muggy, muddy backwaters of Mississippi in order that the commander’s could prove to each other how good they were at commanding troops, and hopefully get a promotion out of it. We went from the brown grasslands of Colorado to the verdant deciduous plants of the south. But I remember that entire trip in grayscale. The constant rain blurred the black plant life into the surrounding grey concrete slabs housing white eyed humans in soaking wet uniforms.

All my life I've been a criminal -- luckily only when I'm asleep. In my recurring dream, the police are always hunting for me because I've done something really dumb and disgusting. Once, I dreamed that I pulled out a gun and robbed the diner where I go every morning before breakfast and where everybody knows me and knows my family. Another time I went to pick up the police chief's daughter for a date and ended up stealing the chief's car out of his driveway instead. By the end of my recurring dream, I am invariably running down a street with th cops hot after me, saying to myself, Why did I even do that? It's not like I needed to. Now I'm in trouble, in trouble in trouble...

Luckily, unlike real criminals, I get to wake up from my bad dream!

When my husband was a small child, there was a tree that banged against the house during storms. His father told him that the noise was made by "killer, man-eating rabbits" living in the attic. He became terrified of the idea of bunnies, but none of the adults in the family realized to what extent. Later that summer, they were on a canoe trip and his older brother announced they were approaching the "rapids." He went into hysterics and tried to walk on water out of that canoe to run away from the "rabbits."

In high school I participated in a team-based competitive quiz game called “scholar’s bowl.” Our school’s scholar’s bowl team regularly traveled to tournaments hosted in towns scattered around the state. I was particularly valued on our team for my knowledge of science history.

Once while driving home from a competition, one of our team was quizzing us from a big science reference book he had brought from home. One whole section was devoted to the scientists responsible for various discoveries. I was on a roll during that part, getting nearly all of them right. But as the names and discoveries became more obscure I was reaching the limits of my knowledge.

I am going through my desk, looking for papers I need in order to register for next semester’s courses. I see a wrinkled copy of my present course schedule. I notice that I registered for a class that I forgot about; I haven’t it attended all semester. It’s a crucially important, required course, and it’s one of the hardest ones I have to take. But it’s too late in the semester to drop it, and I have eight weeks worth of work I haven’t done. There’s no way I can catch up. I’m going to fail the class, a mark that I can never erase from my permanent record. I’ll never get accepted to graduate school. I’ll never get to pursue my passion for science. The worst part is that I always think to myself, “Oh no. I’ve dreamt about this over and over.

I started going to a therapist to help me with a sticky relationship situation - torn between two lovers.  During one session, I said, "oh, wait, I know...I need to not be so nice...I've got to work on that."  The therapist said, "no, I want you to be exactly who you are.  If it makes you comfortable to be nice, go for it, own it, revel in it." 

Ahhhhh, permission to be nice - it was the most relieving thing he could have said!

Sitting on a plane, the flight attendant asks, "something to drink?"  My neighbor orders coffee and continues to bend my ear as he conducts his chemistry experiment-like preparation of his airline coffee - to get it just so.  One pack of sugar, two packs of sugar, three packs of sugar, FOUR?  No way, not really.  Yup.  Four, five!  It's a little cup.

Me:  "Yum, Yum"

We both crack up.

Growing up in the Bible Belt of Alabama and Georgia, one of the things that I dreaded most was having to endure relentless evangelizing from my neighbors, classmates, coworkers, or just people who saw me on the street. I had a carefully selected group of friends who sympathized with my dread, having similarly suffered (non-Christians were bad, Hell-bound people in the evangelical Baptist mind).