Radical Music

As I'm sure many of you are well aware, Organic Chemistry is hard.  Really, really hard.  It is the only science class I have ever really struggled in.  But the worst part of it isn't the millions of flashcards you have to memorize or the mechanisms you have to know backwards and forwards, it's what it does to your mind.

Before Winter Break this year, the last thing we learned about in O. Chem was free radicals.  For those of you who don't know what free radicals are, here's a quick summary.

This system of atom with a lone electron is called a free radical and it is fifty kinds of unstable and really reactive, kind of like a house of cards made of baking soda built over a pool of vinegar.

Boom.  

In chemistry, an free radical is represented by the letter symbol for the element with a lone dot next to it, like this:

It looks deceptively innocuous to those who haven't studied Organic Chemistry, but slightly terrifying to students who have just been introduced to them.  

Anyway, when I got back to orchestra after a full month of not seeing free radicals or any kind of chemistry at all (I love Winter Break so much), I got my new sheet music for the quarter.  That's when I saw a full sheet of staccato notes that looked rather like this:

Except that's not what I saw.  My brain didn't see music notes with dots, it saw a whole army of free radicals, or in other words, a whole pack of dynamite ready to go off at a moment's notice.  For a second or two, I froze in fear.  Then I realized that I was being scared to death by a SHEET OF MUSIC.  Not one of my prouder moments, especially because I had only been exposed to free radicals for a few weeks over a month ago and I had been seeing staccato notes since 5th grade.  Like I said, O. Chem really messes with your head.  

House of cards photo credit: http://gallerydriver.com/Art/Costello,%20House%20of%20Cards%20%232,%20detail.jpg

Sheet music photo credit: http://www.melmartin.com/html_pages/sheet_music.html