MsAntimatter

Okay, so here's the irony: when I was in high school, I hated math and science; a common sentiment shared amongst my female friends. I found these subjects to be intimidating and the teen version of myself was very uncomfortable with them. I dropped math and science after grade 11 and directed all of my energy towards the arts. I simply preferred the open subjectiveness of painting, photography, design. I continued on to college, studying interior design and graphic design and spent many years afterwards in various jobs pertaining to such.

Fast-forward ten years, I'm living in Toronto with my musician boyfriend; artsy-girl, artsy-boy, artsy-life. And then, on a WHIM, my boyfriend buys me a telescope for my birthday. Seriously, I had never expressed any interest in telescopes before that; he just thought it would be a cool gift ...and it WAS.

It turned my world upside-down.

Armed with a telescope and an arsenal of books, I ventured out of the city to places with darker skies. I became drunk on science literature, "Stardust", "The Elegant Universe", "Fabric of the Cosmos", "A Brief History of Time", "Flatland", "Flatterland" ...etc., etc.

Over the years, my obsession grew to encompass many other disciplines: chemistry, neuroscience, computer-programming, quantum mechanics and engineering. In my artful youth, I'd shunned a lot of science-y things—the computable, the measured, the proven—but through the eyepiece of my telescope, I saw an entirely new view of the world. How unsettling and frightening ...and EXCITING. The particle accelerator inside my head revved up and, in 2007, I launched, MS. ANTIMATTER, a collision of science and design.

Often asked if I'm a scientist, I laugh hard and confess that I'm merely a hack, a wanna-be, an amateur. [That's okay].

When I was young, I never would've thought that science could be so beautiful. The sciences and the arts are often pitted up against each other—if you love one, you can't possibly love the other. How silly. As with the human brain, both hemispheres contribute to both kinds of processes, inextricably weaving a fabric of total understanding.

**********************************************************

I still have that telescope. It's ancient compared to today's standards. It's manual (not computerized), the gears are stripped and the aluminum legs of the tripod are dented-in from my pitbull's teeth (...yes, this is true), but I still love it and I still use it ...jubilee clamps and all.