why that? I hesitate to confess that "curiosity about making recreational pharmaceuticals" was a big part of it, but we'd been developing an interest in chemistry years before we ever got curious about psychedelics. analytical chemistry became engrossing during in middle school, and before then I can remember some fascination with simple grade-school chemistry experiments—I recall in particular melting sulfur in a test tube and heating sulfur with iron to make FeS, and the acrid smell of hot sulfur in my nostrils—and RL dad actually got me a chemistry set and I went through stuff from the manual without too much understanding of it.
but there had been so many other notions before then. I remember wanting to go into music...I feel that we must have considered art or writing as careers, until some fatal disillusionment or other, such as happened with music. I'm guessing this, simply because it hurts to think about it. chemistry somehow stuck, though despite our manifest unfitness for the discipline. why that?
perhaps it seemed like the closest thing to magic.
~Chara