In Which I Complain Mildly About Chemistry and Wish I Could Find the Stick of Knowledge to Beat Back the Bear

I had a chemistry teacher in high school that liked to use battle analogies for scholarly problems. In particular, he liked to say he was giving us the “stick of knowledge” so we could “beat back the bear” of chemistry problems. I am having a particularly challenging chemistry problem in lab right now, and I have been wracking my brain and searching for a stick of knowledge that will help me beat back this bear.

The bear requires aqueous reaction conditions, and that’s where the trouble starts. There are sticks that can be used underwater, but the new hotness of sticks mixes with water like oil. Well, more like sand. DH recommends using a phase transfer catalyst, but I’m pretty sure those work excellently with oil, not so wonderfully with sand. It is an idea, though perhaps not one I want to spend a year on.

I even went up to ask the purveyors of the new stick of hotness, and found out they only use the stick in DMF. If they need a water stable reaction, they use the stick in DMF first, then put the product in water. Unfortunately, I need to put the stick in water first, then use it. The new stick of hotness hates me!

I’ve been in a right state over this new hotness, let’s say the fighter jet, of sticks for about three weeks now. My older model, let’s say the tugboat, of sticks, gets me across the ocean eventually, but while I was presenting my work, someone brought up the fighter jet model and got everyone perhaps a little too excited about it. A fighter jet gives great style points, awesome power, and incredible speed, but it’s pretty much useless in water. The tugboat’s got zero style, and severely lacks speed, but at least it’s got some power in water. I’m ready to ride the tugboat all the way to Australia, but I’ve got to convince a few other people first. Hopefully my frustration with trying to get a fighter jet to swim across the ocean will show through and I’ll get permission to take the tugboat one of these days.

So if you haven’t gotten completely lost in my sea of mixed metaphors, thank you for reading. Now you know why today is a not a good day for me to write on the actual topic of this blog.