Ask Sherlock

Today, as I was sitting in my kitchen freezing and unfreezing my latest specimen (Watson’s leg hair) I began to wonder what constitutes a good experiment. What constitutes a bad experiment?

There is no such thing, you see because one may say an unethical or unconventional experiment is “bad” but if it collects necessary data, is it such a bad experiment?

Watson used this concept to explain people to me. What is a good or bad person. It was explained to me, with excruciating condescension may I add, that I was in an ethical grey area. My intentions were good, but my actions were bad.

Killing Magnussen was good for the sake of the world and all of whom I hold dear to my heart, but killing is a bad thing. According to Watson these actions were unnecessary, and ruthless.

I don’t regret them, however and I feel that makes my grey a little bit darker.

Watson tried to get me to understand that life is pure and should be cherished but all I could picture was her flicking Watson’s face. Being a generally evil person.

Watson asked me if it had to do with jealousy. I can dismiss that idea. I don’t get jealous simply because I do not “get” anything. Not angry, sad, lonely. Nothing.

Watson is laughing behind my shoulder. I don’t know why.

It is September second and for many young people it is the time to return from the hibernation of summer and begin learning once again. Watson mused that I should write about my own school experiences for those who may ponder how my schooling was. Considering I was a child prodigy, it was very hard for me during my school hours. Simply put, my teachers were very, very stupid. 

I find the education system can be quite appalling since I feel they haven't quite mastered how to meet the needs of every student in an efficient manner. I grew up knowing and learning everything quite early in my youth and found it difficult to adjust to the overbearing views (wrong views) of my teachers. Everything went so slowly. 

My mummy put me and Mycroft into private school when Mycroft was in his last year of high school, though he had only been at school for ten years. Before we had been attending a catholic school run by nuns and after my third incident debating creationism with Sister Ruth we transferred out. 

The private school was a much better fit for Mycroft who, in his final year, not only became student body president but also managed to convince the principal that he, Mycroft, would be a much better fit for the school, if he was running it. 

Moronically, once in power, Mycroft spent most of the budget on free cake for the school cafeteria.

I, however, was mostly in the laboratories. I often spent my days inside of lockers, due to the insatiable meatheads known as the "jocks" or cooking experiments in the science room. 

There was once I cooked methamphetamine and got sent to the principal's office.

I brought cake and was sent home without detention.

John found out I wasn't blogging and now I'm in deep s*** 

I don't usually enjoy cussing, but there you go. I have no other way do describe my predicament. 

I am forced to continue writing. 

Today's subject, I was hoping, to breach the topic of revenge. Or as Anderson, stupidly pointed out, "Rache" in German. 

The latest case we have been working on, was a double murder of two men who were taken to a small apartment, seated in a sealed kitchen and left to die slowly while the gas stove began leaking. The plan was elaborate and no crime of passion. The room had been built to let no air in or out with the windows and doors shut. The stove was a newer model, owned for six months at the most, known for its quick ignition and easy set up. 

Deliberately planned and well-executed, the plan would have been clean and simple.The two victims would die without the murderer even having to be there. 

However, this would have been genius if the older of the two men hadn't lit a cigar. 

A young woman in her twenties, burned to death in the upstairs bedroom from the house fire.

Josephine Carlton invited an old teacher and an old classmate to her house that evening for dinner, turned the stove on, excused herself, locked the kitchen door and let her plan evolve. 

Her motive? The teacher had failed her and the boy had rejected her advances when she was a freshman in high school. 

She carried around this hatred for so long that it began to boil inside her. She must kill them, she must kill them, she must kill them. 

And that is why I find this idea of revenge so unbelievably fascinating! It seems so petty. A fixation on one event and one person in such a negative way seems so... Unbelievably small. 

You may call me a hypocrite as I am fixated on Ms. Moriarty. Or even Magnussen. However both these times, I have had a different motive. I wanted to conquer them. Not make them suffer. 

Ms. Carlton wanted to force her victims into feeling her pain and sorrow. I don't feel. That is why revenge is lost on me. I don't want to force these people into feeling, I want them to understand that they cannot hurt me. They cannot hurt my friends. That I am smarter, and better. 

That is why I cannot fathom revenge. Forcing evoked empathy? It's impossible. All one creates is fear and a plea for help. One cannot force empathy on another person. 

Trust me, I've tried. 

As many of you have heard, a plane completely vanished while on route. 239 people seated on it, including all the cabin crew and pilots vanished. In the middle of the ocean.

I am aware that this is a very serious topic, and because of this I will breach this with as much sympathy as I have. This may be out of character, but Watson has insisted that I attempt to at least emulate empathy. But, for someone who has almost lost all of my dear friends, Watson twice, I have an easy time relating.

My sincere apologies to those who had relatives, or close relations to those seated on board that plane. My sympathy extends to you.

However, I am a detective and this seems to be a complicated mystery that I am just too eager to get my bored hands on.

So. What happened?

Watson seems to think the plane went through a rough patch, GPS locator wise, and then an engine failed causing the plane to crash into the ocean. The reason they couldn’t locate the plane was because it was in an odd moment of disconnect when the mayday was called.

Although probable, it does bring up the question of the wreckage. Where is all the debris? Where are the bodies? They would have found something by now wouldn’t they? The best lead currently is that two giant unidentified metal pieces were found by a satellite off the coast of south west Australia. But they could easily be scraps fallen off from cargo ships.

So my theory is simple.

Perhaps, spontaneous combustion. Not of the people, but the plane itself allowing the plane to disappear and letting all the passengers free fall into the ocean.

Plausible, but unlikely.

But say that the two scraps of metal are part of the plane. Then the plane could not have spontaneously combusted. No. It would have been something else.

I believe it was a pilots error. As, he seemed to have lost his way and dove the passengers into the ocean.

Terrorist attack? Perhaps. Someone threatening the pilot. But why would that allow the pilot to nose dive? If anything? Was it an alternative to a forced attack on a bigger scale?

I would like to think, and hope, that it was a simple engine failure. Perhaps that will begin to put more focus on engineering, as oppoesed to national defense.

Watson read this through and is giving me a look at despair, saying that this may be offensive to anyone who was affected by similar tragedy.

But remember that I am married to my work. And this is what this is. A detached analysis of what I believed happened.

I have a case.

It seemed almost open and shut when it started. Watson thought so also, which is rare. But I had a hunch that there was another layer.

A young girl came to 221b with her concerned mother. She was complaining of indigestion cramps. That wasn’t the case, of course. The case was that of the mother’s, who believed her husband had another family, and was trying to create her into his other wife. Leaving magazines with perfume samples for her to try, buying her new, very outrageous clothing. And he would go out on business trips and then find new fashions that would “completely suit her” and she swore he was trying to socially engineer her to like grapefruit. He had introduced his daughter the fruit a while back and she loved it. She continued to scarf it down. The clothing was exotic and the fabrics were lovely. But she was convinced he wanted her to be different. And apparently, the sex was becoming more and more awful.

In reality, she was wrong. Her husband wasn’t hiding a family, he was hiding his new job. Fashion design. And yes, the grapefruit was irrelevant.

But then I thought more about it. If her father had introduced his daughter to grapefruit, and suddenly she had awful cramps, it wouldn’t take a genius to see to correlate the two. The symptoms pointed there. Her sullen eyes, droopy posture, her stance of pain. Wasn’t allergies. No signs of swelling. Simple: he was slowly poisoning his daughter.

The young girls shoes were new, her hair pulled back into a Sunday school bun. She smiled only once, when Watson called her Miss Sarah in a way that confirmed my ideas that she was unwell. But one more word confirmed that the father did not have any fault in the true crime.

He was bringing her souvenirs from his trips. He loved her. They were honest gifts. And although he was a disloyal husband, he wasnt at fault for the crime.

His gay lover in Rio may have been though.

The highlight of my afternoon really.

Look at me, I’m turning into Watson with this mess. Typing up my cases.

Lets hope this does not become the usual

I am now forced to apologize for yesterday’s post. Apparently many people were hurt by my three years of absence and did not appreciated my dry humour.

Which brings me to a fair point.

Apologizing. And if it’s worth it.

Now, I am almost never wrong and so I very rarely apologize unless I want something. And even then I don’t really mean it.

So what is the point of an insincere or ignorant apology?

I, for one, feel like it is a colossal waste of time, even if it may soothe the mind of another person. Deception is one thing, but if I don’t mean an apology, why is it thrust upon me to say the words everyone knows is fake.

"I’m sorry"

It’s an admittance of defeat.

Watson continues to explain to me that relationships aren’t games. That they aren’t battles to be fought. There aren’t winners or losers and there are no rules.

But then I watch as Watson’s relationships unfold and see each person lose or win. I see Watson continue to lose every battle, every partnership, every domestic with “I’m sorry”

Why is it that I continue to have to apologize for my behaviour when I know that it will lead to weakness, vulnerability and yet another barrier between me and the rest of the world.

This may make me seem inconsiderate. And in a world like this, where the relations with other people are the keys to success, god knows I need to be charming. But the truth is I feel no obligation to apologize. If it were my way, I would retract all future and past apologies.

The things that happened already happened. Why dwell? I would love to discontinue all apologies.

Except to be fair to Watson, I can’t.

There is one type of apology that I have to continue. The one that I will never forgive myself for. The one that I don’t ask to be forgiven.

A sincere apology, from anyone, is rare. The moment when one person truly, truly understands the circumstances of another.

This type of apology, I thought, was a myth, or some sort of fantasy. I never felt remorse. I never felt empathy.

Until Watson.

I do really feel the guilt from leaving for three years. The pain that I caused for both of us was too much to let this one apology go to waste.

I am truly sorry.

I just simply didn’t die.

I have not been on any case for four days now. This is slowly driving me to the brink of insanity. Furthermore this is causing me much stress.

This is an interesting thing because I am slowly realizing that my body’s biological stand points can only take so much of this, and my usually flawless immune system is beginning to fail me.

Watson continues to tell me that it’s because my coat is too thin. I refuse to believe that my coat is anything but absolute perfection.

In truth, the reason I have contracted this illness is solely due to my stress and anxiousness for a new case. According to the Lazarus theory of stress and coping, I fall into the third stage (debatably the fourth stage, but I tend to simplify the stages into three)

In the first stage, ones fight or flight instinct kicks in and the mind and body panics. This is obviously induced by the stressor. Mine would simply be idleness, and my inability to do anything.

The second stage is the repression of the initial stage. One pushes away all feelings of fear and panic and continues their life. This burns a lot of energy and so one may feel as if they were on fourteen cups of coffee. One is also extremely productive in this stage, and can often get through inhuman amounts of work in minimal hours. This is usually the time I begin conducting experiments. I forget to eat, or sleep. I feel energized, and Watson wants to jump out of a window because of it. The flip side to this coin is that one can also explode at any moment, triggered usually by unexpected stimuli. For instance, Watson can become very stressed after a long two or three weeks at the hospital. So when I leave my experiments in the kitchen and someone mistakes curdled blood samples for jam, someone becomes hostile.

Lastly, there is the third and final stage. When the body has burned through most of it’s energy, it becomes exhausted and begins to not only shut down mentally (makes thoughts groggy, and forces you to sleep) but also physically. Which is the stage I am currently in.

My immune system has shut down and I have an awful dripping nose, almost like a faucet. I am having trouble formulating thoughts and I crave hot soup. I feel a chill moving through my bones. A deep chill.

In more moderate degree Watson has previously labelled this the sulking faze. I attempt to live in my mind palace during these times. It is much less exhausting.

Watson often also gets ill after a particularly grueling case. When we solved the blind banker, Watson was plagued with an awful flu bug. Gave it to half the Scotland Yard.

I am in terrible terrible turmoil due to the fact that no cases have come to me yet. There was one about a young baker who’s loaves were continuously half-baked. But not only did it sound like the beginning to an awful, awful nursery rhyme, it was also too obvious that he had confused Fahrenheit and Celsius and was baking at temperatures that were much too low. Appalling.

New cases will come in due time I suppose.

Day 3: First Kiss

Mrs. Hudson introduced Watson and I to this viral video. She insisted that it was the sweetest thing she had ever laid eyes on and that the beautiful new romance had "practically killed her" 

Watson cried. Obviously some pent up tension there. 

Regardless, I didn't quite understand the film. Perhaps it was the unbelievably boring first minute and a half where all the participants oddly cheat around the true purpose. "Lets just look at each other for a second" or "This here is the awkward moment" they prolong the unnecessary beginning fumbling. So wonderfully human but abhorrently boring. And when the kisses do happen, these strangers decided to stick their tongues down each other's throats without any hesitation, as if they didn't just spend the first minute of the film being hesitant. 

Watson explained to me that it had an emotional impact because of the way in which these people were so innocently, all of a sudden in love even though they had never before met. 

After a quick google search I found that there were many qualms about the film being an advertisement for a clothing company. But looking farther in depth one can find that the filmmaker is in fact part of an art production team who also happens to produce clothing. Their website is located here. 

The "magic" of true love captured in a moment when two strangers kiss. This is the all encompassing motif of this film. 

I had many deductions about why these relationships would not work, specific to the people in the film. But Watson wouldn't let me post them. They were too harsh. I've been forced to work on censoring myself. 

Regardless, the film was beautifully shot and edited and the documentary style back and forth was rather endearing. 

Watson says I am too hard. That I need to open up my heart a little to understand the meaning behind the film. 

In all honesty, I'm not sure how important it is to me. I'm not sure how I can take this as seriously as many other things in the world. When things are happening all over the world that are brutally brutally awful, we distract ourselves with first love and other emotional cotton insulation. 

Perhaps this is the reason people continue to be passive, spectators when many horrendous violations of human rights continue to be projected across the world on live television. When disaster after disaster strikes. Perhaps it is an illness of first love like this. 

But maybe this is a small step to understanding one another and breaching this gap? 

Quite plausible. 

The feeling of being idle crushes down on my mind like its own force of gravity. 

For Christmas, Watson bought me a rubix cube as an alternative to shooting the walls. The algorithms were simple and now the wall has eight more holes in it. 

When business is slow, I have tried many different tactics to occupy my mind. My personal favourite is recreational drugs but Watson has started a weekly check in. I would have considered hoarding clean urine samples, but I am suspicious that Watson is in cohorts with Mike Hooper. And although this could work in my favour, it could also end my current relationship with Bart's Hospital. I would not be able to continue my studies there in the way that I currently do. Also, Watson has DI Gavin Lestrade on speed dial.... Or is it Geoffrey?

In any case, I have tried alternatives. 

I have begun conducting experiments to expand my research to broaden my horizons. After "the great game" as Watson has labelled it, I have begrudgingly expanded my knowledge of the solar system from none to basic. I have begun to construct my mind palace, growing and adding new levels and layers. My encounter with Ms. Magnussen has changed my perspective on this concept. I have dedicated a portion of my case-less days to making my mind palace larger and more intricate. 

And yet there are still hours and hours that continue to chip away at the world, slower and slower until my mind rots into nothingness. I may die of the unspeakable idleness that my brain continues to muster. 

I once took up sea monkeys. Watson banned all aquarium life in the flat shortly after, when I shot through the tank. I do not recall whether this incident was an accident, or not. 

I have also begun many small social experiments. Watson is practically oblivious. I have begun to slowly move the furniture one inch every three days to the right to see if any notice is taken. So far, I am at 7 inches and Watson has woken up in the mornings more disoriented than usual. 

For Mrs. Hudson, I have replaced her normal sugar with a sweetener substitute. The only significance I have noticed is that she has lost three pounds and complained profusely of painful headaches.

This blog, however useless I may find it, seems to be soothing the slothful evening I seem to be having. 

Between this, and deducing the bachelor I seem to be off to a very, very rough week. 

Hello readers, My name is Sherlock Holmes. You may know me as the babe of baker st., the nemesis of Moriarty, the immortal survivor of Bart’s hospital, sister of Mycroft Holmes And so on.

I am the world’s only consulting detective. A female, currently living with one J Watson in London, England.

221b, baker st. To be precise.

After I fell into Watson’s small talk trap, I have been forced into the very grueling task of blogging. The tumblr, as it is known to many. I have many issues surrounding the set up as well as the prospect of writing but so be it. I made the mistake of insulting Watson’s online career, and now I must endure the torturous consequences.

I have been instructed to write a quick introduction to what one may find here.

Once daily I will be discussing a news story or topic that I find particularly enticing. If the world has been keeping a steady feed of boring subjects, I will briskly move on to topics of my own interest, such as tobacco ash, Watson’s embarrasment, my current cases and how appalled I am at the prospect of small talk, because it brings forth promises that one cannot back down from.

Also, dear reader, if one has questions, you may ask them here. If one has topics of discussion that you deem appropriate, you may suggest them here. If one has a particularly interesting case that you would like me to solve, then you may present them here.

Although, for the sake of what’s left of my sanity, don’t be boring.

How delightfully mundane. 

Urban legend has it that if you wear the same scent on the day of the test as you did while studying it may aid you in retaining the information you have studied. 

However that is unreasonably petty. 

Please try and aid yourself by logging off of this website and beginning to study for that psychology test from which you are procrastinating.

Best of luck.