Temperatures are killing. Summer without air conditioner and watermelons is hell on earth.
It has been around three weeks since I lived in a rented house just with myself – and another person with whom I have exchanged no more than ten sentences and some hellos and goodbyes out of politeness, on both ends. A standardly nice college student from a white American middle class family.
Sometimes I get up at eight, sometimes at ten. I microwave my breakfast, pack my lunch, take out the garbage, go down the wooden stairs to the basement, unlock my bike, haul it up the stairs, ride down the cement pavement, glance through the neighbors gardens, cross the crosswalk, five minutes later lock my bike near the university bookstore, head down to Searle, pass several iron gates, greet the labmates, start finding some work.
Example workday: polish a sapphire cylinder with a wheel blade, took four hours, done, go home. Stare at the screen when people are doing experiments, the intensity of the light spots change, look up a paper on RHEED and LEED, getting tired, go home. Watch people focusing lasers, another intern asked me why the laser spot needs to be small, I said maybe there’s different domains and they are small and we don’t want mixed signals; my answer was not satisfying, and I got confused too, go home. Watch Youtube videos on Bragg and Laue equations and reciprocal lattice space, realize that they are just diffraction equations but somehow got their fancy names, feel despise towards myself – diffraction was taught long ago, how can I not recognize?
Back in home I lock my beloved bike, sometimes a detour to Trader Joes and Wholefoods. Meat options generally rotate among beef, chicken and pork, just like how I try to rotate the T shirts I wear each day to declare that I indeed wash them quite often. I also try to switch up carbohydrates, rice, bread, noodles, potatoes. Corn as well, though I don’t know, it fits the vegetable category better. On good days I cook lamb and fish; I have learned to remove the bone of lamb shank, basically you tear the muscles apart, cut the tendons, done. Fish confuses me a lot more, I had no idea when I poked into their brains. Seldomly you see nice anatomy charts for fish. For sheep, cows, and pigs, usually its those butcher diagrams; the animal is a collection of edible parts: flank, loin, rib… Maybe ultimately fish is more lucky. Yet I am only being a hypocrite; something other than conscience is required for me to quit meat.
