Bike Maintenance

One of my chief frustrations as a biology major on South Campus is my commute up North every day for the majority of my classes. Northwestern has one big building, Tech, where almost every single science class is held.

As a biology major, I will have at least 2 classes in Tech every quarter. Tech is up North, 0.7 miles from my dorm. In a world where 15 minutes walking is 15 potential minutes sleeping, my only option is to bike back and forth to Tech several times a day.

This worked out fine fall quarter. I found a fellow on Craigslist who was leaving Evanston and needed to pass on his top quality bike, which was sure to be in good condition, for the small price of $100, since all he had to do was recoup part of the expense of a steed that had served him well for many years.

Such was my anticipation coming into the transaction.

When I arrived after taking the L into downtown Evanston, I found myself a little disappointed. First of all, the bike-owner was late for our negotiated meeting – and not just five minutes late. Like 20 minutes late, and I was idling around in downtown Evanston trying not to look like a victim as the sun started to set.

Eventually he arrived, pulling up to me on the noble steed and exemplifying its excellent brakes with the screech of rubber on sidewalk. After his dutiful apologies for tardiness, I gave the thing a quick inspection and was treated to my second disappointment.

Simply put, it was a shoddy old bike. The brakes, as he had displayed, did work fine – or rather, the brake. The front brake was missing. And upon a closer look, the rear brake pad was so worn down it was almost to the metal underneath.

The rest of the bike was simply old and tired looking. The chain needed oil, the paint was chipped off, and the rubber on the wheels looked like it had been originally used on tank treads in World War II.

But I had taken the L all the way to downtown Evanston, and at the time I was still relatively new to America and didn’t know how much $100 was. I resolved to buy some oil to fix the thing up and make do with it, because clearly beneath its faded exterior, this was a top-notch vehicle worth far more than $100 and it would serve me ruggedly but faithfully for many years to come.

Ha.

As I said before, this worked out fine fall quarter. I oiled the chain and it ran fine. The brake, while worn down, still worked. And the pedals had no issues.

Issues with pedals. That’s almost the last thing that comes to mind when thinking about bike issues. This just exemplifies the nature of my bike’s awfulness.

Anyways, this arrangement worked fine for a while. American weather is sweet during fall and it was no problem that my bike could only be stored on bike racks outdoors.

Then all the sudden fall quarter came rushing to a close and it got cold and there was snow. I shrugged off the first few inconsequential snows. My bike was a paragon of rugged efficiency, perfectly weatherproof.

 
And then it was time to go home for winter break, and the school opened up a couple storage rooms somewhere to stow your bikes while the wicked winter raged. There were, to my best approximation, two notification emails about these storage rooms.

The first came on the Monday three weeks before school ended, warning that the bikes needed to be stored by Thursday or else they would be left to the elements. I still needed my bike to get to class for the next few days, so I resolved to store my bike on Thursday afternoon.

The second email came on Wednesday, notifying all residents that the storage rooms were full. If you had been slow, that was a terrible dose of bad luck.

That was a terrible dose of bad luck.

I was starting to feel less confident now. I was still sure my bike could weather the winter fine, but it was three weeks without my loving caress, and I just didn’t know what would happen.

Still, break came, I went home and forgot about my bike, and then break was over and we were back.

The first day back, I went and dug my bike out of the three foot drift it was buried in. It was not doing so hot.

After oiling it with half a can of WD-40, the wheels could finally turn again. Some bolt work allowed the kickstand to move, and with some difficulty I could even change gears. But my poor little rear brake would never be the same.

It vacillated between two extremes – permanently hugging the wheel and impeding my progress, or giving up altogether and leaving me to wreck unsuspecting pedestrians.

And on top of the flaws in the bike, my careless WD-40 usage began to stain the insides of the legs of all of my jeans a deep, rich grease-black.

 
My $100 bike was starting to look hopeless. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Residents of the Chicago area might recall the Winter of ’11, affectionately referred to as the Snowpocalypse – the third worst blizzard in Chicago’s history. It just so happened that this was that winter.

The Snowpocalypse.

The second consecutive day that I had to dig my bike out of the bike rack, I knew that things were too far gone. There was just too much moisture in contact with the bike’s metal – revealed as it was by the peeling paint.

My rear brake never worked right again. I lost access to half of my gears. I could barely move the bike seat, and my pedals… Oh, my pedals.

I furiously oiled everything day after day, wiping away the gobs of rust that came off with the oil, but there are some things that WD-40 can’t fix. And squeaky pedals are one of those things.

It started with a lurching rattling, like the pedals weren’t fixed into the frame but were simply balanced across the shaft and wiggling horribly with every push. And then the squeaking began, shrill as a banshee, and louder.

Every push on the pedal would elicit this shrill screech – my only consolation that its pitch was so high, it was almost untraceable unless someone looked at my feet and happened to notice the eerie, ethereal noise appearing with the same pattern as I pedaled.

I became good at coasting when people were present.

I fought my bike’s faults all of winter quarter and then into spring. When the snows left, I took the bike home and my dad tweaked things and staved off the flaws for a time. But the relief was only temporary, and Illinois’ rainiest April in 50 years soon had my bike back to its beautiful, screeching symphony and paralyzing absence of brakes.

So if you see me wobbling through campus on a misaligned bike seat, bumping into pedestrians and fruitlessly grabbing my brake, and you hear a strange, haunting warble – just know that these things are not related.

A Mental Exercise and John

A brief and likely unnecessary introductory note: these aren't related subjects. They are just the topics of this post.

Now on to the post.

Okay, so I'm in Intro to Philosophy and we have to read a few excerpts from this large textbook throughout the year. However, the book affords a huge variety of passages in addition to what we have assigned, and I sometimes peruse them when I have other schoolwork I'm procrastinating.

The reading today was on one's identity, and so I was reading a number of essays on that subject and there were a lot of interesting ideas and analogies -- but one particular concept stuck out to me that I thought I'd share.

Alright. Everyone basically gets that we are not our bodies -- our arms and legs and torsos and hair. Our sensory perceptions are all just being interpreted through our brains. But for some reason I could never really picture this. The closest I could come was seeing a picture, like reading a textbook, of a cutaway head with a throbbing brain in it, absorbing signals and perceiving.

This didn't do much by way of visualization, so while I had the idea that my eyes and fingers and ears are simply objects communicating with my very complicated brain, I didn't really understand it.

On to the mental exercise!

Disclaimer -- This is too simple to justify my lead-up. All it consists of is this:

Instead of picturing your brain in your cranium, picture it in a tank of life-sustaining fluid on a desk in a lab. Now picture that your brain is wired up with a radio transceiver that is communicating directly with a little radio that is suspended inside of your skull, which is connected to all of your efferent and afferent nerves.

Now instead of being a brain so intimately acquainted with your body that every fluctuation in your blood affects your thinking, you are a brain in a tank receiving signals from the automaton that walks and smells and sees and looks like a normal person.

Somehow, this illustration disengaged the concept of my body as myself for me. It might take a second.

Flex your fingers. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. You're just running reconnaissance for that gray thing in a tank.

I don't know how impressive you'll find this mental exercise. I found it immensely entertaining.

But on to John.

For Intro to the New Testament, we are required to read through the whole New Testament in a quarter. This translates to a book every couple days, and most recently my task was the Gospel of John.

We had previously covered the other three Synoptic Gospels, and those were interesting. We learned about all of the subtle agendas and biases underlying the straightforward stories, and while I'm not sure how much of this talk to buy into, the stories definitely lost a lot of their flair.

At the same time, I learned to read critically and look for the little agendas or messages in the details, and to appreciate things unique to each Gospel.

John was chuck full of these.

John's doing things his own way. He's got the message that Jesus is offering eternal life and he doesn't slip it subtly into allusions Jesus makes, like the Synoptics. Every chapter, Jesus is hitting the Jews (and Gentiles) in the face with this. "I'm not just a miracle worker prophet. I'm not just John the Baptist's buddy. I'm God's Son, and I'm offering eternal life. Eternal life."

That's why John's so cool. He doesn't hide anything or act polite. His writing is so blunt. Part of this might just be my superior New Living Translation, but John is ridiculously direct. The Synoptics leave things up to interpretation. Not John.

I'll end this text-overload post with a quote from the end of John, showing his characteristic no-nonsense approach to Jesus' words.

     Jesus replied,  "If I want him [the beloved disciple] to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? As for you, follow me." So the rumor spread among the community of believers that the disciple wouldn't die. But that isn't what Jesus said at all.

Oh, John.

Ben Rector and the Amazons

So about a week ago, a few friends and I went to a Matt Wertz concert, which was actually a Ben Rector concert because Ben Rector opened and Danny has been a Ben Rector fan since his youth and Ben Rector actually has a better voice anyway.

Anyway, it was pretty okay. I'm not a big concert-goer, but it was a sort of fun atmosphere.

Because Danny has such a huge mancrush on Ben Rector, we were impelled to arrive right after the doors opened, an hour before the show. That was 6:30. The concert ended around 10:30. That meant for four hours we were out there just standing. Just standing.

Apparently this is nothing unusual for concert-goers. I don't know if this means concert-goers are masochists, or if they just have unnaturally large calves.

Speaking as a regular human being, that was a painful experience. The soles of my feet were destroyed, and my legs were so stiff I walked like a reanimated corpse for a while after we were freed from the prison.

Speaking of prison, this brings me to my next point. There were so many people!

Again, apparently concert-goers have no problem with this. They must learn to reduce their personal space bubbles.

However, as a normal human being, I found this alarming, strange, and ridiculously hot.

In the temperature sense!

It was an indoor venue, House of Blues, with kind of a pit for people to stand in. If you think analogously about peas in a bowl, you'll realize this forces the people within the pit into closer proximity.

When you get these people rocking back and forth and raising their hands, you get a large quantity of body heat generated with no clear dispersion path except the bodies of other people rocking and raising their hands, which leads to ever mounting temperatures and, inevitably, sweat stains.

Oh, sweat stains.

Being surrounded by sweaty strangers rocking and raising their hands would have been bad enough, but in this particular scenario my plight was compounded by the presence of a small colony of Amazons in my proximity -- possibly the last Amazons on Earth!

These women were all the same height as me (six foot two!) and outweighed me by, I would conservatively pose, 50 pounds each. They were an extremely energetic bunch, probably because of their Amazonian descent, and they leaped into every song with emphatic rocking and bouncing.

Thankfully, they were rather poor on rhythm (Amazons were fighters, not dancers) and most of the time their bounces would cancel each other out for a net effect of some small, benign earthquake. But every now and then they would all simultaneously find the beat, and then they'd send the floorboards bouncing.

The other problem was that as Amazons, they were even less accustomed to personal space regions than usual concert-goers.

A couple Amazons were in front of me and every song they would inch back a little farther, their swinging arms threatening to shatter my ribs.

In response, I began to back up into the person behind me, subtly rocking into that person whenever the song's rhythm permitted, begging them to look around and realize the danger I was in.

They didn't.

Eventually my situation was too dire. Any second now, the Amazons would scoot back a little more and I would be destroyed by their legendary elbows and swinging fists.

I did the only thing I could think to do.

I rammed into one.

It was a calculated move, right as the song flowed into the chorus. I left the ever-so-slight potential that it could have been a misstep. But it was a good knock, solid, all my brawn behind it.

 

In the end, even though my blow failed to get through her armor, the awkwardness of our encounter forced her to take a couple steps forward and I was saved. My failing personal space bubble was resuscitated and I could stop nudging the person behind me.

This was great, because Ben Rector turned out to be a really great guy and his music was alright. Matt Wertz was pretty okay too, largely because Ben Rector stayed on stage playing piano while he did his thing.

The concert ended up being way too long. Matt Wertz had difficulty stopping once he got started. (He took off his shirt midway through, and then he was an untamed animal)

But regardless, it was still a neat experience. Both performers seemed like really honest, down-to-earth kinds of guys, and they really got into their music.

Afterwards Danny ran off with Dani and Kathy (who by the end of the concert had been converted into slathering Ben Rector devotees) to get pictures with Ben, and John and Dan and I hung out and talked about the concert, and then Danny and Dani and Kathy came back with rapturous looks on their faces and tried to find words to articulate their delight but they couldn't, and we left the House of Blues and traveled back into the cold Chicago night.

And went home.

Spring Break

Break is just now winding to a close. I'm going to be honest. I expected to get a lot of things taken care of during break -- read some organic chemistry, buy new shoes, play basketball, work out, read a lot of good Christian literature, longboard several miles, write a lot of blog posts, short stories, emails.

Nine days feels like a lot of time when you're underwater in schoolwork and don't have five consecutive hours free. But nine days really isn't that much.

The long and short of it is that I didn't check many things off my itinerary.

Really, I checked off almost nothing. The reasons for this are manifold. First of all, I had important things to do like hang out with friends and family. But what stole more of my schedule was a combination of three key factors:

Sleep, fiction, and Tiny Wings.

I'm going to start by saying I didn't know it was possible to sleep as much as I did. At school when I'm on a regular sleep schedule, I put in eight or nine hours a night and feel super. This is a lot more than a lot of people I know, too.

Over break, I slept ten or eleven hours almost every single night. And every morning I woke up feeling like a hungover zombie.

My sleep schedule was somewhat more variable than it had been during school, but I was still in bed by midnight most nights. There's no real explanation why I suddenly required so much rest. It's like my body detected my vacation and decided to maximize my new free time. By wasting it.

So according to my math, if I was putting in ten and a half hours of sleep a night, then factoring in waking up and showering and eating, I only had about half of my day's hours to work with every day.

This explains away part of my lack of productivity.

Another explanation is mindless fiction. I am an absolute sucker for books. And my family, well aware of this shortcoming, left several mindless fiction books laying around the living room.

Whodunnits. One minute mysteries to tickle your neurons. Well for starters, they take more than a minute each, and when you lump enough of them together they take on critical mass and consume entire afternoons. I will say that I got an exceptional number of mysteries right. I will also say that the opportunity cost for this success rendered it meaningless.

There were various other books laying around too. And it doesn't matter what, or how boring, they are. If they're there, my mind wills me to absorb their contents.

Books, however, weren't nearly the pitfall of the last-but-not-least distraction: Tiny Wings.

A brief synopsis for the un-indoctrinated.

In Tiny Wings, an app for the iPhone or iPod Touch, you play the part of a hefty bird with bitty wings who longs to fly. However, you can only glide. To simulate flying you must dive onto the downsides of hills and then fling yourself up the upsides of hills like ramps, gliding through the air a little ways before diving again.

It's a game of skill and timing, where you tap to send the birdie diving and then release to let him glide. This sounds like the most boring concept of a game imaginable, but it is engrossing.

The colors, sound effects and music of the game have been Scientifically Engineered to be entirely addicting. The bird makes little noises and the music is soothing, and the game provides little score multiplier incentives to keep you reaching for the next goal.

The end result: scientifically engineered addiction.

In short, I spent more time unlocking new achievements in Tiny Wings than my pre-med peers spent studying for orgo last quarter.

That's a lot of time.

Between me and my little brothers, we shot through those levels like greased lightning through a whirlpool. We racked up score multipliers like no one in history.

All this came at a cost, however, because between my copious sleeping, uninhibited reading, and addictive Tiny Wings playing, I failed to do any of the important things I intended to. I didn't read the books I had to read, work out, or update this blog, among dozens of other things. I accomplished nothing this spring break.

Nothing, that is, besides a 22X multiplier in Tiny Wings.

 -----
Note: My touchscreen pen didn't accompany me when I left my parents' house and that is why if the drawings in this post appear to be of inferior quality, it is because they were created with my index finger rather than a precision tool of graphic design magic. Apologies.

My Samsung Cell Phone

Over the summer, I was re-initiated into American culture by degrees. It started with the usual eating greasy foods, going to amusement parks, using a GPS. As time went on I began to get closer and closer to normal and by the time the summer was ending I knew the time had come.

I had to get a phone.

I knew my service would be AT&T. That was the plan some relatives were on and I would be able to tag along. This in mind, I went online and began careful research to determine which phone I was interested in. I had several very careful criteria I would be basing my decision on:

1) Is the phone aesthetically pleasing?
2) From all angles?
3) In terms of the software as well as the design?
4) Were the texts organized into conversations?

By the time I finished my research, I ended up discarding criterion #4. That left me with one very clear choice: the Samsung Impression.

This phone was everything I could have dreamed of in a phone. It looked good, it had a slide-out keyboard, it looked good, and it was aesthetically pleasing. The marketers cleverly concealed the fact that it didn't organize texts into conversation threads, but that wouldn't have mattered. This phone screamed sophistication.

We went to the AT&T store shortly after my research was concluded and, sure enough, there it was. The Samsung Impression, as gorgeous as it was online.

It sat there with that confident, I'm-sophisticated-enough-not-to-be-flashy coolness. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. Perfectly balanced.

I glanced down at the card that articulated its features. And oh man. That phone could do anything but fly.

There was no need to look at other phones. My mind was made up.

My older brother, Cole, was also in the market for a phone at the time. He went for the Pantech Pursuit, to avoid us having the same device.

What a fool.

It might have been free with the service plan instead of costing almost $200 extra and it might have had conversation-threaded texting, but oh, he was the loser in this game. My phone was sleek and black and sophisticated. His phone was green and wide.

What a loser, I said to myself. Ha ha ha.

This was not the case, as time would prove.

However, at the time I was overjoyed and I made us race home to read the manuals and download apps and discover all the marvelous options our new technology offered. As soon as we got home, I wrung the manual open and scanned through. Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy.

"Yeah," said the Impression. "Dude, check this out. You can get on Facebook and Twitter from anywhere in the world, and you can hop on the internet and YouTube and you can put widgets on my home screen and you can move them around and you can change my background and stuff, and you can take pictures with three megapixels and you can edit them on the go."

I was the happiest kid in the world.

I didn't care that the conversations weren't threaded, which meant I had to spend a minute and a half scrolling through the inbox to find any given message a person had sent me. This phone was the best part of my life.

I texted anyone I could whenever it was possible. This was sort of a limited activity because I had approximately one friend in the United States with a cell phone. But I made it work.

And over time more of my friends from Thailand started to come back to the States and get cell phones and I started to make friends in America and I downright abused my texting faculties.

And then one day something funny happened.

I didn't get a text.

Which wasn't weird in itself because I was accustomed to long time spans where no one acknowledged my cell-phone-self's presence. But it was weird because my mom said my dad had sent me a message. And why in the world hadn't I gotten it?

No worries. The Russians probably just shot down a satellite or something right as the message entered it.

No worries. My phone was fine.

And then a couple more days went by, during which I, for some reason, entered a texting lull. I didn't send or receive any texts during that time because my life was kept occupied, so I didn't notice anything unusual. Just that I wasn't texting much.

And then came the day when Mom and I were at Taco Bell and I needed to tell Dad that Mom and I were done shopping and would be home soon and to put the meat on the stove. I punched in the message, hit send, and then my phone got weird.

It just sat there on the Sending... screen, the little periods scrolling out and disappearing like the phone was thinking. But nothing was happening.

I sat staring at my smug little phone for a whole minute. And then I canceled the text. I checked the reception.

Five bars. Pretty good reception for Nebraska.

I tried sending the text again. My Impression just sat on that Sending... screen, so I gave it some time to work things out and ate a few tacos. I checked back.

That was a lie. This message was not sending. Lying little Impression. In my anger I turned the phone off to give it some time to reflect on its behavior. When my anger had subsided, I turned it back on.

It spent some time initializing its messaging capabilities and then all of a sudden its alert screen popped up.

7 NEW MESSAGES!!

Oh my gosh. Seven new messages! That was 3.5 times as many messages as I had ever had unread on my phone at one time.

I eagerly leaped into the inbox. There was the message from my dad from several days ago, a message from my future roommate and then several more from an assortment of other people including a couple "text me bak wut are yoo doing fool?" messages.

I freaked out and started texting everyone to clear things up as fast as I could. I sent all the messages without a problem and then, relieved, set down the Impression and glared at it.

What are you up to, phony?

"What are you talking about? I'm just doing my thing. Sending messages and stuff wanna check Facebook?"

Okay sur- No! Look me in the eyes.

It didn't. And after a few more test messages to myself I was convinced that it was just a random fluke and that my Impression was still a sophisticated piece of high tech gadgetry.

I was so wrong.

The problems developed over time. About a month went by and things seemed okay -- but every now and then I realized that I had typed two letters where I meant to type one, or forgotten to insert some letters. This was unusual because I'm the world's biggest perfectionist*, but I wrote it off as human error.

Foreshadowing.

One day I was expecting a text from a friend and it just wasn't coming. I felt like I was being stood up and I was starting to get peeved. Finally, my annoyance building, I wrote them an angry text, capped it with exclamation marks, and hit send.

Sending.... . . . . . .

Oh man. I'm the world's worst friend.

I turned the Impression on and off as fast as I could, waited for the messaging to initialize, and sure enough -- 3 New Messages.

"Mr. Impression," I said coldly. "What are you playing at?"

"You know very well what I'm talking about. Is there a setting I have wrong? Is this a user feature? Am I hitting the wrong button? Talk to me."

It didn't. And so I went home to talk to Mr. Internet.

I googled "samsung impression issues" and I just wasn't even prepared for the onset.

"Why won't they recall the impression?"

"Almost daily errors with my samsung impression!"

"Samsung impression errors???????"

"Shouldn't have bought this phone!!"

I followed a link to a forum where dozens of users were all complaining about the issues they were having. "It stops receiving messages and I have to turn it off and on to get it to work again," said one guy. "The frequency that this happened with increased over time. Right now it's every 37 messages."

What a specific, fateful number. Thirty. Seven. Messages.

I read on. That was the most prevalent problem, but certainly not the only one. "Sometimes it types two letters when I hit it once," said another forumer, "or else it doesn't recognize a key press. Makes me look like a sloppy typer."

It wasn't my fault. I was still typing like a pro. It was this demonic little device.

I stared coldly at the evil little gadget. It had cost me respect and joy. It had sabotaged my texting life. And the worst part -- it was only going to increase its reign of terror.

In response, I declared war on my Impression.

It was under the two-year protection of AT&T, but thankfully it only had a few weapons to use.

It had the fact that every certain number of texts, it would refuse to accept more texts until it had undergone a reboot. I quickly reached the 37 message limit, which appeared to be the lowest it would go.

Second, it would mess with my grammar.

And finally, it would occasionally disable the alarm clock without warning in an attempt to sabotage my morning schedule.

It had a variety of lesser glitches which would crop up from time to time -- disabling silent mode, changing the alarm times, forgetting about tasks I entered -- but I could ignore these.

The other three glitches I took on in force.

Whenever I had gone a day without any new texts, I would text myself or reboot the phone to make sure that I was still getting texts.

I started telling my friends that using multiple letters in my texts was my new style. "i doo ths on puurpose"

And I bought a clock.

We started a war against each other, me and my Impression. We threw our worst blows at the other, but in time we reached a stalemate. It couldn't sabotage my life and I couldn't coerce it into behaving like a normal phone.

And that's where we are today. An uneasy peace. A careful truce.

Me and the Impression.


-----
*not entirely factually accurate
Note: Cole's Pantech, threaded-conversation and all, still runs perfectly to this day.

Late Night Paper

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Orgo

Orgo. Good stuff.

Today I had a midterm in organic chemistry. That was enough to basically ruin my whole day.

I had squandered all my keeping-up-with-schoolwork time writing raps over the past week or so, so I was left with quite a pile of work to do before my midterm. Thankfully, I got back on task last Saturday, which gave me the slightest hope of getting caught up.
But.

I had to read a chapter of orgo and do problems out of two. When it's put that way, it doesn't sound like that much. Which is what I thought when I sat in the library and developed sick lines for hours. But that actually entails about 12 hours of work -- maybe a little more. And so even though I managed to buckle down and hit the homework load hard, I still found myself swamped, and there's always too much to do on top of homework, and sometimes a lyric is so poignant you have to jot it down even when you're working and then you work a little slower and then even after glaring at organic chemistry pages for hours there's still practice exams and flashcards and six hundred (ish) other things and you're not even sure if you're remembering what you're reading but you just have to read read read and-

The point is, I was in no way prepared for this exam.

I have a graph for proof.

I caught up with the reading and problems at 5:25. The exam was at 6:30. That meant I had like 15 minutes to glance over my notes and flashcards before grabbing a quick supper and heading to the exam.

To put this in perspective, most of the class started studying in earnest last Thursday. They were done with the chapters before we started them in class.

And the whole class is graded on a B- curve.

I was sure I was toast. Which meant that my entire day was awful. It was like there was a big black cloud of misery just- just pooping on me. All day long.

Even when our seminar today proved to be excellent.

In this seminar, we had a professor come in to tell us about biochemical research. Earlier in the year, I had gone to a Biology Students Association meeting and, weird coincidence, this same professor had given the exact same talk there. He's a really in-your-face, engaging kind of guy and he likes audience participation so he always asks lots of questions about things.

Which meant that when he gave the talk last time, I remembered almost everything he said.

Which meant that this time, I came off as an absolute genius.

Meade: "Blah blah blah science science. And in conclusion, we can now identify four different kinds of genetic diseases. Now, what do you suppose would be the problem with this?"
Long silence.
Nolan, with confidence: "Health insurance costs."
Meade: "Exactly."
LATER
Professor Meade: "What do you think these black and speckled shapes are?"
Honest Class: "Neurons? Bone fragments?"
Nolan: "Huh, they look kind of like tadpoles to me. Like tadpoles with two heads or something."
Professor Meade: "That's exactly right. These are genetic mutant tadpoles."

I knew what these were.

Actually, the hardest part of the class was tempering my confidence. I had to try to throw in umms and uhhs as I answered every question right on the money. But I think I was successful because he showed no recognition of me and seemed genuinely pleased with my competence.

But. As fun as seminar was, the misty gloom of orgo was still pervasive and it didn't take much longer than lunch after class for despondency to set in again.

I tried to lift the gloom by heading to SPAC to work out, but there was still that sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach, like when you're about to start in a basketball game or perform in front of a crowd. And it was all the worse because I knew it was my fault and that I could be on top of things if I hadn't wasted so much time writing raps.

And then I had afternoon class, which cost more study time, and then I was cramming in the last little bits of knowledge before supper -- and my head just couldn't hold all the facts and I knew I was going to get like 20 percent on the test, and every part of the future looked like a long black tunnel full of misery.

And that's when my day started to get good.

The funny thing about orgo is that as bad as it is, everyone knows how bad it is. They've heard from someone or another about the twelve thousand reaction mechanisms you need to memorize and the six thousand other compounds and the pages and pages and pages of benzene rings and catalyzed hydrogenations and Diels Alder reactions and Wittig reagents and Friedel-Crafts Acylations and maybe not that specific but they at least have an idea.

Which is really cool.

Because it's kind of like being a gladiator or on death row. Everyone who knows you have a midterm is like, "Oh, man, orgo today? I'm so sorry for you." Or, "Wow, that bites. Best of luck. I don't envy you at all." Or, "I would conceivably trade one of my children not to go through what you're going to go through in a couple of hours."

And if anyone's laughing or joking, you just tell them that you have orgo and then their faces get as sad as yours and they're like, "Oh snap. That's the worst." And you've ruined their day too for a bit.

On a totally sincere note, it's really awesome. Friends are encouraging, they say nice, untrue things about your intellect, they pray for you, they empathize totally. In some ways, having an orgo midterm is sweet.

In other ways, I probably just failed that test.

But I would gladly have another midterm tomorrow -- just so I could tell everyone