Saturday, June 25, 2005

A Good Excuse

Applied math is one thing:

“. . . so, I duct-taped cardboard scraps on the fan I bought – for $15 – from e-bay. . . but it kind of just fell apart”

“Well, I had all this static in my experiment, so I bought dryer sheets and rubbed them all over my apparatus. It didn’t help, and now whenever I walk into lab I get a headache from the Downy fresh smell.”

Biologists have white coats, pipettes, and million dollar grants.

As much as Erin (duct-tape) and I (dryer sheets) enjoyed speaking fluid dynamics when our pre-med friends got too excited about proteins – there was a deep sense that we were doing playground science for our senior theses.

We comforted ourselves with the idea that there was far too little time between the due date of our manuscripts and graduation for our department heads to do much more than skim everyone’s abstract. We spent the final Saturday before the thesis deadline at Fenway.

I hoped my advisor didn’t notice my sun-burned nose as he detailed his summer plans for the project.

I described my meeting to Erin:

“He wants to make it a paper, he even said, ‘Heck it’s summer, we’ll send it on over to ------, see what they say.’ I’m quitting science if my thesis gets published in ------.”

And recently I learned:

There’s a new satellite journal, ------- Physics. The editors think the paper’s interesting; the reviewers think it’s publishable. It hasn’t been accepted yet, and it’s not ------ herself. But, my conception of science has been sufficiently debased to warrant, at least, some time off.

Sunday, June 19, 2005

The Risible Lift

I try to stifle competitive urges.

And, I’ll think I’ve killed them all – until I get on the elevator.

Here in the med school, the first one on doesn’t ask where the others are going. He selects his floor, steps back, and we can make our move.

If we get on at one and someone hits two, a sheepish blush says “I fold.” Fifth floor cardiology says “beat that” seventh oncology says, “Oh, I will”. But as the round closes and oncology smirks, the tech from the ER yells “Hold the door!” And her cart full of samples with biohazard labels beat the clipboards any day.