Midnight conversations

My sister pops out of her studio. It's a few minutes past midnight and we're both going to be pulling all-nighters. Or mostly-all-nighters, perhaps.

Sister: Come see what I'm doing. I want to complain about it to someone.

Me: I'll complain about Darwin! His writing is dense.

Sister: See? It's for the same teacher I had to draw those 80 plates for... [plates as in pictures, not dinner plates]

She shows me a circle, covered in tiny lines that are close together in the center and progressively grow farther apart towards the outside. They're criss-crossed, and then triple-criss-crossed, and tiny, and tedious-looking.

Me: How long have you been doing this??

Sister: Uh, three, about four hours. And then I still have to do it in a line, like, extended out...

Me: WHY?? Can't you just look at it in a book?

She laughed and said "that was a good one!". But I still don't know why the teacher can't just hand out photocopies. $0.5 for two pages, one with the bar and one with the circle. Easy-peasy. They can learn to control their pulse by playing the wire loop game.

Sterile, shmerile

Today we were in Prokaryotes lab, spreading bacteria on agar plates. These agar plates, they're finicky bastards: we'd prepared 10 of them, but four got contaminated with fungus and another two didn't congeal properly (instead of beng firm and springy, they just sort of flopped around in a jell-oey mess and looked sorry for themselves). Team 1, bunch of ninnies**, had no contaminated plates. Teams 2 and 4 had six and seven usable plates each, respectively.

So we were being totally careful with our measly four surviving agar plates. We had our aseptic technique down pat. Two Bunsen burners at full throttle, latex gloves, surgical masks, dipping our plate spreaders in alcohol and then flaming them (very fun), keeping the lids close to the agar plates, making sure the micropipette tips minded their own business and didn't touch the table or anything...

This is a micropipette, by the way.

&%$*!! Someone pressed the wrong button on the micropipette and dropped its tip in the poop solution. Everyone spoke at the same time:

"Fish it out!"

"Here, if you use the agitator...!"

"Oh, crap!"

"Don't put anything in it, we can't contaminate it!!"

"Ah. Fish it out with a pencil or something."

We all stopped and stared at Oscar, who said the last bit. Then we all cracked up and kept snorting sporadically for about an hour. Also he and another teammate labelled the MacConkey agar "MacDonkey", which was funny until the teacher picked it up and went, completely seriously, "Oh, yeah, MacDonkey agar, whose is this?". Then it was hilarious.

Well, perhaps you had to be there.

There's this awesome machine that you use to shake up a solution before pipetting it onto a plate, so that you get a uniform distribution of bacteria and not the three that were floating on top while the rest partied it down with the sediment. Seen here is a vortex mixer, mixing up poopy solution number one, which is one part poop, nine parts saline solution, twenty parts stinky. Also you can see I wasn't lying about the gloves and surgical masks.

** They're not ninnies, I just wanted to use that word. Sa-tis-faction.

I lost my sense of taste.

The strangest thing just happened to me. I've been sick since Friday, with a cough and recently my nose getting all stuffed up. Today I got home, had lunch and then had a nap. Or rather, I tried to nap. I lay on the bed for about 40 minutes listening to music, my nose getting stuffier because I was horizontal, until finally I decided to get up and have dessert.

My mom made orange chiffon cake. I cut two thin slices, sandwiched them with some cherry jam in the middle, made a little bit of hot chocolate, sat down at the table and took a bite.

Nothing.

It didn't taste like anything. The texture of the cake was very fluffy, it felt nice and moist and was great against the cold, slightly-lumpy jam. The hot chocolate was warm, and sort of thick. Quite creamy. But I couldn't taste anything. NOOOO!!! My dessert! Damn.

Partly curious, partly disappointed and partly annoyed at the fact that my dessert was ruined beyond repair, I turned my attention to the salt shaker on the table, right in front of me. I put a bit of salt in the palm of my hand. Okay, I can taste that. It tastes like salt. Back to the cake. Nothing. Salt? Still salty. Salt on cake? Nothing. How about some Swiss chocolate? Oh, great, now this I can tas– no. Wait. It feels creamy and rich, and melty and lovely, but it doesn't taste like anything. NOOOO! NOT THE CHOCOLATE!!

I finished up my food (I'd already spread it with jam, after all), went upstairs and whined to my mother (I can't taste anything swee-eeet...!). She told me to go to bed. I was about to, too, when something occurred to me: this could be a learning experience.

I went back into the kitchen. The verdict on the cake was the same. Tasteless. Broccoli? Nope, but a very nice crunch. Peanut butter was very interesting; it felt like peanut butter, but it tasted like nothing except it was a tiny, tiny, tiny bit salty. A peek at the ingredients: the last one is salt.

It was very eye-opening. I realized that taste isn't as prominent as I thought it was. I went around sampling different foods, and each one felt like it was at 80%. Like I was eating in black and white. I could almost taste these foods, almost, but it's like they were faceless. I had to pause while I was chewing and try to find the taste, only I couldn't. I tried:

A pecan: a bit chewy, kind of buttery. Melty, almost. Very nice.

Salted cashew: tasted like salt. Lots of salt. Ick.

Pita chip: I thought that these would taste like salt the way the cashews did, but they just got mushy as I chewed and didn't feel very appetizing.

Cocoa powder: It doesn't feel like dust or anything. It's okay. Not great, definitely. But maybe that's because I'm trying to remember how it tastes while I try it.

Applesauce: This was my favourite texture. It was cold, and not completely smooth. Not creamy, but not watery either. Not too congealed.

At this point it occurred to me that even salty foods didn't taste like themselves. I could only taste the salt.What if salt isn't a flavour? What if it's a feeling? I decided to try other food with strong "feelings". Starting with alcohol.

Midori liqueur: It doesn't smell like anything, just like the others; I thought I'd be able to smell the alcohol. I poured a bit into the lid and tasted it. EW. This was the most revolting thing I had while my taste buds were knocked out (and I tried vinegar next, mind you). It was horrible.

Vinegar: The next obvious step. Again, no smell. It feels strong, but doesn't taste bad. Very curious, I poured about a teaspoonful into a little mug and drank it. Okay, that was stupid. It's acid and burned my throat. Funny, it almost does taste vinegary. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is as close as I've come to flavour sor far.

After I burnt my throat, I decided to go the safe route and had a frozen blueberry. That's funny. Besides the texture, it did kind taste faintly of blueberry. Is blueberry a feeling? No way. I ate another. Blueberry!

The vinegar somehow jolted my system into perceiving tastes again. Who would've thought? I only regret that I didn't get to try anything spicy.

But seriously, this was amazing. It wasn't the way I would have imagined, and nothing was bland. Separating taste from texture made me realize –and this is weird– that a lot of the characteristics of food that I attributed to taste actually belong to texture.

Milk still felt like milk and peanut butter still felt like peanut butter, but some things were more appetizing than others, such as the applesauce being about 100 times better than the alcohol. The pecan was better than the pita chip. The cocoa powder was better than the broccoli. And these are all things that I enjoy normally, but I didn't compare before because they were so different. Yet now they're all sort of on the same level. There's nothing different between the applesauce and the pita chip, except for my memories of their tastes.

One interesting thing that I noticed was that fatty foods (the pecan, the nut butter, the milk, the chocolate) felt a lot better than everything else, except the applesauce, which was only because the latter was cold.

The most surreal thing of all, however, was knowing that the taste was there. I just couldn't perceive it. Also not being able to say that such-and-such food was "tasty" or "yummy". It was just "nice" or "not nice".

Such childish things as these

You know, it's sad, but I guess I'm getting old. I mean, I'm turning 18 in less than a month, and a few weeks ago I sat down to think of what I wanted my birthday. All I could come up with was a mastodontal scented candle and a music stand. Lame.

At one point or another you just have to admit that you're growing up... and birthdays aren't fun like they used to be. I simply couldn't enjoy, say, a cake depicting a prehistoric scene with little plastic dinosaur figures stuck in it, which by the way I saw today at Lumen and you can get like ten dinosaurs for 30 pesos. COOL.

Ah, yes, I feel the age setting in already. The spring is gone from my step...

Oooh! Or a Godzilla cake!! Now THAT. IS. COOL.

Fernando

Today I went to Starbucks with my sister. We ordered separately, partly because I was taking ages to decide, and partly because I wanted to use my Starbucks name.

Starbucks is cool. You know how they ask your name and write it on the side of your cup? My sister told me about some friends of hers that realized that they don't have to give their actual names, and instead make up new ones every time they drink something there. I've been doing it, too, ever since she told me. Today:

Barista-dude, writing on cup: ... whipped cream, no lid. Right. So what was your name again?

Me: Victoria!

B-dude, scribbling furiously on cup: Okay! So we'll call you, Victoria, when your order is ready.

I stood with my sister watching a girl prepare the drinks (conversation: "Ooh, don't lose count of how many scoops you've put in!" as she puts in the third measure of matcha powder. "Yeah! You're on the second!" "HAHAHA!") so we were already there to pick them up when they were done.

But when we sat down we noticed that my cup was wrong. It was my order and all, as there was zero chance of it getting mixed up with anyone else's (we were the only ones ordering). But the side said....

Fernando?? The dude wrote his own name while saying mine?!? HA! Even better than Victoria.

**I don't buy coffee there because, pffft, expensive! Coffee! Can make at home! But I do get Frappuccinos, because theirs are tasty and hard to replicate.

Daltonism

One of my (new! Uni!) friends is daltonic (he's also dyslexic, and very astigmatic). Today I'm wearing some really cute brown jeans, and he told me they looked green to him>

"I was going to tell you you looked like an elf, but then I thought they might not actually be green."

It gave me two thoughts.

Firstly, how many times have I walked around in a perfectly nice outfit, while daltonic people look on and my color combination seems terrible? I mean, what I was wearing today would look revolting with green pants.

Secondly, and closely related, if some aliens that can see stuff but perceive colors differently from us showed up one day, would they think we suck at combining colors?

To Do

a) Find someone to go to the Sonata Arctica concert with me (urgent because I bought my ticket weeks ago. Call radio, obtain tickets, invite someone?)

b) Do Chemistry homework

c) Move my bed next to the window to make space for sexy new bookshelf

d) Bury the last hermit crab, who died

e) Get new hermit crabs

f) Get some pyjama pants (at that store where they have those Miffy ones...)

g) Pack a school lunch for tomorrow?

h) Do Physics homework

i) Do Philosophy homework

j) Well, do all my homework and study for my exams

h) Return books to school library (give to Dad to drive them there separately because they're so huge)

i) OWWW MY THROAT HURTS, get some medicine or something for that.

It's hard to tell when a hermit crab dies. I mean, yesterday (or the day before) Last Crab Alive moved a bit when we poked it, but was never seen to do so again. For all I know, that shudder could have been his last movement ever.

It was especially hard with this crab to tell when he ceased to function. I didn't exactly hear a raspy, exhausted chirp as he let go his dying breath, nor did I tearfully look on as the light slowly left his eyes. They're still glossy, his eyes, just dead-glossy. It looks the same as live-glossy.

I mean, I usually notice my crabs are dead when they get moldy. That sound horrible, and I have no excuse for this, really. I mean, I do have excuses, but none of them... uh, excuse my behaviour. So I guess they're not actual excuses then.

Sigh.

**** you, classmate!

Bit**ing (biting!) ahead.

There's this one dude who's in most of my classes (all but one, I think). He smokes about 26502982 cigarettes a day, which is one of the least annoying facts about him (which tells you how much he irritates me, given that I'm not exactly a fan of the whole smoking concept).

Anyway, he apparently went to some crappy high school where he never had to work much, and consequently is finding University pretty tough. Like, he barely knows any Math, he'd never (never!) used a library before –and barely uses it now–, he won't ask questions when he doesn't understand something, complains about easy assignments (or any assignment...), and somehow manages to hand in homework that's less than a page long every single time. On both sides of the page, which is really not redemptive, though.

I mean, I know that's basically not his fault, because he told me about his high school's modus operandi and it seems like they just let them copy & paste things off the 'net and hand them in without reading them. But he shows basically NO INTEREST IN TRYING to better himself vis-à-vis school. I wouldn't really care about this except he:

a) Latched onto me in the first few weeks because I wore metal band T-shirts and was nice to him. And he hates everyone who isn't me or a man. Or who doesn't smoke a lot.

b) Since he latched onto me, he's in my Prokaryotes and Physics lab team.

Which brings me to yesterday in Physics lab, where we had two capillary tubes to put in water and then it ethanol to... observe capillarity.

Yes, I know, totally sophisticated. Moving on!

One of the tubes had a bit of anticoagulant in it, but we never found out what was supposed to happen with it because he used the capillary tube as a straw, sucking water out of a Petri dish. The reasoning behind this being that he didn't want to spill any water when he picked up the dish. Spill water on the table which was already wet, that is.

I don't usually get mad at people, but that really pissed me off. It was partly due to lack of sleep, I think, because in the past it's happened that when I don't sleep enough for several days in a row I roll out of bed one morning and start acting all shrew-y. So I calmly (not) asked him what in the name of hell he was doing, that had anticoagulant in it. Which we need. For the experiment. And you drank it.

To give him his due, once he realized the error of his ways he did express concern. "Oh, that had anticoagulant? Awww, no! That's why it tasted funny!"

If I weren't such a wuss, he'd be walking around with half his teeth knocked out. As it was, I realized I was being shrew-y and permitted myself to be in a bad mood for about 10 minutes and give him the stink-eye.

That's the good thing about not really getting mad at other people much. I can get over it relatively easily most of the time. :/

Just a thought

This morning (well, yesterday morning by now, as it's nearly four a.m.) I was riding the bus to school, and there was SO MUCH traffic. It took absolute ages to get to the University. But it was okay, because the school buses are specially designed for students who don't sleep enough or something: each one seats 41 and has great big comfy chairs you can adjust back and sleep in.

So ANYWAYZ, I was sleeping in my seat but awoke with a jolt about two minutes before my stop. (Which rocks, because I've seen people do that on, say, the metro. They'll be snoozing away, and suddenly wake up and get off at their stop. I share the sixth sense! Dang, I'll bet I've jinxed it now) When I woke up I made this surprised, sleepy noise. Not a grunt or anything, but "HUUNH???" and I guess it was a bit loud because the girl in front of me turned around and stared at me for about ten awkward seconds.

If I don't write down these little anecdotes, dumb/monotonous/boring as they may be, I'm afraid one day I'll wake up and I'll be 64 years old and won't remember anything about my youth.

Although I hope that If I'm ever 64 and read this, I won't feel bad because present me thinks 64 is old. Hello, me of the future! Don't worry, you still have some fight in you. Possibly.

Hey, Future Me, are you rich? You could probably afford some nice stuff now. Oooh, if you have money you can go out and buy some nice scented candles. Yum. Oh, wait! What if I lose my sense of smell?? Better buy the candles now.

Oh, future me, is my sexy bookshelf still around? Doing strong? GOD, it's going to be almost a half-century old. If it survived, that is. I can't imagine it giving in to anything. That thing is SOLID.

Documenting

Documenting conversations in the library.

Today two girls who are in my Prokaryotes lab and work at the table across from mine were complaining about a girl on their team. She apparently was using the microscope too much and didn't leave a lot of time for the rest of the team to look. They were getting pretty worked up.

I pointed out the humor in it: "Ugh!! She was, like, hogging the microscope! We had to prepare all the slides!! It's so exasperating!!" and although they laughed, I don't think they thought it was as funny as I did.