Life moves in the strangest cycles--like the laziest days and days of nothing much to do but lay languidly on too-small sofas while Pup cooks salmon for the first time without his mom and take lethargic bike rides to nowhere in particular to eat up long days of waning sunlight, then suddenly everything happens at once.
That was yesterday. Cue torrential rain and and a lot of running around, soaking wet jeans and too scared to carry my laptop the short walk to work. Locked early morning in the lab creating a spectral profile for allura red dye in commercial mouthwash and, not wanting to swim back to the apartment for the short hour before heading off to the greenhouse, cozy time in the Science Library and good, too, because our never-done-this-before lab T.A. and weird wording in our lab manual made me skip over needing to have measured the inner diameter of the cuvette, so I could easily run between lab and heatered-armchair all while understanding Beer's Law a little better than I expected to. Greenhouse at noon then, somehow serendipitously, treading the flood waters on the roof of another science building three and a half hours later, at another greenhouse holed up with delightfully dorky botanical researchers, sitting in front of a microscope drawing clover calyxes with ballpoint pen on notebook paper because maybe the paper that's published on clover taxonomy needs my illustrative powers and if not that maybe I can work in the lab doing data entry on tiny, crunchy bits of dried out plants while claiming some sort of stake in the Plant Sciences department because I'm always talking about the future the future I can't wait to get to the future, right? Straight away to work running through calf-deep puddles to see Pup on the balcony quickly because Tuesdays are usually reserved for between-class naps but not when waves of rain are carrying me all over campus. And if work felt like the end of my day--and it did, coming home to peacefully prepare vegetable curry and sit on the couch for more Chemistry--it wasn't.
Because Monday's botched first rain was rectified with a more organized run on Tuesday, and one which Pup and I accepted as correct despite the crazy rain of all day not carrying on to the 10:10 start of festivities and not cold enough to stop me from running around campus in nothing but rain boots last night and jumping into the OPERS pool surprisingly warm with churning bodies doing backflips and walking tightropes on buoys singing land of the free, home of the brave, we even ran through Wiesel and I got to high-five the girls that live in the room that I ran naked out of last year. An hour of running up and down hills screaming and flailing and laughing so out of breath all the way to drumming and dancing and finally back home for a shower and collapsing in bed and I don't know that I even had a chance to rest all day until then. Waking up with sore legs which is either a testament to my work-out or my out-of-shape, sore toes as a testament to next year I'll wear tennis shoes, and sore back and belly as a testament to how funny life is learning about the menstrual cycle one day and bed-ridden exhausted from it the next. So grateful for slow day today; despite the Cambrian Explosion in Biology I took my sweet time slugly across campus to a short Chemistry review section for the impending midterm, let out early to flop over the side of the couch with Pup's proud-of special-tea before turning in very early for a rest and a recharge. Slow day tomorrow, and slow train home on Friday because I don't think I was built to go here to here to here running around so quickly, I'd rather sit sunk into seats and have locomotion move me so my legs can take a break and my mind can do all the work because for right now I'm studying but this weekend holds pumpkin patches, wild things, art shows in cemeteries, and determining numbers of molecules with familiar stoichiometry. And the slow cycle starts again.
Because Monday's botched first rain was rectified with a more organized run on Tuesday, and one which Pup and I accepted as correct despite the crazy rain of all day not carrying on to the 10:10 start of festivities and not cold enough to stop me from running around campus in nothing but rain boots last night and jumping into the OPERS pool surprisingly warm with churning bodies doing backflips and walking tightropes on buoys singing land of the free, home of the brave, we even ran through Wiesel and I got to high-five the girls that live in the room that I ran naked out of last year. An hour of running up and down hills screaming and flailing and laughing so out of breath all the way to drumming and dancing and finally back home for a shower and collapsing in bed and I don't know that I even had a chance to rest all day until then. Waking up with sore legs which is either a testament to my work-out or my out-of-shape, sore toes as a testament to next year I'll wear tennis shoes, and sore back and belly as a testament to how funny life is learning about the menstrual cycle one day and bed-ridden exhausted from it the next. So grateful for slow day today; despite the Cambrian Explosion in Biology I took my sweet time slugly across campus to a short Chemistry review section for the impending midterm, let out early to flop over the side of the couch with Pup's proud-of special-tea before turning in very early for a rest and a recharge. Slow day tomorrow, and slow train home on Friday because I don't think I was built to go here to here to here running around so quickly, I'd rather sit sunk into seats and have locomotion move me so my legs can take a break and my mind can do all the work because for right now I'm studying but this weekend holds pumpkin patches, wild things, art shows in cemeteries, and determining numbers of molecules with familiar stoichiometry. And the slow cycle starts again.
:O!
ReplyDelete