Because I Don't Write Daily

It's almost nine p.m., and the last vestiges of sunlight have finally disappeared. I got home about an hour ago, and since I've been spending all my sleeping and most of my waking moments indoors, I decided to savor those last minutes of daylight and eat my dinner outside on my porch. Nothing fancy, just a salad and some leftovers. After twelve hours at work I can't find the will to even make pasta from a box.

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It smells different here.

Sometimes I miss those familiar smells from home, of Glade air fresheners and my dog's shampoo, of colognes and perfumes worn by familiar faces, of the strange blend of fried food and Asian seasoning that wafts around mall food courts. I can't quite pinpoint the scent here, and maybe that's just another sign that this isn't really "home" quite yet.

I know the smells of my lab, though. One side smells faintly of dental cement, and the other faintly of burning. Every once in a while there's a waft of QZ's floral hand sanitizer, or some chemicals when the fume hood isn't working properly, or the rats' bedding and food. They're not pleasant smells, per se, but there's something pleasant about their familiarity.

Today I cleaned the lab. On a Saturday, the place was virtually empty instead of crowded with the usual huddles of people to navigate around. I wiped down the counters with 409 and marveled at how much dust and unidentifiable gunk can accumulate. I contemplate re-organizing, but eschew the area where we do surgeries and the electrode-making counter. Drawers get labels when I can identify the contents. Much of the time I can't.

It's nice to look around and see my handiwork, but the place smells of 409 and the chocolate milk and Coco Puffs I've been feeding to the sick baby rats. Somehow it seems incomplete without the smell of burnt skin and dental cement, and the fume hood's hum is lonely without the accompanying sizzle of the soldering iron and PP and RK's mystifying French dialogue and the sporadic beeping of the voltmeter.

By Monday afternoon the place will probably be messy again, and smell of surgeries and melted plastic and rats. That's what I hope, anyway.

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I'm spending the summer of my freshman year in the bowels of a research laboratory, 2000 miles from home. I wake up shortly after sunrise because the window in my bedroom doesn't have blinds installed. When I can muster the will power, I get up and go for a run, but usually I bury my head in the covers after a bleary-eyed glance at my newly acquired alarm clock notifies me it's just past 6 a.m.

What I realized is that I like waking up with the sun. I like running for the bus stop and seeing the same old man there waiting, and wondering where he goes everyday (one day I'll ask him). I like lunches with my lab, which are filled with too many grad students and Miss Vickie's kettle-cooked Jalapeño chips and conversations that somehow meander towards two subjects: science and alcohol. I like Thursdays, and going to the local farmer's market so I can have cooked food for dinner and waste money on frivolities like cheese and maple sugar candy.

What I realized is that I love my job, my baby rats, my coworkers. I love the things I'm learning about epilepsy and behavior and brains (but mostly the hippocampus). I love spending hours coding schedules in some ancient language so I can potentially save hours when I actually use them to train my rats. I love reading a paper and noticing I understand more than I did a month ago, and being able to visualize the different layers and pathways because JK took the time to explain them all to me.

And somehow it doesn't matter anymore that I don't know how or if anything I'm doing now will affect my future (since really, I don't even know what I want anymore, if I ever did), because even if it has nothing to do with my tomorrow, it has everything to do with my today.