The point.
Monday in lab I spent half hour performing a Diels Alder reaction waiting for my lugubrious purple solution to boil into a bubbling pale ale. While cursing this toil and trouble and hoping for the color change, I talked with the girl at the station next to mine. She was waiting too. Waiting to dutifully get her degree and get married. A horse of a different color from everything I wanted. I couldn't imagine longing only for this metamorphosis, shedding her own name and schooling and emerging an eternal summer butterfly free to bum around and have a family. With medical school you almost couldn't have kids till you were after thirty and that was just so late.
I thought it was late already to go through what we were and arrive no further than Austen. To try one's patience and sanity refluxing reactions, synthesizing salicylic acid, learning allylic hallogenation. After all the hours in labs, all-nighters over orgo textbooks, splicing genes and ideas together in paper. After centuries of cooking dinner, washing clothes and if accomplished sitting in rooms, cutting flowers, speaking French and German, covering screens and I know not what; all she wanted was not benzene but wedding rings.
This education. To raise children. An incredible and dauntingly difficult job, but I couldn't conceive that with all these opportunities, conception and lying around a ritzy apartment were the extent of an ambitious young Yalie's goals. Each to their own, and I guess I want the bread someone else won hard-earned for me. I want my full-fledged citizenship in the world. Not necessarcily moving in high but to be out in society, doing something with the education I am fucking lucky to get.
I walked back by the 5 o'clock light graveyard where Noah Webster, Robert Sherman, and other important men lie. It was one of those afternoons it's not too hot, all you need is a tee-shirt, and I remember this is my favorite season. Running my hand along the fence, looking up at the Law School carved stone beaming its best sun-warmed smile, I thought of the paper and the text that were mine to work and re-work and write. I thought of the problem sets with pages of cryptic stick symbols and arrows and excited electrons catalyzing polymerizations, everything coming together. The world's going to room temperature but besides the library, I'm not going to sit in a room while it happens.
I went to services tonight. I would say I went to Temple, but they were held in the First Summerfield Methodist Church on the corner of College and Elm. The fifteen foot wood cross was covered partially by a cloth with Hebrew painted on it. I walked in late after dinner with Seema and Isabelle and remembering more reasons I'm happy I went to Horace Mann. The sirens fled down College street outside. It was strangely secure, reassurring the melody, the familiar lilt of the prayers chanted in a language I understand only pieces of. A Long Island accent read one of the passages and I lifted my head from the Gates of Repetance to see a fellow Tiyuler who's now apparently and unexpectedly a freshman here. I sat in the back in jeans and enjoyed all the colors everyone wears for Rosh Shashanna, short Stiles Master Schwartz coming in later than I and sitting in front of me, the same translations with ruler instead of king and the voices, reading as one, managing to finish a slight second off from each other. I did not enjoy the bland and flavorless version of me cha mocha, it sucked. No spice. The student cantoring also tried to get too high on Avinu Malkeinu and I actually missed Cantor Botton and conrny Chants of a Lifetime until the last verse when everyone came in and it was redeemed. The Rabbi also had grown up Roman Catholic and converted only to find out she was adopted and her biological parents were Jewish. Her sermon was her life story. She insisted that during these days of remembrance, these days of return (what if I don't want to I argued) we need to remember, to return and to figure out where we were returning to. She intoned it was time for everyone at the same time to ask the big questions alone. Who am I? Where am I from? What am I doing? I'm Samantha from 53 Spring Street above red orange Gatsby's and from Lexington, Lawrance, 2946 on the fourth floor of Stiles, Yale, New Haven, the World, Horace Mann, P.S.3, Playgroup, artists, love, Purchase, Westchester, the Bronx, Queens, Holland, Eastern Europe, the East. I'm writing to you, l'shana tova.
I thought it was late already to go through what we were and arrive no further than Austen. To try one's patience and sanity refluxing reactions, synthesizing salicylic acid, learning allylic hallogenation. After all the hours in labs, all-nighters over orgo textbooks, splicing genes and ideas together in paper. After centuries of cooking dinner, washing clothes and if accomplished sitting in rooms, cutting flowers, speaking French and German, covering screens and I know not what; all she wanted was not benzene but wedding rings.
This education. To raise children. An incredible and dauntingly difficult job, but I couldn't conceive that with all these opportunities, conception and lying around a ritzy apartment were the extent of an ambitious young Yalie's goals. Each to their own, and I guess I want the bread someone else won hard-earned for me. I want my full-fledged citizenship in the world. Not necessarcily moving in high but to be out in society, doing something with the education I am fucking lucky to get.
I walked back by the 5 o'clock light graveyard where Noah Webster, Robert Sherman, and other important men lie. It was one of those afternoons it's not too hot, all you need is a tee-shirt, and I remember this is my favorite season. Running my hand along the fence, looking up at the Law School carved stone beaming its best sun-warmed smile, I thought of the paper and the text that were mine to work and re-work and write. I thought of the problem sets with pages of cryptic stick symbols and arrows and excited electrons catalyzing polymerizations, everything coming together. The world's going to room temperature but besides the library, I'm not going to sit in a room while it happens.
I went to services tonight. I would say I went to Temple, but they were held in the First Summerfield Methodist Church on the corner of College and Elm. The fifteen foot wood cross was covered partially by a cloth with Hebrew painted on it. I walked in late after dinner with Seema and Isabelle and remembering more reasons I'm happy I went to Horace Mann. The sirens fled down College street outside. It was strangely secure, reassurring the melody, the familiar lilt of the prayers chanted in a language I understand only pieces of. A Long Island accent read one of the passages and I lifted my head from the Gates of Repetance to see a fellow Tiyuler who's now apparently and unexpectedly a freshman here. I sat in the back in jeans and enjoyed all the colors everyone wears for Rosh Shashanna, short Stiles Master Schwartz coming in later than I and sitting in front of me, the same translations with ruler instead of king and the voices, reading as one, managing to finish a slight second off from each other. I did not enjoy the bland and flavorless version of me cha mocha, it sucked. No spice. The student cantoring also tried to get too high on Avinu Malkeinu and I actually missed Cantor Botton and conrny Chants of a Lifetime until the last verse when everyone came in and it was redeemed. The Rabbi also had grown up Roman Catholic and converted only to find out she was adopted and her biological parents were Jewish. Her sermon was her life story. She insisted that during these days of remembrance, these days of return (what if I don't want to I argued) we need to remember, to return and to figure out where we were returning to. She intoned it was time for everyone at the same time to ask the big questions alone. Who am I? Where am I from? What am I doing? I'm Samantha from 53 Spring Street above red orange Gatsby's and from Lexington, Lawrance, 2946 on the fourth floor of Stiles, Yale, New Haven, the World, Horace Mann, P.S.3, Playgroup, artists, love, Purchase, Westchester, the Bronx, Queens, Holland, Eastern Europe, the East. I'm writing to you, l'shana tova.
