Socks and Laboratories

I have a very busy summer planned for the next nine weeks. I am taking the whole organic chemistry series, and am also working in a laboratory, where some very smart people are studying evolution. I get to work with photos of fish.

The lab I will be doing the laboratory portion of my organic chemistry class is, as I learned today, very, very cold. It was like walking into a walk in freezer. Not that it was actually below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, but it had that shock of cold across the face on a warm June day. I’d estimate that it was under 60 in there. I am wearing jeans and a short-sleeved sweatshirt over a tank-top, and I was wildly uncomfortable. Everyone in the lab was sniffling. With all of the talk of budget crises, I wonder why they are choosing to make it uncomfortably cold inside a building, when it would be so much cheaper and easier to just, y’know, not do that.

I have also wondered for a long time why the landscape people fight so hard to keep the students from wearing paths the grass; why don’t they just turn those ruts into real paths? People are going to keep wearing out the grass there anyway. I have been whining about this issue for years now, and during the spring quarter, a professor actually mentioned the same issue during class.

Yesterday was father’s day, and my mom (in a mild state of panic) sent me and my boyfriend to the sporting goods store to buy a couple of pairs of socks for my dad. Better than a tie? Oh, yes. These weren’t just any socks. These were Thorlo socks.

Now, like gravy, this may be one of those things which is unique to my family. There is, they feel, no better gift in the world than Thorlo socks. These are the socks that can solve all of your problems. They are the best socks in the world. These socks could cure cancer and then bake you a pie if they wanted to, but they don’t. They just want to cushion your feet from all the ills of the world and your Nike shoes. These socks are the Chuck Norris of hosiery. They’re the best.

Next door to the sporting goods place is an independent fish store (the kind which sells pets, not food) and since I like fish and we weren’t on a time constraint, we ducked in there after buying the life-changing socks for my dad. They have a large tank in the front of the store where they keep sharks and rays. Normally there’s one or two of the little guys swimming around, making me feel vaguely uncomfortable while I try to look at mollies and guppies and things, but yesterday, one of the sharks wasn’t happy.

He (or she, I suppose) had the most horrific injury I’ve ever seen on a living animal. His entire nose had been torn off, probably by another shark. There were little white strips of cartilage poking out of the bloodless pink meat, and the shark was breathing hard and fast, floating near the bottom of the tank, while his companions swam around like nothing was going on--like their sharky friend wasn’t missing most of his head.

Then we went out and shared a chicken bake and a soda, because I’m heartless and not easily put off my food.