Hello you,
I hope you’re doing well. You probably are, happily taking the first steps on the path to becoming something more fulfilling than a toxicology cell culture robot.
I’m ok, been writing a lot lately. Nothing particularly high quality or of much merit, just filling page after page of my little spiral notebooks with ease. It’s becoming a problem because whenever I get some time alone, I won’t study or do class work. I’ll just write. I had hoped to do well in my courses at the Harvard E School and maybe open a door to a PhD program somewhere. It’s not going to happen though. I feel disinterested already after only a few weeks.
There is a short comic that I read and loved called, “The Amazing Life Of Onion Jack”. It’s basically an amalgamation and fun retelling of the typical superhero myth.
An infant in a spaceship crashes into earth and is adopted and taken in by the discovering couple. As a toddler, the boy’s favorite toys are his pot and pan cooking set. Later, sometime during his childhood, an otherworldly being contacts him and entrusts him with a magical ring. As a kid, he cooks a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner for his family. Shortly after this, he pulls a sword from a stone and hears a voice anoint him with a grand destiny. After high school graduation, he’s accepted into a culinary academy. But then he’s bitten by a radioactive spider. Then mysterious toxic waste falls on him. Then he’s irradiated with cosmic gamma rays.
Defeated, he hangs his head and says, “Fine then. I won’t cook.” He becomes a superhero, “Onion Jack”, and fights crime and supervillans for the next fifty years. Occasionally, an opportunity to cook gets him excited but then another superhero crisis interferes. Eventually he gets old and retires. His friend, “The Human Wedge”, asks him, “What are you going to do with all this free time? Won’t you go nuts?”. After a thoughtful pause he replies, “I was thinking of opening a little bistro somewhere.”
Time passes. A funeral occurs. Many elderly superheroes and chefs attend. A newscast comes onto a TV. The anchor announces, “Today the world’s greatest chef, “Onion Jack” has died. He opened his famous restaurant, “My Greatest Adventure”, at the advanced age of seventy-five and quickly revolutionized the culinary world. “He was our Mozart”, a contemporary was quoted. After the accolades, the newscaster closes with, “Prior to Onion Jack’s career as a chef, he was in law enforcement.” The End.
So, I’ve been kind of feeling lately that Biology is my superhero and that maybe writing is my cooking. Still I plod on in the sciences, forcing myself to get through these fascinating courses that I find boring. I hope that you are more fortunate and that your adventure into medicine is your little bistro somewhere and not saving the world.
….. Here I am pausing, considering whether I should just wish you well and end this rapidly expanding monologue or soldier on. You know, maybe you thought I was hard to read but you weren’t exactly transparent either. I often wondered (and still do) what your perception of me was. I have a feeling that mine of you is far off from the truth. Perhaps I’m just a lost soul to you. If I had a more accurate idea of who you were I think I would miss not knowing you very well.
Well, whatever type of creature you are, I miss you. It stings when I come into the tech office and sit next to where your place used to be. But then I drift to the sad consoling knowledge that you will fade slowly from my memory like the other wonderful people I have drifted apart from but wish I hadn’t. It’s a personality trait of mine to form strong attachments to the people I truly enjoy being around. They’re secret one-way bonds that grow silently and independently, partially out of my consciousness and control. Their intensity only becoming fully realized when they are ripped away.
So I hurt now. But it will, of course, pass. And if these things really do come in threes, I have one more encounter with an intelligent, cute redhead to go. I wish you all the best in the world,
me
The Ancient Undergrad 