Okay. Onward to a different point.
 |
| Have some leaves and some light and be happy. |
I like working at Starbucks. I know, I know, I didn't move to another country just to have my grande mocha served to me with an accent, but it's familiar, it's comfortable, and it's got good internet and an entire floor of study space. Give me a quaint Scottish coffeeshop with ten picture windows where I can sit for four hours after I've finished my drink and I'll be there in an instant. Until then, Starbucks it is.
I'm here more than I should be, probably. At least part of the staff recognizes me. And I've learned the combination to the bathroom upstairs. I've spent most of a morning repeating it to all the people who tried the handle, pushed against the door, and stared at it like the material world had betrayed them and everything they held dear until, I told them there was a combination. And of course, there are various language barriers, so I've gotten up a few times to type in the code for them. Seemed simpler.
It's nice to be helpful, you know? While I still start when my voice comes out in that round, broad, campy American fashion, it's good that the words it carries are useful ones, making someone's life easier for a minute. I've been on the receiving end of so much help lately and try though I might, that's never going to be a life-mode I'm comfortable with, so any time I can make up that altruism balance in my life, I'm going to.
Halfway through the day, a guy came in and sat at the table in front of me and I wouldn't have paid him any attention except I thought he was someone I'd met, but he wasn't, and then he caught me staring, which was embarrassing enough that I went back to my laptop, pretending like I hadn't noticed him at all. There have to be twenty people here at any given time. I could have been staring off into space in his general direction for all he knew. I could have been staring at someone, anyone else. He could assume that there wasn't any significance to my glance, I told myself. Reasonable doubt is the saving grace of public interactions with strangers.
Anyway, this guy who I could have ignored had a friend who came in maybe half an hour after that and they started going through some science classwork. I thought for a minute it might be physics or astronomy because they were talking about absorption spectrums, but it turned out to be chemistry. Normal enough. What I wasn't ready for was overpowering nostalgia for undergraduate physical science classes, with their equations and their problem solving and their straightforward application of empirically derived physical laws. Oh, thank god, I thought. Numbers. Math. Integrals and derivatives and even, yes, fourier transforms. Give me something that makes sense. Give me something I know.
That feeling, that wanting to latch on to something concrete, is something I've heard from other people in our program. As one of my professors said at the beginning of the year, "At least with physics I can tell that I'm getting somewhere." And for me, the sciences, they're something familiar. No, I don't think it's the normal human experience to label calculus as familiar, but it's my human experience. There's something wonderfully useful and helpful about science and applied sciences. It's accessible and beneficial and provable.
Of course, I also had four years of undergrad and four years of gainful employment to consolidate my knowledge of basic science. I can't expect theology or even this weird intersection of theology and science to have the same kind of comfortable relatability in just a month and a half. It'll take two months, minimum. Three, if we want to be safe about it.1
And that's okay. Because I didn't come to another country to bask myself in the familiar, either.
1 We all know I'm joking, right? This is a joke. It's funny because it's such a vast underestimation of the time it takes to gain proficiency in any endeavor. Oh boy, do I like explaining jokes due to a lack of vocal context. But also, my favorite joke is one that's explained, so what do I know?
No comments:
Post a Comment