I dub thee

By my fifth year working in a lab, I was fairly jaded about the amount of excitement one could get up to. The New Thing that happened yesterday wasn't strictly lab-related, but I doubt I would have gotten this opportunity had I not been working in a lab.

We have an exchange student from a medical school in China. We introduced ourselves to each other yesterday, and I asked her how she would prefer to be addressed, since I'd heard about three different names from three different people in reference to her. "Oh," she said. "I don't have an English name yet. We can choose one -- how about Sophie?"

I sputtered.

"Oh, you don't like it?" She asked.

"No, it's not that!" I said. "I just don't know if I should pick your name! You don't even need an English name, if you don't want. Whatever name you want to use is fine!"

"What about Amy?"

"Amy is nice!" I finally said, bemused.

Afterwards, she gave me a really awesome dragon pendant and expressed surprise that my boss/mentor communicates through text, since apparently that is too casual of an interaction to warrant a response in her experience.

This is going to be my first experience working so closely with an exchange student, and I already know I am going to learn a lot.

Crimes against myself

I used to make myself some absolutely absurd "snacks" after school. Even worse than eating them myself was trying to convince my friends that what I was making was real, edible food. (A few of them bought into my lies, poor things...)

The first offender in a long line of gourmet detritus was something that I very creatively titled "Bread, Butter, Sugar," because that's what it was and who needs conjunctions? The only way the name of this food item could have gotten more literal was if I called it "Bread, Margarine, Sugar." Anyway, the important thing to note about this snack is that the goal was to put as much not-butter and sugar on top of the bread as possible. Like, if you were to take a cross-section of this thing, the butter and sugar would hopefully stand at least an inch tall on the bread. Because if you're going to eat something like that, you may as well fully commit to your self-loathing.

From there I ramped up the ridiculousness with a currently untitled piece that was also bread-based. This one involved dumping approximately two liters of maple syrup onto a piece of bread and then covering the whole slice with whipped cream. This one I continued to make well into high school, and unlike B.B.S., I actually ate it in front of my parents, as if it weren't totally shameful.

If I had a DSLR, I'd love to take a photo of the whipped cream thing like it was some classy "secret shame" snack and tag it #foodporn and see how many notes it would get on Tumblr or Pinterest.

The time I gave myself an eye infection for four hours

Touching and rubbing your eyes is one of those mostly involuntary things that we all do throughout the day even though we know we shouldn't. It's irritating, mechanically, to rub them; it's also dirty and you don't know what is on your hands that is getting in there. It's probably how we get sick, most of the time. We introduce who knows what virions right into their favorite vacation spots: mucous membranes.

It's especially good to exercise caution when you're doing as I was, which was handling raw chicken. I mean, I wasn't literally like "Here chicken, meet eye," but I am certain that at some point after mostly finishing the cooking process, but before washing my hands completely with soap and water, I did rub my left eye.

It didn't take too long -- probably about 40 minutes later, my eye started to hurt. If you have ever had an eye infection, pinkeye or whatever, you know what this feels like. It's not like a sharp "Ow, there's something in my eye" or like you've been poked. It's a dull ache, like a bruise, like how your eye might feel the day after it was punched. I started feeling that soreness along my lower eyelid, along with some telltale dampness.

Get up, peek in the mirror. Gasp. That asshole left eyeball of mine is noticeably redder and stickier than the right. "Well done, Amanda," I thought to myself. "You've gone and given yourself pinkeye, now you get to cross your fingers and hope that shit goes away before tomorrow." I took a page out of my lab safety handbook and decided to flush the shit out of my eye with water. I did it a couple times, making the sign of the cross, throwing salt around the room, waving burning sage in the air, and chanting in something I hope was Latin, trying exorcise the demon salmonella attempting to possess my eye.

The point of all of that is, it worked. Even before I went to bed, the soreness had gone, and when I woke up this morning, there was no trace of last night's carelessness. So the moral of the story is, once again, don't be me.

"If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?"

The first post-puberty penis I ever saw in person -- because I'm not counting the times where we were young enough to play naked on the beach and I thought it was called a "peanut" -- was at an intimate dance performance at the Deaf West Theater in North Hollywood. It's a small space with limited stadium-style seating; most of the audience just sits cross-legged on the floor, or at least we did for this performance.

It was my sophomore year of high school. As part of our dance curriculum requirement, we were responsible for seeing one dance performance per semester and writing an essay about it. Our teachers usually got us together for group field-trips for these performances, but if we couldn't make it for whatever reason, we had to find a show on our own. When that was the case, if you're a high-school student with limited disposable income, as I was, your options tend to be limited to whatever the small, independent dance troupe is putting on at the theater around the corner. Often, these shows are really cool; equally often, they're fucking weird.

The show I attended included performances by two troupes, both of whom advertised themselves as "modern." After the performance by the first group, the Nesting Dolls, my friend and I, seated on the floor, were waiting to see the next group, named Steamroller. As this was awhile ago, I don't remember what specific details on the pamphlet had led us to be more excited about this group's work, but for whatever reason, we were particularly anticipating their half of the show.

The lights dimmed, and out walked the penis. More specifically, out walked a naked man, through the audience exit path, to the stage. He couldn't have been taller than about five-foot-two, and as my friend and I were sitting right next to the exit path, I turned my head as he walked out and found myself at eye level to, and sniffing distance from, his flaccid penis.

When he reached the stage, he began dancing. My memory of his actual dancing has been warped by time and by the shock I was experiencing at the time, but I choose to remember it as the kind of avant garde movement that would-be contestants sometimes try on "So You Think You Can Dance," to which the judges respond "I appreciate what you're doing, but it is not right for this show." The track he danced to was some kind of arthouse disco beat with a sample of a male voice saying "If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?" over and over again.

Sometimes you dig up something old from your grade-school days and you think, "Wow, I can't believe I kept this!" On the opposite track, I would give anything to find the essay I wrote on this performance.