Farewell lunch
Quite possibly the coolest email I have been the subject of (to my knowledge). From a labmate, to all my other labmates:
Hi folks,
On Wednesday, Katie is off for a four-month slog through the
malaria-ridden, leech-infested overgrown stinking hellish man-eating
jungles of the Dark Continent. In the name of Science, bitches. In honor
of her awesome, probably lethal sacrifice, why don’t we go for a
farewell lunch Tuesday? No crying, though. If, by some freak of nature,
Katie survives her descent into savagery, madness, and probable
cannibalism, you’ll feel like a real wimp later.
In any given situation, remember to ask yourself, "What would Leonidas,
king of Sparta, do?" Shed some cowardly tears for his doomed labmate, or
cut out his own quadriceps muscle with nail clippers and smoke it into a
nutritious jerky to send along as emergency rations? I think the answer
is obvious.
—
I’m off tomorrow. Two days of travel just to get to my first destination. Although I could catnap with my leather field hat over my eyes a la Dr. Jones, or drink uber-cool martinis a la Mr. Bond, or read up on ancient Greece while calibrating my myriad gadgets a la one Croft, probably I’ll string myself out on backlogged paperwork in an effort to ignore the periodic adrenaline-spiked flashes of OhMyGodness as they wash over my body and grip my stomach with cold, steely fingers.
Hilariously to me, I day-dreamt about doing this sort of thing (biology research on big mammals in Africa) over a decade ago, as my quasi-consciousness mixed scenes from The Lion King with my recent re-discovery of Indiana Jones and my reading of Cry of the Kalahari written by two PhD students who studied lions and hyenas for several years in the ’70s. And here I am, actually doing it.
(Really?) Really.
Holy shit.
26 - an auspicious year. For some reason, this age has always stood in my mind as a landmark, an age at which big important things would happen (for me, to me, by me), either materially, mentally, experientially, whatever. 25 was the I-have-arrived year of numerical beauty (5^2 - c’mon, it’s beautiful in so many ways), but 26 is the year for doing stuff, setting the stage for the next couple decades. I don’t know why I always thought that, and I certainly didn’t plan my trip to square with this irrational impression - but there you have it.
Here I go.
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Cheers!
Comment by FIDO — January 16, 2007 @ 9:33 pm
Good Luck! sounds like it will be an incredible life experience. Take many pictures so that we might peruse them and lead more interesting lives vicariously through your adventures.
Comment by Matus1976 — January 17, 2007 @ 8:05 am