Dark Night

Analysis

"I got a brand-new advisor," I offered. "New to the faculty, opening a whole new area of expertise for us. Now that I'm going to be mostly a land lubber, I had to find something different."

"Yeah, you weren't very specific about your internship," Maya said. "How bad could it have been?"

"I got the opportunity to go out for two weeks on a research vessel, studying what I thought I wanted to study, learning about the ship as well, but a storm came up that was way worse than expected. I was seasick and terrified that we'd die out there." I could still feel it in dreams occasionally.

"Come on." Zayna was skeptical.

'Oh, god, it was awful," I said, shuddering. "Ninety knot winds. The waves were about twenty meters, or about 65 feet, for you savages who haven't accepted the metric system, I was puking my guts out then dry-heaving, the ship was rolling and pitching up and down, the metal was making noise. And the scientists were pretty worried too. I don't have such an attachment to ocean studies that I'm willing to do that ever again. After that, I spent my time looking at different aspects of climate change; it's not like we have to declare a focus right off the bat. But now I'm looking at land-atmosphere interactions, water cycle processes, land surface & hydrological modelling, fire spread and fire-atmosphere interactions, and climate change impacts on fresh water resources. Drought studies, basically, and the consequences of drought. Things that I can study safely on land. Or on lakes and rivers. I can handle those."

"Ok," Maya said after a short silence. "That does sound pretty bad. But studying drought? You're usually not given to extremes." That cracked us all up.

"I was interested in the ocean pretty much because I enjoy surfing so much and wanted to focus on that. But the things that interested me about that area is in the deep sea, and fuck no now. I'm not going back out there. There's nothing you can do in the middle of the ocean if you get in trouble. And there are a lot of other aspects of climate change that are interesting. My new advisor has some other things he wants me to explore before I settle down on one area."

"I'm willing to concede that it must have been horrible if you're so against it now," Zayna said. "You're usually like a dog with a bone once you get your teeth into something." She toyed with her coffee cup. "So, does this mean you could possibly get back together with Will?"

"No." I said after a moment. "He's got somebody new in his life. We talked after graduation. And while we'll always be fond of each other, it really is over. It took him time, but he's found somebody who can tolerate the risks he runs in football. They're compatible, and he wants to get serious about her. The pendant was both congratulations and goodbye."

"That kind of sucks, still," Cass said, and I shrugged.

"Well, it is what it is. And I really am trying to look around, recognize that there's more to life than tearing through school in the shortest amount of time. For my birthday, Grandpa is paying for classes just for fun. Off the UCLA campus. I start a class at the Gourmandise School called Pie Therapy, where the instruction incorporates mindfulness, nixes judgement, and tackles control issues while you make and bake a pie that you take with you. Never tried baking as a form of stress therapy, but even if it doesn't really work, I have something to eat at the end of it. After that I have an Outdoor Urban Skills class, where I learn what's edible that just grows in urban environments and what's not, and how to tell what mushrooms are edible and which will send me to the ER. And we make a dinner out of what we find. Then I'm going to learn how to do macrame. And learn how to harvest sea salt. And that takes me up to finals. Pie Therapy, the foraging class, and the sea salt class are all one-shot deals, the macrame class is four classes. And sure, it reeks of the 70's, but you can make really pretty room dividers and stuff. It'll be some fun new experiences and it gets me off campus and away from my usual routine. My work-study assignment is being a research assistant to the faculty; I'll be checking citation and helping research their papers, so that's different but not really new, you know?"