Countdown to Extinction

And so begins my last week in these United States – a culmination of 6 years of Grad & Advanced Grad School. 15 months ago, I expressed a good deal of grief on leaving Cambridge, and 2 years before that, Fellow Blogger mourned my exit from Cornland (caution: link highly sentimental). The essential goodbyes have been said, extraneous apparel have been dumped in the nearest recycling bin, the Last Lunches have been cooked, and most heartbreaking of all, the lease has been broken.

The last 3 years have taught me a valuable lesson, or rather, reinforced it: nostalgia is one hell of a vindictive bitch. No matter how much I crib and whine about life in a town/lab (one being interchangeable with the other) or about the general suckiness of the past present, the present past always attains a sunsettish glow in hindsight. Gone are the travails and frustrating troughs of grad school; vanished are the uncertainties of the postdoc; smoothed are the ubiquitous fluctuations of life with a mean field approximation. Although the immediate future encompasses everything that I have worked for since birth, inertia and the comfortable rut of the routine seductively beckon like sirens.

Ironically enough, the job I’m about to leave is intricately tied up with a boss I hate to desert. 2 years ago, I congratulated her on securing this professorship little realising that I would end up working for her. My gut told me that we would hit it off and that the experience would be enjoyable. Score oesophagus. Why? Very few people share my at-times morbid sense of humour or perennial foreboding of doom laced with dollops of pessimism. She is now one of the few females whom I’m quite fond of apart from A., A., A., and shall we say M. and E. too. Note to the doubt-ridden: yes, these people exist and no, not all of them are my mom and aunt. Through A., the rigours of Young Facultydom have revealed themselves to me in glorious technicolour, Hi-Def and Dolby-Supported Stereo, which makes me feel ridiculously guilty for all the complaints I had against my old advisor. With her help, I was able to revolutionise my PPT skills and morph from a sleep-inducing, stage-fearing geek into a veritable dynamo albeit with dying batteries. She exposed the beauty in extracurricular activities such as trekking, spelunking, rapelling and white-water rafting. In all fairness, the latter sentence was utter bullshit. Anyway, every meeting of late has been punctuated with a profound sense of sadness on my part. We start talking about slides and end up cataloging the end of days. I’m pretty much of a douchebag to most folks but in this one circumstance, I genuinely wish her well and am quite depressed that I won’t get to see her win the Nobel in Chemical Engineering Physics.