Written at my workstation, 301 Lvl 5 Chemistry Building, University of Auckland
He stepped out of the lift. The doors clunked behind him.
The card reader x-rayed the pocket of his cocked leg, letting out a gleeful
beep as its ESP confirmed the presence of the card in the guy’s back pocket.
The level 5 door resisted, stubbornly waiting to be opened unlike every other foyer door; all the rest behaved themselves, heard the reader’s
beep, and opened like good little automated doors. Once in the corridor the guy
glanced left and right: normally occupied, the hospital-style 301 building was
rather desolate. Two offices announced their occupation with flags of light on
the shiny floor, the man knew who’d be in – they were always in.
Another card reader, another trill to signal one more portal
open to the hands of the privileged passer: you may pass Into the PERC quadruplets of
labs and the parent workstations! The guy sat at his desk, booted up the
computer, his laptop and his brain (which, at this time of the morning, hadn’t
yet upgraded from Windows 95 – this was going to take coffee). After a Skype
date, displaying all the cuteness of a date-well-dated, exclamations of love,
debates on meaningless subjects that nonetheless seemed to mandate
contrarianistic fervour… there came some hours of work. Until…
“Good afternoon dear readers. It’s been about three weeks
since my last update; I’ll have to check my calendar to see what actually happened.
I’ve started my PhD! That’s not quite the song-and-dance
affair that I’d like it to be, it really means very little except that the
reading I’ve been doing is now ‘official’. Now, I walk around with a suffusing
glow of propriety counterpoised by the fact that being officially a PhD student…
I can now, officially, screw up. Between reading and doing spectrometer
experiments I thought that I was immune to anything going up the Schlenk tube
and through the pump, but I’ve somehow managed to come up with a series of data
that can only be explained by my using the balance wrong. It sucks. Once I’ve
finished writing this, I’m going to be going through every sample to date to
try and find another explanation.
Since my supervisor asked me to get acquainted with the
basics of the techniques I’ll be using to make my polymers, I asked the
teaching labs for materials and ran one of the syntheses used to teach the
undergraduates. I rushed it a little, but came out with a polymer that looks
about right.
Speaking of undergraduate labs, I’ve taken up my position as
a Graduate Teaching Assistant, with 48 little students of my very own to
nurture and educate, and somewhere along the line I’ll have to stop one or
other of them from doing something stupid. They’re a good bunch: split in two,
morning and afternoon, they’re manageable and while the first experiment was
about as hazardous as changing a nappy there was a good feeling once everyone
had got everything done and put all the equipment away. It makes me smile to
think of how bloody eager they all are.
I remember way back when I was an undergraduate*, using all
four colours of highlighter to demarcate equations/things of
importance/quantities and instructions; my scripts were a merry playground of
budding excitement at being at university… and were completely useless as
summaries.
*Read this with the image of a narrator, reclined in a
wing-back chair affront an iron-grilled fire, air tinged with the echo of
tobacco smoke
Other things to happen in the last few weeks include a
variety of MMA-related injuries – my toe’s still purple and bruised from
Tuesday evening. I’ve also met a few more people satellite to friends at uni:
at Karima’s BBQ there were a couple of people from England (bringing the total
of homies up to 8), including Anna’s boyfriend (Anna’s a Pole who met John
doing her Master’s back in the UK); for about 20 minutes, me and John batted
British insults about this, that and the rest.
This brings me to a theory about British humour that’s been keeping
my noodle busy for a bit: British humour is not simply a brand of humour, but a
superior evolution displayed only by those who’ve had enough experience with
the language. Humour arises from situations differing from our expectations,
where our surprise is directed into laughter. At its most basic, humour is
exemplified by the foundational peek-a-boo, and this seminal surprise
translates with age into the use of puns and euphemisms – the ‘peek-a-boo’ of
language.
British humour – the slap-stick, the insulting, insinuating,
disgusting display of dispassion and false of Faulty Towers, Blackadder, Monty
Python and more – is a development in humour that is contingent on an appreciation
of multiple happenings of ‘surprise’. Physical, psychological, linguistic, relational
and social humours come together in sketches like Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Fatal
Beatings’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBeguUvuDzs)
and Fry and Laurie’s ‘Your Name Sir?’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ);
and being possessed of a great legacy of written humour, British humour has
retained that splendour through memetic transfer to arrive at Black Books, Red
Dwarf, Fools and Horses and a list of stand-up and acting comedians that
represent the cream of side-splitters.
…
…
Or I’m biased because I’m English.
Why should Spanish humour, or Italian humour not exceed the madman
in the corner of Europe, laughing away at his own jokes? Why can’t tribes in
the Amazon have invented slap-stick before an Anglo Saxon invented the stick?
Can I disprove that Neanderthals actually died out because they came across the
original of ‘The Funniest Joke in the World’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gpjk_MaCGM)?
Regrettably, I can never fully realise my quest for the answers, since the best
humour is intrinsic to the culture and language of the original source, and I’m
terrible at languages (and I lack a time machine). But, as conclusion to this
segue of cranial masturbation I will offer up the thought: maybe, because for a
thousand years just to get by in a country that’s being constantly invaded, wrecked
by civil war, fires, plagues, famines, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”,
not to mention religious feuds between two sects of the same religion that both
believe in the infallibility of the same damn book, that maybe someone
somewhere, by chance, came up with the tenant that has become the cornerstone
of British survival, the one thought that has allowed the Darwin Awards to
flourish, British politics to maintain its unbeatable quality and dead babies
to be nailed to trees and floors throughout the world: “Well… You’ve got to
laugh.”
I think two pages are enough for one post, I’ve got samples
to attend to. In addition, today is St. Patrick’s day and I have three Irish
housemates so I better go home and go green.
Happy Pi day to those who missed it!"
