I probably should have picked up on that earlier. Whether it be from DJ’s frequent singing in falsetto or the Joker laugh occasionally emanating from the dairy cooler. Oh, well.

I showed up at work Friday and got into a uniform: tan polo and black apron like all the other level 1 employees at the Gr1lle. As I walked into the kitchen, Liz passed me, sporting a gray polo in her uniform, symbolizing her newly bestowed elevated rank. She stopped, stared at me and said, “Go talk to Sam.” I think, “Okay, boss lady.”

Sam’s the student manager at the Gr1lle. She’s really high up in the University Dining Services hierarchy while still being a student. I got to her office and after two minutes of conversation and shared confusion, she remembers that she forgot to tell me got promoted to “grey shirt”. In reality, I blathered for about forty-five seconds in flattered surprise, but I prefer to remember the moment like this.

Thus a new age dawns.

In addition, leveling up unlocks new branches on my skill tree in addition to upgrading several old attributes. But there’s still some abilities I can’t do.

	Shakes Scooping rate is increased 17%.
	Fryers NEW ABILITY Fryer oil can be filtered once nightly. Speed increases with experience.
	Security clearance Access granted to top secret areas. Immune to security gnomes.
	Health Stamina increases 13%. Double shifts no longer cause drowsiness.
	Expediting “For here” orders are basketed 15% faster. “To go” orders are wrapped 12% faster.
	Locked! Communication Log

The first meeting was the night before classes started. I was nervous to a degree that even I thought was unreasonable. Don’t ask me why. Regrettably , I visibly and audibly jumped when Brent pointed out the presence of Prof. De at the back of the room. Maybe it’s because I didn’t hear her come in or maybe it’s the caffeine-soaked, anguish-laden, Max Payne-esque tribulations I experienced last year as a direct result of her class. I know I shouldn’t be afraid of her. I no longer have reason to be, but it’s a reflex I guess.

My schedule also lends itself for me to be one of four lecture TAs as well. The professor asked us to stand as she called out our names. Awkward: She didn’t tell us to sit down. I ended up standing for like a minute like an idiot, failing to see that the other TAs behind me had sat down.

So I get to sit with my friends who are actually in this class as well as pretty much everybody else from the learning community last year. The most popular question seems to be what lab section I teach, but I can tell that’s merely a front for a prod at the possibility that I can throw some points their way. Trust me. I can already see that ruthless savagery that lurks in the heart of every Purdue Prepharmacy student. One that would use me for their benefit and discard me just as quickly, like a scintillation vial full of of oxidant or a plastic pipette. They stop only at what would alert the pharmacy admittance committee.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t another Hersey alum?”
“Wait, aren’t you… Tommy Tran?”
“Indeed I am.”
“I thought you went to U of I.”

That seems to be the prevailing thought here. It’s only natural. Most of my crew went to Champaign. Oh, well, alas and all that. I console myself by reminding myself that that ellipsis is my reputation preceding me.

The second floor of Cary is a bit of a disappointment. I tried to reserve room 314, but I got bumped. This puts me a little closer to the drunks, and it’s not delightfully esoteric. The new dorm room comes with good and bad, of course. First off, it’s 3 ft narrower than last year’s, but a couple of feet taller. The hallways are wider but at the expense of shorter rooms.

There is only one closet for both of us to share and on top of that, it’s filled with piping that I’m guessing contains the electrical lines for the two rooms directly above as well as the recently installed sprinkler system.

The bedlofts are done by a different company for this building. These lofts are specifically designed for Cary South’s rooms (narrow and tall). Both beds are lofted on the same frame, which is made of 2x4s held together with wing nuts and carriage bolts. Unsanded, unpainted lumber. It’s a little bit… rustic?

Oh, well. I came with sandpaper packed so that I can try to smooth any bumps I encounter.

The lofts are also taller than last year. Final occupant elevation is about 2 feet higher, at 7 feet. This makes the ladder quite necessary. Furthermore, there is no side rail. Rolling off the side of the bed is not only hilarious, it’s also fatal.

There’s more. I’m actually tall enough to use the peephole this year. There are individual dressers as well as a separate desk but no on-the-wall cabinetry like Harrison had.

But this is a newly renovated low-range res hall. Meaning…

there is a goddamn bathtub!

Just a couple of doors down the hall, it has its own stall and a curtain and everything. But I’m a little afraid to use it, mostly because of all the other people that have used it. I’d like the opportunity to pour bleach all over it first ever since I remembered that it has contained the soakings of what could be hundreds of other people.

The rest of the showers are just like those at FAR at UIUC. Except since this is an all male dorm (part of which is solely for the football team), the shower is proportioned differently. It’s really big. The knob is about 6 inches above my eye level and the nozzle is two feet above my head. I have to stand on my tip toes to adjust the spray.

Still, though, this set-up has the same sinks used for hand-washing are used for other general use. As a closet hypochondriac, I shudder in my bed for fear of brushing my teeth in the morning. Something I’ll just have to get used to. Hopefully, this floor won’t have “that guy” who will ruin it for everyone.

The three of us walked down to the incessantly-legitimate business establishment where my soon-to-be tattooer was chillin’ on a sofa watching TNT.

It took ten minutes to do, and thankfully, there was much cleaning and unwrapping of instruments beforehand. Assembling the multipart needle apparatus was like putting together a rifle or SLR. Then there was all the cleaning with what smelled like phenolics. The actual process hurt like an intramuscular injection given to me by a power sander. But it wasn’t unbearable. It became easier after a while.

A short while later, we were making our way back to Harrison, hopping fences and disrupting the established order in somewhat of a thuggish manner in accordance with my new status as “badass” although I continue to question the aptness of my new designation.

Everyone at the Grille wanted to see it. And the people on my floor when my RA noticed it in our particularly echoey hallway. And then the engineering majors (which is everybody) found out and I had to roll up the sleeve for them, too.

The design is mostly original. I pulled a free copy off of the internet and photoshopped the hell out of it. The upper bar is actually originally a tilde that I grew to enormous size and tamed and whittled. The legs are flipped around and slimmed variants of the originals.

I’ll spare you the details of the aftercare which lasted a week at a half and involved much more lotion than I care to remember. Although I will have to say that I bled blue without even being a Cubs fan.

I am not so eager to tell my family about this. It’s not the programmer aunts and engineers uncles that are the problem so much as my immigrant grandmother whose math skills are rudimentary at best and whose world views are essentially reactionary and… “distrustful”.

She’ll think I joined a gang.

When I try to explain to her the concept of using pi as a universal constant for Euclidean calculation, she’ll inevitably fill in the words she doesn’t recognize with such panic-inducing terms as “firearms” and “rollin’” and an image of a young urban thug named “Euclid”.

But so it remains. An irrational and constant reminder of a constant and irrational decision.

However, I don’t want a recurrence of last time when I was unable to efficiently carry a package with both hands and pull a duffeloid with my free hand/clipped to my belt. Solution, as expected, is duct tape. Lots and lots of duct tape.

The chair was first double-bagged to prevent it from tearing or getting dirty. Then it was sealed with several yards of clear tape. By making a handle and arm sheath, I redistribute the load to my shoulders and elbow and allow for full use of my fingers. Incidentally, this also makes it resemble a Spartan shield so I went ahead and finished the image with an upper-case lambda on the front. Oh this is going to be fun to push through a crowded station…

And with the advent of sub 255° outside air, we now have frost. Not just scrap-off-with-a-fingernail frost, it’s centimeter-thick The-Day-After-Tomorrow killer frost that I tried to chip at with a quarter before giving up and going to class.

Of course the aluminum of the window frame would have a low specific heat. Any chem major could have deduced that.

Now, I’ve never been a big water drinker (which probably explains the subcutaneous ischemia in my hands) but from now on, I have to keep a water bottle close at hand when I sleep. Otherwise, I’ll find myself woken up by dehydration with nothing I can do about it.

The little shelf on my bedloft for the alarm clock has no room for a top heavy bottle of water. So I improvised. I bought one of the high-capacity Purdue bottles and hung it from the frame with a lanyard and some of those wrist bands that Target gave us in case we ever felt like being corporate whores. Whenever I wake up, I can just pull the lanyard up and take a swig. Of course, I have to watch out for the straw coiled up inside that always pops out and hits me in the eye.

I walk right on past several easily stealable bikes on my way into classes, while folding up my 6-lbs scooter to its smallest 24 inch length so that I can set it under my chair when I sit down or clip it to my backpack while piling up on subpar rice.

I’ve seen other distinct Razor scooter riders. Two have the Razor A model, like me. The other appears to have a larger, less compact Xootr. (One was walking out of the Wiley dining court, one arm around his girlfriend, the other holding a dirty, beat-up A2 series Razor. See? Cool people do it too.) Mysteriously, I didn’t see any of them until after Labor Day (when I presume they went home for the weekend, dug their childhood scooters out of their garages and brought them back to campus).

So I’m a trendsetter here too.

I don’t know why everyone is so surprised. Do I not seem like the person that would work? I work at the Harrison Grille, which is a restaurant in the lobby of my residence hall. While other buildings are buffet-style, we pride ourselves on our more personal customer contact and quality of service. This past week has been training and I learned to make flatbreads, wraps and scrub potatoes and fry chips. I’ve heard what other people have said about work: that it sucks, that it is eroding their self-esteem, that the radiation gives them cancer. But I disagree.

Call me crazy, but I actually like work. Though it has been pointed out to me that this is my first job ever (true). I’m still caught up in the teamwork and nice smells. Even dishwashing isn’t that bad. There’s this huge industrial dishwasher the size of a minivan that we use after scraping the dishes. It blasts them with all sorts of detergents and drying agents and they come out the other end, still wet, but looking like they’ve been through some sort of hell for dishes.

My first day just happened to be opening night, Sunday, 5:00-9:15. I was put on fryer with a senior supervisor who I think is a junior. I was basically supposed to put something in the basket and hit the right button.

I was a bit shaky and first because there is only one 15″ touch screen LCD to view orders on and everyone crowds around it. I can’t fight my way towards it, so I prefer the system where they would yell new orders out and I would fry them.

Four hours, I fried popcorn chicken and fries and spicy chicken sandwich patties and potato chips and nachos. I have never sworn so much, while frying, while fully clothed. The brown paper laid on the counter was overtaken by oil splatters and the floor tiles were slick enough to be curled on. (Canadian curling, not real curling.) Good thing, then, that I’m powered by Vault because I have to do this every Monday (9:00PM-1:00AM) and every other Friday and Sunday. Not necessarily frying something, but I’ll be up to my neck in something.

My fears are a little, just a little, allayed for the chem and psych exams on Tuesday. Today was the finals for each. 68/75 for psych and 64.25/75 for chem. But I still didn’t beat Junyong’s score. (P.S. I hate you.)

That leaves me freer focus on the physics test on Monday. I recently learned that I need to get fives on both AP Physics exams or they’re all for naught. I get no credit for fours. That ups the ante a little. Especially since on the practice exams, I got a four for mechanics and a two on electricity and magnetism.

I’ve also recently had problems with sleep. It’s all because of the damn sunlight. My house doesn’t have any drapes or curtains. So when the sun rises at about 5:36 AM, my closed white blinds illuminate the room with a cold blue glow. This, in combination with me being a light sleeper, makes it hard to study late. In fact I tried to go to sleep extra-early on Wednesday night (for the English Lit AP exam) at 8:30. I ended up sleeping only six hours, laying awake in bed from 3 AM to 5, when I decided to start sparknoting every novel I had read in preparation.

So if you remember my earlier post about my daily 6 PM mental crash, you can predict what happened since my day was time-shifted 3 hours. I crashed at 3 PM right in time for the physics review, which explains my worry-inducing behavior. Don’t worry, people. That’s normal. Usually happens everyday but no one ever sees it. I don’t think I’m not going completely uninsane.

I’ve remedied my window problem by putting some old cardboard over them to block out the light. I get a few extra minutes of sleep and the neighbors get treated to my seventh grade science project board.

Here I am, quietly reading about alternating current and men’s shoe size (not in that order), when all of a sudden a loud voice announces that I am the recipient of a medal. “WHAT THE HELL!?!”, I exclaim. As I awkwardly scramble over a metal handrail to the aisle to accept fifth place for Chemistry Lab, I think to myself, “Does this have anything to do with that teacher I saw Baker dangling over the second floor balcony?”

Minutes later, I’m finishing reading that same Wikipedia article about alternating current when I’m interrupted again. This time, it was second place for Rocks and Minerals. Pretty good for 17 guesses being “halite”. The trick is to pick the mineral sample that is the cheapest and most widely available to science teachers.

As you probably guessed, when the final team trophies were distributed, I was intently reading that same article, hoping for its magic to work again. Alas, no. We were but seventh, when sixth place and down gets to go to state. Oh well. At least most of the team won medals. And I’ve stumbled upon the secret to victory. I only need to print out that Wikipedia article and have every mathlete read it during awards.

The bad news they had for us was that there were no hotel rooms available at state because of that accursed Mathletes. Damn them and their state competition!