The Wake

It wasn’t even my idea to go to the Renaissance Festival this year. I’d been once before, about seven years ago, and although the turkey legs were good they didn’t seem to warrant an annual pilgrimage to Shakopee. Boyfriend felt differently, or at least said he did after he and my 16-year-old sister began plotting our journey to the western suburbs, complete with costumes. I knew that I would prefer to spend my one afternoon of the week with him doing something a little more relaxing, romantic, and non-medieval perhaps, but in the spirit of Queen Elizabeth I went along.

Unfortunately, the night before the big excursion was a sleepless one for boyfriend, (see Episode 1 for the specific sleeping patterns of Chemical Engineers) who spent 14 hours writing the introduction of a lab report for a class called Unit Ops. The name sounds like a robotic Star Wars character, but apparently this class matters a hell of a lot to ChemE seniors, as in: if they don’t pass the series of tests and hoops and 65-page reports with flying colors, four years of work and tuition gets flushed down the toilet. As in: they don’t graduate.

I was starting to feel a bit like a middle-aged man who doesn’t wear pants as I sat watching back-to-back episodes of Cops drinking a beer, but I couldn’t get off the couch anyway given that the living room had been taken over by boyfriend’s science-y necessities. Stacks of notebooks, textbooks, a laptop, a printer, and pages of printed out graphs were strewn across the floor, and the rest of the space was devoted to his incessant pacing while he clawed for new ways to say “aqueous solution.”

“How ‘bout I write it for you?” I tipsily teased. Boyfriend and I both knew that I could write the damn introduction in five minutes, but I figured that he was too protective of his hard-won data. For that matter, I was content enough watching the unveiling hilarity of a man being evicted from his ex-wife’s house because she was bringing her new husband over to spend the night. Thank God for CourtTV.

“Okay.” Okay? I thought. Boyfriend never wants help. “You can write the introduction, but I’ll tell you what to say, and then you make it sound better,” he replied after a pause. We stared at each other.

“Alright. Give me your laptop,” I challenged, feeling feisty. I put the computer on my lap, and aligned my fingers to the keyboard. “Whatcha got?”

“Umm. The dispersion results were variable across the data points, but a suspect result occurred where unexpected results were shown from the data plots on the curve blah blah blah curve blah blah blah data data data blah blah aqueous solution.” He kept going, but I sat there desperately trying to remind my fingers how to move. I couldn’t even remember the last few words he had said, other than aqueous solution of course, let alone the paragraph of scientific rambling I had missed at the beginning. “Read it back to me,” he said.

“Ahhhh, well, gimme a second.” It tried to translate the fragments I had typed into something that ‘sounded better’. “Well, first you said, The scattering of meanings were strewn across a deserted and opposing arc when a misnomer made his way into their world, taking over, ruining their harmony without care or reason…

“Give me the computer,” he said. Frankly, I think that chemical engineers could benefit from a little poetry now and then, but apparently my take on the lab report wasn’t going to cut it for good old Unit Ops. I went back to my beer, and settled into a new episode of Worlds Wildest Police Videos, but deep down I felt sad that Boyfriend thought that documenting lab reports was “writing.”

How does this relate to the Renaissance Festival, you ask? It doesn’t, really, except that after deleting my expressive rendition of his introduction, boyfriend proceeded to spend the rest of the night and the following morning face to face with his laptop, writing sentences at the same speed as sap inching it’s way down a tree. When my sister arrived, cheerily ready to hit the road in her flowing dress, he grudgingly saved the document and got in the car.

It would have been a nice change of pace if boyfriend hadn’t fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion the moment we started to drive, not waking up through the 2 hour standstill as cars crept towards the entrance of the festival, hardly rousing as we trudged the dusty mile-long hike from the parking lot to the entrance, and falling face-first into the sought-after turkey leg. As he snored, and my sister went to watch a taunting clown get pelted with rotten tomatoes, I sat among fairies, monks, bikers, and screaming children, drinking many cups of aqueous solution*.

*Note: Aqueous solutions can be harmful to your health. Consult a Chemical Engineer before drinking them.