Snapshot #1

Snapshot #1 Tuesday morning, I excused myself from de-insectifying MATLAB scripts for a breathless noontime hour and ran. Terminal windows dissolved into concrete sidewalk grids, swollen with rain delicately infused with the brine of Bostons air pollution. Soaked in a brew of life-shortening chemicals, I wrestled down the nightmare-inducing plethora of health concerns associated with touching water that had once belonged to the Charles River and, choking on flying needles of acid precipitation, battled onwards across the Harvard Bridge. As I approached the threshold of drowning, I flinched away the retina-searing tears of rain that had glommed in the gutters of my eyelids as my field of vision was suddenly, out-of-nowhere filled with the morale-raising sight of Professor McGreevy in an orange T-shirt, sprinting heroically toward MIT. Simultaneously bewildered and inspired by the aerobic presence of my former 8.022 professor, I drowningly flailed my arms in greeting as we passed, accompanied by a frenzied, Picasso-esque facial expression that said, “Nice to see you, Professor- excellent final this year. Hope you got the thank-you card our class sent you- thats right, the one where I wrote that div(McGreevy)= 4pi*(awesomeness/8.022). Clever, I know. By the way, did you hear about the guy who fell into the Charles River and immediately broke into a deadly rash? Ha ha ha.” McGreevy sort of waved back with his left eyebrow.