Science and the person next to me

Something strange happened to me today. Well, not that strange, but at least notable.

I left for work around 45 minutes late today, after getting 3 hours of sleep last night and just dragging this morning. At either the Clinton-Washington or Lafayette stops, a girl sat next to me on the train. At some point I glanced up from my book (Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi) and did a double-take--I realized I knew this girl sitting next to me. She went to New College, and in fact, I'm pretty sure she started at the same time I did. I wanted to say her name was 'Kate.' One of the classic hippy-types that's almost extinct now.

Anyway, I kinda tried to get her attention, but she looked about as dead as I did. Later on I noticed her glancing at me in the "don't I know you" way...but I was too tired to come up with an appropriate way to address her. After all, her name might not be Kate. And holding a 20 minute conversation with her while half-asleep could very easily be brutal. So instead I just kept reading and never said anything to her. Oh well, it's not like we were friends.

This isn't the first time I've run into New College students in the middle of the City, but it is a bit weird when one unknowingly sits down next to you on a train!

In an unrelated tangent, I've been missing science. I'm not that great at science, and it can be a struggle for me to understand some concepts, but I miss spending time trying to wrap my mind around complex scientific concepts and theories. I've been reading these science articles in the New York Times. They've been making me long for my biochem book, and the computer programs used to model proteins. It was so cool learning science on that level, and now I'm reduced to reading pop science. I'm not even sure I could understand actual scientific articles now. I had a hard enough time understanding them when I was a science student.