White cholera

Does your clothing define your profession. Physicists and engineers by and large seem to have split from the mandatory lab coat common to the technical application of scientific theory.

I work on a boat (motherfucker, don't you ever forget). It pays well and the crew are some of the most charming and motley people I have ever had the privilege of having met.

I work behind a bar, pouring drinks for the astute and the abominable, the influential and the abysmal.

My uniform is white. The collar tight around my neck when I try to wear it done up is also white.

I now owe ~40k AUD for an education at the university of Melbourne and the university of Queensland. I have learned fascinating things about the minute and gigantic world that surrounds us. I have learned terrible things about the people that surround us.

Working in a bar makes me happy. I serve drinks to people who are out on the river enjoying themselves. Their jovial attitude is at times contagious. I work very hard, but I enjoy myself.

The easygoing and touching people I find myself in contact with at the bar are not the same people I have found in a lab. My research work at MUARC was fascinating and the people I worked with were interesting. But my honors year has provided a different perspective.

Perhaps it was merely the small lab I was working in, and the specific staff with which I came in contact. My sample size is small, yet I fear a possible dystopic propensity towards self deception and malicious skulduggery that goes with a career in a laboratory.


Or maybe I have yet to see it on the boat. The world is mine. So it goes.