meet nat

it looks like working for dr. ghosh will be different this semester... he actually has a job for me to do! true, it mostly involves doing google searches and sending him the results, but still, there seems to be a goal in mind. this is strange.

we will be researching the much-celebrated geek buzzword, single-walled carbon nanotubes. very hot right now. the main thing we are doing is trying to reproduce the results of an experiment that correlates the velocity of fluid flow over the nanotubes to a voltage that the tubes produce. and when i say "we," i mean me, ghosh, two very important (and also very nice) ladies in the chemistry department, and ghosh's grad student, nat*.

meet nat. nat is the punchline to every engineer and grad student joke i've ever heard. i've been working with him for almost two weeks, and he has yet to say my name or make eye contact. in fact, until yesterday he hadn't really even spoken to me, but when i asked him if he had my email address he had to say "no" and hand me his pen so i could write it down.

you'd think this would be awkward, but it's so amusing. between him and ghosh i am constantly bombarded by quirky techno-weenie social graces. the hardest, i think, to not laugh at is when ghosh asks nat a rediculous question, and nat just stares at him. i can almost see his brain thinking furiously, "what are you talking about?!? are you insane?!? how did you get your phD?!?" but all that eventually comes out is, "what do you mean?"

this is high-quality humore, friends. and i get paid for it.

*and yeah, i changed his name.