Day Thirty-one

It's 8:20 am and I'm sitting on the train, self-consciously covering as much thigh as possible with my bag to disguise the fact that underneath, I'm wearing pretty much nothing at all.

I get off the train at Lewisham and go to Jez's house. I switch on his computer and mumble something about preparing for my forensics speech, but he knows what I'm here for and I drop the pretense.

An hour later we leave for uni. We're both outrageously hungry and buy two pies from 7-Eleven. I take two bites out of mine (cheese, bacon and steak), read the nutritional content on the back of the packet (500 calories per serve) and throw it out.

I arrive at uni early and sit in the computer room of Badham library. I type up my part of the afternoon's speech and fail to shake off the feeling that something about our powerpoint presentation is very, very wrong. Andrew arrives and adds to the presentation several more slides. It still feels wrong. He comments that it was very pretty. I spent a few minutes last night changing the backgrounds of the slides to various mod colours inspired by the sushi plates at Umi, and the effect is asthetically brilliant. Pretty and lacking content. Just like my mother's description of me.

After finding nothing to add to the presentation, Andrew and I head off to the speech room.

The first group is Mari and Fady. They bring up a slide which describes a fictional patient whose case they, pretending to be forensic scientists, have taken over. Andrew and I look at each other, horrified. We didn't have a patient. We're not pretending to be forensic scientists. Our game plan involves pretty much just reading off the slides.

The second group. The third. My mind starts wandering. How many calories have I eaten today? What colour should I paint my nails? It's my auntie's birthday tomorrow. Should I buy Jez an iPod? Is it really impossible to time-travel? I haven't seen Abhi in awhile.

Soon enough, it's our turn and we're the last group. I try to smile but yawn instead. I look down at my notes and read from them. I think of Jez's Ebay-man speech and am envious that he could feel free to be witty. There's absolutely no humour in the pharmacokinetics of diphenhydramine. Not even Russell Peters could make a joke out of this.

I'm annoyed because my beautifully-coloured backgrounds are projected into flat, highlighter shades. How a deep, mossy green could translate into fluoro lime is beyond me. So much for brownie points for presentation.

To add insult to injury, Andrew is as professional as a wild gypsy. He calls N-diethyl groups "nitrogens", and describes mass spectra fragments as "the thing on the end", and "that bit that goes like that". Of course, it's unlikely that I would have done a better job. But you know. Come on.