Chapter 1: The stage is set

September 1999

The first week was pretty much a blur. We (the grad students) had planned several activities to welcome the first-years, culminating in an overnight trip to a cabin in the Pennsylvania countryside. I remember being preoccupied with an experiment that hadn't been going well. The machine I was using kept on munching my sample with nothing to show for it. Time would later reveal that it was part blind alley and part faulty machinery, but it didn't help me then. The night before the Penn trip, we went to an Orioles game. It went into extra innings, which wasn't good for the whole 'getting an early start tomorrow morning' ethic. Still, any game in which the O's bullpen doesn't blow it is a good one.

We left around ten Saturday morning, right on schedule. It occurred to me five minutes into the trip that I had forgotten to pack my swimming trunks (there was a lake by the cabin), but consoled myself by recalling how I had nearly drowned there last year. Toss in the fact that I had slashed my toe open on a mysterious object at the bottom of the lake as well, and I suppose that forgetting my trunks was a blessing in disguise.

Up to this point, I don't believe that I've spoken more than three words to Liz, aside from basic introductions ("Just don't call me Beth," she said). I knew from Sean that she was a NIH (National Institutes of Health) student, which meant that she would spend part of her first two years at Hopkins, but do her doctoral work elsewhere. She was also the only girl among the first-years that came. Minor detail. Still, I don't remember paying any attention to her at the lake; I was too busy rowing around on the canoe while she was enjoying the water.

Eventually, everyone headed back to the cabin, unpacked, and pitched in to make dinner. When everyone sat down to eat, Sean commented on how we looked like a giant family. I noted that the duo sitting at the head and the foot of the table made rather bizarre parents, which drew a few chuckles. But then, no one at the table looked parentish.

After dinner, the drinking games started. I admit to playing for the sole purpose of playing in the card game within the drinking game, but got bored when alcohol started to interfere with the cardplay. Besides, drinking orange juice during a drinking game just isn't as interesting. So, I wondered over to where Nick and Liz were chatting, away from the group. Both of them were avid talkers, and I was content to interject a comment here and there while letting them talk away. Truth be told, I learned more about Nick than about Liz during that conversation. He was one year ahead of me in the department, but since his lab was in the opposite wing from mine, we rarely saw each other. He was Greek, and tall and muscular to boot. A genial giant with brawn and brains, so to speak. I noticed en passant that he and Liz were sharing a chair, but didn't care--much--at the time. Hey, I was leaning against the wall at the time, and wouldn't have cared whom I had to share a seat with. The two of them were discussing (among other things) differences in curricula between undergrad institutions, which led to a big school vs. little school discussion. Nick's from Brown, I'm from Cal, and Liz spent two years at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts before transferring to UNC; thus, both sides were well represented. Dull-sounding, I know, but we went off-topic enough to make it interesting. Eventually, the drinking games broke up, and we rejoined the somewhat inebriated continuum. Somehow, the subject of skinny-dipping came up, and it ended up with three people daring each other to go skinny-dipping in the lake right then and there. After rounding up enough sober people for safety purposes, a group of us trooped down to the lake.