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Fish Tank
April 27, 2023
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One night right when I got in bed around 11pm my roommates alarm went off. He immediately shut it off, so I figured he was just going to keep sleeping. Then it went off again 20 minutes later, and once more 20 minutes after that. I got annoyed, but I wasn’t sure what my roommates plans were, so I decided to just give up on sleeping and went to McDonald’s to study. My xuezhang had talked about doing this a few days earlier — he couldn’t find a good place to study at 2am so he went to McDonald’s. Studying at 2am! It always has seemed so cool to me, but I can never manage to actually make myself do it. That night, my annoyance had zapped me into the sort of mental state that craves learning something new, so I figured I’d take Hartshorne’s Algebraic Geometry with me to McDonald’s and start reading Chapter 4 on curves, which both my advisor and xuezhang had said were easier than Chapters 2 and 3 and could be read right away without finishing those first.
At the McDonald’s I ordered fries and a coffee. I took a picture of the closed mall across the street. All the McDonald’s here have their dining room on the second floor, which is so rare in America -- or at least all the sorts of America I'd lived in. It always feels magical to eat on the second floor. I stared at all these words describing the definitions of concepts pertaining to curves: genus, degree, Hilbert polynomials, the Riemann-Roch theorem. I turned pages. I’m not exactly sure how efficient I was, but I did manage to stare at the textbook for four hours straight, which is quite a bit more than I can usually do. Three out of every four lights in the dining room were off. The men’s bathroom was closed. The women’s bathroom was disgusting. The faucet of the sink shared by both bathrooms only let water out at the slightest of trickles.
When I returned my roommate was at his desk with only his desk lamp on. This was rare for him. Usually when he’s awake he has every single light possible turned on — the two ceiling lights, the bathroom light and the balcony light. But that night he was sitting alone in relative darkness, watching soccer, while also listening to bubbling water noises that must have been from a playlist of sounds for sleeping and studying. I’m not quite sure why they were necessary. He obviously wasn’t planning on sleeping. He had a big game to watch.
I immediately brushed my teeth, put my sleep mask on and lied down. An illusory veil of the tired mind compelled me to imagine our little dorm room had transformed into a copy shop I had visited once -- one which was quite unique in that it had bubbling fish tanks lining all the walls. The owner wore a shiny orange paisley shirt tucked into his jeans, the kind of shirt a guy who sells spare parts to overpowered sports cars in a movie filmed in 2022 that takes place in 1982 would wear. The orange color must have influenced my subconscious, so as I fell asleep next to my roommate, in his own watery world of soccer, this room of fish tanks I found myself imagining we were in took on an orange glow that never quite disappeared as a lied somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness for two hours.