the fifth of brovember

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)

Imagine, if you will, you are a nine-year-old boy and you are to be sent to school now. You will move away from your family, and the people you know best and who have actively raised you will no longer do so. Your parents will still be your parents, but they are somewhat more distant figures - or if they aren't, you will become aware that this is somehow Unusual and Strange at school. At school, you will be thoroughly brutalized in various ways, and then when you go home, there is suddenly a Gap. It is no longer quite proper for you to run around with the footmen. You are still permitted into the kitchens as a guest, but you are now the young gentleman. Some of the housemaids are already getting nervous about you, because soon you will be A Young Gentleman with all the dangers that involves for them.

You go back to school. You are further brutalized. Perhaps you have a homosexual relationship, and perhaps if you are fortunate it is one of mutual consideration and gentleness, but more likely it is one of awkward power imbalances with an older boy. If you are particularly unlucky, it is outright abuse, sometimes vicious. You of course cannot speak of this relationship when you go home, one way or another. But then when you go home, you discover also that is is no longer proper for you to visit the kitchens at all. You can no longer play with the footmen except as assistants in Gentlemanly Pursuits.

You will continue this escalation for several years. You are systematically alienated from the servants and taught Your Place and Their Place. You are taught to look back on your formative relationships as now inappropriate, and that you must take these people you thought of as friends - or as slaves if you were a little shit - and Rule Them.

An aristocrat who still goes down to take tea with the servants after all that is being very odd from everyone's perspective, and also a little tragic and sad because it's an arrested development, a state of painful regression, a refusal to let go of an innocence that society has demanded be discarded. They're not just the awkward boss, they're the awkward boss who is being super weird about it, even if they're not trying to.