The Garden of the Hesperides

"Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection." by Brené Brown

Following up on last week's coffee talks : it was brought to my attention that drinking coffee first thing in the morning is not the best of choices. I decided to push it to later in the day. I kid you not, on the first day I had a strong headache, I was drained of all energy and to top it all off I was extra grumpy. That's when it hit me: "Oh damn, this addiction is truly out of hand."

I will now try to take steps towards doing a caffeine detox in the following weeks. My research suggests reducing my caffeine intake gradually is better than going cold turkey. So I will finish the coffee I have left and then try to quit for a while. On Thursday I only drank one cup of coffee compared to the usual two litres of black coffee per day (I wish I were exaggerating).

This week's chemistry practical lesson was a disaster. The experiment at hand was composed of two halves. Upon arrival we were asked for a specific paper that we had done six weeks ago about the first half. This would have been reasonable if we were warned in any sort of way, that it was necessary to bring it in.

Furthermore my project partner and I were not at the top of our game that day in the sense that we did not really understand the experimental protocol at first, then we struggled with basic math (which is not really allowed to happen when one has ten hours of maths a week) and eventually our time management was so poor that we turned in half a page for questions that required about two to three pages. A great volleyball training made up for the below average day though.

On Fridays we have this time from 11 to 12 o'clock called : the "encounter hour". This corresponds to a period of time when all teachers are free and students can go ask questions about anything and everything. This just means that we have a longer lunch. This week we had three engineers come in to explain their careers.

They were three people with very different experiences. The first speaker was an environmental building engineer who had just finished her studies two years ago. The second was a HEI graduate from 2000. He gave a great overview of what you could expect as and from an engineer. He insisted on versatility, polyvalence. He himself had done a radical career change from the building and public works sector to a managing role in an industrial field without having any prior experience in the latter. He presented the fact that he was given a 48 hour window to take it or leave it as an introduction to the "real" world.

Our last engineer was also a HEI graduate. She finished with a chemistry major and went into automobile manufacturing. She went into depth with her description of the job and car parts, I have to admit that the subject was not of great interest to me. The idea that resonated most within all speeches was that when finishing engineering school one will not know how to be any sort of engineer. Engineering school is supposed to provide the ability to adapt efficiently to any challenge.

This Saturday's engineering science exam was short. We had two hours planned for it. It took the whole class a maximum of an hour. Thus began the Olympics of boredom fidgeting, we had quite a few different competitions. Some drew the shape of their hand on paper like in kindergarten, others stared at a spot on the wall for a continuous amount of time, there were also people who spent the hour spinning their pens. I was taking part in the last activity. I managed to get to 81 spins in a row without the pen falling.

This week I finished The Siege of Troy by Theodor Kallifatides. The author revisits the poem told long ago by Homer. I enjoyed the book a lot, since I am a Greek mythology enthusiast and the text was well structured whilst being an easy read. The only aspect that slightly disturbed me was the gory description of battle. The gore can be explained by the fact that Kallifatides believes the Iliad to be an anti war poem. The book is going back and forth between the main timeline and the trojan storyline. The main timeline being Greece in the year 1945.

Till the next start of the workweek!