Suddenly, I’m awake; on like a switch. It’s Tuesday. With no bedside clock and a cellphone I intentionally keep out of reach, I can’t be sure what time it is. Judging by the glow of dawn smuggling around my curtains, I know it can’t be too early. If I wake up too early or too late, time is wasted. And yet, despite my concern for timeliness, I almost never set an alarm. I’d rather let my body decide when it’s fully recharged and ready to start the day. Besides, if I’m not sleep-deprived, I wake up with a start after almost exactly seven and a half hours of sleep. That’s why I don’t need an alarm. I already know when I’ll wake up. I’m fully aware that I’m a mutant and should shut up about it, but for today, let’s roll with it.
On the rare occasions I do set an alarm, my internal clock has an eerie ability to wake me up minutes — literal minutes — before the alarm sounds. Like clockwork. I’m not bragging…I think it’s weird. Suspicious even. Like Truman Show suspicious. Rejecting the possibility of something so conveniently egocentric, I have come to accept that my subconscious is just an overachieving try-hard.
Sheets thrown back, I get out of bed mechanically, thoughtlessly. I’m compelled forward by something other, pulled toward something elsewhere. The natural progression is to move toward the shower. Most of the time I’ll stop and check my phone. I squint into the phantasmic glow. I note it’s 6:41 AM. Perfect. Okay, let’s see. No texts. Expected. Instagram? Twenty-three likes from the sunset photo I posted last night. Data collected. No notifications on the Facebook icon, but I check it anyway just to be sure. Sure enough, nothing there. I put my phone down before opening my email. That shit can wait.
To save time, I brush my teeth in the shower before methodically soaping the sweatier parts of my body. The hot water pelleting into my scalp starts cranial engines and my mind begins to churn. Towel off. Subdue hair. Apply deodorant. Adroitly don underwear, socks, jeans, running shoes, and whichever t-shirt is most accessible. I slide my laptop into my backpack, my cycling attire into my gym bag, and within 10 minutes of waking up, I’m dressed and packed for work. My phone buzzes. Facebook, I swear to god if it’s more birthday notifications. God dammit, Facebook:
Who the fuck is Richard Fuller? What kind of bullshit algorithms are you running that you’d notify me about this? I slide my phone back into my pocket and carry on with my life. As I’m sure he’ll also be capable of doing without any perfunctory well-wishes from me.
I pace down the carpeted hallway through the living room and out our homey green kitchen door. I turn the key in the ignition and immediately synthy pop-tunes ambush me from the radio — ah, leftovers from my ritualistic dance-party-commute-home. I keep the channel but turn the volume down as I ease into my morning ft. Ariana Grande.
I navigate the empty 5-way stop sign in the center of our sleepy town. Ever since I was little I’ve been convinced that if five cars were to ever come to all five stops at the same exact time, the world would explode. It’s the only logical outcome, really.
Park. Door open. Door closed. Lock. I’m to Thyme in the Ranch two minutes after it opens. 7:02 AM. At the counter, today’s slightly-more-punctual octogenarian is being handed a scone and herbal tea. Tyler and Claudia see me and exude their near daily greeting “Good morning, Spencer! .. How Are You?.. The usual?” “Good Morning! .. Great! How Are you?? .. Yes please!” “Are you sure you don’t want a cinnamon roll today?” I laugh, all modesty, “haha oh gosh, no, not today.”
My “usual” is a blueberry bran muffin and a cappuccino. Yes, it has occurred to me often: “Holy hell, I am literally 80 years old”. I assume they try to tempt me with a cinnamon roll in an effort to make me less of a bore — bless their hearts — but I almost always decline unless I’m feeling particularly angelic or unusually nihilistic. So if you see me eating a cinnamon roll, I’ll either want a hug or need one.
They bag my muffin and hand me my dry-as-a-desert Cappuccino. We exchange our much-practiced have-a-nice-days, and I’m off to work by 7:10 AM.
The muffin and cappuccino are consumed concurrent with driving to work. (All hail efficiency!) I’m careful to only eat at stop signs, stop lights, or straightaways. Statistically, driving is those most dangerous thing I do all day (if not all year), and I’ll be damned if a bran muffin is the death of me.
Once at work, I answer emails and plan the day, sometimes sneak in a short experiment before heading to spin class at 8:30 AM. My friend, Sage, teaches a class in the basement of UCSD’s old gym. Dingy but serviceable, especially for the price. I’m the only male in the class except for Sage’s roommate, a Chinese kid who, as far as I can tell, is mute or (more likely) just fiercely reserved. Otherwise, there are two female neuroscience PhDs and a cognitive science post-doc. Then a smattering of anonymous undergraduate girls that bike apathetically in the shadows.
We listen to saccharine techno-pop mashups (mostly my fault) as I sing along — I have the most terrible superpower: Lyric Memorization. Intensely useless. Worse still, singing along is involuntary and automatic. Every class Sage makes fun of me for my sing-songy weirdness. And I’m always compelled to agree with his diagnosis. I sing louder now, marinating in the joke that is me.
In the middle of class, I remember Richard Fuller is that Australian guy I met in Berlin. I laugh out loud at how ridiculously and relentlessly connected we’ve become. Remembering too late my present location amongst other humans, everyone turns at the sound of my unexpected laugh and looks at me like I’m crazy. Nothing new. Apparently most people don’t laugh unprompted. I never got that memo. My poor coworkers and roommates have to hear me cackle to myself all day and resist that compulsory urge to ask, “what’s so funny?” They’ve learned it’s always something too contextual or random for me to explain. My mind is always two places at once.
Spin. Sweat. Hydrate. Wipe down the bike with Simple Green. Another “Thank you, good-bye, see you later”. I ponder the importance of these polite society rituals as I walk to the locker.
The girl who checks my school ID, the locker guardian, doesn’t speak. She just holds out her hand as she reluctantly looks up from whatever she’s reading, swipes my card, passes it back, and goes back to her homework or gossip magazine or whatever. Efficiency.
“Is that what I want?” I wonder.
I enter the locker room and it’s quiet. Still early. Shower. Towel off. Tame hair. Attempt to minimize contact with locker floor. With locker bench. Locker everything.
I’m dressed now, speed-walking (my natural cadence) back to lab where I drop my bag and head for second breakfast at my favorite coffee cart on campus. Yes, second breakfast. As I approach, the blonde who’s name I never caught, and it’s too late now to ask, starts making my cappuccino before I can order. More people who know me and my routine; it’s only 9:45 AM.
When I get to the counter she confirms, “Double cappuccino right?” I smile and say “Yup!”, another worker rings me up for my second cappuccino of the day and a pre-made Veggie Burrito. There was a season in which I only ordered the Soyrizo Burrito. But two separate bouts of soyrizo-induced diarrhea made that season come to an abrupt stop. The fact that it took two bouts probably says something about my fidelity to routine. Then again, to have made such a drastic decision, to ostracize the Soyrizo for a single isolated event — potentially a statistical anomaly — would be to succumb to the scientist’s sin of impulsivity. To, *shutter*, be emotional. To, *gasp*, be passionate or resolute or dogmatic! These traits, more so than diarrhea, are unforgivable.
But to be poisoned twice? All temperance of action out the window! That demon, Soyrizo, must be forever condemned.
The man hands me my change and I direct myself and my non-Soyrizo plunder back to lab.
On my short walk back, I begin to wonder, with the regularity of my routine if an outsider would think I have OCD à la “As Good as it Gets”. If I would lose my shit if Art of Espresso were out of burritos or if the muffins on the shelf were unorganized. I’d be sorry to disappoint them, to inform them that I’m of no such interest. Things were this way because they were the best I could do with what I had. A mathematical conclusion of sorts. The result of an optimization protocol that has always functioned as my brain’s primary software.
And yet, optimization is a mirage. Okay, slightly less heartless than a mirage. You can live in the oasis of optimization for a time before it disappears. It’s a season of happiness until the season changes and whatever subjective value your optimization had, vanishes. Blame your brain. On a survival level change is dangerous. Keep the equilibrium! Keep the equilibrium! We’re alive, so that must mean whatever has been happening can continue happening without too drastic of consequences.
But humans are far beyond mere survival now. We must thrive. And to thrive demands creativity and change and disruption and innovation. It demands that after the 116th Veggie Burrito I can never look at one again (with or without resulting diarrhea), that after listening to Adele’s “Hello” two hundred times I want to barf the 201st time. What unnecessarily trivial subjects for such a profound algorithm.
Soon enough, I’ll have to figure out a new plan for second breakfast. However, I’ve only had maybe 76 egg-potato flour-tubes to date, so the Oasis of Burrito Goodness lives on to see another day.
Enter Code. Open Door. Walk to Break Room. I rip the plastic off and place the burrito in the microwave. I set the timer to exactly 1 minute and 7 seconds. This, surprisingly enough, isn’t the result of optimization. But rather, a small exercise in rebellion. Tiny victories for a privileged white male youth with similarly tiny problems… I’ll explain.
Every day, countless others and I march into our kitchenettes and indiscriminately nuke our cuisine for exactly 60 seconds. Trusting in the sacred, dogmatic minute to heat our respective food to the necessary temperature no matter its composition or countenance. And if it’s not a minute, it’s thirty seconds or 2 minutes or something so-god-damned even and round. The poor “7” or “9” or “4” never gets a chance.
*Says silent prayer for the forgotten numbers*
Day after day I lived under the tyranny of the microwave minute, until one fateful day I had a revelation. Who says 1 minute cooks my burrito to the most perfect temperature! The man says so! Or whatever part of our brain that simplifies shit says so! Fuck you man! Fuck you dumb brain thing! I’m taking control of my life! And by god, I shall heat this starchy goodness for 67 seconds of unadulterated freedom!
And now, many months later, it’s always 1:07 in the microwave. Jumped from one prison to another it seems. But it’s my god-damned prison.
Maybe it would serve to invent a microwave that chooses a random “Minute-ish” time. You just press “Minute-ish” and sometimes it microwaves for 58 seconds and other times 1 minute and 4 seconds. Checkmate, brain. What now, huh?
Hey Microwave people, can you make this happen please? Thanks in advance. (Isn’t it weird that somewhere in the world there are certainly “Microwave people” just as there are “Kale Chips people” or “Lycra Jumpsuit people”? The diversity of human occupations absolutely fascina-
The microwave beeps and sucks me back into reality. For today, I must accept 1:07 as a serviceable solution to the first-world problem of “needing” a second breakfast.
Sitting on the bench outside, sipping my milky espresso I continue to think about this burrito issue. Sometimes my brain thinks it’s a good idea to use a canon to knock over a single, insignificant domino. It’s always running running running. Doesn’t matter what for.
And so I hop back on this unbridled train of thought… “Okay, I’m a scientist. I can solve this. Let’s imagine the study necessary to determine optimal burrito heating time.”
*I take a bite.*
You’d get a bunch of “identical” burritos (impossible, but a tolerable simplification); heat them up for a variety of times (multiple burritos at each time duration) then ask people to eat them and rate their satisfaction. You then plot “Satisfaction” against “Time” in the microwave and look for a peak.
*I slather the hot sauce evenly and take 2 latitudinal bites.*
Of course, satisfaction would vary person to person, and in all likelihood the enjoyment level would be nearly indistinguishable with any sort of significance for a relatively wide range (maybe 20 seconds?) of microwave times but we could at least point to some sort of middle. This of course assumes everyone has the same microwave (which in reality, they won’t), but it’s another simplification we will have to humor.
*Munch, Munch.*
Alas, that only tells you what the majority of people like, or the time-duration correlated temperature a new potential burrito-eater is most likely to enjoy. But what if you’re different!? What if you like it unusually hot so that by the time you finish it, the butt isn’t too cold. What then?
*Distracted, I bite slowly.*
You’d have to use yourself as the only subject of the study. Which, for statistical significance, would require you to eat at least 3 burritos at each temperature, by which point it’s like, “is this even worth it anymore? Is life even worth it anymore? Do I even like burritos? Did my parents not love me enough as a child? Should I see someone about this?? …and, and starving people in third world countries wouldn’t care about the damn temperature you privileged asshole!” Okay, okay, calm down.
As I conclude there’s no point to truly optimize its temperature, I arrive at the butt of the burrito to find it still satisfactorily warm. 1:07 is good enough. Great, even. And if you consider it less an objective reality and more a state of mind, you could even say 1:07 is in fact, Optimal.
