Prescription rugs for Atomic Readjustment

It’s not like dropping a couplet of rosy-cheeked, newborn twins into a blender, really, but…

Putting a few psychologically healthy, socially-skilled human beings into a light-absent, unadorned cell with a rhythmically syncopated faucet drip, a bored albino ferret and ten minutes of blared Chopin once every 9 hours…

Now…, that’s something I would love to observe!

(Aside from providing exceptionally entertaining dinner party discussions, it would be…, well…, philosophically-engaging and psychologically intriguing enough to keep me home on a Friday night…)

How many months would it take before our once-healthy individuals built their own perceptional Stonehenge around melancholically euphoric outcries, began associating enlightened thoughts with rodent-toe nibbles, and hypothetical sunlight with delayed water droplets?

How long before our once-productive members of society constructed a ferret-scat sculpture to the Darkness, began writing abstract articles about evil chlorophyll-converters with terroristic tendencies, and developed a sound-based, drip-powered irrigation system?

These are the kind of obscurely ordinary and stupid thoughts that often shoulder-jab me at the bus stop, making me wish I had gone into a field that allowed me to do otherwise unethical scientific research…

But…, alas…, though I enjoy contemplating the ideas behind atomic bar-hopping within our quantum physical world and can’t get enough of discussing the repercussions of uncertain electrons, I can’t bring myself to study and memorize any physiological or chemical equations that would educationally pertain to such experiments.

So.., I have decided I have to create my own studies…

And..., well…, I can think of no better, easily-diagnosable, experimental Subject than Myself…, so here goes my shot at scientific research…:

One simple, healthy rat thrown into a foreign yet healthy environment…

Rat = me, healthy environment = ESL School

Observations: It only took the Subject a few weeks to adjust to the new, shadowed, Platonian, dark world of rampant ferrets, leaky faucets, and oddly-timed obscure music…

Within two weeks, the Subject was still smiling, laughing and carrying on as if things were perfectly normal…, even when people around her were uttering such odd phrases as:

“I am a typewriter”

“Fine movie producers are worn by great editors.”

“I am China.”

And

“If I couldn’t have had had a wouldn’t great had experience, I would, had have fabulous great times kindly!”

Conclusions: The Subject (yes—me!) took everything in stride, treated every exchanged conversation as if it were perfectly normal and…,

Diagnosis: this Subject is only moderately aberrational in her thinking and behavior.

Recommended Prescription: only 76 more years of life for this Subject, a few months of therapeutic discussion from an equally-aberrational thinker, and two full-strength 120mg pills of reality (taken via expresso shot) per day.

*Editorial insert: TGPIF (Thank the Great Platypus It’s Friday!) I don’t get paid enough to lesson plan at home, lead extra-curricular ferry trips to neighboring islands and chat with outstandingly accommodating, English-language-practicing conversationalists with expected preferences and rehearsed arguments! Thank the winged mammal-like whatsit in the sky for Mr. E, blank sheets of paper, and random drum circles by the river!

*Cheesy editorial PS#2: And thank the world for so many smile-invoking pieces of confetti that come in the form of political flyers.