Why it turns out to be pretty good.

It is 840 am. I am tired and sleep deprived. I am sitting in the back corner of an advanced cellular & molecular physiology class for which i am an assistant teacher. (this supports my art and a $3 a day cappuccino habit). The professor has pulled out two clear plastic laboratory flasks out of his back pockets. "Its blood!" he declares delightedly. The blood has been diluted with saline. It looks like a delicious berry wine. He is a Man of Science in the old way - gray haired, stalwart, smells of sweat and coffee. He comes everyday, his large frame in a tie and a well pressed shirt, wears his eye glasses on a cord that hangs from his neck and sits on his large stomach. He has a patrician New England accent in which he gesticulates wildly about hemoglobin protein structure and the intricate curls of carbon dioxide graphs. To reach his office, you must traverse the dingy yellow laboratory, with its caldrouns, humming machines, and pale, hunched over graduate students who look up briefly to regard you with suspicion and to squint at the sudden onslaught of light. Inside his office is a beautiful dark wood bookshelf, heavy with text books, and that air of sweat and stale coffee is also thick with the souls of the great dead men--Fick, Boyle, Bohr, the weight of their tomes, the mysticisms of their equations, their journeys into blood and breath.

The students coo while he adds packets of nitrates and watch the rich red become a deep startling purple.