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I’M STARING AT my phone—just that: brooding and staring at my phone—

when a Twitter notification pops up on my screen.

@SabriRocks95 Second year geology Ph.D. student

going through a rough patch, here.

@WhatWouldMarieDo if she felt like the universe is trying to tell her to give up?

Ouch. This one hits a little too close. My sense of helplessness reached critical mass earlier today, halfway through Alanis Morissette’s discography and well past my second tub of orange sherbet. I feel like I was run through a paper shredder. Like a used Q-tip. A flushable wipe. Not fit to give advice to the moth that’s been fluttering against my window, let alone an intelligent young woman with career trouble. I retweet, hoping that the WWMD community will take care of @SabriRocks95.

“Maybe I should quit academia,” I muse, leaning back in my chair, staring across the open-plan kitchen to Dr. Curie’s magnet. “Should I quit my job?”

Marie doesn’t reply. Silent approval? There are things I could do. Brush up on the German accusative and meet Reike in Greece, where olive oil tycoons would hire us to instruct their teenaged heirs. Shop that sitcom idea I once had: a Bayesian statistician and a frequentist become reluctant roommates. Write my mermaid YA series. Move under a bridge and ask riddles in exchange for safe passage.

Maybe I shouldn’t quit. At least one Königswasser twin needs a stable job, to post bail when the other gets arrested for indecent exposure.

Knowing Reike, that’s any day now.

Then again, I’m fairly sure that without BLINK, Trevor won’t renew my contract anyway.

My career is the ultimate unrequited love story, littered with well-reviewed grants that never got funded for political reasons, a shitty boss instead of the rock star I was promised, and now NIH and NASA petty-fighting like cousins at Thanksgiving. When your supposed big break turns into a losing game, that’s when you cut your losses, right?

But what would be left of me without neuroscience? Who would I even be without my burning need to correct people who say that humans use only 10 percent of their brain? (They even made a movie about this. For fuck’s sake, does no one fact-check Hollywood scripts?) Did you know that

conservatives tend to have larger amygdalae than liberals? That taxi drivers’

hippocampi grow bigger as they memorize how to navigate London? That brain differences predict variations in personality? We are our nervous systems, the complex combination of billions of neurons firing in distinctive patterns. What’s more exciting than spending my life figuring out what a little chunk of these neurons can accomplish?

I avoid my reflection as I brush my teeth. Maybe I love what I do too much. I should go back to school for something boring. Auctioneering. Naval architecture. Sports broadcasting. I should also stop crying. Or maybe not.

Maybe I should feel all my feelings now, so I can be solution-oriented later.

All wept-out for tomorrow, when I explain this mess to Trevor. When I tell Rocío to pack her bags.

The second my head touches my pillow I know I’ll explode if I don’t do something. Anything. On impulse, I message Shmac.

MARIE: Do you ever think of leaving research?

His reply is immediate.

SHMAC: Sure am today

MARIE: You hate your life, too? What are the chances.

SHMAC: Maybe we’re the same astrological sign.

MARIE: lol

’

SHMAC: What s going on?

MARIE: My project’s a shitshow. And I’m working with this total camel dick who’s the worst. I bet he’s one of those assholes who doesn’t switch to airplane mode during takeoff, Shmac. He probably bites into

popsicles. I’m positive he sneezes in his palm and then shakes people’s hands.

SHMAC: Eerily speci c.

MARIE: But true!

’

SHMAC: I don t doubt it.

’

MARIE: How s the girl?

SHMAC: Still married. Plus, she probably thinks I’m a camel dick.

MARIE: She could never. You two having a torrid affair yet?

SHMAC: The opposite.

MARIE: Did she at least get ugly while she was gone?

SHMAC: She’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

My heart skips a beat. Oh, Shmac.

SHMAC: That aside, I’ve been thinking about how much easier my life would be if I quit and became a cat trainer. Except, I can’t even convince my cat not to piss under my living room carpet.

MARIE: I can see how that would be an issue.

MARIE: Do you ever feel like we put too much of

ourselves into this?

SHMAC: On the bad days, for sure.

MARIE: Are there good days? Ever?

SHMAC: My last one was in middle school. Second place at the science fair.