You ever sit in a room so white it makes your eyes ache? It is 2:14 AM. I am staring at sample number 382. It is just a pile of brown dust in a plastic tube. I have 412 of these tubes left to go before Friday. They are supposed to tell us about the climate ten thousand years ago but right now they just look like the dirt under my fingernails when i was a kid back home. You spend eighteen hours a day in a lab coat that smells like bleach and old coffee. You look through a microscope until your vision goes blurry and you see spots. My back hurts from sitting on this metal stool for nine hours straight. I have eaten exactly three granola bars today. That is it. Sometimes you just wonder if anyone actually CARES about what happened ten thousand years ago. My parents call me every Sunday at 6:00 PM. They moved across the world and worked in a laundromat for twenty years so I could sit in this chair. My dad tells the guys at the grocery store that his son is a DOCTOR. He does not understand that I am just a student looking at old dirt. He thinks I am curing a disease or building a bridge. I do not have the heart to tell him I am just measuring nitrogen levels in mud. You know that feeling when you realize you have been working for years on something NO ONE will ever read? My final thesis will sit in a library. Three people will read it. Two of them are my advisors. One of them is only reading it to find a typo. It is a LOT of pressure for a pile of dust. Sometimes the pressure feels like it is actually crushing my ribs. I look at the fluorescent lights. They hum. It is the only sound in the building besides the ventilation. Sometimes you want to just dump the samples in the trash and walk out. You want to see if the world stops spinning. It would not. The sun would come up at 6:12 AM like it always does. My samples would be in the landfill and NOBODY would notice. You feel like a fraud. You are the first one in your family to go this far and get the big degrees. You have the scholarships and the awards and the fancy title. Everyone back home thinks you are a genius. But you are just sitting in a cold room at 3:00 AM wondering why you are wasting your youth on a dry lake bed. I am twenty-one and I feel like I am eighty. Sometimes you just want to go outside and touch real grass. Not ancient grass. Not fossilized pollen. Just regular grass in a park where people are laughing and being normal. You realize you have forgotten how to talk to people who do not use words like ISOTOPES or STRATA. You are becoming as dry as the soil in the tubes. I am typing this on my phone while the centrifuge spins. It takes twelve minutes to finish a cycle. That is twelve minutes of my life I will never get back. I have done this four thousand times. You start to count the seconds in your head. One. Two. Three. It is like you are waiting for a life to start that is ALREADY over. There is a weight in my chest that finally feels a bit lighter just saying it out loud. Admitting that this old dirt is just DIRT. It does not matter. It will not change anything for my parents or my sisters or the people on the street. It is just a very expensive way to stay lonely and make my family feel like they did something right. The machine stopped. 3:12 AM. Time for sample 383. You just keep going because you do not know how to stop anymore. You do not want to see the look on your mother's face if you came home and told her you were done with the dirt... so you just pick up the tweezers and start again.