wobbles in time

We are just being bombarded all the times with wobbles from the beginning of time”- Hector sighed. The speech writing was not going well. He had been asked by his professor of his department to take over for him at this conference, due to a last minute illness. Hector did wonder about all the last minute illness and emergencies that the professor had had in the past year. They all seemed to occur after a frank conversation where the Professor had asked him to take on more tasks that just his teaching role. As it was Hector taught seven classes a week, so he had tried to bargain. If he was taking on more roles, could he get more money, or teach fewer classes? At first the professor had seemed to understand and said that he would do what he could, but two weeks later, he got back to Hector saying that unfortunately he would not be able to cut his class load or give him more money. Hector had responded, after consulting his union, that he was not interested in working more for no money. He spent a lot of time trying to come up with the polite wording for turning the professor down, and had then spent three or four days in a cloud of anxiety that lasted for twenty four hour a day. He would wake up at night in a sweat and then wonder, why as astrophysicist he was spending his time so concerned about such a trivial matter. The head of his department, a man with whom he thought he had had a fairly good relationship, never wrote back to him or acknowledge the exchange at all. This left Hector feeling forever in doubt of the strength and amicability of their working relationship. The unease left him, generally with less wonder for the world. And then the professor had started sprinkling in requests for extra assignments anyway, alway under the guise of an emergency or illness. Hector wasn’t sure if this was some sort of passive aggressive play to make him work anyway. Or, perhaps he was very ill, and had been trying to pass off his duties to others while he still lived. So Hector was either horrible angry or horribly guilty.

In any case, he had to write this speech about pulsars and gravitational waves and how they were to form the basis for the new Martian maps of the cosmos, and could be useful for speeding up interplanetary travel between Mars and Earth. It was a difficult position to be in and it was made worse by the fact that his brother had died last just as his brother’s daughter was enroute to stay on Mars for two years. Hector was 38 and never had the slightest inclination to have children, and wasn’t even very interested in relationships. He thought he might be perhaps A-Sexual.

— 7Roses