Faculty Interview | MIT Introduction to Bioengineering, Spri

Lec 1 | MIT Introduction to Bioengineering, Spring 2006

MIT asked:

Bioengineering – Prof. Douglas Lauffenburger View the complete course: ocw.mit.edu License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA More information at ocw.mit.edu More courses at ocw.mit.edu

bioengineering

Connecting Through Word Vom

Karen Royall asked:


I’m sure we all have one of those stories where we drank a little too much and spilled our guts about something we had no desire to say. In my social circle we lovingly refer to this phenomenon as ‘word vom.’ My favorite word vom story involves one of my now good friends, Allie. In my sorority, the newly elected leaders go to a conference at the end of January to learn some techniques and transition into their new role. As treasurer, I was paired in a hotel bed with the president, Allie. Sharing a bed obviously meant sharing a bathroom too. Allie had forgotten her contact case that weekend, so she put her contacts in two cups in the bathroom. The next morning, I was parched and blind because I didn’t put in my own contact yet. I fondled around for a cup on the counter, filled it, and drank. I noticed the water was a little foamier than usual (due to the contact solution) but kind of ignored it. Minutes later, as I became less groggy and recovered from sleep inertia, I remembered the misplaced contacts. *Gulp* indeed!

When Allie was in the bathroom I heard noises of frustration and did my best to play ignorance. She told me what happened and I pointed that it could have been one of our roommates from another school and helped her look for a bit. It was so hard to let her look for so long and not say anything, but I was terrified to mess up our newly formed friendship. She spent the rest of the day squinting at everyone through one contact, but I remained firm in my ignorance.

Of course, months layer I spilled the whole story while intoxicated…as intoxicated people will do. Even though I was terrified all this time to tell her, it weirdly made us closer. I still joke that part of her is always with me, since I ingested her contact.

The point of this tale is that even though word vom may make us squirm the next day, it has an uncanny ability to repair misunderstandings. Just this weekend a friend kind of confessed something to me that I had been sort of upset about. The situation ended up being different than what I had thought, and now it’s all good. We unsteadily hugged it out, and even though we’ll probably never talk about it again, the repair to our bond will always be evident. At the end of the day, spilling secrets through word vom makes us all closer. Cheers to that?

Bioengineering Center