Routine had taken hold. He'd been awake for about 25 minutes, and already he knew almost exactly how his day was going to go. He looked around the classroom, wondering whether or not anyone was truly interested in the substitution patterns of cyclic hydrocarbons, or if they were just memorizing it so they could pass the class and forget about it. He knew when the time came, he would pass the tests, and that's all he needed to do. But everyone else in the room, it seemed, was actually giving this short, stocky woman, all too excited for the hour of morning, their undivided attention.

He looked to his left, where his friend sat drawing. He was the only other person he knew who would never bother paying attention to the woman while she used pathetic sexual innuendos to pique our nonexistent interest in chemistry at this equally pathetic college in Maine.

Something stirred inside him, an urge to just get up and leave; the problem was that, in a classroom of 50 students, it was impossible to go undetected, and, by this school's unjustifiably high standards of itself, tantamount to slapping your teacher in the face. Although, he wished he could do that, too, if for nothing other than having to sit through all of her disgustingly inappropriate jokes about her and her husband.

Meanwhile, life dragged on along the coast of New England, the same as it always does, frigid February waves fall on the beach, and slide out under the next. Students fall into place in their classrooms, and are replaced by the next set an hour or two later. The thought of how people even went on with their lives without an ocean in their backyard crept into his morning mind. Stretching his arms over his head, he let out a sigh and wondered what the Great Plains looked like, or the Southwest. Places that rolled on for miles without the constant beating of waves on the days of peoples' lives.

"...And if you see two peaks in the aryl region of a proton NMR..."

And so the day went, drifting in and out of consciousness and caring. The sad part was... it was a good Wednesday.