I love emerging from the train in the bustling rush hour of a Chicago morning and entering the staid confines of the university shuttle bus. It�s as if all the anonymous faces you�ve been passing all the time have converged in a single location and you are suddenly aware that you are all members of the same family, like being in a strange place and suddenly discovering that you�re actually at home.

I sat down in one of the last vacant seats on the bus and looked around. The man across from me was reviewing a grant proposal. A woman in front of me was reading Emmanuel Kant in German. Further up the aisle a slightly harried woman was knitting an indeterminate garment with indescribable yarn, which kept jumping into the aisle like a small and unruly house-pet.

This morning I spent most of the trip admiring the city � I got stuck with a rear-facing seat, which afforded a stunning view of the departing downtown � and eavesdropping on the people across the aisle. A man who was apparently a director of a research lab got on behind me and began talking to an older woman who seemed anxious to display her credentials as a scientist. They discussed lab politics and funding and then wandered into the field of cancer research in which the woman was actively engaged and the man was tangentially so. As they were talking, it was as if she needed to contribute to every part of the conversation and she wanted very much to be thought of as intelligent and informed. And I have no reason to believe that she was not � an older woman in that type of job has probably had to do a fair amount of jockeying for position in her life. However, her comments were such that anyone who had been listening carefully to the man she was talking to could have made them. They were carefully calibrated to reiterate what had been said in a slightly different fashion so she sounded both agreeable and experienced. But no actual information was required. I could have had the same conversation and I haven�t taken a science class in twenty years.

Next to the woman scientist was another woman who looked to be about my age who was studying a course packet for a class in the business school. She looked up when her neighbors began discussing the cancerous effects of environmental toxins that no one knew were toxic. Bladder cancer. Cigarette smoking. Washing hands in benzene. Pouring experiments out in the sink. Who knew what we were doing? Oh, yes. Who knew?

The business school woman interjected, Really? Bladder cancer and cigarette smoking? Yes, 85 % of all cases. It�s not just lungs. And cancer from working in labs? Jook at the rates of Argonne researchers. So you work in treatment? What do you do? How do you tolerate it?

The conversation veered eventually to a friend of the man who had been diagnosed with stage 4 uterine cancer. She had received a harsh diagnosis � 4 to 6 months even with a hysterectomy � in the harshest manner. She talked to her friends, did research. She abandoned conventional wisdom and all advice to have the hysterectomy. She radically changed her diet, abandoned her beloved junk food, lost a lot of weight, became a vegetarian. Two years later she is still alive. Oh, the man said, and she asked her friends to pray. She changed her diet and her life and asked her friends to pray. She hasn�t gone to the doctor for tests, she has given up faith in doctors, but not in her own life. Isn�t it amazing how much we don�t know about the human body, the human spirit. Sometimes, he said, I wonder if I�m researching the right things. There�s so much we don�t know.

My heart leapt to hear this kind of open-mindedness from a research scientist, a man who spends his days confronting evidence and trying to reach rational conclusions is open to the possibility of the overwhelming impact of the irrational or inexplicable. Lately, in the shadow of our current political leadership, I�ve found myself squirming away from the irrational and the spiritual because these things as presented in public daily life are often associated with ignorance and intolerance. But here is a man who is clearly neither. Moreover, he is in a line of work and in an institution that tends to fight against such things and yet, how can these things be explained. There�s so much we don�t know.

Upon my arrival on campus it became fairly clear how much I didn�t know. My Latin exam did not go at all well. Part of this was my failure to review passive voice. But much of it was due to the poor quality of the text I had to translate. It was all in italics. Some of the words were completely illegible. It was littered with abbreviations I�d never seen before. There was very little punctuation and many of the words were so run together that I had a hard time just trying to figure out what the words were, let alone their cases, declensions and meanings. Still, I finished a pass through the passage, which is better than I did last time. It�s not terribly readable, though. And given the traditional pickiness of the Latin exam (as compared to the other language exams), I think I�ll probably be taking this one again. I bought myself another Latin book in anticipation. I am reminded of Matt Groening�s cartoon about being a graduate student: when all else fails, READ ANOTHER BOOK.

I did manage to have a pleasant lunch with my friend H. after the test. For some reason � I no longer remember how we got onto the topic � we spent most of the time discussing the over-medication of psychological problems and our society�s tendency to be overly normative to the point of declaring personality an illness. We also discussed plans for dinner: H. has invited the whole family to dinner on Sunday � Brave girl! This is looking to be quite an eventful weekend. We have a babysitter coming on Saturday evening and have not yet decided what to do. We have tossed around the idea of trying to catch Bettie Serveert at the Abbey, but will probably abandon the plan for something a little closer to home. We�re not so good at staying up late anymore. Do we make ourselves feel old by not being able to handle a concert? Or make ourselves feel old by admitting in advance that we are probably not up to it?

The city is slipping away behind me while iTunes has shuffled up a live recording of Kansas� �Dust in the Wind.� It�s been an existential kind of day.

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