Whoops, apparently my post from February 1st got cut off. Here’s what it was supposed to say:
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Imagine living with your coworkers for six weeks. No, scratch that. Imagine living with your coworkers while sleep-deprived for six weeks. Okay, then imagine living with your sleep-deprived coworkers for six weeks inside a floating container not more than 250 feet long. From there, you might be able to conjure up some idea of the current mental state of everyone on board this ship. Our breakfast conversations are always amusing.
Breakfast is served early — around 5:30 — when the night crew are getting ready for bed, and the day crew are just beginning their shift, and everyone at the long galley table is zonked in slightly different ways. The conversation often manages to wind up on the subject of poop (human feces, zooplankton feces, or otherwise). Today, it started with a discussion of last night’s carbon isotope data, traveled (of course) through eating one’s own poop, and somehow ended with a heated argument over the definitions of “sweet,” “savory,” and “spicy.” To settle things once and for all, we collected all thirty-something condiments we could find in the ship’s galley and arranged them in a triangular spectrum, with pancake syrup (sweet), soy sauce (savory), and jalapeno pepper sauce (spicy) at the vertices.
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