the time i blew up tea
hey y’all
i finished my re-read of the harry potter series this tuesday. i’d previously had a vague intention of writing my next newsletter about this re-read and the many complicated emotions it made me feel, but i OBVIOUSLY do not know myself as well as i should because at the end of Deathly Hallows i was in no fit state to articulate any single coherent thought, hence the three weeks of radio silence from park dates with krys, for which i apologise but not profusely
for a few days i’ve been battling with a low-key WHAT DO I WRITE MY NEXT NEWSLETTER ABOUT panic by eating too many pieces of slice cheese and texting myself dodgy ideas at 2am —
— but then i decided to address this crisis by breaking out my favourite party trick, which is talking about the time i blew up tea.
this is not a funny story but it’s one of my classic Moments. you know, those moments that so inexplicably and specifically reflect your essence that even before the dust has settled you’re thinking, wow, this one’s going in the biography.
the Tea Story™ might not be my first biographical beat but it might be the most telling because it has all the salient bits of my personality: the ambitiousness, the crippling depression, the near-mechanical deference to authority, the sardonic self-referential humour, and, of course, Singapore
yeah, this went down in singapore. i was in my first year of IB (11th standard equivalent), attending a boarding school and coming to the fresh realisation that i might not be that smart after all — after sixteen years of being reassured of my unwavering intelligence, this came as quite the blow. (i have since made my peace with it.)
chemistry was one of my struggle subjects, the struggle made no less by the fact that my chem teacher was a fellow Indian, and continually reminded me that I was letting down both family and country through my inability to grasp the behaviour of atoms or bases or whatever you learn in chemistry. how would i know.
anyway, one of the many cool things about IB is that not only do you get to learn a bunch of stuff, but you also have to prove that you learned it by doing some fun grown-up things, like DESIGNING AN EXPERIMENT about LITERALLY ANYTHING. you can just be like, hey, i think i wanna find out how windspeed affects the buoyancy of coconuts, and they’ll be like DO IT!
i was obviously very excited by this prospect, and given how I had not yet realised that chemistry will, in fact, be the death of me, i decided to do my experiment on the very complicated affair of extracting caffeine from tea.
extract from ‘Chem IA Proposal’, Apr 19 2015
in case you can’t tell because you, like me, are not a science person, not only was this UNNECESSARILY COMPLICATED but also an OBJECTIVELY USELESS topic to explore. nevertheless, i persisted.
after many drafts of my proposal, in which i cut down my methods of extraction from four to three, and refined the steps in each method to the point where i could recite them off the top of my head, i was ready to begin my process of data collection. by this point we had already reached the end of our first year, and were given the last two weeks of the term off to carry out our experiments during supervised lab time.
we’ve covered the ambitiousness; cue the crippling depression.
i’ve never been very good at managing my mental health, and apparently (who knew?) living away from family + a general inability to feed myself + failing badly at two out of six subjects = a very, very sad krys. this period of time featured all the greatest hits, including ‘All My Friends Hate Me’, ‘Mandarin Is So Difficult And For What?’, ‘Reading Fanfiction Till 7AM Just To Feel Something’, and ‘All My Friends Hate Me (Reprise)’.
i was down to one meal a day, no less than 12 hours of sleep at a stretch, and zero lab hours. of the two weeks given to us, i spent the first one in bed, anxiously gnawing at the thin skin of my lips, well aware that i was running out of time.
it was the Monday of week 2 when i dragged myself to the chem lab with four family packs of Lipton Tea, prepared to give my earnestly designed but ultimately inconsequential experiment the bare minimum amount of effort required to get a passing grade.
i set up camp at the frontmost station in the lab as it was the only one available; behind me, my roommate worked quietly over her research that she had spent an admirably normal amount of time collecting data for. my roommate is still one of my favourite people ever, and i loved watching her work back then because she was always so consistent and methodic, but that day all it did was add to my panic and anxiety, and i knew in my bones i was destined to screw this up.
well, once you’ve allowed that thought into your head there’s no going back.
it happened when i was halfway through extracting caffeine from my tea using the autoclave method. i couldn’t tell you head nor tail about it now, but this particular step included a soxhlet setup, which was essentially a round-bottomed flask connected to a reflux condenser positioned over a bunsen burner.
my tea was in the flask at the bottom of the set-up, and the reflux condenser — a long glass tube-like contraption meant to cool down any rising vapours — was sitting cap-less on top of it. the fire was on; the water was boiling. and then the lab assistant, Clement, who mandatorily supervised all experiments that went down in the lab, came up to my station. he studied my procedure notes, and my set-up, with my tea leaves bubbling cheerfully, and the cap-less condenser doing whatever it was supposed to do.
and he says to me, he says, “hey, maybe you should put a cap on your reflux condenser.”
and i says to him, i says, “should i really? because it’s not in my procedure notes, and these have been approved, so i don’t—”
“no, no, you definitely should. there’s supposed to be a pressure build-up at this stage, right? if you don’t put the cap on, no pressure build-up, no caffeine. cap on’s the way to go.”
cue the near-mechanical deference to authority.
“right. of course. thanks.”
on went the cap. away went the Clement. back went the krys to her laptop, re-reading her procedure notes for the umpteenth time, with her roommate working soundlessly, diligently behind her. and then —
BAM.
tea everywhere. reflux condenser lying flat on my station. someone screams. it’s probably me. in an instant i’m up and away from my laptop, seeking refuge in the far corner of the lab, eyes shut, hands over my face, thinking someone messed up but not that maybe it was me
it was, obviously, me. i got that pressure built up all right, and with nowhere to go… well.
it took a moment for the other shoe to drop, and when it did, I rushed back to my station to assess the damage. by some miracle, no glass was broken, but tea really was everywhere. all over the station. the floor. my laptop. the ceiling. huge-ass tea stain on the ceiling. i’m thinking to myself good god, they’re gonna make me pay for that, and then the shoe REALLY drops, because my roommate goes “what the fuck, krysanne”.
my exploding tea contaminated her experiment. whatever she had been working on that morning had been rendered useless. i can still remember her face and — wow. there’s no feeling shittier than when someone you admire is pissed off at you.
i don’t remember much of the rest of the day. i cleaned up alright, and waited for Clement to take responsibility — he didn’t — and then i packed up and went back to my room. slept for the rest of the day. woke up at 8PM, mailed my teacher…
… and realised with a sad sense of finality that my dalliances with tea had come to an end.
i only had two days left before i was scheduled to fly back to India for christmas, so i had to come up with an alternate experiment, and fast. i threw together a badly thought-out design to measure the changing iron content in ripening avocados, and decided Chemistry just wasn’t for me.
OK so i lied. this is kind of a funny story based on how you look at it. did i cry about it for the many weeks to follow? yes. but did i fail chemistry? no, i actually got a 7 eventually, which is pretty kick-ass if you’re familiar with the IB grading system. and did my roommate hate me forever? no, she didn’t even hate me in that moment.
the only real long-term effect of this incident is that i can’t look at Lipton tea bags without flinching. which, in the grand scheme of things, is a really small price to pay.
thanks for reading the first chapter of my biography! i can’t be the only one who collects these stories in my head. there are a few — like the time i caught a train from khandala to pune but ended up in mumbai… — that periodically remind me i’m NOT All That, which is nice. keeps me #humble or whatever.
by way of life updates, i’ve not been up to much. i’ve been re-watching Succession, which is objectively speaking the best goddamn TV show of all time, so if you aren’t watching it right now i’m really sad for you. just kidding. but i am.
i’ve also been RACING TO FIFTY BOOKS with my sister. a Kindle hangs in the balance so, you know, pray for me. or recommend me a book or two. I’ve issued The Age of Innocence from the library but my eyes are tired.
i think that’s all for today! hope you enjoyed story time! bye!