overdue obituary

My favorite memory of Maria Toledano popped into my head last night.

It was in Ms. Havern's epidemiology class, which we took first semester senior year. Often, we would do experiments that required sterilization of metal innoculation loops, which would be used to add bacteria to Petri dishes and other nice environments for them, and to sterilize the loops we would hold them in an ethanol flame.

As inevitably happens in a high school "science" class filled with fuckall seniors, the ethanol got spilled one day while Maria and I were working in a group. She went to clean it up and I said to her, jokingly, "you should probably just burn it. That stuff's clean, it won't make any smoke."

I'd barely finished saying these words before she, with a huge grin, struck a match. I didn't have time to object before she dropped it on the puddle sitting on the table.

I was right, there was no smoke, and the whole spill went up into carbon dioxide and steam in just a few seconds, not even emitting enough light to be noticed by Ms. Havern.

From that day on, Maria made a point of spilling ethanol on the table and burning it in fun patterns whenever we were doing any experiments. It started with a simple happy face, which looked like it was crying flames because the eyes had to be linked to the mouth. She would write obsenities in ethanol and burn them. The flaming "fuck," in particular, cracked me up the most.

I was a bit annoyed at the time, because I wanted to do the work for the class and not pull my papers away just before she threw the match, but in retrospect, Epidemiology was the most bullshit class I've ever had. I got an A in it without doing any work or handing in anything. Maria detected this bullshit much better than I ever did.