The Shepherd and Miss 🐑

Her name is miss 🐑, the lady mentioned in the last weekly highlight.

She’s like a bouncy little 🐑 that brings relaxing atmosphere to everyone surrounding, with her pure and innocent personality. I will never forget our first encounter, when I was still in hysteria on the constantly failed experiments conducted for the iGEM competition in which I was selected as one of the student leaders for XJTU-China. Whether you are currently fledging or expert in lab work, you can tell how desperate a man could be when he just simply cannot gene-engineer one of the most common model organisms in the community of molecular biology, namely, E. coli, for over one month.

Right at this point of time, she jumped in the pitfall I was trapped in. That day, nobody else but me stayed at the lab processing a batch of plasmid extraction. Not sure about the weather but the light in the lab was definitely dim and dizzy as usual, which struck a chord with my once-again failed result. When I decided to perform another round of Golden Gate Assembly to construct the plasmid, a young and gorgeous lady entered that room, putting her bag on the bench saying she was new in the Wet Lab Group. But unfortunately, she knew nothing about the lab skills and the trigger of her joining was merely her so-called interest, thus hand-in-hand instruction must be scheduled. The experiment itself had already held me down, letting alone an extra workload of teaching. In other words, I was a little bit annoyed.

However, my duty as a leader required me to serve all of my teammates. And just during the instruction, I found this girl was quite lively and made acquaintance with everyone instantly, though she was still hard to understand the background principle or mechanism of what she learnt. In addition, her soft but nagging voice broke the deadly atmosphere which was originally filled with the buzzing of microcentrifuge. “Interesting lady”, I thought, with curiosity of her appealing personality.

She was super attentive. Knowing other lab mates and I frequently skipped meals due to the continuity of experiment, she purchased plenty of snacks sharing with us, nagging like a nanny and forcing us, most of whom sometimes lacked the awareness of hungry, to consume them instead. Also, she could even remember the lyrics of my favorite songs shared in the social media, and echo my perspective on the lyric stories, for instance, the Fongfong and Gaga in one of Hins Cheung’s hit singles. It touched me deeply because nobody else has ever understand my words as I was trying to utilize lyrics to express my veiled sentiment, and her response was incredibly breaking the peace of my mind.

She’s the one I usually describe as “the Angel”. I’ll never boast her beauty in this case though she’s definitely young and beautiful. In fact, she’s so pure and innocent that I hate to tag her. Robbie Williams’ Angels offers protection when he feels beaten and never forsake him. So is mine. Comforting me when I teared down for the vanish of time (don’t feel gross plz), being a wanderer in the campus with me for relaxation, giving consoling gifts when knowing I could not go home to reunite with my families during Spring Festival… She’s so caring that, suddenly I realized, as described in Angels, “I am loving angels instead”. Then I seized the opportunity to say thanks for the warmth she passed to me, and apparently gratitude was not the whole story I tried to convey. It was more like a hint saying “I’ve already noticed you and you’re kind of attractive to me.” So naturally, we dine together, date and fall in love as if the Gibson free energy change is less than zero coupled with the increase of entropy—— I mean, the process is spontaneous and irreversible.

There are many other fantastic moments between us, but I have to skim them in view of her privacy. Being with this bouncy little 🐑, I dare not tell words like “forever”, “eternity” or “swear” because I’m afraid some of my misbehaviors hurt her without awareness, hence those naive words could only worsen the pain that attacks her. Perhaps strong responsibility and constant enthusiasm are the most significant values I should equip with in our relationship. Not gonna tease or deceive you guys, coz as a shepherd, is there anything more important than protecting and delighting his 🐑?