Pressure

Force per area? That Pascal thingy? Pressure is not physics.

The last few weeks and months have been…(TBH I do not like the word)…stress-full. Where should I start sef? The first few weeks of the semester had the monkey of IT defense hanging on my back in and out of classes. For a time that seemed like ages, it had somehow escaped the department of chemical engineering to ask her part five students how they spent their previous holiday. It was not until we had forgotten we ever interned that they informed us it was time to be clad in borrowed suits.

Pressure? The professor whose assignments hung around our neck every weekday to choke us until we coughed out “dubbed’ or poorly-done work. Then there were chapter readings (or “studyings”) followed by two- (or as-your-hand-leads-) page summaries. Then there were his eternal classes…mhen…he could talk…on and on and on and on.

Pressure? Choosing a research area when many unforeseen dynamics suddenly became apparent. For instance, some areas would require your BVN (you’d spend and be spent, glory!), some performing lab experiments until depression sets in, others traveling far and wide to look for pollutants not lost, and some, staring at models (*clears throat* not those other ones o!) until sleep comes. After the choice was the chore…that moment when you realize google does not have all the answers to your problems…that you had to work this one out sleeves-rolled-up or face your supervisor’s disapproving face with a sorry face. My supervisor loved slides. And timelines.

The practicals came and went…to be sincere…they never came in the first place. The equipment were not really interested. PHCN was not. Lab coats were not. In fact no single person or thing really was. But somehow “data” surfaced and reports were thus necessitated.

Long rescheduled classes, learning new software you did not think you’d need, sleep deprivation, expending airtel data searching for Adams-Moulton-Bashfort’s Boring Technique (FYI I included “Boring”), deadlines that never die, and oh! tests and exams, and oh! living the other aspects of life. It was as if the department waited until our final year to show us the difference between pepper soup in ones mouth and pepper in ones eyes.

TBH, I would love to refer to all the aforesaid as pressure. They are all great contenders for legit excuses for failure. I could easily stroke my philosophical beard and say life is like a pressure vessel — a pressure vessel that holds gases at dangerous differential pressures, that can make one give up and explode anytime. Or that what actually kills people is not the bomb per se, but the sudden increase in pressure. I could easily paint the pressure being faced in a bad light, but I’d like to see pressure in another light:

PRESSURE IS WHAT MAKES DIAMONDS.

I hope that is deep enough not to necessitate another paragraph. I am even tired sef. Now back to my race against deadlines.