Sometimes on late, hungry law school nights I catch myself with my face pressed up close against the microwave glass, watching my burritos cook, and I think to myself,

you idiot.

No wonder the LSAT kicked your ass. Your brain is fried by microwaves.

And then I think about what might have been. Imagine my capacity if I had never been dropped as a child, never sat too close to the TV, never consumed microplastics or GMOs or items on the Taco Bell Cravings Menu.

What if I had never depleted my protein levels by donating plasma, never stared directly at the sun, always worn gloves and a mask while handling industrial-strength cleaners? I could have been a contender.

I really could have been something.

I bet I’d be at Harvard right now, smiling a smug rictus while the President of the United States hung a laurel wreath around my neck. Heck, forget that, I bet I would BE the president of the United States, graciously accepting the Nobel prize from a grateful population after comprehensively ending war and world hunger. I bet Bob Dylan would actually show up, if it was my award ceremony, and I hadn’t drunk the arsenic-laced water in the law school basement.

What if those creepy stand-up airport scanners had never exposed me to backscatter radiation? What if I had never eaten that bad sausage all those years ago, or swam in that oily Cuban bay? You can’t tell me that stuff doesn’t have some kind of negative effect on cognition down the road.

I think about all the gum I’ve accidentally swallowed over the course of my lifetime and honestly, I’m amazed there’s room in my stomach for anything else. You can’t tell me that doesn’t make a difference.

What about all that radiation from Fukushima, just out there, blowing across the pacific far enough to waft its carcinogenic way into my sleeping nostrils years later?

When I consider all the cognitively damaging shit that I’ve endured, I feel lucky to be coherent at all. It’s a triumph that I’ve made it as far as I have.

When I am not first in my law school class, when I am not offered a job at a big law firm, when my memo comes back from the professor marked in red, I know why.

It's the microwaves.

Because goodness knows it's not possible that I might just be bad at law school, right?

Right?