Engineers

By Erin Deborah Waks

It’s 10pm on a Wednesday evening, and I’m standing in my kitchen unloading the dishwasher. Behind me stand three 24-year-old guys playing with the metal poles from my broken shoe rack. They’re making high-pitched whistling sounds blowing through them like flutes, swinging them around chaotically and doing ‘tricks’, flinging them dangerously close to my beautiful flowers and pretty mugs and vases. I’m trying to tidy up - but can’t help smiling to myself as I watch what are, essentially, three overgrown boys playing with sticks in my apartment. 

My life got better when I made friends with engineers. Let me explain.

Most of my male friends, until the age of 21, were ‘philosophy’ boys, literature fans, linguists, arts and humanities students. And I’m not hating on that - I love my fellow creatives. Some of my closest friends are writers, musicians, publishers, journalists, public speakers. 

But then I moved in with a bunch of engineers, and things in my life shifted. 

I find myself pondering a parallel situation from a few years back. It’s 9pm on a random day, and I’m sitting in my kitchen trying to convince myself to eat something, a salad, a mouthful even. My closest friend at the time walks in, notices my somewhat panicked expression, and makes a move toward the nearest exit. ‘Hey,’ I interject. ‘Can you just sit with me for five minutes while I try to eat?’ 

‘Not now,’ he says, avoiding my gaze. ‘I’m busy thinking.’ Exeunt. 

I’m not blaming anyone; dealing with another person’s anxiety is never your responsibility, and I know it can be almost impossible to know what to say in a situation like that. The thing is, I didn’t need anything to be said. I just needed a friend to sit with me for five minutes, so I felt a little less alone. A little less of a burden to everyone around me.

Nowadays, I’m far more likely to get my eye taken out by a flying metal pole, sometimes have to sit and listen to an explanation of how car engines work, and know I might be met with a blank look when quoting Shakespeare or Austen. 

I may have to listen far too frequently to the telling ‘zoom’ of a fast car that accompanies F1 races, have an apartment littered with sweaty boys’ tracksuits from overly sporty pals, and spend a lot of my time discussing who would win in a fight between one hundred duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck.

I won’t be given poems comparing me to a summer’s day, won’t sit and debate the significance of form and structure in Plath’s poetry with my best guy pals at brunch, won’t spend hours dissecting the colours, form, metaphors and imagery in a single Renaissance painting with them in an art gallery. 

But you know what? They’d all sit with me for five minutes on any day of the week - no questions asked. I know which I’d prefer.