Today I learned that a quadrillion is ten raised to the power of fifteen, or 1,000,000,000,000,000. I suppose it’s million-billion-trillion-quadrillion—that’s how it works, right? Anyway, did you know that the galaxy is about 588 quadrillion miles across? That’s 100,000 light years, which sounds much less daunting. Yes, I had to stop the timer and look that up… that would be an insane fact to just know off the top of one’s head, unless you were an astrophysicist or something.

I once had a roommate who was an astrophysicist. She was quite brilliant but quite odd. It was a forced arrangement via graduate student housing. She really liked Ayn Rand (I don’t, but I never told her that). She was a compulsive cleaner and I’m pretty sure she was addicted to Adderall for an illness that I’m not positive existed, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt on that one. I am also a hyper-clean person, especially when I’m stressed (which is perfect for grad school!), but she didn’t like the way I cleaned. It wasn’t sufficient. Personally, I think I’m pretty compulsive about it, but I have a feeling that no amount of clean would have been clean enough. She would clean night and day.

Anyway one day she left to go visit her family a few states away (I’m being purposely vague here) and she said she’d be gone for a weekend. Well, the weekend passed, and then a week passed, and then two weeks passed, and I hadn’t heard from her. I got a little worried. One day I was looking for a stapler and I recalled she had one on her desk. I figured I would just pop my head in and borrow the stapler—no harm done, right? I open her bedroom door and the place was cleared out. She had moved out without telling me, leaving me alone with a beautiful two bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of New York which I only paid half of the rent for, which itself was subsidized 40%. Not too shabby.

I texted her to express my concern that she had apparently just dropped out of school for the semester and moved several states away without a word, and she informed me that she had posted the apartment on Craigslist (which was supposed to be strictly forbidden according to graduate student housing), and then several random women moved in. Fortunately, I got along with the one who stayed the longest, and the others weren’t terrible either. Certainly better than the original roommate. I kept quiet about the blatant disregard for student housing rules. Anyway, a friend of mine was roommates with her classmate, and he tended to like to talk a lot, and he told me that she had told him that she didn’t get along with her roommate. Which was news to me. I mean, besides the whole not cleaning sufficiently thing, I thought we got along just fine, even if we didn’t communicate much. She didn’t seem like a terribly communicative person so I just stayed out of her hair.

Several months later, she moved out of the apartment for real, and dumped out a trash bin on the floor, and also left the front door unlocked, which wasn’t a great thing to do in New York. She insisted it was an accident, but it didn’t seem to me that this was the kind of woman who did much of anything accidentally. But I suppose we all have these kinds of roommate stories, and I’m sure hers would be just as colorful in her characterization of me.

Anyway, that’s my story about astrophysicists, inspired by random facts about the size of the universe, inspired by the word “quadrillion.” I don’t know how many minutes it’s actually been because I didn’t actually set a timer despite my assertion that I stopped it at some point. I'm sorry for lying to you and for disregarding the laws of the freewrite universe. The end.