Refulgent- shining brightly; gleaming
Ex: The refulgent yellow liquid in the piss bucket sat undisturbed inside the curtained-off stall in the plant science building bathroom. A miniature ice rink made from frozen Martinelli’s apple juice, the bucket may have served as a recreation center for little rodents come wintertime. But it was far from wintertime, and though the piss bucket didn’t know it yet, it was about to have its peaceful bliss rudely interrupted by a most sinister act. Enter Dwayne Lockyear, a junior in the plant biochemistry program. Dwayne saw the signs in the bathroom that read, “Please pee in this bucket. I am collecting pee samples from students for my dissertation work that aims to extract bio-ethically sourced nitrogen from human urine!”. But the only sign that mattered was a sign that didn’t exist. A sign telling Dwayne, and any other bathroom-goers, that the bucket was for one thing and one thing only: pee. Of all the hours spent toiling away in the lab meticulously planning out a dissertation project that would advance plant science in a meaningful way, the doctoral student had somehow forgot to let their human subjects know that a number 2 was a no-no. That a doodoo was a do-not-do. That a brown submarine was not meant for this makeshift latrine. That an Arabian poo snake was an improper bowl movement to make. That it was a no-fly-zone for a chocolate dipped soft-serve cone. And so Dwayne, two hours removed from a sloppy lunch of deviled eggs and chimichangas, pulled down his pants, sat on top of the orange Home Depot bucket, and dropped a buttload of sun-tanned immigrants off over the border into pissland. Just like that, five years of research literally went to shit.
As for Dwayne, well he eventually went on to invent a new strain of fiber-rich GMO pears that alleviated constipation in opioid addicts. As for the doctoral student, she never quite recovered from her thesis shitting the bed. She still pisses into bottles on road trips and leaves them under her windshield to bake in the sun, praying that the resulting condensation will yield some sort of revolutionary, self-sustaining nitrogen byproduct. She has written to Bear Grylls to see if he would ship her some of the evaporated urine that he forgot to drink in his Saharan adventure episode, but to no avail. In a deleted scene from Obama’s episode of Running Wild With Bear Grylls, you can hear the two cracking up as Obama suggests that they look back over the student’s cringey email requests once their gummy bear edibles kick in. Obama can be heard snickering and saying, “That bitch is crazy” before handing over an earbud to Bear Grylls and telling him to “Bump this shit, it’s Cash Cobain, it’s on my 2024 summer playlist.”