Written Words – Frozen

I was annoyed, I’ll freely admit. I had pressing work I needed to finish before I left, corrections to the protocol I’d been helping write for the past two months that were due back to a supervisor by the end of the day, and she’d already wasted both my time and my boss’s.

She was a research assistant from another lab, wanting to borrow cells (yes, like the things that make up your body) from our lab. We couldn’t give them to her at the moment, but my boss told her that she was welcome to look at how many vials we had left so she would have full information when she made her official request. The assistant didn’t have any questions, so we pointed her toward the huge liquid nitrogen freezer and told her where to look.

In retrospect, she should have asked for help when she realized she didn’t know what she was doing. It’s easier (at least on the pride) to pretend to know what’s going on, that I’ll admit, but you don’t play with substances you don’t understand. Especially not substances that maintain a temperature of -320 degrees Fahrenheit.

Found Words – Stacey Head

“There’s a lot of money in the city. We are not a poor city, we are a poorly managed city.”

 - New Orleans City Council – Recovery Committee

Written Words – An observation

I remember more fondly those I give myself to less completely.

Found Words – St. Anna’s Concert

I got my mojo workin’

it just don’t work on you babe

Written Words – Relationships

I’ll freely admit to having a death wish for my relationships. I am fundamentally relationsuidical. 

Because before you’re going out with a girl, you have the girl herself to obsess over. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a chaser. Hopefully no one looks at me and thinks flat diet pepsi after soco and lime. All I’m saying is, before the relationship you think about getting in a relationship with the girl.

After you’re there, what’s next?

Marriage? Probs not at this point.

So what do you have?

Breaking up. 

It’s the next logical step.

I don’t think it’s hard to comprehend that the guy who wrote that semi-coherent, but completely insane, insight into his mind, is having a few conflicted thoughts when it comes to the act of dating in general. 

I tend to think that the problem is small sample size. If I had dated every girl under the sun I would by now have amassed enough of a data set to really look at these things the right way. But as it is now, all I have are general types, and I have to work by inductive logic. 

Things didn’t work out well with The Fighter? Maybe I should stay away from girls I fight with. 

Rough Around the Edges is still upset that I dropped our long distance, don’t ask don’t tell, year long “thing”? Maybe I should stay away from girls that never made any sense even at the time. 

Best Friend is, well, my best friend? Maybe now isn’t the best time to see that “crunch.”

The list goes on. End Girls, the one’s I dated at the end of my high school and college careers (and is it even fair to lump them together?)? Maybe they are definitive proof that dating people immediately before completely leaving the life you are currently sharing is a pretty lousy idea.

But here’s the thing. I feel like I’m learning really important lessons. For example, don’t not talk to your girlfriend for two weeks while you finish your novel, she will break up with you. It’s important I know that before I’m married. Right?

Written Words – Quality of Life

Something to add to the list of simple pleasures that vastly improves quality of life:

Ankle socks that fit. 

Yay for Big-and-Tall. And new footies.

Written Words – Pasta

There is one cure for paperwork. Bureaucracy. Not getting work done. Having too much to do. Being stressed. Not sleeping. 

That cure is pasta. Preferably with onions, peppers and vodka sauce. 

Because life is good.

Found Words – Lee Zurik

Still, Mayor Nagin supports NOAH’s program saying WWL-TV’s reporting has been inaccurate, biased and reckless.

 

“You basically presented something out there that we are misappropriating federal funds and that is just not accurate,” he said last week.

 

Gentilly homeowner Larry Dupont said he disagrees.  On Monday, Eyewitness News found a folder in the city’s files, for his mother’s home on Sere Street.  His mother’s name was listed on a sheet of paper, with no signature, but the home is on the Mayor’s list showing cleanup work done after Hurricane Katrina.

 

Dupont told a different story, saying a woman named Janet Jones with a  North Carolina church group helped with the house gutting.

 

“Nobody from the city ever came to this property,” Jones said.

 - WWL TV

Written Words – Help

Asking for help isn’t admitting failure, it’s sometimes the only way to ensure success.

Found Words – John Banville

“This, of course, is worrying. To enjoy writing is deeply worrying. I must be doing something wrong.”

-in “The Two Mr. Banvilles” by Bob Thompson, July 28, 2008, The Washington Post