Summertime Clothes

I kind of met something of an interesting woman while crossing Forest Park Parkway on Friday. It was around noon so the St. Louis sun was blazin’ and it must have been at least 95 degrees. As I took my first step onto the Parkway, I hear a

“Oh LOR,’ iss HOT!”

“Yeah, it’s totally hot. Ugh.”

“Wooooo-eeeee! I cain’t beLIEVE it!”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s so hot out today and here I am wearing entirely black! Smart, right? He he.”

“Yeah, I uh, heard that black clothes makes the heat go away from ya.”

“Well, um. Actually, I think it holds onto the heat pretty well. It’s better to wear white, I think.”

(partially interrupting my previous sentence) “Well I knew it was one or the othah!”

” … ” (we’re still crossing the street, if you can believe it)

“Well I gotta go to Applebee’s to pick up a ordah now! I’ll see ya! Hmm!”

I’m wearing black every day this summer in hopes of repeating this conversation with that woman, needlesstosay.

yet another reason china is a giant pile of suck

Leave it to me to ask a Chinese grad student in my lab if she had any sisters or brothers at lunch in an attempt  to make conversation. Just try to imagine the saddest little asian face appear as she said, “Ohhhhh I wish I did! My parents’ generation had siblings so I have lots of cousins? “

 

I’m such an asshole.

regarding my triumphant conclusion of college this week

one J. A. Ivers says:

“i’m having a very surreal experience just thinking of you being finished . . . i can only hope you’re sitting in a kiddie pool in the middle of your apartment drinking cocktails from some kind of oversized vessel . . . or at least, as i was, writing a faulkner paper on nothing but coffee, lots of coffee, so that when you finally finish it all you have to do is have one beer and dance to a rolling stones song in order to be intoxicated in every sense of the word.”

Ev’ Pluhar is a Crazy Beezy

Hello blogreaders!

 

Come  see me give a talk on human moral superiority at the Philosophy Senior Seminar tomorrow at 11 AM in the Humanities building, room 142 at Saint Louis University (a swell place, to be certain) in St. Louis, MO.  Jeff Tweedy says I’m ‘a real good talker,’ you know.  He knows these things.

Out of Italy

On Wednesday, an MD from Yale came to talk at Hematopoietic Development and Malignancy journal club about some translation oncology work he’s done with some new cancer drugs.  But that is beside the point.  He. was. perfect.

He’s about fifty, if I had to guess and he has the most darling salt and pepper hair. He’s originally from Milan, so his accent was totally intriguing and sexy, naturally.  He wore a grey suit and olivey-brown tie;  he used a Macintosh computer to do his presentation. He started this talk with a joke about Democrats.   Although it was made clear to us that he is a Big Deal Fancy Researcher, he was so humble;  he apologized and said, “You all are stem cell biology people, I must say I know little about stem cells and even less about biology.” (very funny.) He spoke in a calm way for a exactly one hour and I didn’t notice anyone leaving early or losing attention. He also made charming little jokes here and there that resulted in us exchanging “Hey, isn’t this guy GREAT?” glances with each other.  He probably plays the piano, wears Italian cashmere and has cool cars too. Probably. When asked about the clinical trials of drugs from unpublished research, he laughed and said he’s not supposed to talk about it, but he’d say some things if someone “bought him a few drinks.” I’m in love.

I understand that you wonderful readers may find these attributes somewhat arbitrary. But you don’t know anything.  This man’s perfection revealed itself to me in a mere 60 minutes.  How often does THAT happen?

Apocryphal Stories of the Presidents

An excerpt from the Shouts & Murmurs section of the February 23, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, by Yoni Brenner (who is really awesome).

“Pirates!” the young sailor Andrew Jackson cried. He and MacGraw skittered down the mainmast and in a heartbeat a hundred and twenty men, all sweat and sinew, swarmed the deck, priming the cannons, affixing bayonets to rifles.  In two minutes, they were ready.

   The captain probed the misty horizon, his lips contracting into a taut frown.  “What pirates?” he shouted.  “These are otters! Who is responsible?”  His fearsome eyes searched the crew and came to rest squarely on Andrew Jackson.  But Andrew Jackson did not shrink.  No, he boldly returned the captain’s gaze, and with a single bony thumb, he gestured over his right shoulder–in the direction of MacGraw.

May envy

As much I totally disapprove of Angelina Jolie’s existence in general, the giant emeralds she championed last night at the “Oscars” (if you can even call it anything other than an unwarranted Slumdog party) made me swoon. Emeralds rule.  The folks at the academy drool.

the stuff tears are made of

um.

 

ubiquitously superior

Here is a list of terms/phrases that come up in my British philosophy text, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, Readings with Commentary by Peter A. Morton—they’ve yet to cease grabbing my attention and affections and holding on tight. I find these lovely alternatives to lowly American English nothing short of adorable and when I come across them, the words stay stuck in my head for the remainder of the day. And that’s okay with me.

A list:

1. defence
2. sleight of hand
3. analyse
4. judgement
5. fibre
6. learnt
7. manoeuvre

Henry Higgins was onto something when he said as basically an aside in the song “Why Can’t the English?” , “Well in America, they haven’t been speaking it [English] for years.” I sincerely apologise then, Henry, for contributing to the demise of the English language by speaking it, in this dreadful midwestern American way my whole life.

transient attention is better than none?

Somehow, I’ve managed to escape doing the whole ‘central west end weekend night’ thing for awhile (with the exception of going to Brennan’s at every possible opportunity, of course), despite residing in the heart of it. Well that blissful streak ended last night, when my friends and I found ourselves wandering from one shitty bar to the next, trying to hold on to each other in the ocean of middle-aged county people. At one point in the evening, Julia, Ellyse and I were sitting at a table—in an establishment so horrible that I refuse to name it here—when a group of three dudes, obviously from either Wash U or Israel, approached us and said (cheerfully), “We’d like to buy you ladies shots.” I suppose our response wasn’t emphatic enough, because moments later, they retracted their offer. Claimed that they were looking to have a good time tonight, and we obviously weren’t into that. “Have a good night,” they said in a huff.

I think I’m still laughing.