the thing about houston is

that it is really fucking humid. my hair has never been filled with so many secrets in its twenty-one years.

Oscar Wilde tells the truth once again

I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John.

-Gwendolyn, The Importance of Being Earnest

engraftment failure

There seems to be a pink suede elephant in the world and no one is allowed to talk about it.

Since I, however, have no regard for Internerd authority–I am going to say it: Mandy Moore is nowhere near cool enough nor smart enough to be dating Ryan Adams. I don’t know that I really endorse this whole Natalie Portman and Devendra Banhart fling either.

I suppose this is evidence that sweet musicians must be real men too (read: real men prefer stupid women, not blondes).

What’s next? John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston?

taking ernie to a new level

Even ole Hemingway would be impressed with the minimalist I’ve become in the past three years. In addition to formulating short sentances and excluding the flowers of rhetoric I used to insert here and there in everyday conversation, I’ve now begun to not even greet the people in the Walter lab unless they say hello to  me first. Now this might be acceptable on the East Coast–maybe even expected–but my unfortunate Midwestern roots seem to wince a bit when I simply float past Jin and Tim in my lab, without saying anything and likely with some sort of determined look in my face. I’ve known them for  three years now. We’ve had countless conversations about the weather and each other’s health, heeding Henry Higgens’s most practical advice. Isn’t this grounds for a ’Hey, how is it going?’ once in a while? Apparently not.

You know what this means, right? J. Andrew Ivers would say, “Papa Doubles all around!”

last night when i saw radiohead

i experienced true love and nearly died.

modelizers are real

This weekend I accidentally attended some sort of Alive Magazine event, a loathesome misfortune in case you didn’t know.

St. Louis has quickly become the pathetic, determined-little-sister attempt at being cool–meaning feigning a ’scene’. Seconds after giving the valet unnecessarily specific instructions on how to open the hummer door to avoid ripping the whole thing off, I was horrified to see the sign just inside the door to the new Mosaic location on Washington Avenue. It said “Fashion Show after-party this way”. The wonderfully patient valet was already gone, so we didn’t have a choice but to face our miserable fate.

The decision was instantly regretted when a TRAIN of ugly St. Louis models followed us in. I’ve never seen models so heinous! It should be noted that I am no stranger to magic of a fine-tooth comb and half a bottle of Big Sexy Hair—hairspray might actually be in my top five best friends list. Anyway, it really is just tragic that these women—if I can take the liberty to call them as such—must have been rejected from every fashion show in America before being assigned a show probably for middle-aged people in Clayton.

Possibly worse than trashy models are the creepy dudez they attract. All under 5 feet and 6 inches, these men streamed into Mosaic and leered at everyone, not just the ‘models’. More than 3 of them had giant, young-professional-from-the-80s swoop-back bangs and blazers over t-shirts. Luckily for me, one of these model-chasers happened to be a Brit who looked like the short and over-the-hill version of a sailor–and he talked like one too! He was glorious. I watched woman after woman walk away from him when he tried to speak to them in his curse-ridden speech while he downed vodka tonics without the tonic. I guess he noticed my intrigue in his repeated failures because he looked over at me before he left to try his luck at probably Kitchen K and shrugged.

 

When someone has the time, will you explain to me how I get into the ‘friend zone’ with strangers?

if these walls could speak

In an elevator at the Siteman Cancer Center today, I was trying to get from the 6th floor of the southwest tower to the main floor when this happened.

I was relieved to see that the elevator was empty when the doors opened on the 6th floor because I have a terrible tendency to say the worst things to strangers in elevators. True to tradition in my life, this relief was fleeting as the doors slid open on floor number 5. Enter two interesting individuals, to say the least. One of them was a middle-aged woman with a lisp and hair far too short for comfort; she was wearing short white coat but I cannot stop hoping that she is anything but a doctor, for the sake of the unsuspecting greater population of St. Louis, MO. The other was a tall man with a large middle wearing jeans and red t-shirt with the letters ‘UMSL’ on it—a telling choice of attire, to be sure. Worse than this unexpected company on my typically peaceful ride down the elevator was the conversation that occurred between these two individuals (I opted not to participate. Obviously.). The woman with the lisp spoke first after she pushed the button marked “M” even though it was already lit up from when I pushed it not 20 seconds earlier.

‘Oh! This elevator is going down, not sideways!’ (chuckles)

‘Heh heh. It sure is!’

‘Wouldn’t it be funny if elevators went from side to side and up and down?’

‘Heh heh. Whoa! It sure would be funny!’

‘That would make it easy to get to ICU!’

‘Heh heh … you wouldn’t get any exercise that way!’

(collective chuckles)

Some one should really just follow me around with a camera.