September 3, 2012
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wolf
But how long are you gonna make me wait?
And how long are you gonna hesitate?
'Cause I love the way we carry it on...
But baby, how long?- Matchbox Twenty, How Long
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“The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.” - Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors
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I wonder if you get as nervous as me when I'm getting ready to see you. I panic a little whenever I apply my eyeliner a little too much, or when my hair doesn't look just right. Oh god, what am I going to do about these bangs? I can't be seen like this. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.
But it never really matters, does it? Our faces always light up the same way whenever we first see each other. You're always as easy on the eyes as I remember, and I can only hope that it's the same whenever you first see me.
...
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I spent my Labor Day at a lab dinner... that wasn't with my own lab! It was a gracious invitation that was an AMAZING culmination of how much I want to start mingling with all of the other labs.
Their lab tech handed me the little toy mouse and joked, "Okay, show me how you kill your mice."
"Really?" I threw my hair back and laughed, "Okay...!"
In my hand, I ran my fingers up the "spine" of a little plush purple mouse with a feather tail - normally it was a beloved cat toy. Today, it was my dissection model.
I verbally walked through my motions, "So you find the cervical vertebrae, and you pinch it between your fingers, and then grab the tail with your other hand, and you PULL!" They laughed at my animated explanation, and the way that I punctuated every gruesome step with a basket of giggles.
This transitioned into a discussion where we all contrasted our own experiences of performing dissections on cats, frogs, and fetal pigs in our middle school and high school educations. Namely, for those of us that are from California, we brought up how the animal specimens were always given to us already dead. However, in France, students would be given live animals, and were responsible for sacrificing their own specimens prior to dissection.
"They don't trust us with killing them," I said, in a very manner-of-fact way. The group all laughed, much to my befuddlement.
"Man," they shrugged, "only biologists could talk about this stuff like it's nothing." I finally realized how morbid my statement was, and laughed nervously.
"Yeah," one laughed, "it's definitely a biologist thing."