Get out the vote

I've been declining to comment on politics on any social networking for the upcoming national election.  As a reasonably loud-mouthed person by nature, this hasn't always been particularly easy because people from both political parties are pretty riled up over this one. Sometimes I understand it.  Other times, I don't understand at all. 

It just seems that balanced, rational, calm discussion is completely out of the realm of possibility for most people, at least the one's doing most of the talking. It's all sound bites, bald accusations and exaggerations, and misconstructions of truths that weren't black and white to begin with. It's Fox News vs. "the liberal media." It's far slung interest groups calling for a moderators resignation from her private industry job for correcting a blatantly wrong statement. It's all catch phrases like as "Save Big Bird!", "Binders Full of Women" memes and the resurrection of the insidiously racist Birther movement. It's getting harder and harder to find facts on what laws actually say, who supports them and what each candidates actual plans for governing are.

It's infuriating, frustrating and it honestly makes me head-on-desk sad that this is what political discussion in this country has come down to.  

So when I saw this video, I just had to share. Not on Facebook (since I'm positive one of my wacko friends would ruin it with some nasty comment) but here, in my own little corner of the Interwebz.  There's no name calling.  There's no hatred.  Just women standing up and saying "I matter and I will vote."

That..je ne sais quoi.

I don't know if it's the residual warm fuzzies from a great weekend celebrating the impending arrival of one Charles Aiden Patteson.

It could be the come down from a successful, spur of the moment GRE taking. 

Or hell, it might be the beer, pizza and tv watching talking.

But as bad as I know it is...I'm totally going to see Taken 2 when it comes out. 

 

Liam Neeson...I still love you.

Unicorn

I met a unicorn yesterday. 

Sadly it was not a real, cotton-candy eating, skittle pooping unicorn but a metaphorical unicorn.  Disappointed?  Tell me about it. 

Abandoned by the other members of the Front Office for their vacations, I was feeling a tad bit bereft and decided to attend the noon Influenza-Gonna-Kill-Us-All lecture all by my onesies.  It's a small understatement to say that I've been looking forward to this lecture for a long time. Not long after I first started at this job the director of our unit gave a lecture on influenza, now it may sound bizarre and unbelievably geeky but this talk rocked my world.  Maybe it's because it was the first work lecture that I was able to comprehend, maybe it was because he mixed history with health care and then tied it back into what we do.  I don't know but I was so enthralled by this lecture that I went home and bought a (okay several) books on the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. (My nerdiness truly knows no bounds.)  So it's fair to say that I've been looking forward to a reprisal of this conference for approximately four and a half years now and I saw no reason to miss it just because I had no posse. I left the conference and hour later still feeling bereft and even a tad bit disgruntled. What's the fun of a sensational virology lecture on pandemics when you're alone?  That's right, it's no fun all.

Being in the neighborhood, I decided to stop by the Cogle Lab.  I've been "learning" french via a podcast and was hoping that I could somehow convince Raphael (the french-speaking MD/PhD student in the Cogle lab) to say "Je suis prêt" and "sœur" without having to tell him why.  My podcast is broadcast by BBC Scotland and I've been minorly concerned that I may be developing a very strange American-Scotch-French accent.  I did not succeed in this covert endeavor but I did meet...the Unicorn.

It seems contrary to what you might think but people working with cancer seem to be an atypically happy group of people.  Wicked smart with dangerous senses of humor, my coworkers are complete lunatics but by in large quite happy.  Standing around talking about nothing in particular we came to the topic of GRE's and other standardized testing when The Unicorn walked into the room.  Never have I ever before met people whose math scores are what saved their GRE scores. Math scores, not verbal boosting the total score. I say again: math scores that ecclipse verbal scores? I seriously thought that such things were the stuff of legends, stories told to make liberal arts and science people like myself feel bad about our less than robust math scores.  Never in a million years I didn't think I'd ever meet such people in person and I admit that the poetry club nerd in me just can't help but rejoice in that I get to call them friends. 

The kind souls that they are they gave me a moment to gather myself as The Unicorn trotted in circles around me...and then we broke out the griddle and made some grilled cheese sandwiches.  True story. :)