Filler
Some short-shorts while I work on a super-long post.
Last week at the weekly neuroscience conference I go to (partly for the edification, mostly for the free Greek salad pizza), I had the most amazing struggle trying to pay attention to the presentation because all I could do was stare with a puzzled look on my face at the girl who was speaking — not what you think — who had this unusual odd vocal artifact that made me want to stand up, cut through the seated crowd, smile, ask her to relax, pinch her mouth open and then examine the backs of her teeth to see if she was wearing a dental appliance, because her lisp was really driving me crazy.
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As part of my new regime of extreme stinginess, I trek everyday up the hill to eat the vegan lunch provided by the local ISKCON cultists. Suggested donation for said meal (which consists of some sort of vegetarian stew, rice, and bread/dessert) is $3; this back sliding Baptist refuses to pay the agents of the Devil more than $1 a meal, except for Thursdays, where I usually feel sufficiently guilty for cheating the poor saps that I increase my contribution a whole dollar. (That’s a 100% increase, folks.) I realized a while ago that the end result of all of this monetary stinginess was that I had unwittingly and completely bought into the Krishna diet, at least for one meal of the day. I told my “Three Protein Shakes a Day” brother that I was accidentally becoming a part-time vegetarian. He was not pleased.
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No work was accomplished yesterday. Rather than do things to earn our paychecks, our time at the Brain Institute was occupied by chatting, random lecture auditing, a 2 hour lunch break, a side trip to the bookstore, a discussion of the various Hebrew derivations of English words, and pretend superhero battles with the sacred weapons of the Leonard lab, namely the Katana Meter-stick, the Holy Hammer of Cedar, and the Rainbow Coalition Lightsaber. What can I say? It was Monday. Today’s not any better. I’ve edited 3 lines of a brain preprocessing script. That’s about it. It’s Tuesday. Still too close to Monday.
It’s like the excuses my old High School teacher gave for why she would flub simple arithmetic in her proofs: “It’s Monday. Can’t do math on Monday. Brain’s still stuck on the weekend” or “It’s Friday. I’m already mentally on vacation.” Wednesday was no better, because her brain by then was being pulled in two different directions simultaneously, which of course made it no good at arithmetic. Tuesday was too close to Monday, and Thursday was too close to Friday, which made them no good either, meaning that there were in fact no days which she could do simple math due to the weekend, which had some sort of magical nullification effect on her abilities to perform in her area of expertise, no matter what day of the week it was.
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