Category Archives: academia

Dear Dr. Noodles

Hope all is well with you. I presume the annual LSD binge is going well, as I have not yet been contacted by any local, state or federal law enforcement agents.

I continue to hold down the fort. It hasn’t been easy. Yesterday, Co-worker Who is Not My Boyfriend appeared in the office to tell me that he, Husband and Brother-in-law were going to make their own sausage this summer. This does not seem like a good idea to me, particularly after viewing the source of their inspiration: sausagemania.com. Now I’m just afraid.

There were a bunch of memos in our mailbox. They made nice scrap-paper.

We got a nice package from the Scientologists. It’s another oversized coffeetable book of picture of L. Ron Hubbard. It would be a thing of great wonder, if they hadn’t already sent us 7 copies.

Yesterday, I rode the metro with Captain Howdy, who was off to an Adult Dodgeball League game on the Mall. The guy driving the train was insane. He kept making announcements about not blocking the doors. Not your standard “stand clear of the doors” announcements, either – these were full of anger and went on well after the door shut at each stop.

By the time we got to Metro Center the driver’s psychosis was in full-bloom, and he proceeded to rant non-stop all the way from Metro Center to Gallery Place. He really had it out for one particular passenger, but he threatened to dump us all out of the train just for good measure.

I think pretty much everyone got off the train at Gallery Place.

Your parole officer called to make sure this wasn’t you.

A masked and caped do-gooder has been sweeping through an English town, performing good deeds and scattering terrified bad guys, a local newspaper reported.

The Kent and Sussex Courier said Friday it had received letters from “stunned residents” of the town of Tunbridge Wells, southeast of London, who saw the man in a brown mask and cape scare off hooligans and return a woman’s dropped purse.

“To my great surprise,” the paper quoted 21-year-old psychology student Ellen Neville as saying, “a masked man wearing a brown cape rushed past me to assist a woman who was having a bother with a group of youths.

“He swept in, broke up the commotion and ran off, leaving myself and the woman in a state of shock,” she said.

A man wrote to say he was being chased by some youths when the hero appeared and “shocked the gang so much they ran off.”

Another woman wrote to say the crusader had tapped her on her shoulder to return her purse.

“If only there were more people around with this kind-hearted spirit,” she said.
I said I didn’t think so, since spandex gives you a rash.

The office is a lonely place without you, but I shall endeavor to stay sane. As soon as I get there. Which should be soon. Pretty soon. Fairly soon. Sometime this morning.

your humble minion,
skarlet

and not a moment too soon

I’ve turned in the grades for all of my classes. I’m pleased with myself at a level that is all out of proportion with the accomplishment, but right now I couldn’t care less.

Dr. Noodles leaves tomorrow for 10 days. I’ve been telling some people he’s going on his yearly LSD binge and others that he’s going to take refresher courses at clown college. I’m waiting to see how long it takes the stories to merge and mutate.

We spent our lunch hour today discussing the history of the pogo stick and pondering the case of the man who recently got a 30 year sentence for killing someone with a pogo stick. Then we made duck noises for a while. It’s really hard to tell which of us is the most burned out right about now. We’ve also been playing with the glowing blue ball that Batty sent us.

And we wonder why they’ve moved our office so far away from the rest of the world?

i must have a masochistic streak a mile wide

I took today off.

I took today off so I could get up at 6 a.m. and go to a Law Conference. This is what passes for fun in my squalid existence. There should be some interesting articles about the conference itself that I can link to later, which is good because I’m too braindead to recount any of the details now and I don’t like to write about work here anyway. So I’ll just jabber about a few random things that got loose in my brain today and then go drink tea and write a lecture.

I didn’t want to try and park at the Law School so I took a bus. A bus full of law students. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they were all talking at once. Not to one another, mind you. They were all using their little earpieces to yap on their cell phones.

Do you have any idea how fucking irritating it is to be on a bus with at least a dozen people all carrying on conversations with invisible beings? It was like being on a bus full of untreated schizophrenics.

And then, because I wasn’t quite on the edge of my sanity yet, the bus driver’s cell phone rang. And he answered it, taking both hands off the wheel to do so and thus driving on the sidewalk for a few moments but never slowing down.

Today I was reminded why I generally avoid buses.

Somehow, we got there without any harm coming to anyone on the bus. They went their way, I went mine.

Coffee. Panel discussions. Coffee. Panel discussions. Coffee. Panel discussions.

I’ve realized something very important about my brain. About 3 hours into panel discussions, by brain goes out of service for a few minutes. No matter how interesting or dynamic the panel is, I hit a wall. It’s like everyone is suddenly speaking Finnish and I have to concentrate very, very hard to translate it all back into English. “section 54 in effect … compulsory … confiscatory … mechanical … disintermediation … rights of the creator … whatwhatwhatwhatwhat?”

Today when I hit that wall I found my mind wandering to the idea that perhaps if I went to a conference in Finland I would find that at the 3 hour mark everyone would start sounding like they were speaking English. Then I checked weather.com and realized it was currently 12 degrees in Helsinki. That snapped me back to reality and I was able to follow the rest of the panel just fine.

At the end of the day I discovered that I had just missed the bus and the next one wouldn’t be along for another half an hour. It was roughly a mile back to my car. All uphill. And I was wearing a long skirt with no walking pleat. And I had my briefcase. And it was starting to get dark. I could walk, uphill, in my skirt, in the growing twilight, carrying my briefcase or I could wait half an hour and then ride the bus with the law students.

It was a nice walk.

And so, in closing, let me say that, although I am of course fascinated by Peter Huber’s brain, I find it hard to make eye contact with him because he has the most amazingly beautiful and interesting hands. He creates a sort of gestural poetry when he speaks.

A mathematician, a physicist and a squirrel walk into a bar…

This morning I was getting out of my car when Dr. X, a mathematician, pulled into the lot. I left my car door open while we exchanged pleasantries.

I could have sworn I saw something out of the corner of my eye. That’s when Dr. Y came running over insisting he’d just seen a squirrel run into my car.

Sure enough, there was a squirrel careening around the interior of my car with a mouth full of acorns. Didn’t anyone tell this little monster that Squirrel Awareness Week doesn’t start for 3 more days?

We opened the passengerside door thinking he’d run out. Nope. He liked it in there. Unfortunately, to open the back doors you have to reach in and manually unlock the door. Everytime we’d try that, Rocky would make like he was going to claw us.

We decided we needed a plan to get him out. Animal Control was our last resort because Dr. Y insisted that they’re pretty sloppy around here and don’t care whether they get the animal out dead or alive. As irritating as this little gray ball of chattering psychosis was, I didn’t want him to get hurt. I just wanted him out of my car.

Then the mathematicians began making this project a lot harder than it needed to be, jabbering about vectors and shit. That’s when I remembered: these two are theoreticians. We were probably going to have to design a computer model first or something.

I had a sudden flashback to the incident involving the nuclear physicists, the espresso machine, and the powerstrip and decided to take matters into my own hands.

Don’t get me wrong, they were proposing a solid course of action, but I needed to get to work and we’d already spent an awful lot of time taking into account the basic concepts of rodent behavior. How long was it going to take us to factor in basic human nature? I didn’t have that kind of time. I wanted the little monster out of my car so I could get some coffee, er, I mean, get to work.

We were going to have to enact The Plan and hope for the best.

I can’t even begin to imagine how silly we looked.

We all gathered on the passengerside of the car. Dr. X inflated the plastic newspaper bag he found in his car. (Thank god they weren’t microbiologists or we’d still be there sterilizing the bag before one of them would get it near their mouth). As the designated physicist in the bunch, they left it to me to decide how much he should inflate the bag. I made up a nonsense theory about the relationship between sound pressure levels and the tensile strength of the plastic (eventually conceding that everything I knew about the subject I learned at summer camp) and then we were ready.

We counted to 3. And nothing happened. Dr. X didn’t hit the bag hard enough and it just sort of made a dull squeaking fart-esque noise, causing us to start laughing. We tried again.

1. 2. 3. Bang!

The squirrel made tracks, I got my briefcase, and, most importantly, I was reunited with my beloved coffee.

I made Dr. X promise to check in with the campus police to explain the loud gunfire-like sound so we didn’t have every cop in the area descending on this place looking for snipers.

That was what had originally hung up the plan…would people hear the popping sound and mistake it for gunfire? People are rather on edge here as there’s a sniper loose in the DC area and every belief that s/he will strike again.

Dr. X got to make the call because he has tenure, you see, and is not only expected but required by his rank to periodically make loony phonecalls like this to University officials. It’s part of the deal. If word got out that academics were even partially sane or, even worse, useful, they might expect us to behave like so-called normal people. Can’t have that now, can we? Ruins all the fun.

Originally posted October 4, 2002 10:06 AM at punkprincess.com

Imported Comments

Oh man. Talk about timely, huh? I have a story like that about skunks, sent to me by my mother this morning.

I’d post it, but I have to translate it into English first.
Posted by: Tara at October 4, 2002 12:50 PM

Funny you mention skunks Tara because I was thinking about the way these stories grow and mutate on campus, in a week or so it will have been a skunk. Or maybe a deer. By next semester there will be a rumor about a family of bears living in an SUV in the student parking garage.
Posted by: skarlet at October 4, 2002 05:43 PM

Hey, did you hear about the bears that escaped from Rock Creek Park and took up residence in a dorm? It’s hard to differentiate between bears and ordinary students, although the bears show up for class more often.
Posted by: Linkmeister at October 4, 2002 06:10 PM

I just very nearly did a classic spit-take onto my monitor, Link. *giggle*
Posted by: skarlet at October 4, 2002 08:56 PM

Very cute!
Posted by: Zelda at October 5, 2002 10:01 AM

The other day I was walking to BART in the wee morning light and was stopped by a squirrel blockade. There was this enormous fluffy beastie, scampering down the tree as fast as his little muscled legs could propel him, with a mouth full of almonds.

I have been known to leave out almonds, or brazil nuts, or even pecans, for the little guys when they get bullied by the my-fig-eating alpha squirrels.

So here’s this big fat squirrel, at eye level with me on this tree, teeth cradling 2 almonds, giving me The Look. The “I can fit two more, lady,” look.

Here are some adorable baby bears, apropos of nothing.
Posted by: Jessica at October 5, 2002 02:16 PM

You think the squirrels are organizing? They can take us, I think.

I found acorns in my car and I’m convinced it now has the faint aroma of squirrel pee, but maybe I’m imagining that…
Posted by: skarlet at October 5, 2002 02:39 PM

i’m laughing so hard i’m crying, and my son thinks i’m insane. i blame all of you. and the damn squirrels too.

i have no squirrels. i feel so deprived.
Posted by: kd at October 5, 2002 07:03 PM

This is one of the funniest damn stories EVER! EVER! EVER to exist! BWAAAAAAHHHH HAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: JeanNINE at October 7, 2002 04:21 PM

i have no squirrels. i feel so deprived.

Hey KD: expect a package. ;)

I’m only kidding of course.

No animals were injured in the making of this website.
Posted by: skarlet at October 8, 2002 11:37 AM

This is a little number we like to call "If you don't put your damned dog in your damned house where we can't hear it incessantly barking it's fool head off I'm going to come over there and do it for you. Don't make me come over there. Because I will. I mean it this time. I do. Really. Um. Yeah. Or maybe next time. Next time it happens, I'm coming over there."

Go visit my cat hates you. It’s still one of my favorite sites and it never fails to make me laugh.

Office hours now. Trying to quell a student mutiny over a situation I have no control over so off I go.