Journaling...

I have a lot of writing to do. And I should be doing it, but every time I get distracted by something like lunch or jellytime, I have a terrible time getting back into it. Not helping matters at all is the new student who has decided that she wants to pursue jellies as her dissertation topic because she thinks I can help her get started, and so comes over to my desk periodically with incredibly naive questions about what's important in the world of jellyfish research. I'm not saying I was any less naive when I first started this process, but I knew better than to take every dumb question to somebody who had better things to do with her time before I'd done at least a couple of days worth of library research on it. Also, there was nobody to take my dumb questions to in the first place. I'm sure she thinks I'm a big old meanie, but the sooner she figures out how to handle these things for herself, the better it will be for everyone.

They say that just starting to write, anything, is the way to get going again, so here I am writing anything. I don't know why I thought of this today, and I might have blogged it before, but it's making me giggle:

One day a couple of years ago, the older of my two younger brothers and his girlfriend, S, were hanging out at my parents house when li'l brother #2 walked in.

S to LB#2: Did you hear about Maggie?
LB#2: No, what about her?
S: J hit her.
LB#1 and S: (running outside to block the driveway because before they knew what was happening, LB#2 was back out the door and on his motorcycle on the way to Maryland to defend my honor)


(To be very clear, J would never, ever hit anyone outside of the context of a martial arts class/competition or defending himself or someone else. He would most especially not hit me, but if he did, S's sentence would have ended "and then Maggie killed him dead." We still don't know why LB#2 believed them, except that it did come from S, who is everything you expect a second grade teacher to be, including possibly the nicest person on earth, and usually quite trustworthy. I'm not entirely sure why they thought this was a funny joke except that LB#2 sometimes seems to think that J is the most awesomest person in the whole world and should be his BFF. J and I are somewhat resistant to that.)

I'm not sure exactly what LB#2 was planning because he has no idea where I live. He's never come to visit me on the grounds that he doesn't want to cross the Mississippi, on principle. I think he actually means the Mason Dixon line, and I can't seem to convince him that Maryland is not on the other side of either of those. Also, J outweighs LB#2 by at least 70 lbs. But I guess he figured he had a 10 hour drive to come up with a plan. I almost wish they hadn't stopped him because having him show up at my door, all riled up and in the middle of the night would have been a sight to see. Or he might have actually ended up on the other side of the Mississippi.

And so that's my story. We now return to the regularly scheduled science.