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In the comedy of errors that is my life, I came home Saturday afternoon to a keyboard that had suddenly forgotten its alphabet.

It appears that laptop preschools have started taking their curriculum from the New York City board of education, which forbids its teachers from actually teaching the nation’s youth.  And so what is a keyboard to do, really, other than use its imagination! – the one skill that preK teachers (and Barney) are still allowed to nurture and encourage – and come up with its own character system.

Apparently qe, ad, and zc are going to replace the letters q, e, a, d, z, and c in the eventual future when machines take over the world.

At least, that is…if my keyboard has anything to do with it.

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If someday I pack up all my bags and transport them 3,000 miles across the country without even a hint of warning and definitely without anything resembling two weeks’ notice.

I need you to know that it has nothing to do with the fact that staring at adipocytes (fat cells) under a microscope for hours at a time makes my head hurt.  Or that instead of trying to figure out which plasmids (circular pieces of DNA that we electrify into aforementioned fat cells so that they’ll express whatever gene we’ve engineered into them) I need to order to so that I can move forward with this whole “PhD thing“…I spent my time in lab yesterday impulse-procrastination-buying 32 oz bottles of vanilla extract online.  (How can one be expected to think about science when there is not even a tbsp of vanilla left in her household?!?!? Seriously.)

And instead. It has everything to do.

With ice cream.

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Unbeknownst to the areas of my brain that control conscious, reasonable and rational thought, I started out this year on a mission.

On the surface, it seemed like that mission was to come back from my second stress fracture by training for and running the NYC Half Marathon.  No time goal, no lofty PR dreams.  Just. Finish.

Which somehow evolved into running three half marathons in three months, each in under two hours when I haven’t been able to run that fast for 13 consecutive miles since…2009.

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