am out of the house at the crack of dawn, run *constantly*, and am not
done until late evening, and one of my many Things ends me up in a
cluster of quasi-members of one of my labs...quasi-members cos they're
all...::shudder::...ugrads.
one would have to work with ugrads over an extended period of time to
understand the shuddering part; they're young, impressionable, and
often bunny-brained. They have the attention span of a gnat, and when
i say 'impressionable', I am being very...kind. These chirrin are
capable of running across campus for a soda, and when they aren't back
in forty-five minutes, it's fallen upon me (or Karen, or Scooter,
etc...) to walk down to The Union and pull them by the ear away from
dancing and singing with their new Hare Krishna friends all the way
back to the lab, tambourine in hand, newly-borrowed saffron robes
billowing in the breeze. We then have to randomly say, 'I don't care
-- TYPE!', as they yammer on about the horrible government-induced
droughts in Jakarta, religious-based lynchings in East Drambuie, West
Bangalorian pickle raids, and occasionally a UFO sighting or two.
Seriously -- if you have something that needs believing-in, try a
nearby student union. Bring colourful pamphlets. They like colourful
pamphlets, especially if there is a MySpace URL on there; having a
MySpace makes your cause seem more Real.
So I am not an Earth Mother type; shoot me.
So I am babysitting, which involves trying to write some stuff and
watch over them...only I don't *like* them. Or, I try not to. And I'd
been waylaid after class Wed. morning, then I was held up again on the
fifth floor when our Head of Department's office admin wanted to talk
(I love her!), so when I got there, I slipped into one of our side
observation rooms upstairs above the main lab to try to catch up on my
stuff yet still make sure none of them (now over two hours
unsupervised, Ceiling Cat help us) had invited the Hare Krishnas
over,turned the place into a soup kitchen, started listing our
equipment on eBay, or any other of the million things they *might* do
that contributes to my insomnia. And as I'm trying to unobtrusively
lean over the half wall and make sure they are behaving (and ready to
give my best 'get back to work' glare if needed), I hear my name.
Yep, the little dorks are talking about me. They were right below,
under the overhang, so I couldn't lean over, or they'd see the
movement, so I waited out of sheer curiosity with a tich of masochism.
I mean, I don't *try* to be liked, so my assumption is that I am not;
I know there are those who think that I am too hard, a perfectionist,
too frank, and my not being a snuggly huggy-bunny type is a big
difference from some of the others in our group, and...well, I'm not a
favourite flavour; I'm an acquired taste. I know this. But back to the
story:
So I am standing right above them, and they are talking about my eyes,
and I hear, 'smaller...no, smaller...yeah. Ancodia's nose is higher,
though. Hmmm...make her eyes bigger...' and so on. From this, I am
gathering they're drawing something. Then one of them says that I am
taller than Rachel, our lab manager, and that he thinks I am taller
than Scooter...in fact, he has figured that I am the third-tallest
person in our lab (I'm not, but the dork doesn't *know* Tom, who is
over six and a half feet tall and is taking a year off, 'cos his
internship turned into a 90k offer, or any of the other long-time
people, cos he is NEW, and hasn't been around long enough to be
entitled to an opinion on whether or not GRAVITY is working today,
much less anything else), and then they move on to my hair.
...and I'm up there thinking, 'WTF?' as everyone starts yes/no-ing
something about my hair. It's mainly an issue of what colour. Want to
know what colour my hair is according to ugrad group consensus?
Blackety-red.
No, not 'red'. Not 'auburn'. Not 'hennaed'. Not even 'dark auburn',
which would have been the ding-ding-ding answer. Blackety-red.
These chirrin intend to take the GRE. A couple of them are graduating
in the Fall semester. That's graduating COLLEGE, now. And they're all
with us forexperience and letters of rec., which means they plan to go
on.
...blackety-red???
So then they quit me, and start on Fluffer. I can't take the curiosity
any longer (plus, 'blackety-red' is fast becoming a migraine
headache), so I go downstairs; six of them are on the floor around a
television, and one more is at a computer station nearby, trying to
see if Fluffer is in Facebook. I can see they have unpacked our Wii
crap and set it up (we got it as a 'thank you' bonus for a consulting
job, and only used it once in a small study, then packed it back
up...these kids could smell a video game a mile away). When they see
me, they are all happy, and start in with this 'Ooh! Show her! Show
her!' chattering (I swear, they remind me of the mine-mine-mine
seagulls in Finding Nemo when they act like this), and at this point I
have a pounding, blackety-red headache coming on, and one finger on my
eye to keep it from twitching. They switch the screen to this pastel
one, with little avatars all over, and then click an icon that blows a
whistle, and all the little avatars line up. Almost everyone in our
lab -- most everyone I can recognise; these little ankle biters have
put some real effort into this. We have a virtual lab of Miis.
Not that I knew anything about Miis before today (remember, please,
that I am working two-plus jobs on top of the school crap, and am
limited in what I can keep up with, pop culture-wise), but...this is
cute. Very cute. *They* are cute. Sometimes. This is why I go get them
from the Hare Krishnas. And why I let them play tennis and stuff for
the rest of the day.
Sigh.
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