The devil is in the details

Novella du jour

First, I would like to congratulate myself on fixing my internet connection last night and again earlier tonight when it went down. Good job self! Today was another day of mostly internet-based research (PubMed and BD Pharmingen are my friends.) and then an excellent pulled pork, sweet potato and hush puppy dinner. Sigh. Even though Boston will never have NC's wonderful weather, at least NC food is readily available.

On the way home from eating too much, I decided to stop at the Gap. (Right away 90% of all readers know where this is going...) I needed new khaki pants and wanted to look around. I went in knowing that I have seen lots of things that I like there lately, but I figured I could hold back since really all I needed were khaki pants and maybe to try on a pair of jeans and because I was not going alone and would not want to hold the person I was with up. Damn Gap. Their current line's color palette is basically brown, pink, yellow and khaki. Those of you who know me know that 98% percent of my wardrobe is a.) from the Gap and b.) jeans, khakis, brown, black, white and varying shades of red (including pink). If I threw in blue, it would be 99.9%. Really, I am a brown-based outfit type of girl. Right away you can probably see the problem. So now I have a lot of new clothes. (I told my fellow shopper that he didn't have to stay while I shopped, and he promptly went home.) It's really all the Gap's fault though, for picking those colors. Oh, and I still need a new pair of sneakers, since the ones that I wear every day have holes in them. It always makes me laugh to think about how poorly I dress when I go to work everyday given how much I shop. I am sure that my co-workers think I know nada about clothes.

After the copious shopping, I took the longest T ride ever home. I think the red line was having some big problems. This T journey gave me lots of thinking time, and I had three dominant thoughts:

1. How out of touch are marketing peeps? On the way in to the station I noticed that there were a bunch of new ads up for something called Axe. After much consideration, I figured out that Axe is a deodorant, but the way that is pictured made it look like an energy drink. Anyway, the ads were semi-official looking, and seemed to be of the opinion that if you wore Axe, your fellow T passengers would want to have sex with you immediately. On the T or in the station. For example, there was a semi-official looking sign that said "Clothed passengers only beyond this point." Another, which was somewhat obstructed, seemed to say that passengers were prohibited from asking Axe wearers to engage in intimate contact on the train. Ummmm....EW! Ew, ew, ew. I suppose that you could say that the campaign is doing it's job-after all, here I am telling you about the product; I know its name and that it is a deodorant. But, um, I'm not sure that I'd want such insanity associated with my product. Maybe that's just me. Also on the marketing front: the Target ad is still on the T wall, and I still contend that the girl is topless. I assume that she isn't, because if she was I would probably not be the only Bostonian to have noticed, but it still looks like she is. The problem is that the guy who is shirtless segues into the girl who is potentially topless a little to seamlessly. And after we go by and I am like "was she topless?" I can't exactly make the T move backwards and go by the ad slower to check. Okay, enough about being sold products.

2. Did you ever notice that sometimes the qualities that you might consider your strengths-ie qualities that make you particularly successful in one part of your life, just so happen to be the exact same qualities that totally kill you in other parts of your life? Not to brag, but I think I have relatively good analytical abilities. I think that helps me out in the lab-I am pretty good at analyzing pages full of plots of 100000+ dots and figuring out what the hell is going on. At the same time, I tend to over-analyze things to death in my personal life. I objectively know that I do it, and I wish that I didn’t, but I can’t turn it off. Hmmm.

3. When are coincidences not coincidences? Obviously this thought speaks to bigger themes that are kind of on my mind. I know that as a human I am programmed to look for patterns and notice coincidences often (You know how you always notice when certain things happen at the same time and infer that they are related, but never notice the vastly larger number of times that they don’t happen at the same time because they aren’t noteworthy? I mean that.) Anyway-at what point do you conclude that maybe there is something more to events than just pure chance/coincidence? Just wondering.

Oh, and one more thought. Why do they keep discontinuing my deodorant? My switching to a brand of deodorant is like a death knell. Grrrrr. Maybe I should switch to Axe so I don’t have to see those ads anymore.

posted by Immunegirl @ 9:13 PM