Quote of the Morning

Friday mornings are one of my favorite parts of the week. I drag myself out of bed at 7am and head down to Weaver Street Market for two whole grain blueberry pancakes, a cup of coffee and an orange, all for $5.14. Normally it’s a couple of graduate students, a professor and a database programmer.

What I like most about Friday mornings is the unstructured and interesting conversation. We’re not there with a grand purpose or vision. We’re just there to eat and yack. There is a lot of genuine love for each other and a lot of laughter; it’s something that I really enjoy.

Our conversation can be pretty varied. We usually talk about our lives (jobs, kids, vacations, grills) but as those include some random pursuits we’ve been known to watch videos of cell locomotion between our discussion and speculation on other topics. I think we safely qualify as pretty geeky as much of our conversation today was speculating about whether or not the data one guy received yesterday was generated by a random number generator, hearing stories about terrible college calculus experiences, and confessing that none of us really understand either Monte-Carlo simulations or hidden Markov Models.

Usually our programmer utters the most memorable line of the morning and I often wish for a tape recorder to catch it but today J took the prize. As he and I were driving back towards campus I was telling him about how Charity and I left our gas stove on overnight on Tuesday mistaking the stink of the gas for the stink of the fish we had just cooked. (Oops.)

After hearing about this, mutual speculation ensued about why Charity and I are alive. He then offered this pearl:

“I’d like to die with just enough dignity that people say it was a tragic accident and not a bone-headed mistake.”

What a fine line!