Stories to tell

Such a bad blogger I am, not shaping any of my busy little life into stories. Lots of activity, not a lot of movement.

Am in ROC for the week, pecking away at some work stuff (which just keeps MULTIPLYING) and trying to figure out what my pilot project for my dissertation is. In the middle of this, I received an email from the woman-I-met-on-a-plane whose wedding I randomly went to in Santa Fe last summer. She spent a year in Afghanistan working on an alternative livelihood project, and just wrote a really riveting piece for the Washington Post about the futility of such development work.

Her email also said:

After the piece ran, I received nearly 200 responses from all over the world, many of which stunned me with their humanity and kindness. After all was said and done, these responses proved to be more moving and meaningful than anything I had written. I hope to find a way to share some of them at some point.

Very sobering stuff, and pokes even more sharply at my questions about how my work can be meaningful. Sometimes I really envy F the concreteness of his science :-).

Instead, I spend my time with distractions like scouring the internet for an extremely good coq au vin recipe. Apparently StraightCate can cook things like this.