Look Mom, I'm on TV! (On the internet)

I was recently asked by one of my colleagues to pose as a test subject in a video about Harvard Business School professor and social psychologist Amy Cuddy. Here is the resulting TIME video about her research on power posing. According to Cuddy, just standing in a power pose for a couple minutes can give you the confidence you need to nail an interview or give an awesome speech. Check it out! Yours truly appears around 2 minutes, 30 seconds.

A boy a girl and a rendezvous

Man, it's only Wednesday and it's already been a bit of a poopy week. There is a lot of sadness in the air and, while it's totally unrelated to the sadness, I seem to be everyone's problem child this week, which only adds to the poopy feeling. I messed up a printing order, sent a mass e-mail out with date for last November in the subject line, and my mother hates me because I accidentally de-activated the sim card in her US phone, just in time for her trip back to the States. I think I'd hate me too.

On the upside, Veronica and I had a great time writing a birthday song for our friend Emily on Tuesday. It's a little collection of inside jokes from our Belize trip, to the tune of Bob Marley's Sun is Shining. Come over and get me drunk and you may have the pleasure of hearing it. If you haven't already, check out Emily's cacao exporting outfit Moho River Cacao on Facebook.

I've been single for ten weeks now and the novelty of it has slowly started to wear off. I was feeling really free and pumped about all the new time I had to myself. I've directed a lot of the free time into bike work and have tried revisiting several old past-times (over the weekend I spent two hours making birthday cards) but I also feel this burning need to fill the time and share things with someone else. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the someone else I want to share with doesn't exist (yet). But this feeling, this need, has made me super angsty, restless and distracted. If you've noticed a significant uptick in the number of text messages I've been sending you, you now know why. Sorry! I'm sure it is just part of the process and it will pass. Getting over a significant relationship was so much easier in college, when there were tons of other young people everywhere to "get to know."

When writing to a friend about my daydreams of dashing long-bearded pirates, sexy young bankers on the T, and rendezvous with out-of-town lovers, I had to look up the word rendezvous to make sure I was spelling it correctly. This is hard to admit in real life, especially because I used to be fluent in French, but it was so worth it because I learned that one of the definitions of rendezvous is "the process of bringing two spacecraft together." I got excited, imagining that this new information would lead me to find lots of dirty pictures of spacecraft rendezvous, or orbital manuever pornography as I would call it, on the internet. I was sadly disappointed. This is about the best I found:

An artist’s rendering of the approximate positions of the Gemini 6 and 7 spacecrafts during rendezvous.

Still a little dirty seeming if you're in that head space, but definitely not the stuff of viral internet hilarity.

In completely unrelated news, a busload of Harvard Kennedy School students touring the West Bank as part of a spring break trip were detained this week by the Israeli Defense Forces. The Dean of Students called to alert me, because one of our fellows is on the trip. It was so hard not to say "Yep. Sounds about right." The comments on the linked article are worth reading.

New AfroFunk Out of DC

The Funk Ark, a fairly young afrobeat outfit from the District, is about to release their second album High Noon on April 3. You can listen to it here on their website.