At first, I just posted this link in the comments on Erica's blog. But then I thought, "Hey, I bet other people would like to look at stuffed germs too!" That's right, folks...stuffed germs. Like...toys. You can buy something banal, the common cold or athlete's foot, or something a bit more exotic...like ebola!

Am I too easily amused?

Scabies reminds me that if any of you or your pets gets any mites, fleas, lice, etc. you can send them to me. Oh yes, I want them. Not to become my own personal ecosystem, but because I am making a collection for insect systematics next fall. Storing them in ethanol is best, but otherwise any little container will do.

It's amazing how much better my PI gets along with men than with women. He is extremely formal with the girls in the lab, but we recently got a new (male) student and they are instantly thick as theives. He'll come into the lab and be like "Did you do this totally manly thing Saturday?" "Oh, me too! It was awesome." Yesterday they had a conversation at lunch about hunting wild pigs in California and how they make pig wallows or something. Seriously. There was so much testosterone in the air I started growing a beard.

As I sat in my form and theory class, the theme of which is something like "Love and Death in Contemporary Fiction," I'm pretty sure that my heart momentarily stopped beating when my professor announced that our semester final project would be to write a love/romance story.

Are you fucking kidding me? Number one: I don't write fiction. Number two: I don't write about love. Number three: I don't know anything about love...do I?

The reason we even have this course is quite simple. Most writers can't write about love and death without writing almost exclusively in the land of cliché and sentiment. We simply don't know how to do it, so we over-do it. The idea is that, if we read a lot of well-executed love stories, we'll somehow learn to write our own. (Although "death" is also in the course title all of our texts are marketed as love stories, so I'm not sure where the death fits in to things.)

Anyway. The big question is, How can I invent a love story? How can I invent a love story that's believable and that's not a parody of every love story ever written, made into a film, or recycled in a pop song?

This is going to be an interesting semester. I'm terrified. Holy shit. And, to make things worse, there are only FOUR people in my class, so I'm going to have to talk. I'm going to have to speak at a graduate level about fiction...and, even worse, about love. Oh god.

What I learned in class last night: Approaches to writing a sex scene. Oh no. What if I have to write a sex scene in my love story? I don't think my character can just lay there...

Lauren: You'll be pleased to know that my love stories class isn't hetero-centric. (Is that a word?) We're reading a lesbian romance and also a gay romance.

Randomness: Authors of Harlequin romance novels get paid $2,000/book, and churn out a new book every five weeks. Maybe I ought to look in to that. I could write some formulaic crap, calling the penis a "sword" and the vagina a "sheath," methinks. It might be fun. And I could use some lame-ass pen name, like Jade Midnight.

Ingrid's random question of the day: "What causes scabies?" Apparently one of the people on The Real World has it. Eeeeew.

Instructions: Copy this list of 10 authors. Remove the ones not on your bookshelves and replace each of them with ones that are. (Replaced authors are in bold.)

Here's mine:
1. Truman Capote
2. Toni Morrison
3. Don DeLillo
4. Tobias Wolff
5. Augusten Burroughs
6. Jack Kerouac
7. Margaret Atwood
8. Annie Dillard
9. E.L. Doctorow
10. William Shakespeare