Today is not...

a day to be at work.
When you wake in the middle of the night, and are lulled back to sleep by the sound of rain spattering across your window… When the gentle rumble of thunder eases you out of sleep before the sun rises… When the rain trails off as you get into your car for a drive through the slick, wet darkness….
           then, it is not a day to drive in to work and perform an HPLC run to evaluate the room temperature stability of your research compound in a mixture of DMSO, methanol and aqueous acetate buffer… and it is not a day to review operating procedures for their suitability to your functional area… and it is certainly not a day to spend hours correcting previously-discovered deviations from OP in your laboratory notebook…
          rather, it is a day to slip out of the house early with the one you love… a day to opt for breakfast at a coffee house – peppery vegetarian sausage gravy over buttery biscuits and coffee so strong it can strip the corrosion from your nerves… it is a day to pop a Nora Jones and then a Madelein Peyroux CD into your car stereo and drive to the lakefront… it is a day to read over stark and moody poems collected in college (“no whale surges past my window pane”….”and she is not, she is not, she is not”) …a day to look for a dry spot in the park to spread a blanket and steal a late-morning nap…and awaken sprinkled with touches of sunlight and last night’s rain slipping from the leaves in a lake breeze… it is a day for peace, for life, for love….
But I’m at work instead.