dear angela,

It's been 2 years and 12 days since you died and 2 years and 11 days since I spent a crazy day with our boss and your friends driving through the city, trying to find you and figure out what had happened to you.

One of your old name tags is still hanging on my cork board. It's my lame attempt to pay homage to you. Sometimes people mention you in passing, like yesterday, when our receptionist was talking about funerals. Guess what? We moved up to the main floor a few months after you died. Maybe it's because it was too quiet in that secluded office space without you there. I didn't want to sit in that space and look over at your empty chair. Our old space, now painted a happy yellow, is a childcare room and kitchen. When I go in there to pick up my lunch from the fridge, I try not to think about you, sitting in the corner. But I always do.

I think about you a lot, especially when I'm trying to put together a research plan. Nerdy, right? I wish you were here to help me think about how to make it relevant to our campaign and how to make it fun for us data nerds. You convinced me to take this job, telling me that it would be fun: You would teach me how to do data analysis and I would help write the papers. We were going to be a mean research duo.

Now, I'm not even sure how I feel about this job. I wish you were here. Maybe if you were still here, then work would be fun. Or at least you would be able to tell me honestly if I should still be working here. Maybe you would have already left to take a better job like you had always talked about.

Today I heard that song by Sia that we both loved to listen to over and over again in the mornings, while we were working. Sometimes I think that the lyrics were a message from you about what had happened to you that day you died. "Help, I've done it again..." I went to her concert a few months after you died and I cried through the entire song. I still get emotional when I hear it. It reminds me that you died before your time.

I think some of my passion for this job died the day you did. I had finished my second full week when you left us. When you died, it knocked the wind out of me. And now, 2 years later, I'm still thinking about what could have been. Some people might think that I should get over the death of a co-worker. Yeah, maybe I should have already been over it. But you were a friend and a mentor of sorts. And I never had the chance to thank you.

Thank you Angela, I miss you.

i'm a nerd, part 6735631

Yesterday, I was givine a presentation to new staff in our office (a new intern and a new organizer) on the research I did for our latest campaign. Ten minutes into the presentation, the organizer was staring at me with "zombie eyes" -- the look that you get when you are sleeping during class but trying to keep your eyes open.

Yes, my job even bores my co-workers.

After the presentation, I made myself feel better by decorating my office space with "rap graphs":

quote of the day courtesy of messy danny

"Let me go on the record with something: I went to a pretty good undergraduate university, graduated in the top ten percent of my law school class (and was the editor of the school's entertainment and sports law review), and am a decent enough writer that the good folks at Huffingtonpost.com allow me to blog, and yet I don't want someone "just like me" to be president. I want someone better than me. And 99.9999 percent of us should, too." -- Mitchell Bard, Huffington Post