LOL "Physics for Poets" reminds me of college! So funny. I love your Jim voice -- it's just so good! This line was really sweet: "If she’d been there, she would have smiled at him, maybe winked, in conspiratorial amusement. All the same, he would have seen in her eyes that she was proud of him."

Author's Response: Wow, you're really finding my 'back catalogue', lol. I'm flattered. I tend to favor my more recent stories, but have to say, these old ones are nice to revisit. Glad you think the Jim voice works...I kind of like that boy  ;-) Thanks much, Finer Things.

10

Science + Jim Halpert = awesome. There's a formula for you.

I really like this, it flows so well, sort of like you're drifting along in his stream of consciousness, idly bumping into things in the current. Just wonderful.

10

Any formulas to determine whether the motion initiated by perhaps just one phone call was going forward or backward.

Oh Jim!  I thought that line was perfect (along with many others!).  I think you really captured the uncertainty that has to be going through Jim's head right now--uncertainty about Pam, Karen, work, everything.  This was just lovely to read :) 

10

This was really lovely. It reminded me of a poem I found about a year ago that I really liked in an online lit journal. Here it is:

What we do in doorways and in kitchens
might be explained with the laws of physics.

Walking home, tripping over another’s tongue,
let’s call that fusion, hands clasped tight enough
to turn coal to diamonds, air to stone.

Break-ups in parking lots or on porches,
name that old song fission, the mechanism
of separation and dissolution.

Newton’s Third Law: all actions have
their equal and opposite reactions.
You cannot touch without being touched.
Press against skin and skin presses against you.

The metaphor becomes strained. It snaps.
You can harm without being hurt.
You can love without being loved.

Physics’ linear progressions explain
nothing.  There are no systematic laws
for the heart, save one: it beats.

9

I love that all your fics are full of little pearls like "All the same, he would have seen in her eyes that she was proud of him. The way she’d looked at him at his barbeque, when he rescued Michael by singing that insipid karaoke song with him. Or whenever he’d devised a particularly ingenious plan to harness the Dwightness of Dwight for her entertainment. His second thought was I’m so fucked." and "Any formulas to determine whether the motion initiated by perhaps just one phone call was going forward or backward."  So lovely.  I liked the idea that Jim tried to be attracted to Karen, and it sort of works because he is not indifferent to a charming woman, but it doesn't carry the power that his relationship with Pam has.

10

Thing is, Colette, you can take one moment and turn it into something more. All this musing derived from the moment he receives a nod at a sales meeting. "Since then, he’d become an expert on how one moment, one miscalculation, could render the simplest thing impossibly intricate." The angst of Jim, perfectly summed up. And I'm a huge science geek so you hooked me there as well!

(This is why you'll be ghost writing my memoirs!)

10

Lovely Colette.  Just lovely and sad and haunting and is it freaking Thursday yet (she says even though she's not going to be able to watch right away)????

Geez.  I miss fanfic - more than I ever thought I would.  And it's only been a week.  LOL! 

Thanks for giving us such a glorious fic. :)

Love this: Since then, he’d become an expert on how one moment, one miscalculation, could render the simplest thing impossibly intricate.

Who'd have thought you could make physics this engrossing?