Odd

I'm feeling no less strange or awkward and my mom still doesn't quite think I'm smart enough for grad school, but in spite of all this I'm feeling happy. By which I mean I have this constant low buzz of contentment and life is good.

I haven't even had tea yet, today.

The med-into-grad applications (it's pretty much what it sounds like) got mailed out today. I'm not participating. I could say I'm not philanthropic enough to want to deal with the patients except that...no, you know what? I'm not philanthropic enough to deal with people. It's a very valid reason.

So, basically

Have gone through five papers today. Conclusion? That pulmonary hypertension is veeeeerry deadly and phosphorylated tyrosine blots are cool, but doesn't really pertain to anything I'm interested in.

The paper I have to present made me lol by including a paragraph explaining that, originally, they named the protein Fish, but naming it Fish made it really hard to work with in databases and search terms so they had to change the name back to Tks5, which was a clone name.

Creative naming fail.

Have also concluded that it's entirely possible to like someone as a scientists and not like her as a person. Have concluded that the current lab has far too many meetings (four per week, if I'm interested, which thanks, but no thanks, since I don't want to be in the lab on both Saturday and Sunday). Also that the tissue culture room is no longer a safe haven because once the clock hits 10:30 am and people all arrive, there is only one microscope and something like eight incubators, all stuffed in a room with five laminar flow hoods in a configuration that possibly violates six different safety codes and it gets crowded. At the risk of sounding anti-social, I just want to be left myself somewhere without having to move aside and make room for other people every five minutes.

Not to mention I don't get my own pipetmans, and that makes me sad.

Have cells, will induce genes tomorrow and harvest on Sat. May do qPCR tomorrow too, but we'll see. Have constant urges to draw things today but do not have sketch book on hand. Will settle for sketching them out in my head.

I remember this from somewhere

I had been hungry all the years;
My noon had come, to dine;
I, trembling, drew the table near,
And touched the curious wine.

'T was this on tables I had seen,
When turning, hungry, lone,
I looked in windows, for the wealth
I could not hope to own.

I did not know the ample bread,
'T was so unlike the crumb
The birds and I had often shared
In Nature's dining-room.

The plenty hurt me, 't was so new,
Myself felt ill and odd,
As berry of a mountain bush
Transplanted to the road.

Nor was I hungry; so I found
That hunger was a way
Of persons outside windows,
The entering takes away.

Hmm

My current lab names its incubators (e.g. "Keith"). I think it's my favorite thing about this lab so far.

[edit 15:04]
The lack of a desk has given me, in addition to a truly awful crick in my neck (which, now that I've thought about it, would explain the slight headache), a constant feeling of disturbance as people go in and out of the lobby. Since the postdoc who's in charge of my project can't be found and no one else aside from the PI (who's busy) and another grad student (who's in class) ever notices whether I'm there or not and I can't do any experiment today, I've fled to the library.

I've never appreciated a desk and a chair more. Truly.

Here comes the sun

I expected it to rain yesterday except it never did and now we're in the 70s. It does not feel like February.

Tried several new things this weekend as well: liked dolma (courtesy of Lucy), liked the lemon-ginger infusion thing from Tazo (tasted like the herbal tea thing they have of the same name), didn't like the TeaZazz thing (it's supposed to be carbonated mint green-tea, yet somehow the mixture of my favorite things was ...rather terrible, really, given that I had to dilute it with juice to drink it). The peanut butter with celery combination, at the suggestion of the girl from the grocery store, was interesting. If I took it with enough peanut butter it's not bad, but it does defeat the purpose of eating celery as a healthy snack. I think I still prefer it cooked.

I went to the Getty Villa with Lucy & her family (well, minus her dad) this weekend! The gardens are pretty neat and I kept getting distracted by the carvings on the ceiling and tile-work on the floor etc, while most people are photographing the statues. Annie, you would've really loved the place. In their signet ring collection there're stuff with the profiles of people you know, such as Octavian. (Yes I typed "people you know" on purpose.) We also finished watching Merlin, which was very shiny (or as Lucy said, "lighting-y"). There's no redeeming value, but it was entertaining. I like it.

Lucy's grandpa is vaguely intimidating. Due to a mistake in communication Lucy was dragged out of bed at a quarter to nine on a Sunday. I felt bad, except for the part where I mostly didn't because it meant we could go wandering around outside.

Coraline is creepy. I think I find cutesy things creepier than blood and gore, actually, though this may be a beneficial side-effect of physio (or just, you know, the fact that I have to read so many biomed papers with cadaveric animal parts). The 3D was much better than I expected. I miss having cats.

Will start transfection in lab this week. Hopefully. Currently still have no spot to stay in lab, but at least I will have cell lines?

And Poe had his cadaveric heart

I many times thought peace had come,
When peace was far away;
As wrecked men deem they sight the land
At center of the sea,
And struggle slacker, but to prove,
As hopelessly as I,
How many the fictitious shore
Before the harbor lie.

-Dickinson

Dear Diary,

Today I was called "Bessie" by someone in my new lab. I have never been associated with that particular name before. It was interesting. The other rotation student, Tom, laughed so hard that his whole face turned red.

Yours,

S


......

Kate said that we're not, in fact, doomed. We will suffer, but we are not doomed.

Cheers.

Put your neurosis to constructive use

I went to Roger Tsien's presentation (he gave the nobel-laureate presentation on campus today), and that was one of the pieces of advise he gave to future scientists (read: students). There were loads of people there and I didn't get out of lab early enough to get a seat, and so had to stand (with loads of other people -- we were a mob, albeit mostly a very organized, geeky mob) for the entire hour. Roger, being Roger, looked around and wryly commented that he didn't expect this many people to come since this was almost exactly the same lecture he gave every year to about 20 grad students in the florescent protein class, but now that some "Swede had sprinkled fairy dust" on him, it seems to be much more popular.

Needless to say, he was quite an engaging speaker (and also responsible for the glowy protein that I imaged this morning, in addition to naming the other glowy proteins "mCherry" and "mTangerine" &c instead of something like ASDF651389) (he claimed to have gotten the color-name inspirations from Crayola).

(It's also hard to get the "zmg nobel-prize winner" attitude when the guy's just the crazy PI from the lab next door.) (Literally -- my current lab is next door to his.)

I also saw the people from my previous lab rotation there (who also came too late for a seat, so we stood together), which was nice. My new lab still appears to be organized chaos to me. To the best of my knowledge, no one there went to the event.

The boot lace from my favorite pairs of boots broke. I think this may be the first time, for me, when the shoes lasted longer than the laces. I need to get new shoe laces. I wonder if they sell that separately?

Maybe, next time

Okay so, I have decided to do four lab rotations. I have picked out my fourth lab. I have interviewed for my fourth lab and I will be ready to switch into it at the start of next quarter.

In the meantime, I'm 90% sure I will NOT be joining the lab that I just started at today.

Meanwhile, if I understood Kate's explanation of the economy-stimulus-bill-thing correctly, we are all doomed. Doomed. The weather's lovely, however.

[edit 20:53]
I should add that I did, in fact, gain a greater appreciation of cell morphology, especially those of fish karyocytes. (And possibly those of kangaroo rats?)

It went a little something like this

My parents, after reaching here on Saturday, checked the weather forecast and decided that the weather will be (and it is) really awful on Monday, so they're going to drive back on Sunday. Therefore, yesterday morning, after some more nagging ("Be safe and take care of yourself." "Yes mom." "Do you have a boyfriend yet?" "No mom." "Remember to eat all the food in your fridge, don't forget." "Yes mom."), they left. I was returned to the middle of my living room, feeling slightly shell-shocked because in less than 24 hours (courtesy of LA traffic on their way down) my domicile went from one person to three person to one person again. Except for the refuse around the place and the vast quantities of food in the fridge it might've been a dream.

(I also noted that I've apparently grown very territorial of my kitchen, given that I spent five minutes trying to convince mom to stop putting things away when she's done with them because she's putting them into the wrong spots.)

(It's a rather sad kitchen to be territorial of. As Lucy can attest.)

Also, I introduced mom to BPAL (Black Phoenix &c) and she snagged "Ultraviolet", so that one's out of circulation, folks. Her ability to tell what is what, however, is worse than mine, since for almost all of the bottles she can only describe it as "something plant-like." (I can ID the more obvious things such as juniper, mint, eucalyptus, and citrus. And some commonly used lab chemicals, though I suppose that doesn't count in this particular context.)

I've gone through five papers about actin polymerization this weekend, and pages of photos of cells. I know nothing of cell morphology (and they vary based on cell type, too!), most of them just look like cells (vaguely fibroblast-like things) with cobwebs to me. I expect I will gain a greater appreciation for them by 12pm tomorrow, or just end up banging my head against the desk a lot.

...

Microscope scheduling continues to fail, along with my attempts to do volunteer work. I seriously miss Davis, when I just email someone, say I'm interested in volunteering, and I get some sort of message back in a week at the most and at the end of the month at the most I'd usually be doing something. (Usually it's more informal than that: I just get a "you might be interested in this" email and show up to the event, then I sign up for the more registered thing on the spot and start working right away.) Currently, at SD, I've contacted six different organizations, received an initial email back from four of them, averaging at around two weeks, have to fill out a bunch of forms ahead of time indicating my volunteering history and whether or not my act of volunteering is required by school or court order (funny how those got grouped together in most forms) (my God how I despise paperwork), mail them back to pend for approval and then never hear from them again.

Er. Sorry about the italics abuse. I felt they were called for.

Clearly something is failing. It could be me & my "volunteering history", but I'm more inclined to blame it on the system right now (the four page form I had to fill out for the last one had not helped). There's one that turned out to be a "show up as you are" event, except I missed yesterday's due to parents and the people only meet twice a month. (But it's to plant things, kind of like the Central Park Project I was in, so that's nice.)

For the record: I did look up this sort of things via campus-related means; most of the student organizations for this sort of thing are run by undergrads, and have meeting times I cannot attend to, being now a paid lab minion and all. The grad organizations do have cool out-of-country trips, except I can't afford them and they take time away from my research for week(s) at a time and, in a time when I occasionally have to show up on the weekends (not this weekend, though, but last weekend? Yes) to wrap up experiments, this is perhaps not a good idea. (Read: spectacularly bad idea.)

There you have it.

...

Lucy said she'd met someone who looked like Mike but had a more Nick-like personality, and trying to imagine that is like getting lost in an Escher drawing. In my brain.

I suppose if they both had babies and ended up baby-sitting for each other a lot one of Mike's offspring might turn out like that. Though currently the idea of Mike's offspring (my God, baby-proofing the entire house might not be enough) had gone off on a Mobius strip and I don't know how that's going to end up. I suspect he'd be rather horrified at the thought if he were still infecting my brain, especially since the infecting-the-brain voice is still at the 20ish age range.

Pet peeve

People who don't label their axes (as in plural of axis, not ax).

Gaaah.

In which there should be more tea

Today is a very sci-fi sort of day.

I made the bullets for the gene gun this morning, the actual practice of which is nowhere near as cool as it sounds, though it did involve giant tanks of compressed nitrogen and desiccant pellets. Then for our discussion (which was supposed to be Monday and so got moved to today, all hail the mighty power of the instructor) we went to a classroom in the pharmaceutical sciences building (PSB -- we also have a BSB and a NSB; occasionally us first years get a little confused in the conversations). It has a special projector. We got to use uber-cool 3-D glasses, of the sort that came with a tiny chip in the frame that you use to calibrate to the projected image at the beginning of class, so that the structures you see will be 3-D while everything else remained firmly 2-D without any sort of weird overlay.

There was a weird moment while the instructor was showing us the structure of a protein where it looked like we were going to get brained by an alpha helix. Slightly nervous giggling ensued. (None of us are actual structural biologists -- if we were, we would be majoring in pharmaceutical sciences and not biomedical sciences-- so death by secondary protein structure struck us as being slightly hysterical.)

(It was a G-protein coupled receptor, if you must know. 50% of the drugs on the market target some form of that, so it's not just this random unrelated thing we have to do each week.) (Though I wouldn't mind playing with those glasses even if it's unrelated.)

(Did I mention that it was awesome? Even though I despise structural biology?)

Tossing away all my cells today made me sad, but I had to do it since no one else would take care of them otherwise and then they'd die and possibly cause contamination and then the world would end. (All the cell culture people firmly believe that contamination == end of the world.) Waiting by the bus stop in the dark and the rain was very lonely, and then I ran out of the un-caffeinated lemon tea but there was chocolate, so all was well at the end.

I'm taking the opportunity, while switching labs, to have Monday off. Parents are coming over to visit this weekend to prove, as my mom put it just now, "that we still care about you."

Cheers.

[edit 21:43]
You can apparently light nail polish on fire. Have checked.

If you were a tumor...

It is probably a sign of mental instability that when I first heard that today I felt an almost irrepressible urge to laugh, and when I looked around me, I saw that all my classmates (all fourteen of them) were completely dead-pan.

The key question, of course, is whose sanity is in question.

I have a new-found respect for nail polish. You can use it to make slides for prokaryotes AND eukaryotes, apparently. (And I got to play with paraformaldehyde, which was, sadly, not as exciting as I'd hoped.) Watching the post-doc painstakingly dab at it is funny though, because he's in his thirties and has to sit down in order to look through the microscope in the culture room since otherwise he'd have to kneel on the floor to get his eyes on the same level -- and it's such a dainty tiny bottle of polish. (Kate, I think the top of your head may just about clear his shoulders.) (Yes he really is that tall.)

(Also: has anyone ever seen nail polish catch on fire before? Purely scientific interest. Or at least, purely curious as to why it'd say "FLAMMABLE" on the back when things that I know are flammable in the lab have often more innocuous looking warning labels.)

In other news:

From Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab I have "Ultraviolet", "Crossroads", "Tiger Lily" and "Shanghai" up for grabs for anyone interested. If you really want to I can be persuaded to give up "Dance of Death" and "Loup Garou" too, though the latter is currently gracing the scent of my linens.

First come, first serve. Will mail, unless you're Lucy, in which case we'll do an item trade of some sort next time we see each other.

Lolz

Dickinson's awesome:

Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency!

Speaking of which, I've a date with the microscopy core on Friday to make the bullets for the gene gun. You may now cue the sci-fi themed music.

Well, that was an unexpected amount of foresight

I just got a bunch of "Forever" stamps the other weekend.

Presenting at lab meeting today. Have 4 more papers this week and 11 for next week. Grad school and having a life clearly are meant to be mutually exclusive concepts.

A little wistful now

Wait, Sims 3 got delayed?

...which is probably a good thing since I do not have time for it right now. Huh. Think I'll have time in the summer? Assuming I'm not taking classes then?

I really, really feel like writing something now except I'm just getting a bunch of scenes, personalities and emotions and no way to put them together into something that makes sense. It's like white noise in my brain. I still want to write something that does not contain words like "signaling pathway" and "regulatory function".

It got a little hazy after the tenth plate

I have somehow accumulated many, many plates of cell cultures. Currently this is not a good thing. I wonder if I should be freezing down a sample of each plate when I leave, just because when you passage cells too many time they tend to become strange and disinclined to die when they're supposed to.

Today alternated between periods of downpour, where it is in fact accurate to use the word "downpour", and periods when it's sunny and massive fleets of clouds go sailing by overhead (way cool to watch if you've got the time -- for me it's mostly limited to glimpses between class and lab). The wind made me gasp, mostly because it's there and there was an unexpectedly lot of it. The presence of weather is almost soothing after the days in 80s. This could be why I'm having another good day today, despite of the fact that my troubleshoot experiment has failed. Or you know, I could just like being a lab minion / geek that much.

I got "I'm Feeling You" stuck in my head this afternoon, which is strange since I'm pretty sure I haven't heard that song in a very very long time. It's not even the entire song, just the part of the chorus that goes "I'm riding the highs / I'm digging the lows / cause at least I feel alive" ending right before the "I'm feeling you" part. I didn't know the lyrics until I looked it up just now. It has probably something to do with the rhythm of things, like the "The Hurlers", except I actually like "The Hurlers" and I'm not entirely sure I like the other song. (Oh and Annie, I recommend Seth Lakeman to you, his style a little bit like Leahy and...well...just look him up on youTube or something.)

Speaking of multimedia type things. I had an extra hour last night and so went to look up Pushing Daisies. Except I can't find season two on the abc site anymore. Lucy, is this because I was just browsing the wrong abc part or did they took it down?

I've structural biology papers. They are confusing. I mean I know those bits are hydrophobic, but so what?

Ergo

25 things meme is done over at lj. Meanwhile I've finally given in and ordered a set of imp-ears from Black Phoenix Alchemy lab (sorry Annie, let me know if you want to order together still and we can try the next time you remember). They came and I had some fun trying out the scents because, wonder of wonders, they are not the overly-sweet / musky stuff you'd find in the stores that'd make me sneeze. My favorite scent so far is "Shattered", which is a kind of mint + citrus type thing and smells fresh and not at all over-powering, like most of the smells that involve citrus I've run across. Unfortunately it doesn't last on my skin at all. The runner up is "Undertow", which (and I've tried again last night after my shower just to confirm), seems to actually make me sleep better. By which I meant I felt so well rested that I woke up at 7:07 on a Sunday morning with no alarm clock and felt ready to go out and face the day (it was almost the same the first time I tried it, too). Just for this I think it might be worth the investment.

I liked how "Loup Garou" smelled in the bottle better than "Undertow", but it does something on my skin that I'm not entirely sure about and ends up smelling almost acrid, so now I keep it tucked in the bag with my spare linens because the smell reminds me of every single hiking trip that I've ever enjoyed. (Considering that my scent association outside of chemical labs is usually pretty bad, this is fairly impressive.)

Oh and the Black Phoenix people did two random swaps for my order, and I got "Dance of Death", which I liked more than I thought I would and will most likely end up being the scent I wear on dates, should I ever go on dates (dunno, it's that kind of smell, I can't really explain it). The other one is Tiger Lily, which is far girlier than anything I'd ever pick for myself, but there's something very sweet and innocent about it that makes me think of sunshine and puppies. I put one dab on in the morning before my two hour discussion the day after I first tried it because I want the sunshine and puppies kind of feeling. Though I probably should never try to describe myself as sweet or innocent, in scents or otherwise.

That sums up my excitement of the week. Lab proceeds as usual, ditto for the papers. (OMG the load of papers.) My lab rotation ends next week and I have to give a talk on Wednesday in between the papers and there is so much stuff that I need to do next weekend that I've actually managed to convince my parents to not come and visit that weekend. I may need more chocolate.

Cheers.

So

Result of being tagged by Victoria's over at my lj.

Learned why diabetics (mostly type II) tend to have heart problems. It's like watching a train wreck happen.

Peach jam

Did a transfection the yesterday. The results so far are not too promising. The fusion protein construct that I put in refused to light up but I've still 24 hours left to check, so here's to hoping.

In other news: my rotation in this lab ends at the end of next week, and I went to Pt Loma last Sunday morning and saw a maroon-colored crab with white spots on its back. It was still alive, too. I found out by accident. I also found out that lichen-covered rocks are slippery and that perhaps having my camera out was a bad idea, since I dropped the camera pouch into a tide-puddle (not deep enough to be called a pool).

Despite of how a lot of things could've gone better this week, I am feeling oddly content.

Upon reflection, it's really a new kind of pathetic

Sometime around 2am I woke up half way, thought about my reaction mix for an experiment I have to do on Monday, and calculated 18.5*33 in my head. Then in the morning I woke up, remembered that thought, laughed at myself, and checked and I've actually done it correctly.

On one hand: cool, I can apparently do two digit multiplications even half asleep.

On the other hand: my God I need to find something occupy my brain that's not school related.

Maybe Mike'd find this more impressive. Except for where he wouldn't because he can probably tell you the answer to 12! off of the top of his head at 6 in the morning with no caffeine.

Sometimes it's very awkward to write people who are smarter than you are. Especially if they happen to be the mouthy type of person.

Also I just realized that today, for the first time ever, I can't tell you right away where my sketchbook/notebook is. Remember high school? I used to carry that thing with me all the time. And throughout most of college too. This is the sad state of things.