In which there is karaoke

I feel much more human after ten hours of sleep. As predicted, the retreat made me somewhat sleep-deprived, though I am much better off than many of my classmates and faculty (for reasons that will be explained later). However, on the whole, it's great fun! We're far enough from SD that, despite of the fact that something like 80% of us brought work with us (100% of the faculty, but that's a given), none of us disappeared into labs halfway through (aside from certain PIs, but that's also a given). The talks are 15 minutes long each and strung into mandatory sessions, but we also get socializing hours (which I avoided mostly after my first one) and free time for half a day on Thursday, so combined with no classes and no labs, it's a bit like a vacation.

Riding on in a bus full of biogeeks is kind of fun. We watched PLANET EARTH on our way there and PLANET EARTH and RATATOUILLE (but mostly PLANET EARTH) on our way back (when I also had the dubious pleasure of having a PI sit next to me. He fell asleep half way through PLANET EARTH). I don't know about my classmates, but I for one started making little corrections in my head as I watched. We did get to see the part with the tundra and the caribou, which made me think of DUE SOUTH. Then were was the part about grasses and such where I kept thinking "Well, technically...". I'd forgotten how overly dramatic the narration and soundtrack for those sort of things and was Very Amused at the music accompanying caribou migration.

My roommate was kind of bad the first night, mostly because she kept forgetting that I existed before inviting her guy over (who happened to be my classmate, and I'm going to pretend that I went deaf / didn't speak Chinese for a few hours on Wednesday because otherwise things would be very awkward for the rest of my classes). But she remembered the next day though, which was good. The place was very ...homey, in a rustic kind of way. My room didn't get wireless, for various reasons that don't need to be explored at this juncture, but it is in a building named "Ponderosa". In fact, all the rooms are in plant-named buildings (at first I thought it was just trees, then I saw "Acorn"), which was cute.

The talks were fairly good, though there was a panel discussion about fellowships that made me realize I should perhaps considering applying for something over the summer (you could feel the pressure in the room build up as the discussion went on). We got fed a lot and my PI showed up the morning of the second day, only to disappear again as suddenly. I heard he left after lunch. Certainly he was standing in the lab with a gel tray in his hands when I returned yesterday. I was a little...nonplussed to see him the instant I stepped inside the lab.

On my free hours on Thursday I went for a hike by the lake (will post photos later to Facebook), which didn't take long, then went back, showered, and finished BELOVED. A lot of my classmates went to the pool or played volleyball (though there was a notable exception who wanted to swim across the lake -- I never found out whether she did it or not) and had tired themselves out enough that they were all sleepy during dinner. Which meant a bunch of them went to nap after dinner and came back later for the socializing hour / karaoke, which lasted until the wee hours of the morning. (I stayed for the department panel and went to sleep during socializing -- I managed to endure about fifty minutes of socializing my first day there and had to go and take a nap afterward because of a headache.) (I don't MEAN to be so antisocial, but the amount of small talk -- and you always get asked exactly the same thing every time someone comes up to you --gets tiresome really fast.) However, from what I've heard, karaoke is a lot more popular than dancing ever was. As in, there was more people dancing during karaoke than there ever was during dancing. More specifically, I heard that the faculty eventually got into it too and some of them even went up to sing while others randomly grabbed people -- students and faculty alike -- and fake swing-danced them around the room. My labmate claims she has filmed this. I am kind of boggled by the idea of some of the faculty who are there, swing-dancing.

I had the idea of a beer-pong explained to me. I had concluded that people are very, very strange. The next morning one of the faculty was so hung over that he had to switch his speaking time with someone else. On the whole though, most of the faculty were up freakishly early. By which I mean that when I went down for my tea in the morning there was a whole ensemble of faculty sitting right there by the tea with their laptops out. It was a little unnerving. I've heard more than one student wonder how they do it. PIs, we concluded, are very mysterious beings.

I met Tiffany, who was a labtech in my current lab before she became a grad student. She promised to teach me how to do brains slice cultures. I also learned a lot about the processes of grad school from my upperclassmen, a great deal of which is about getting papers submitted and how the reviewers have an uncanny ability to slowly destroy your will to live. (I take hope from the fact that all of them are still alive and I've so far only heard of one grad student who had a nervous breakdown.) All the sessions are announced with a gong, which was...strange. (Seriously, why a gong? Why not a bell? Or a buzzer? Every time I hear it I think of summer fairs when I was little.)

Upon returning I found my cell lines to be alive and well, which means I can go ahead with the rest of the experiments next week. All is well with my world.

And now, to the animal shelter!