This is apparently how it works

Wendy told me the other day that "if you haven't gone insane yet, you haven't been in grad school long enough". After the general up-spike in panic the past few days (how is it that the PIs managed to do that, long after I'm convinced that I just don't have the energy to panic anymore, I'll never know) I'm beginning to gain a new appreciation of that sentiment.

On that cheering note, my defense's next Tuesday. It was scheduled for next Tuesday (confirmation of rooms and everything) by Wednesday, because due to the schedule of the professors and the rooms (which we do need to schedule ahead of time) the only weeks that are available are either next week or, it seems, the last week before Thanksgiving (which is also my deadline for this). Then of course it's juggling the times until the PIs said, okay, this time will work. (In between all this I've gone through my slides twice already and found a photo where people are monitoring the circadian rhythm of lobsters, of all things, by putting a wheel in their aquarium that's hooked up to the computer and seeing when they'd run. On wheels. The photo was titled "Lobster In Wheel". ) Then yesterday one of my PIs emailed me and said that she had an eye appointment at the time of my defense, and could I reschedule, please. Of course, the person who is in charge of scheduling the meeting room for my building was gone for the day, so I ended up frantically looking up room schedules for other school of med buildings and discovering that, within the next few weeks, there is apparently only one hour when all the PIs will have time for me. (The qual is designed to be 90 minutes long, with 40 minutes for my presentation and 50 minutes for questioning afterwards.)

At which point I might have said, "Oh my God" and banged my head against my desk a few times. My labmates seemed concerned.

But the problem (sort of) resolved itself. One of the PIs is still going to leave early, but the other two will make it. (Or at least, after I scheduled the new room I sent out an email which said "IF YOU CAN'T MAKE IT, LET ME KNOW ASAP!" and no one has replied yet.) It is still on Tuesday. I still need to figure out what food to get for the PIs. ("Cookies," suggested Wendy, "And bottled water. Because even if they don't like water, if they're thirsty enough, they'll still drink it!") In between all this I need to figure out how to explain the math model behind my comp bio stuff (yep, I ended up doing that for my third aim, after all) without confusing the people even more. My PI is of the opinion that I should put in the math equation so at least even if the other PIs are still confused, they can at least see that I know what I'm talking about. I'm of the opinion that as soon as I say "For the function, rho, of X and Y at residue position i" their eyes will glaze over. But that may be my inherent cynicism speaking. (Or possibly what I know from my time explaining my written qual to my committee, but I'm trying hard not to think about that right now. A healthy dose of denial seems to be how most of my upperclassmen handled it, after all.)

(I seem to spend a lot of time lately thinking "this, too, shall pass". Did you know that in order to schedule a meeting with the thesis committee, which contains more people than the qual committee, my upperclassmen have to start the scheduling process two months ahead of time?)

Thank you, everyone, for your comments. I will probably take up the offers (practice is good; practice is always good), though it'll be a little sad since the movie of my mice will only play in the slides if it's .odt. (The original movie file is .mov and it converted weird, but since it's a mac thing I guess Kate, at least, should still be able to see my twitchy mice if I mail it as a separate file.)

Christ, it's Saturday. I need to find the time to wash my car sometime this weekend. The amount of dirt on it is approaching critical mass. Or at least, approaching the level where I might consider starting a roof-top garden.

Cheers guys. Happy Halloween. Eat some candy for me. Or something.

Volunteers needed

Anyone interested in going over my qual presentation with me, over the phone, this weekend? I need as much practice as possible. Please email if you've 40 minutes free this weekend. Thanks!

Dear Diary,

Today I discovered that my laser pointer is, in fact, a ball point pen as well as an old fashioned pointer (the pen end pulls out). As I was extending the pen-cum-pointer link by link and marveling at it, the PI happened to wander by. He asked if I was planning to thwack someone with it.

Sincerely,

S

[edit 17:08]
Fedora or ubuntu?

Am mostly better by now, just feeling a bit wrung-out and exhausted. Still on schedule for qual though. (Did end up having to drag myself home Tuesday afternoon because I got too sick.) Practice talk next Tuesday. I've taken to carrying a bottle of acetaminophen in my backpack and I am all out of cough drops. Also, my transcript hasn't been received by the right place yet despite of the fact that it was sent on the 14th and my mp3 player broke this week.

All this all this has been a very crappy week and I look forward to having it end, soon.

Bad timing to the power of x

Caught a cold. Or a flu. Augh this is so stupid.

This is a little appalling, but

I think I've had too much tea today, as that I am currently exhausted, unable to sleep and harboring a strong urge to scrub out the kitchen and the bathroom. Unfortunately I do not have bleach, which, in my current state of mind, seems like a minor tragedy. (No, you do not understand. Detergents contain bleach won't do it. I'm at the mindset where I need to pour liquid bleach into a large container and soak things in it so they'll be nice and disinfected.) Clearly what I need to do tomorrow morning, in addition to going to the lab to put away my in situ stuff and stow my slides at -20C, is to buy bleach. And tea, since I'm running low.

I'm on the 6th draft of my qual now. Not counting all the v3.2, 4.5 and so on that I've taken to doing (because the comments between the PIs on what I should change are almost always different).

Oh God. I've wanted to sleep since 8 this morning. What is wrong with me?

Yes that's rhetorical.

On the bright side, my current bout of insanity should end before Thanksgiving?

(Admittedly it's not just qual right now so much as qual + four different experiments of mine that keep on failing + Stuff In Beijing. It's a lethal combination that managed to do what GRE + grad school app + scholarship app + senior thesis + classes failed to do two years ago.)

(And you know what? I still think grad school is most likely the best thing to have ever happened to me. Clearly I am insane.)

D:

My qual has a vestibular dysfunction.

It's going around in circles.

Prognosis, anyone?

This is sort of a wtf_nature type post

I found out what a tenrec is, while going through the cladogram again for my protein of interest.

Have I ever mentioned that my lab has a rubber duckie in the 37C waterbath?

Hm, a new phase

I'm experiencing a sudden and inexplicable urge to eat hotpockets and do system maintenance sort of stuff to all three of my laptops. I think it's a sudden spike in geekiness level, which is more fun than spike in hormone level, but less predictable. However, this spike did not in anyway increase my desire to work on my qual right now. It's a shame, since I think my enthusiasm for the qual has reached an all time low around this point. The fact that the people on my committee are giving contradictory advise could have something to do with it, though more likely it's just that I've reached the inevitable low point all large long-term project-type things must reach and I will spent a couple of evening on the floor with my laptop, surrounded by far too many piles of papers and abandoned mugs of tea.

(I've incidentally discovered that black tea that's been left to steep for too long, without the addition of any kind of sweetener, is actually quite vile. They remind me of those meds I used to take when I was four that usually resulted in me throwing up.) (Mom claims that the smell of those those will even make her nauseus. Then again, of the two of us, I'm the less squeamish one. Got nothing on Annie of course.)

The seminars and talks have started again for this quarter. I am still trying to average at least one seminar/talk per week. Yesterday there was a talk by a student who reprogrammed skin fibroblasts (cell type) from Alzheimer's patients back to being stem cells so he can differentiate them into neurons to study patient specific phenotype & genotype changes for Alzheimer's. It was pretty cool. Afterwards I had lunch with my labmates and Wendy and I (via a long, somewhat convoluted line of conversation starting around lost wallets) ended up reminiscing about Davis. The post-doc in the lab looked at us askance when we said that yes, Davis weather is nowhere near as nice as SD, its water can be toxic to plants and fish (and humans), and the allergen level has a way of giving people who never had allergies before allergies, but we still miss Davis.

What's in a place?

Dry ice in ethanol looks just like Sprite with ice.

Way too many mugs of tea

I'm re-writing my qual. Again.

This time I'm changing one of my specific aims -- getting rid of the comp. bio. one and adding in one where I directly look at the central vestibular system, because that is apparently more cogent.

I find that the amount that I care is inversely proportional to the number of drafts I write (and I haven't even started on the powerpoint yet), and directly proportional to the mugs of tea I've ingested during the writing process. Though admittedly the latter might be correlation without causation, since the amount of tea is probably an attribute to the number of papers that I've had to read for this stupid thing, which does lead to diminishing enthusiasm. (I cannot claim diminishing marginal utility any more than those of you applying to grad school right now can claim diminishing marginal utility over the days you spent on your application. Maybe increasing marginal cost, in terms of sanity?)
(Though I also suspect, given the news lately, that it's a buyer's market on sanity out there right now. See: pirates and Nobel prizes. It's a crazy world out there. Therefore selling sanity would be like, selling air -- unless it comes with some property not found in nature / super shiny packaging, it's a no-go.)

(Can you sell pressurized sanity?)

(More importantly, I suppose: who'd want to buy it?)

Dear Diary,

Today I noticed that there is a lone, life-size stone statue of an owl on the roof of the apartment building next to mine. I am having a little trouble thinking up reasonable explanations for its presence there.

Sincerely,

S

Someone called me at 10:40pm last night. It is a 408 number that I don't recognize off of the top of my head & it isn't stored on my cell phone either. Did anyone who got a new phone number recently called me?

The replay button's stuck

I'm being very productive today. I have been very productive all weekend. I am becoming astonishingly zen about the whole qual thing. It's either that or something like the mechanism (forgot what it's called -- maybe Anna knows?) that people use to train other people out of their phobias: after a month (and a half), I've simply run out of energy to keep panicking. My energy can be better spent elsewhere. Such as washing my car the next weekend around.

Pragmatism is reassuring.

Random list of things, in no particular order:

I spent half an hour yesterday trying to figure out how fruit flies can tell which side is up / down when they're flying, then another half an hour figuring out that fish have really bad proprioception -- but it's okay, they don't need it. Much. Most of the time. Either way they seem to live perfectly fulfilling lives. For fishes.

Today I discovered that gummy worms (or at least the CVS brand of gummy worms) have eyes. And a smile. At which point it officially joined my list of "food that are creepy to look at." (There is something very disturbing about eating something that is SMILING AT YOU.) (Yes I have a problem with chocolate bunnies around Easter time, too.)

Anyone know what, if anything, will happen if I mixed formamide with paraformaldehyde?

I miss my Intro to Genetic Analysis book (yes Annie, that green one from BIS101). I think it's the only book that I sold back that I regretted.

I currently have "Henry Martin" stuck in my head. It feels weird to be pipetting things and hear in my head "Hello, hello pirate Henry Martin...&c." I suppose, though, that it's no weirder than yesterday when I had the Log Song stuck in my head. Ms. Seidl apparently taught me more than I realized.

Have called Beijing so now at least the guilt's gone.

... ...

I thought I heard "I'll be your scarlet letter" as part of the lyric in one of the Taylor Swift songs. Taken literally, I translated that to mean that the person is going to be someone else's sign of adultery.

...what?

Gah

Yesterday's Mid-Autumn Festival. Mom's managed to ship me a small tupperware full of mooncakes, wrapped in more tape (the tupperware, not the pastry) than even my anti-serium shipment, which had to be sent on dry ice in a box inside another box. But hey, food. It was nice of her. I also had grapes, and didn't call my relatives in Beijing like mom asked me to, for which I feel extremely guilty about but I just can't bring myself to, even after I remembered. ...and it's hard to feel happy after that. Even with the mooncakes.

I also forgot to mention that I did, in fact, finish Persuasion during the retreat, and liked it better than Pride and Prejudice. There's less of the witty repartee, but also less of the Prince Charming On A Horse Of White feel. (Oh come on, Bennet was marrying into wealth and class. Even Darcy had said that her family is way below his but he loves her anyway.) (Well, maybe not in those exact words.) Mostly though, I just like Anne Elliot a lot more than I ever liked Elizabeth Bennet, or the Dashwood sisters for that matter (those two seem to spend most of the book moping, if I recall correctly).

Now for something completely different: I nearly got in a car accident with someone this morning. I was going down Grand (post grocery shopping), when a car shot out of one of the small side streets (Grand, Balboa, and Garnet are the three main streets in Pacific Beach, and while they're not quite El Camino they are still the main roads). I'm guessing he didn't see me, because by the time he saw me, he was right in front of me already and of course he stepped on the breaks, because that's sort of the instinctive response. Unfortunately, vector math indicates that means his car is therefore also spending more time directly in front of my car. At that point I was slamming down the breaks but the cars are so close that there was no way I could've stopped in time and so I ended up executing this wild swerve (successfully, thank God) and left some rubber, I think, on the road. (Just to point out that I was close enough to see his head turn and to use the pronoun "he" even though he drove off right after.)

I was very thankful that it was early enough, that the car density was low enough, that I could swerve without crashing into anyone else.

People would've been shocked if they'd heard the stuff that was coming out of my mouth. Even I was somewhat surprised, after I realized that I was, in fact, swearing under my breath. (In my defense my mind was doing that whole slow-motion-before-collision-thing and I was 95% certain I was going to crash.)

I do not like driving. At least, not in urban areas. Affirmative.

Because destruction is not part of the limbic system.

I have been assigned a committee member. Due to the two weeks delay in assignment, we were given a one week extension. The math seems a little sketchy there, but trying to complain means a long list of emails being shuttled back and forth between PIs inevitably resulting in a loss of information to the black holes of cyberspace where all lost emails go to die, so my classmates and I just sigh and carry on.

Second years traditionally host a welcome party for the first years, and this took place yesterday. I left lab early and provided peach pie and three types of cookies (including that weird modified mocha thing I made at Christmas that everyone seemed so fond of) in addition to copious amount of experience in untangling streamers and spreading out table cloth. ("You're good at this!" Exclaimed one of my classmates in astonishment, while she wrestled with tape -- the tape largely gaining the upper hand. I think she's under the expression that anyone who's as socially inept as me would naturally be equally inept in all aspects of social occasions. "Think again," I thought, and allowed my self thirty seconds of smugness while reminiscing back to the days when I built a castle out of cubed fruit and toothpicks. Those were the days, my friend.) Also, I taught my classmates how to cut watermelon, thereby confirming that there is some truth to the myth that the girls in grad school are there because they're horrible at normal girl-type things. (Myself being a key example of the different aspect of impairment in achieving normal girl-ness.) I left about an hour in, once the place (one of the conference cottages down by Scripps Institute of Oceanography) became packed full and no disaster seemed eminent, confident with the knowledge that at least there was enough alcohol supplied so that no one will notice if the decorations were hanging crooked.

(I've come to realization that I am infinitely more comfortable behind the counter, wielding a large knife, than socializing. I am better at the former than the latter, too.)

( I bask in the fulfillment of my annual obligation to the departmental social events. Now I can be anti-social for the rest of the year without feeling guilty.)

Orientation to working with rabbits was this morning. My mentor is a girl from Bulgaria (discovered when she was on the cell phone and answering things with "Da!". "Do you have Russian friends?" she asked later. I laughed). The rabbits are cute, though they are currently shedding enough to make their own twins in fur. I was told that unlike the cats and dogs, the adoption fee for rabbits here remains fairly consistent at 25$. There rabbits don't seem to particularly care for me, preferring their hay instead. I suppose it makes sense since the hay is quieter and less likely to scruff them if they refused to go where they are supposed to.

Well, should be fun anyways. Cheers.