Fish thymus

I realized that I have a lot to do this weekend but couldn't quite figure out what I ought to get started on tonight. So I said, "Okay, I'll just go through and answer all the emails and PMs that I've been putting off" and now it's past eight already. Tempus fugit indeed.

These two weeks will involve dealing with three different collaborators in four different species. It is a bit insane at the moment. I have found out that somehow, despite of the distinct differences between the characteristics of the labs and PIs, messages from PIs seem to always require considerable efforts in deciphering, like it's an Oracle From God. Tamara's PI has informed her that he wasn't going to help her schedule her candidacy exam until she figured out what she was going to do with her life, which made me hugely grateful that my PI didn't choose to do the same. Sure, mine still does the mini-lecture about career choices every once in a while, but I was never thwacked with an ultimatum or refused help, ever. Also, this is extremely unfair since most post-docs still don't know what they're doing with their lives, so how are we, the students, who have less experience with both life and academia, supposed to know? (And then we had a mini existential crisis over lunch.)

Collaborations has also allowed me to find out that there was a pretty virulent strain of bug going around these past few weeks, that laid a lot of people on their backs who normally wouldn't even get sick. (Wendy's baby ended up in the hospital and had to get fluid sucked out of his lungs on Christmas Day. I don't know how she deals with this on top of writing her dissertation -- which she will be defending in February -- and the experiments that the PI is still hinting she should continue.) Today, at a collaborator's lab, a post-doc staggered in, accused his colleagues of getting him sick, and announced that his goal coming in was to infect someone else. At that point the person I'm working with suggested that the post-doc go infect someone next door because that particular neighbor "hates French people" (the post-doc was French) (yeah Lucy, I thought of Mike & Nick and lol'ed). The amount of people staggering about and staying at home made the labs seem very empty. It also meant that it took me that much longer to figure out that one of the post-docs from my own lab is absent because he found another job over the break, and will only be coming in later to clean up his stuff (this is the guy who rescued me from the person at the bus stop the other time, I shall miss him). And Wendy is leaving. Which meant that by summer our lab will be down to five people and we'll be a very small lab indeed.