For various reasons I've been drawing a lot lately, but I think I've done more than my minimal, or even average quota for the week, so instead I'll take the half an hour to spare today and start to try, in my rambling way, to account for some of the things that have happened over the past few weeks.
It's really been weeks, hasn't it?
Well, I'll start from the most recent and go backwards.
One of the post-doc from my lab is leaving at the end of the week (i.e. tomorrow). He is both in the middle of the project and also the only person in lab who knows the techniques for a certain type of experiment, so one of my labmates and I had to, essentially, drop whatever else we are working on these past ten days and try to learn how to run this type of experiment before, as the Adviser puts it, "the knowledge passes out of the lab." On one hand, learning something is still really fun. On the other hand? Less time for my own project and yes, the Adviser is still hoping for me to put a paper together by March, without interrupting my on going experiments. I have yet to figure out how to put together a manuscript in the ten to thirty minutes of incubation time between the craziness, because writing is something that you have to ease into, get into the flow of, in order to get done. The choppy blocks of time where I have to switch track between two to three different experiments as well as plan the set up for the next steps just isn't working for me. I can only conclude, with a sigh, that I am apparently not as good at multitasking as I thought.
Though it is deeply reassuring that no one else I've talked to, besides the Adviser, thinks it's possible to write a manuscript and run experiments full time at simultaneously. My lab mate's theory is that that's one of the tests of if you're suited to become a professor -- the ability to crank out sciency-sounding paragraphs amidst on-going insanity.
Two other post-docs are off getting their visas renewed in their home country, so for a while in the lab, with the undergrads absent as well, the lab was strangely empty. One of the post-docs returned today and well, the visa process is its own special brand of hell, like DMV. I have experienced both so I think I'm qualified to compare the two.
There is, by the way, a new record for the "strangest legitimate question posted to me by Adviser". I work in a mouse genetics lab, see, and that day I was running experiments with various genomic and plasmid DNA samples when the Adviser wandered out of his office, stopped in front of me, and asked, in all seriousness, "What's the size of an adult zebrafish brain?"
Long after he's left and I've recovered from his explanation (which makes less and less sense the more I thought about it, but my dissertation does have an evolution component so hey, zebrafish), I turned to my labmate and asked, "What's the strangest question that B (the name of the advisor) has ever asked you?"
To which my labmate replied, "I don't remember. I think I try to forget those as soon as possible to make room for real thoughts."
Which is actually a pretty good indicator of what some of the questions are like.
I still don't know what the size of a zebrafish brain is. I'm assuming that we're dealing with dimensions here and so will be talking in terms of microns in the transverse, coronal, and sagittal planes. Though I suppose for over all volume I can always fill a 1.5mL tube with fluid and plop a brain in and measure the displacement....
Right.
What is probably more unfortunate than us, who are more or less used to the Ways of the Adviser, are the poor sales people who wandered this earlier this week, while the Adviser is out, and made the mistake of trying to do their sales pitch at him. The Adviser, by the way, is something of a science wonk, and so all of us felt rather bad for the sales people as they were being quizzed about the mechanics behind the product they were selling and the theory behind how certain things are supposed to work. It's a bit like witness a group of less-than-well-informed door-to-door salesman-type evangelist engaging in a debate with professor of philosophy who also happens to have a masters in theology. So yes, I felt bad, but even more than feeling bad -- I also found the entire thing hilarious and vaguely explanatory of how I am gradually less capable of communicating like a normal person, the longer I stay in lab.
I was going to blog about books as well -- lack of internet had led to procrastination which had led to a peak in ebook reading -- but I think not tonight.
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