I can't think of a title so you get this instead

We got another campus police alert this week for sexual assault, which makes this the third police alert in two months (stabbing, stabbing, assault, in that order), which I find worrying. The campus I work at is fairly well known and has a good reputation and is surrounded on one side by villas of people who have way too much money and thinks sculpted topiaries and rococo moldings are a thing (I went for a walk through the area a few years ago, curious about architecture). People have tried to make that area a closed neighborhood for the wealthy and elite back in the day. This -- three incidents either on campus or within fifteen minutes walking distance of campus, should not be happening.

Yet here we are.

Which brought me to the point on Thursday where I realized I might have to stay a lot later than my usual time on campus. I actually had to plan out possible ways to ensure my own safety and had decided that, if I had to stay late for an hour or more, the bus stop was empty, and the street light there broke again (it does that) I was going to text my way through my contact list until I find someone to keep in touch with until the bus arrives.

Consequently I have suddenly become a lot better at remembering to recharge my phone.

On that note, I just want to mention that this week's Thursday was awful. It was awful not in the sense that something horrible and/or tragic happened but the grinding dreariness of hundreds of little things not going my way all within a twenty-four hour time span. The highlights of those hours include but are not limited to: nose-piece on glasses falling off, sudden and inexplicable cramping in my calf muscle, bad enough that I couldn't walk, missing the bus, and somehow switching the electrodes on one of my protein gels -- which is a mistake I have never made in my entire life-- so that I needed to re-do the whole thing. By the time the evening came around I was at the "I hate everybody and everything" stage and ready to declare war on nameless deities and abstract concepts alike, so it was probably a good thing that the day ended.

Friday was much better. I have a new-found appreciation of Fridays, even above and beyond the usual joys of the arrival of the weekend.

And now, I have tea.

Hello, hello

It's been awhile since I've updated my blog -- my current schedule being what it is it just hasn't been possible to do daily posts like I've done, once upon a time. I could make time, it's true -- I can always make time -- but as is the case with everything else, it comes down to priority lists and cost-benefit analyses and at the end of the day, nothing gets written (that's appropriate for posting here, anyway).

That being said though, I do think that it's still good practice for me to write regularly. Tumblr is well and good because it's more informal and there is VERY little low pressure to generate unique content when all I can do is hit "reblog", but it'll be good for me to write something more structured that is NOT related to what I have to do at work, because I have a very (justified) fear that I may forget how to write something that's not a science report.

Still, I'm a bit short on time still, and given that this IS my blog, I've made the executive decision that I'll write one post a week, regardless of the length, and if I'm really short on time I'll just ...not revise / edit it. Editing takes about 2-3x as long for me than writing these stream-of-thought posts, you see. You have been warned: you will get to see my informal writing in all of its grammatically questionable glory and if that's not your thing...well I assume since you are here, you know how to operate a browser.

No seriously, I feel that my academic writing is slowly destroying my ability to write anything else. One of my acquaintances had said that writing an article and writing a short story shouldn't be all that different (she...doesn't write stories) since they're both narratives that need clear writing with beginning and end and  you are essentially telling a story in both cases. Having thought about it, I concluded that yes, there are similarities, but for me, who has written both, the differences are more obvious than the similarities. It's like the different between Monet and Mondrian -- they are both painters and paintings are very similar as an medium of art in that you do need technical skills to apply pigment to a surface in order to convey certain kinds of thought and emotion in the viewer. However, if you will google image Claude Monet and Piet Mondrian, I think you will agree with me that the style is VERY different, the technique to paint each other is most likely different, and the general feelings of looking at a Monet, regarding which one, is very different from what you get from a Mondrian.

Scientific writing is, for me, the Mondrian; fiction writing is the Monet.

Things I have discovered upon returning from Peru:

1) The CO2 regulator was not replaced. The incubators are down. All of them. For the cells. 90% of my remaining work involves cells. (The regulator finally got replaced yesterday evening but one of the two incubators are still down and the working one still needs to be calibrated.)

2) There was some issue with temperature regulator in the vivarium last week. May be reason why I lost 2 mice. Does not excuse mistake make by staff where they accidentally switched the cage label so that a cage with four female mice got labeled as a breeder pair. The sex ID mistake I can understand but- did they not realize that the cage contained 4 mice instead of 2?

3) The fan for the camera for the microscope is officially out. As in the camera got shipped off for repair and won't be back for three weeks. There goes the schedule for the cell immunofluorescence experiments.

4) Apparently on Monday there was an issue where they tried to fix the emergency power supply and ended up blowing out the fuses to a bunch of -80C freezers (i.e. where all the bio labs keep their most expensive and delicate samples). Ours is okay. For now. The place is crawling over with electricians though.

5) I still don't know what is wrong with the ventilation in our building. Last week the air pressure got inverted. Starting yesterday it's operating at a dull roar so that I can barely hear my timer going off.

The consequences of which meant that at one point today I sat down on the floor in the mouse room and tried to come up with a new schedule for my experiments because as much effort as I am exerting, trying to graduate, it really does feel like fate is conspiring against me. So much for that nice little bubble of joy that I carried back with me from my vacation.

Friend of mine's gotten the okay from her committee to graduate in December! I'm torn between being deeply jealous (she'll be done!) and nonplussed (she doesn't have a job lined up and announced she's not going to finish her current set of experiments and apparently her committee was okay with it??) and sad (she'll leaving, both the school and from science -- she's going into teaching / writing). Also she will be having a baby soon which seems to me like a whole 'nother sort of stress. But on the other hand I'm also kind of happy for her because she was handling the near-graduation stress even worse than I am (save for July; July was the abyss from which I hope to never return) and was joking about quitting so she'll be done and free at last, free at last -- and I think she'll be happier once she's done.

So, complicated feelings tonight.

Also, I'm presenting in lab meeting tomorrow evening and flying out for Peru the day after all. Just FYI.

Trying to get my stuff approved by my committee as well as my PI and, eventually, peer reviewers. This can only end in tears.

Also, for reasons unknown, my neighbor's left his socks on the communal cacti.

Taxonomy is not for the common English language. For instance, Osteichthyes I'm pretty sure I can just type in as "fish", or possibly "bony fish" if I'm feeling particular -- but what on earth do I call lamprey? "Invertebrate chordate"? That's not exactly common speech....

Universal standard for application of common names fail UTTERLY once you reach the point that the things you're trying to name is no longer something people commonly encounter.

(Though I suspect that most people outside of my niche - most NORMAL people - just consider lamprey to be fish.)

(Yes I'm still working on this bit.)

(Did you know people use the term "worm" for earth worm, round worm, and polychaete worm when there's like more evolutionary divergence across those three categories than between us and like, sea urchins?)

I just spent 30 minutes confusing myself with the past tense of the verb, "to spread". Why English WHY?

I have discovered madeleine cookies and they go well with earl grey, except we're in the middle of a "heat wave" (meaning 80s F where I am) so I'm mostly sticking with making a large pot of caffeine free ice tea and drinking it throughout the day, because I live on the top floor and there is no air conditioning and also - computers get hot when you use them for a long time.

Also discovered? Lentil snaps / Snapea crisps. They are as bad as Pockys in how addictive they are.

In the meantime I have to go and finish updating the accession IDs for my supplemental table #2. There are 97 species I have to go through across 4 different databases and a lot of the information got updated / merged so it is a tad painful to wade through. I am in the 70s, however. I WILL PREVAIL.

There are only so many scientifically acceptable ways to say "statistically significant" and "not statistically significant". Also: I think my committee disagrees with my PI on what the main focus of my paper should be on. WHY.

Has any one of my acquaintances ever found what they learned in high school geometry useful?

Trying to write for a Nature publication from scratch is painful. (And you know what? I don't think my manuscript will even make it because it's not a hot topic or, as some of my co-workers like to say "it's not sexy enough for Nature".) (I know right?)

As someone who likes to finish 24hrs before the actual deadline, the feeling of being perpetually late and in need of catching up is deeply unsettling. And exhausting.

In other news my brain decided to pipe "Oh My Darling Clementine" at me for over an hour this afternoon, for no reason I can discern. It was especially annoying since I don't actually know the lyrics but, since Annie introduced it to me during my undergrad years, I was well aware that it involves some lady dying and her lover pairing up with her sister. Which lead to a round of "why brain, WHY?" It's admittedly no worse than all those sailor songs about drowning but even so, WHY BRAIN?

And update to clarify:
I am more or less fine. Meaning that, after comparing notes with my classmates, we all realized that we are all more or less in the same boat of stressed and overworked. Which no doubt contributed to some of my dithering but the exact question is HOW MUCH.

But you know me, I'll keep soldiering on and keep you all updated on my progress whoo.

Warning: long unhappy post, but not that much existential ennui

Today I spent some time huddled in the restroom while waiting for the last 200mg of motrin to kick in. It's gotten worse recently. 600mg and I was still in enough pain that I could not effectively function in lab -- a lingering, unnecessary reminder that I've been going through one of the rougher patches in life. That and the fact that it was actually the wrong day for Shark Week, which would make the upcoming Peru trip -- yes the one that's I'd mentioned last year, with the tickets for everything ordered and paid for months ago-- very interesting. (I was considering canceling, last month, but my mother persuaded me not to. Since February this year she's taken a more "as few regrets as possible" approach to life, which she's trying to extend to me, whenever possible. With dubious results.) It's perhaps telling that I have had enough experiences to know what happened and how long it'll take my body to recover. Human bodies are complicated and full of regulatory mechanisms, most of which, thankfully, I do NOT have to know off of the top of my head. (Read: committee meetings. Ugh.)

Dear blogger why won't you let me publish this this is my THIRD TRY

A temporary end to the "BRB off dying" post a while back (yeah a while back, I am aware) as I have just had my committee meeting this afternoon and am going to take a few weekends off before I go insane. In the meantime I would like to announce that:

1) This is the first committee meeting that did NOT end with directions for me to go and edit my slides. (Though of course my PI told me how to improve my slides anyway -- there's no "go edit these or I will not sign your eval" from the other PIs, praised be.)

2) I am scheduled for another meeting at the end of November to  a) serve as progress check and b) set a defense date. DEFENSE DATE.

3) I got more experiments suggested to me, even though I'm supposed to be WRITING NOW and it's supposed to take me around 6 months to put together a manuscript, so I'm not entirely sure how this is going to fall out so OH GOD. (Does this mean it's a pre-defense meeting? I'm not entirely clear. The PI claims that the pre-defense meeting is not an official thing but just a thing to make sure that the student is ready to defense so I guess????)

4) I have apparently started the process of completing my doctorate. Yet somehow I don't feel any smarter than when I started this journey. If anything I feel stupider. I feel like I should write very indignant and cuttingly worded letters to somebody.

5) I want tea and a chocolate cupcake, rather badly.

Have accidentally swept up a harvest spider in the kitchen. Have just accidentally apologized to the spider as it scurried away.

I'm exhausted and there is, fascinatingly enough, aggressively upbeat pop song coming up THROUGH MY KITCHEN FLOOR, from, I believe, the new neighbor that moved in recently. Am rapidly approaching the state of "Why is it still June I HATE EVERYTHING" and reveling in the sheer irrationality of my aimless hatred. Also, Ivy's battery died (as in laptop thinks it's not present and will not charge or withdraw charge from it) and I haven't the faintest idea WHY.

Hey guys,

Still not dead. Recent activities have been pretty hard on my wrist but there's no way to protect it without severely limiting my range of motion, so I've mostly resorted to wrapping it up when I get home, which means that doing stuff outside of work takes a lot longer than usual. Typing is okay except I can't really reach for backspace easily and kept hitting "=" instead and drawing is...interesting but at least I know how to ctr-z like a pro. It's more of an extra support for my wrist at this point than anything else and if my experiment goes well this week hopefully that's all it'll be needed for.

Honestly, the things I do for science.

Found an extra old thing of tea and tried to brew it and found that it's sufficiently aged to go all crumbly and escape from the tea strainer. Ewww. I need an extra fine strainer or possibly cheesecloth for the size of particles. This is what I get for being cheap.

Cleaning the kitchen while making lunch. Making a note of the fact that my parents and I have progressed in our relationship to the point that when they bring food that I don't eat I'm comfortable telling them I probably won't eat it and they'll insist that I just keep it "for now" and if it's still there when they next come they'll pick it up but won't insist that I try it, and because I always feel bad that they brought it all this way I'll keep it, so now I always have this bag of aging snacks sitting in the bottom shelf of the fridge waiting for pick up. It's "love, as demonstrated by food", episode "how to compromise". It's also a mark of where we are that the sight of a bag of food I won't touch makes me feel all fond inside. A little annoyed still, because that's what family inspires in me, but fond.