A report from the trenches

Today is the big molecular biology exam and I feel mostly unprepared. Because of the exam, we didn't have mol. bio. lecture at 9:30, but we still had cell bio. at 10:45, so I still had to drag my ass down here this morning. It doesn't make sense for me to waste an hour or more driving home and back for the test at 4:00, so I'm just going to stay at school and study. After lecture, I tried to find the medical library so I could camp out. Naturally, I went the wrong direction coming out of the stairwell and the hall ultimately came to a dead end at a classroom. I didn't realize that the hallways on some floors don't make a full circle around the building. So I turned around, found the bridge to the other building and went down a different stairway. I popped out just outside the cafeteria ("The Vital Signs Cafe" - yeah) in Scott Hall. WTF?? I didn't see a certain med student who usually flags me down in the cafeteria, so I slowed down and checked for the presence of microwaves, so I can bring my lunch next time. Check. There are several. Lots of vending machines, although I didn't check to see how outrageous the prices are. They have an area with sandwiches, salads, and cooked stuff, so I picked up some chicken salad scoops (no bread) with grapes. Now I have until 1:30 (when the cafeteria closes and I get booted out) to sit here listening to and watching med students. They're almost cute, what with their medical-ese and entitled student grousing about the presentation of concepts in their lectures. They look so motivated and energetic and very very YOUNG. I am tired, want to go home and veg in front of The Peoples Court, and I am, um...thirty-something. Sigh. By the time I finish this and do a post-doc, Elliot will just about be an adult, and I will be close to retirement age. Maybe Jim can hold off on retiring for a bit so he can give me his job. Then Ashley can replace Kurta and maybe Jen can take over for Clemans. No one can replace Walker, so he's gonna have to stay. When he dies, we'll have to freshen up his cardboard cutout and then we'll just stuff his corpse into a wall during the next remodel. I've got it all worked out. If only I devoted this much time and energy to studying. I tried explaining to Elliot the importance of doing a little homework everyday so he doesn't end up all extra-irritable and frantic like his mother who waited until the last minute to do her homework. I showed him all the amino acid structures I've been drawing over and over and over again and you know what he did? He laughed. I told him that I wasn't kidding and he just laughed harder. Maybe I should quit school and go into stand-up.

The changing of the guard

Writing is exactly what I shouldn't be doing and really don't have time for now, but it was either procrastinate this way or by cleaning up the kitchen. I had an 8:00 am meeting today to go over requirements and what is expected of me as one of the 6 recipients of an NIH training grant (Minority Biomedical Research Support Program aka IMSD) that will fund my tuition and stipend for 2 years and give me a little bit of money for research supplies and conference travel. Basically, the message is "no pressure or anything, just don't screw up and you'll be fine!". The program director sent out an email with the date and time of today's meeting and closed with the request to please be on time. I left the house at 7:15 and was delayed this time not by rain, but by some moron who couldn't figure out where the brake pedal was and rear-ended the car in front of him. In bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic. In the left lane (which has no shoulder). I just about came unglued. I finally got clear of that and raced up to my exit only to get tied up in construction on John R at Warren. Are you fucking kidding me??!! The light cycle for traffic on John R trying to cross Warren is ridiculously short. The light stays green for no more than 15 seconds (I've timed it), just enough for 4 cars to get through - at most. Unless someone just has to turn left onto Warren (no Michigan left turns here!), then only 2 cars get through. After a few light cycles, I got through, got to school, and yada, yada, yada I ended up being 5 minutes late. I hate showing up anywhere late. Especially for the first meeting of the semester. I had even called the program director's cell phone to let her know, but she didn't answer. ARGHH!! Deep breaths...

Lucky for me, one of the other 5 recipients of this training grant is D, who I've met a couple of times before and is a 2nd year student in Immuno & Micro. I had emailed him yesterday asking about the content and format of the molecular biology test and we chatted a bit about the tests today. After this morning's meeting got out, we went up to his lab and he grabs this HUGE stack of old cell bio and molecular bio tests off a shelf and basically tells me that I am now the keeper of the exams. I guess the stack is added to every year and passed on to the next newbie. There's stuff going back to 2002 in this pile - it's amazing!

My pile of salvation.

I feel like I don't know anything, even though I've had this material before. It seems like for every new bit I can cram into my head, something else that I really needed falls out. Are PhDs just really good at faking like they know shit or do they really and truly learn it? I'm not talking about "learning" something to get a passing grade on a test and then promptly purging it. I always viewed the PhD as the stage where you finally and permanently master all of this crap that you spent umpteen years in undergrad or other grad work practicing with for when you have to learn the stuff for real. The depth and breadth and magnitude of the knowledge that I always thought PhD students were gaining is not possible!! It can't be, especially with the amount of material we have to know and how fast we have to learn it. It's like trying to create the philosopher's stone - the substance that would magically transform ordinary metals into gold. Every alchemist thought every other alchemist had a leg up on them; racing to unlock that final key step that would to allow them to make the stone, and thus become infinitely rich. When will I figure out how this whole system works?? That is, the PhD/learning thing, not the alchemy thing. Although I may end up having to resort to that.

Water water EVERYWHERE! And some academic stuff too.

Okay, I should start out by saying that I'm pretty obsessive about checking the weather forecast both before I go to bed and first thing after I wake up. As far as I knew last night, we were supposed to get rain today, but not early in the morning. So you can imagine my horror at 7:45 am as I lay face-down in bed blindly swatting at the snooze button and I hear it raining outside. I've mentioned before how long it takes me to get to school when it's raining. Right. Somehow, I manage to eat something, shower, and leave the house by 8:30. Traffic wasn't quite as bad as I expected and I made it to school 20 minutes early. Awesome! Had class and didn't fall asleep. Yay. This is about as good as it gets. That is, until I tried to get on the freeway to go home. Bah. Traffic was stopped up because just the middle lane wasn't under a foot of water. Only idiots in SUVs were driving in the heavily flooded left lane. Opposing traffic traveling in the left lane made wakes so big that water was splashing up at least a foot higher the concrete median - it was unreal. I'm basically sitting in the middle lane creeping along when some jackwagon in an SUV comes barreling up the left lane - through the pond of water. I've never had my car be completely doused like that before. It sucked. I don't even want to think about how bad my commute will be when it snows.

Anyway, I have a test in molecular biology on Wednesday evening. It's from 4-7 pm in one of the med student lecture halls, which is not at all where or when I normally have class. I think that's weird. In anticipation of the grade I'm likely to get on this exam, I decided to do online evaluations of the faculty that have taught so far, which will get me 10 extra points. I'm desperate. These aren't done the way EMU does it. Evaluations for molecular biology are online and apparently done at the end of each "block" of material (which I explain below). And they have to be done within a week of the end of the block. After a certain date, you get locked out of that evaluation. You get an email that tells you who you're evaluating, along with a PIN and a password. There are 24 multiple-choice type questions, along with free text fields for comments that go along with each question. All 3 faculty I had in the most recent block are evaluated at the same time. My answers are supposed to be anonymous, the only thing the course director can see is whether or not I completed the eval.

The structure of the courses here is pretty different from that at EMU also. Here, at least in the 2 classes I have now, material is broken up into "blocks". For example, Block 1 was all about the structure of biological macromolecules, Block 2 was enzymology and protein function, and it keeps going until Block 15, which is genetics. Different faculty from various departments come in and teach different portions of the block or sometimes the entire block, based on their area of expertise. The material I'm being tested on was taught by 3 different faculty members. In the case of molecular biology, a total of 15 faculty members will have taught a portion of the material over the course of the term. This can be a positive thing if you get someone who is good at teaching and if your learning style meshes with their teaching style. It can also be very very bad. And of course they're all different - some are straight lecturers, some assign problem sets, some assign journal articles, etc. The prof. who just kicked off Block 3, membrane biochemistry, does a mix of chalk-talk and PowerPoint. Amazingly, none of the faculty - 4 in molecular bio and 3 in cell bio so far - have fallen behind with any of their lectures. That's impressive. Overall though, I think having that many different people teaching is going to make the class harder no matter the level of the stuff being hurled at us.

Part 2 - some of what I learned, etc.

I can't imagine anyone is still following this story, as I am sick of telling it myself. But I have to finish what I started, I'll just try to keep it brief. My dad started having problems related to congestive heart failure in early 2006 and had to be hospitalized. He was very ill and there was a very real possibility that he wouldn't make it out of the hospital alive. It was during this time that my mom told me something that my dad had made her swear not to tell me. Remember when I said that I thought I had been an only child until my younger brother was born? It turns out that I am actually just the youngest daughter of the 9 children in total that he had. My oldest sibling is my sister, Audrey, who is 67 and a month older than my mother. My mom told me that my dad had been married twice before and that he had 7 kids from his second marriage. He had apparently paid child support, but never saw them again after he split from their mother. I really can't even begin to describe my feelings during this time, nor do I want to revisit them, so I won't. Suffice it to say that it's been a long journey to get to where I am now. I will never understand why he felt he had to lie to me. Alzheimer's ensured that all of my questions will forever go unanswered. That and the betrayal of trust were the worst of it. Did I ever really know him at all? I don't know and that still hurts. I haven't yet figured out how to forgive him. That is still a work in progress.
However I feel about him, I'm sad that Elliot doesn't remember having any relationship with his Grandpa Mitch. My parents and mother-in-law alternately took care of baby Elliot during the day so that Chris and I could go to work. For a while, my dad was really good with my son - they napped together, they played together.  Because I'm weird, I keep my dad alive to Elliot by making him the benchmark for all things that are "old". For example, we watched a documentary about the Titanic recently and I told Elliot that Grandpa Mitch was 6 months old when the Titanic sank. Then we talked about how long ago that was. Knowing someone THAT old makes the history seem more tangible. We've also discussed the fact that the last Passenger Pigeon didn't die until 1914 - Grandpa Mitch would have been 3 years old then. At the Detroit Science Center, we saw a model of the 1st modern traffic light in the U.S., installed at the intersection of Woodward and Michigan Ave in 1920. "Hey Elliot, did you know that Grandpa Mitch was born before traffic lights?! How crazy is that?!"
So that's about it. During the course of today, I've realized that there are so many more stories to tell about my father than I thought there were. Maybe one day I'll get around to writing the rest of them down. Happy centennial, Dad. I hope it was a good one.

Part 1 - some of what I know.

My parents were introduced by a mutual friend in the mid-60's and they dated for 10 years before they got married in 1974. My mom was 30 and my dad was 40 - or so she thought. I'll come back to this later. I was born in 1976 and was an only child - or so I thought (more on this in the next part) - until my brother came along in 1981. My dad worked for the Ann Arbor Public School system as a custodian before switching to the paint department. He painted all of the schools in the school system, and I was always a little excited and proud to see my dad working when it was my school's turn to be painted.
Life hummed along as life tends to do until a letter from the Social Security Administration, addressed to my father, came in 1989. The letter was basically asking my father why he wasn't retired yet. Exactly what happened after this, I am not sure. I do know, however, that the shit really hit the fan once my dad was finally forced to tell my mom the truth. He knew exactly why the SSA had sent him that letter. When my parents first started dating, my dad told my mother that he was born in California about 1934, which would have made him 10 years her senior. This is the birthplace and birthdate that is listed on my birth certificate as well as my marriage certificate (since it was on my birth certificate). He told her his real age at that time: 78 years old, making him not 10 years her senior, but 33 years her senior! He said that he'd had to lie about his age in order to get work at some point and he just never corrected the error. Much later as an adult, I hypothesized that he was living in California in the mid-1930's when he was issued a social security number (FDR's "New Deal" really was new then) and it was convenient to make that his new birth year. I wasn't able to verify that he lived in California (even though he said he did) until a few days after he died last November. I was searching Ancestry.com for any new scrap of information I could find to help me make sense out of his life when I stumbled upon an "Index to Register of Voters" for Los Angeles precinct 238, dated 1934. And there was his name staring back at me. As well as the name of his first wife, Dora, whom he'd also kept secret. He voted democrat and so did his wife, but I digress.
I was 13 when this all came out, and all of a sudden my dad had become old enough to be my grandfather. In fact, he was older than both of my mom's parents! He became the "cool" dad somehow, just because he was that old and didn't act like it. He had always loved clothes and cars, and although his own fashion sense fell by the wayside, he still liked a sweet-looking ride - with lots of bass-heavy music blasting out of it. He never kept a car for too long before getting a new one. The one he had the longest was also his last, like he told me it would be. It was a black 1998 Pontiac Grand Prix two-door, with a rear spoiler. Nearly every time I'd come over to visit, he'd be out in the driveway happily polishing it. For a few years, he ran an auto detailing business as a side job. He had a small number of clients - mostly older women. When I bought my first new car 11 years ago - the Jetta, which is now on its last legs - he taught me how to detail it properly (this is a story in and of itself). He hesitated to point out what I was doing wrong when he saw me washing it because as he told me, "I know you don't like nobody tellin' you what to do". Can't imagine where I got that from. Ultimately though, he got to the point that he couldn't drive safely anymore because of his dementia, and my mom made me take it to my house so he couldn't see it and keep asking about it. It soon became clear that we needed to sell the car. We got the necessary repairs made to it, since he hadn't been able to maintain it himself in quite some time. I spent most of a day detailing it, inside and out one last time. It was so pretty:

The people I sold it to were buying it for their teenage daughter and wanted something driven by a little old lady. This was the next best thing. So I took my dad's old license plate off and sold his car.  Before the buyers had even made it to the end of the street, I just started sobbing. I mean, to the point of not being able to talk or breathe. I felt like such a traitor. I had just sold my dad's car right out from under him. Since finding out he had Alzheimer's, emotionally, I think the day I sold his car was one of my darkest. He loved to drive. He had driven damn near his entire life (his first car was a Ford Model A, for Christ's sake!) and I just sold the last remnant of his independence. That really drove home for me the fact that he was going to die and I felt like I had just helped speed the process along.
Good grief, that tangent really took a turn for the macabre, didn't it? Sorry. More of the story later.

Happy 100th birthday, Dad: an introduction to the story.

Today would've been my dad's 100th birthday. Aubrey Archie Mitchell was born September 18, 1911 in Gregory, Arkansas to a Baptist minister, John, and his wife, Lottie. My middle name comes from her. If you've ever received an email from my emich.edu account, you know what that name is. Only my dad's sisters and brothers called him Aubrey, everyone else called him Mitch. Some of you know his story and some of you don't. He was older than dirt, as I used to like to remind him, so it's kind of a long story. I only have first-hand knowledge of the last third of it, since he was already 64 by the time I was born. I can't retell it in a single sitting, so I'll likely be writing in fits and starts throughout the rest of the day. Time to go collect my thoughts...

Don't blame me for my bad attitude, blame the architects.

In the course of putting off studying (again) for my molecular biology test, I was perusing the PhD Comics archives and found this:

I circled the "Neo-Penal" style. Remember what it looks like because it will be important in a second.  Note the underlined and italicized "...drain your very Life Force". Now I'm going to show you another picture. Try to guess what it is:

Not really a prison. Just looks, feels, and probably sometimes smells like one.

No, it's not the Wayne county lockup - that's actually much nicer looking. This is Scott Hall at WSU. This building houses research labs, med school classes, my classes, etc. It's basically the main hub of the med school. This is where I go every day to have the Life Force drained out of me. The first time I saw this building, I actually said, "God, this looks like a prison!" Oh yeah, it also has security guards posted at a reception desk just inside the front doors. Can we say "prison"? Yes. Just don't say "Neo-Penal" out loud though. It doesn't matter how you spin it, it just sounds dirty. You have to show your WSU ID or sign in. These people mean business too. I tried to sneak past one of the guards I'd already seen several times before I got my ID and she caught me before I could get to the elevators. They have guards posted at the medical library front desk too. I don't know if any of them are armed. I'll try to find out. Hopefully not the hard way. In case you want to know what the Wayne county jail actually looks like, here it is:

The Wayne county lockup. Looks like a nice place to have class, doesn't it?