Ms. Crabbypants

Cranky is not really the emotional state I expected to be in after the big department holiday party, but cranky/grumpy/pissy/grouchy, etc. is what I most certainly am right now. I'm guessing there are actually several reasons for this, now that I'm sitting and thinking about the day. A caveat - my reasons are likely not great reasons, but they are mine nonetheless.

I am an introvert and social situations/people in general really stress me out. Unfortunately for me, I am half of the social committee and was responsible for putting this holiday party together. This included food (was up until 2:00 am making the cookies I had stupidly promised to make), drinks, decorations, and all the time-consuming minutiae that goes along with that - standing in line at Meijer longer than it took me to shop, loading the car, unloading the car, hoping I didn't get ticketed, towed - or worse - while parked in front of a "Fire Lane - No Parking or Standing" sign. To be fair, I was the last and least obtrusive of 7 or 8 vehicles that were clogging this fire lane.

Once the party got underway and I got a hold of some social lubricant, the day was mostly enjoyable. Oddly though, as the last handful of us wrapped things up and started leaving to go home, I neither felt happy that I'd had a good time, nor was I even relieved to finally be alone with my thoughts again. I simply felt empty and unconnected to anyone or anything. All I could think was that there really is nothing new under the sun. This is the way my life is going to be until I die - a parade of new faces that come into my life and that I become very fond of and attached to, until it's time to leave and I have to tear myself away to go start the painful process over again somewhere else. Over and over again ad infinitum. And this is the way it's supposed to be, so I'm told. I don't like it.

So that was a vague and rambling diatribe. The seed for it was planted earlier today when an even more cantankerous friend of mine advised me to be careful what I write in my blog posts, lest it come back to bite me in the ass later on. I'm accustomed to being told what to do by this person, who I know only has my best interests at heart, but for some reason today the message really grated on me. Aside from that, there were stupid little things that didn't work out the way I had hoped today. I really wanted to talk science with my PI for a bit, but he had to leave earlier than I expected. I stupidly texted him while I was on my second or third gin/juice/pop concoction, asking if he'd be around tomorrow to discuss my project. No typical "drunk" texting - just science. Now I'm thinking that I'd really rather sleep in and stay home during the day tomorrow, especially if we are supposed to be getting snow. Driving to and from Detroit is enough of a challenge with the usual crazies zooming, drifting, and swerving all around me - I don't feel the need to up the ante with some weather event.

I thought there were more reasons for my shitty mood than what I've just outlined and maybe there are. It could simply be that I'm cranky because I'm old. And old people get tired and cranky late in the day. That must be it. I hope this blog post doesn't come back to bite me in the ass someday, but it probably will, and likely sooner than I think it should.

Holiday lab madness

Today my PI is treating our lab to lunch at The London Chop House somewhere in downtown Detroit. Apparently, it's a yearly lab tradition to go somewhere kind of fancy for lunch before Christmas. I'm not sure how long we'll be out - lunches here tend to run really really long. As in 2-5 hours long. Should be fun once I toss back a drink or two.

Tomorrow is the annual department holiday party. Since I am head of the social committee (I'm really only a puppet for the more socially-minded grad students), I am at least partly responsible for pulling this thing off. Ha! Essentially, people tell me what to do and I (eventually) go do it. We are getting pulled pork and chicken from Slow's BBQ, as well as their macaroni and cheese. The most controversial part of the party plan this year is that we are hiring a bartender. The deal is that unless we hire a bartender ($125 flat fee, 4 hour minimum), our department can be fined $4000 for unauthorized alcohol consumption. The problem with the bartender is that everyone has to supply the alcohol they want served AND each person gets only 2 drink tickets before being cut off. So that means if I bring in a six-pack of beer, this douchebag bartender will only let me have two of my own beers. WTF??! Excessive regulation tends to drive people underground, so in the spirit of fighting unjust oppression my lab mates are planning to hoard liquor in the lab and run our own speakeasy (at the opposite end of the corridor from the party). Bartender or no, there will be drunk grad students. Anyway, I said that I would make cookies (that was a dumb move) and pick up some other supplies, so I have to go to the store after lunch today.

We are also having a white elephant gift exchange, which should be fun. I have a box of rejected Christmas gifts in the basement (any gift that we haven't so much as looked at in at least the last year or longer) that I can choose from. I think I'm going to go with a giant mace gun I got for Christmas last year. When I say gun, I'm not kidding. This thing looks like a starter pistol (it's all black and doesn't say "mace" or anything on the grip, unlike the picture in the link) and it comes with a giant cartridge of mace. Working in Detroit, it sounds potentially useful. However, where the fuck am I going to keep a starter pistol full of mace and still be able to get to it if I need to use it?? Although now that I see how much the damn thing cost, maybe I'll hang on to it. It just looks ridiculous and thus perfect for a white elephant gift exchange.

Ugh. I still have two hours until lunch. I guess I should start catching up my lab notebook. I know that I've threatened to do this before, but I mean it for real this time. I think I've located all of my note scraps and put them in relative order. That's huge. Now let's hope that it all makes some kind of sense when I write everything down where it was supposed to go in the first place.

Recovery and stuff

Nursing a man cold is hard work. It's also extremely boring. I've spent pretty much the entire weekend in bed, with occasional breaks to strap on my feed bag. Never one to settle for mediocrity, I likely took the adage "starve a fever, feed a cold" way too far. Today I felt well enough to get dressed at least. Unfortunately though, I missed Elliot's field trip. His class was going to the Discovery Center in Garden City to conduct a "CSI"-type investigation. When he got home, Elliot told me that it was kind of like Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Hmm. I didn't catch what part of the field trip he was referring to, but I think maybe I should limit his exposure to the police procedural shows.

I think I'll be well enough to go to school tomorrow, but I am really not looking forward to going. I have an IMSD (Initiative for Maximizing Student Development) meeting tomorrow morning at 8:00 am, which is essentially an hour and a half of listening to other students present their research. I need to leave the house between 7:00 and 7:15 to make sure I get there on time, which means that I need to set my alarm for 5:30 and out of bed no later than 6:00. Waaaahhh!! Once I get there, I expect to receive a dressing down for not having registered for the obligatory 10 credits already. I'm supposed to do this 6-8 weeks before the start of the semester, but I always put it off. Then my PI was in Japan for two weeks, and yada, yada, yada...

I need to sit down with my PI and talk about defining the boundaries of my project. One of the classes I have to sign up for is basically the same thing as Proposal Development at Eastern. During the course, I am supposed to write up my actual research project proposal. In June or July of 2013, I am supposed to defend my proposal to the committee I will have chosen. If my proposal is accepted by my committee, then I'll be promoted to doctoral candidate from doctoral student. This promotion is supposed to come with a $1000/year raise. That comes out to roughly $35 a paycheck. I guess that will pay for my parking permit, so I shouldn't complain.

The rest of this week is going to be busy and I don't expect to get much, if any, actual lab work done. I'll write more on that tomorrow or Wednesday, but right now the boys have just come back from the store and my concentration is shot.

Man Colds

I think I have come down with my first official man cold. A man cold is just a regular cold with a lot of unnecessary whining, complaining, and languishing. I can't breathe through my nose, but mouth breathing makes the phlegm rattle in my chest. Sleeping is a thing of the past and I wish I could die and be reanimated when this cold is done with. I don't have the energy to keep typing, so here's a picture of the demon cat under our new Christmas tree.

I should have known...

I should have known by the way the other grad students chuckled when they volunteered to help me load returnables into my car that the job was gonna suck big sweaty donkey balls. Let me back up a little. Our department is having its holiday party next Thursday, and tradition dictates that the new second year student (just me, in this case) is responsible for returning a year's worth of bottles and cans in order to have extra money for food and whatever. My initial thought was to just give the bags of returnables to a bum (never in short supply in Detroit) and give the secretary a wad of cash that I thought would cover the money I would've gotten had I done it the right way. A hot wave of lapsed Catholic guilt washed over me and pushed that really good idea out of my head in favor of actually taking the goddamned bottles to the store like a good girl. First of all, the returnables hardly all fit in my car. My trunk was full, as was the back seat. I just hoped to God that they didn't leak before I got to Meijers. More problems: a full grocery cart only half-emptied my car and I apparently hadn't noticed that the bottle return had been moved from the back of the store to its own separate entrance in the front facade several years prior (runonsentence,anyone??). Chris always takes the mountains of our empty beer bottles back, so I don't even remember the last time I got within 20 feet of a bottle return machine. I think I'll go thank him profusely for taking that one for the team as soon as I'm done with my rant here.

Anyway, after I'd finished storming through the whole store muttering about how upper management must think it's damn funny to hide the fucking bottle return - I had to call Chris to ask where the hell it was - I quickly figured out the reason for the earlier chuckling. Mold. If you've known me for more than 30 seconds, you'll know that my two biggest phobias are mold and parasitic worms - not necessarily in that order (the order tends to flip-flop from day to day). I could (barely) deal with the relatively light coating of mold on the cans in the two single-ply bags. I did have to work really hard to hide the look of horror on my face as I gingerly picked up each disgusting can and tried to throw it into the machine. The machine actually told me to stop throwing cans into it! What?!?! I almost punched it at that point because it just seemed like it was trying to mock me. Then I got to the last bag in my cart. Inside, I found year-old multicolored, dry, sometimes fluffy, and now airborne, mold inside nasty fermenty beer cans, and on the outside of the cans. On the potato chips someone had dumped in, thinking it was trash, as well as in the styrofoam coffee cup. I should have known something wasn't right from the way this bunch of returnables was quad-fucking-ruple bagged!! I almost thought I was trying to rip through a set of Russian nesting dolls. Okay, I thought to myself - this is far beyond my mold-tolerance capacity. I must have stood there for a good two or three minutes deciding what I should do with this bag full of nasty because I was damn sure not touching anything in it. I ultimately decided that I would grudgingly load the bag back in my car (there were no dumpsters around), drive it home, and put it in the trash toter. Sorry Mother Earth, but I think the thick coating of filamentous saprophytes will have to do the recycling here because it ain't gonna be me. I decided that the biohazardous waste I disposed of was worth about $10, which I gladly took from my wallet and put in the envelope with the money from the things I could actually stomach returning. Shhhhh!! No one (except for you, lucky readers) has to know about this little indiscretion. That is, until the holiday party when I will inevitably get wasted and want to tell a funny story. Ugh.

Back Again

Hey, what do you know? I'm not dead! I know I haven't written in a very long time. I guess I felt kind of burned out on all the introspection I had to do in order to write. I just didn't want to think about anything substantive and I got wrapped up in doing mundane lab stuff. I've discovered that I really enjoy stuffing pipette tip boxes. It's monotonous, I don't have to engage my brain at all, and I manage to get something accomplished for the lab. It's win-win for everyone. Two things I really don't care for, however, are taking care of the biohazard waste and filling the water carboys. Biohazardous waste is gross, the bag is heavy, and it usually leaks so it really isn't a surprise that I don't like it. Because the fancy Milli-Q water machine is in the fish lab (one floor up from me), we have to schlepp the carboys upstairs, fill them, then try to get them back downstairs somehow. The first time, I used a cart. That took too long because I had to call the elevator and wait. The second time, I carried the full 50 pound carboys downstairs, hoping that my messed-up knee wouldn't give out and I wouldn't fall down the stairs and die. Fortunately, I didn't fall down and die, but my arms and hands felt like spaghetti for quite a while and were sore through the following day. 

I don't know what to say about my research or how to say it so that it makes sense to anyone, including myself. I need some time to think about what the hell I'm doing before I commit anything to "paper" (blog post). My PI said that we need to sit down and clarify the bounds of my project, but he's in Japan until next week, so...I need to figure out what I should do this week. One thing I'm doing that I'm really excited about is learning how to do histology on zebrafish. That includes all of the fixing, embedding, slicing, staining, and imaging. I asked the tech in the fish lab to show me how to do it. I think tomorrow I learn how to slice the fish I fixed last week into sections. I really like the fact that I get to do stuff that goes beyond culturing bacteria and doing molecular genetics. I feel like I'm learning some valuable skills that will make me a more well-rounded scientist. And a more marketable one to boot.

One thing writing apparently does NOT do is deter Chris from trying to talk to me about Christmas gifts for my mom and my brother. I don't want to think about Christmas and I wish it would just go away. I am ready to just buy a Festivus pole and get ready for the Airing of Grievances and Feats of Strength. Ugh. I go through this every year and I wish I didn't have to. I wish I was happy and easy-going like other people seem to be. But I'm not. I suppose that the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence - until you jump the fence and see that the grass there is just as brown as your own.

I've had enough and I suspect that you have too. Here's an idea for you to ponder. If there's something that you want me to write about, tell me. The topic could be anything, but even I'm up for a challenge now and again.

Effing up

I knew that in the course of attempting to do some actual science I would fuck something up. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, Kristie does not disappoint. First mistake I made was to forget just how weird cholera bacteria are. They live in the environment, which is normally quite a bit cooler than body temperature (except for the last week or two), so you'd think that you could toss a Vibrio culture in the fridge and everything should be just fine. Not so. Vibrio cholerae is not only a genomic hoarder, with two chromosomes, but it's more thermopersnickety than a woman with a malfunctioning thyroid gland- it really doesn't like to be cold. So, I grew overnight Vibrio cultures for my fish infections last week and, not thinking, took them out of the incubator and popped them in the fridge while I finished up some other stuff and went to lunch. They were in the fridge for two hours at the most. When I got back, I took them out of the fridge and was spotted doing so by two of my fellow cholera cult (lab) mates:

"That wasn't Vibrio you just pulled out of the fridge, was it?"

"Uh...yeah." Uh oh...

"You know you might have just killed your cultures, right? Vibrio dies if you put it in the fridge."

Shit! "Oh, right. I totally forgot. Well, I guess we'll see if two hours is enough to kill them!"

Even though I  felt like a complete moron, I did still have the presence of mind to plate a couple of dilutions of each of my cultures, just to make sure I really didn't kill them. When I infected my fish later that day, I had no idea if I was adding live cholera or just polluting their water with dead useless cells. Dumb, dumb, dumb. At the very least, I figured out how to set up the fish infections on my own - which tank to take fish from, to make sure that they hadn't been fed first, which water/beakers to put them in, how to mix up the tricaine solution to euthanize the fish, etc. Plus all the other stupid little details that get forgotten by people who've been doing this stuff for a while - like where they keep the ethanol, how do I clean up the fish shit when I'm done, where the dissecting kits are...it's getting a little bit easier every day. Oh, and it turns out that I hadn't killed my cholera after all! Sometimes I think a lot of research is figuring out just how much you can fuck things up without ruining the entire experiment. That sounds smart-ass-ish, but I think it's absolutely true. You need to know how much wiggle room you have in your protocols - then you try to figure out why, which sometimes leads you to new side projects. It has been strongly and repeatedly suggested to me (by a favorite cantankerous former professor of mine) that a good student should be working on at least three projects simultaneously (at the time of my scolding, I think I was only juggling two things. And rather lamely, at that).

Tomorrow, I'm going to attempt my first ELISA assay (ever!), looking for cholera toxin in last week's fish water. If it doesn't work, then there's a good possibility I fucked up precipitating protein from the fish water. I really have no idea what the hell I'm doing! I'm also still stuck in cloning hell, but so is everyone else in the lab. We think that the UV transilluminator is frying all of the DNA we try to gel purify - even though I limit the gel exposure to 15 seconds or less, plus we add guanosine to the gel to act as "sunscreen". We're supposed to be getting a blue LED transilluminator soon, I think. Maybe that will help.

I still need to get some work done tonight, but to hold you over until my next post, here are some crappy iPad pictures of the lab.

The fabulous view from my desk.

My bench, replete with impressive-looking bottles of stuff I made, new pipettors, a brand new ear-piercingly loud timer, and ice! Woot!