Work hazard: Frost bite

So, I have a question: Is EVERY lab in the world freezing as hell? I would really like to know. Seriously.

My lab is a fucking ice box. Even though our building is less than 10 years old, the facilities managers have no idea how to keep it at an appropriate temperature. Even in the middle of the summer, I'm walking around here in sweaters and I have a portable radiator on next to me. On occasion, I will pull that radiator beneath my desk and practically straddle the damn thing to keep myself anywhere near warm. One or two times, I put on my big puffy jacket at my desk and worked with my hat and knit gloves on. Awesome.

I get it - the lab should be kept cold in order to improve general sterility. But seriously, man. Why does it have to be that cold? Why?

On another completely different note, I just ate the worst banana I have ever eaten in my life. Holy shit. I fucking love bananas, but that could put me off of them for quite a long time.

Damn.

What is the opposite of the blues? Maybe this...

I've been on a golden streak for a few months. That's right - MONTHS. I am not even trying to complain here. I'm just totally astonished.

Just the other day, I was thinking about how some people have a fear of failure. This boggles my mind. It is completely alien to me. I've failed so many fucking times that it's not even funny. Over and over. Big things. Little things. Some which changed my life, and some that meant nothing.

I fail pretty much every day, but that is just the nature of the big ugly beast that is science. Do an experiment and - if it works - probably only half of it worked the way you wanted it to. I worked on a protocol for four months before, meaning that it failed every day for over three and a half. I tinkered with some one or other part until it slowly began coming around. ChIP took me a long time as well. You just never know. The staff scientist says that learning any new technique will take six months. Now I don't know about that, because she might possibly be the most pessimistic creature to have ever walked the Earth, but you get the idea.

So imagine my amazement when everything has worked this summer. Everything. I don't even know what to do with myself. My lab notebook is so far behind that it's not even funny anymore. I really can't keep up with the data. It's really the best time in the world for this, since I was toying with blowing this place up and going to work on some seal or dolphin project out on some faraway beach.

And even though I want to vomit in my mouth just talking about it... the uh, the paper... Well it's pretty much wrapped up. I'm just doing statistical repeats.

So I'm getting ready for some classes this fall. I only have to take two, and they are going to be pretty easy. After that, I'm planning on taking my qualification exams. This could be an interesting few months.

I hope the gold streak continues. More than anything.

The Neverending Paper

Oh fucking shit on a shingle. This paper is going to haunt me until the end of time. I truly and sincerely hope that they are not all like this. If so, I may very well end up becoming a carpenter or something. Because fuck this.

I am still doing control experiments. Still! No one seems to be satisfied with my explanations, let alone the data itself. I would like to remind people that data don't lie, but I keep forgetting that in their eyes I apparently don't know shit. Or something. Seriously, how many different methods will it take to prove that my new method works? Three isn't enough. And if three isn't enough, I have the sneaking suspicion that not even ten will.

I gotta say, supplemental info on journal articles really chaps my ass. And all of this dumb bullshit that I am currently enduring will just end up in some big stinking barfy pile of supplemental info that only the anal-retentive myopic fucks will read. One of my mentors, a true scientist who still comes in to the lab every day at age 80+, says this: Prove it, but don't over-prove it. This is something that has stuck with me for years, and I will remember it forever. I am all about this phrase. That is science. One well-crafted experiment should be enough. But no, in the age of supplemental info, it will never be enough.

One day, in the near future, I truly hope that this will be remedied. I will probably still be working on my paper then, to be quite honest.

I was always under the impression that grad students typically have a problem with not knowing when to end a project. Well I'm trying to end mine, but my PI and the staff scientist want to keep it going. I am NOT going to take three years to put out a paper. I won't do it. Fuck that shit. I swear I am not going to carry it over through the fall semester. So it is said here, in print, kinda-sorta. But for fuck's sake, the paper must die soon.

Turning the corner...

Well, shit. Life is pretty fucking good today.

I have been working on this dumb experiment for MONTHS now - trying to get ChIP to work. There has been lots of plotting to set my bench on fire, wanting to blow up the lab, and general crankiness during this optimization process. Today, though, I received the results from my last run and it totally fucking worked. Perfectly. Beautifully. The most perfect ChIP protocol ever.

Holy fucking shit. I am the motherfucking ChIP master. At least, I am today.

My paper came back from the boss, and there really aren't that many notes. Then she added that I was a great writer. I felt like she put a little A+ sticker on my paper and a big smiley face. It felt good.

Things have been so fucked lately in the lab. I'm not really talking to anyone anymore due to the horribleness of the last month. By that, I mean no chit-chatting - just work-related stuff and typically polite pleasantries. Amazingly, though, I've discovered that I get a fucking shitload of experiments done now. This has been one of the most prolific periods of my time in the lab, and it's wonderful.

So, with all of the sudden good fortune in the lab, I'm expecting that my paper will be submitted within the next 4-6 weeks. Fuck yeah.

Everything's coming up Millhouse.

I would like to barf all over you...

I don't know why, but I've been thinking about "barf" quite a bit. Not vomit, but "barf." There is something so juvenile about the word that I love. It makes me think of being in grade school, when life was not all complicated and full of lady lab dragons.

Come to think of it, I do know why I've been thinking about barf. I've been reluctant to admit it, because it sounds really stupid. But in my head, as I wandered about campus, through throngs of dumbass medical students, I kept thinking that I wanted to "barf with apathy."

Sure, you can't do such a thing. But it sounded good. Those people made me want to barf with apathy.

Man. This is my life. Right now.

I think I am just going to take a day off. I mean, I'm not just gonna stay home and couch all day. I am going to take a day off and go fishing or something - play some serious hooky. Maybe I just need an actively relaxing juvenile action to go with my increasingly juvenile thoughts.

Yeah, that's it.

I can feel the skies brightening already...

Grad School Blues

I hear that everyone in grad school gets depressed. Well, maybe this is my turn. My time to be awash in misery and question my desire to continue.

There are just so many things wrong. I should be happy, having finished and passed all of my classes this semester. It is also the last semester of full-time coursework I will ever have to endure - so even more reason to celebrate. But no, I am in a strange void.

So, to start, I am being challenged by my own lab about my paper. It's getting to be a really uncomfortable, antagonistic environment. I designed a new method, and it works, but no one in the lab believes me.

I don't know what's going on here, but I am miserable. I have pulled up paper after paper and provided tons of evidence that demonstrates my method actually works. It works! I have done countless controls before starting these experiments, but the past month has been spent doing more. More controls to prove something that I have already proven dozens of times over and over and over.

So this is science?

I am amazed at how myopic scientists can be. It really saddens me. They get something in to their heads, and it becomes an immovable fact. There is no plasticity in their brains - just facts. "Facts." Unfortunately they forget that, in order for science to be evolving, some current knowledge must, by definition, be incorrect. Some "facts" are fucked, and if we keep using the same methods and the same setup, we will never learn anything new. Science must evolve, or else it will become like the medical field - figurative and literal regurgitation.

I can't wait to have my own lab. I hope I make it.

My plans? Destroyed.

I am an idiot.

In order to be all proactive and shit, I decided to ask my boss which journal I should submit my paper to. She usually leaves that up to us, but I know I'm lucky that I'm even getting to write the damn thing in the first place so I'm not trying to push my luck here. Anyway, her response was that she would like to see my results section - right away - in order to make that decision.

Fuck.

So yeah, I'll be in the lab this weekend.

There's a really important lesson here. It's one that I thought I knew already. Way back in my undergrad years, the sage grad student in our lab told me that I should never let my boss know exactly what I was doing at any given time. I should instead give him old data (ie, a few days) instead of fresh, just finished yesterday results. That way, I would always appear productive and on top of things. I would be able to take off in the afternoon and drink beer - just like she did - even when the boss knew about it.

See, I've brushed up with up-to-date here. My boss knows that I don't have my results written and all of my figures done. She didn't sound too happy about it, either.

Ah, the imaginary connotation of email.

Writing a damn paper

Ugh. More complaining!

Ok, not really. This one really isn't that bad. I am just writing my first paper. It is, in theory, fucking awesome. The idea was mine, I designed and performed every damn experiment for the thing, and I am writing it. It's my first first-author paper. Woohoo!

In practice, though, it's semi-horrible. I work much better with a gun to my head. In fact, I've done my best work under atrocious conditions - and I have the gray hair to prove it! For this, though, there is no deadline except for "soon." That is just not working for me.

I can't tell you how many times I have toted my reference papers and photocopies of my results from the lab, to my home, and back to the lab again without even taking them out of the binders. They just look at me over the weekend, taunting me. I keep thinking, "I should be working on my paper." Torturing myself. Over and over. I always end up watching some stupid crap on TV and feeling guilty when I stroll in to the lab, late, as usual, on a Monday morning.

So I've made a deadline for myself. I have ten days to finish the first draft. With hope, this goal will make the transition from arbitrary deadline to a proverbial gun to the head and I will accomplish the task.

The outlook? Not so good. I foresee several all-nighters in the murky future, or endless streaming waves of guilt. Awesome.

Some new vocabulary

Today I was so tired in class that when I was taking notes, I wrote "geen" instead of "gene."

Disaster at a temporary pause

Right. I was postponing writing about the end of the semester until I received all of my grades, but that hasn't happened yet and I've already started a new semester. So here it goes.

Fall semester.

This was the single worst semester of school I have ever experienced - and that is saying a lot. I got kicked out of school three times my senior year in high school, so there was some pretty tough competition on that front. Seriously, I've tried to convey the horror here but I am incapable of finding the right words.

See, my education means a lot to me. I feel a little silly sometimes when I take bad teaching so personally, but then really everyone should. I'm only going to go through grad school once, so in my opinion it better fucking count. But the majority of professors in this school are horrible and are making class pointless.

Let's say someone gives you a lecture on how to make a batch of cookies. You follow along, understanding why things are added when. It all makes sense. Cooking is, in fact, just chemistry. But then you are tested on this lecture. It's a multiple choice exam, and the questions are asking how many millimeters across the dough mound should be and about the type of heat that is delivered by your oven. Are both of these points important? Sure they are. But do they truly further your understanding about how cookies are made? No.

This is what I am talking about. I am being taught stuff, but not learning anything. It's horrible.

Anyway, the first semester is over. Thank fuck for that. No more complaining about that shit. This semester, instead of taking seventeen credits, I will only be taking fourteen. Or twelve. I haven't really fully decided on this one class, so I'm going to wait and see how that goes. It sounds interesting, but it's on Wednesday evening and gets out after 5pm. This means less time out of the lab. Tricky.

Maybe it's that I'm fresh out of a break, but things are good right now. I'm writing my paper, finally - but that is another story.