It's true. It never ends.

Things have been very busy the past few weeks. And by busy, I mean that the clock has been literally crammed up my ass and using its arms to puppeteer mine.

Let me break this shit down.

Thursday, I had my first committee meeting. Holy fucking shit does it take some acrobatics and persistence to get four extremely busy people to agree on a time to sit in a room. My boss - by far the busiest of all due to her administrative duties - took one for the team and missed something important to go to this meeting. Man, she is the best.

Back in August, when I did my defense, I proposed a big stinking impossible pile of shit that I knew was a piece of shit. They all expressed doubt, but let me proceed. In the months since, I came to the conclusion that they were right. It was, in fact, far shittier and impossible than I had imagined. So I started a new project.

The boss then gave me one week to write a revised proposal. Two days later, she asked me to review a paper for a big journal. And I have to give a departmental seminar in two weeks. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU!

The knife just kinda sat there, twisting slowly in the gaping wound around my liver.

Anyway, I got it all done. Although I felt thoroughly prepared, I was slightly nervous about my committee meeting. Dr. Impossible Questions didn't show up, we were in a shitty, tiny room that was awkward for presentations, but I went ahead and started my presentation.

It is a wonderful feeling to take a swing and feel like you hit it out of the motherfucking park - and that's what it felt like during the presentation. I'm a perfectionist. I wish I wasn't, but I am. I always want to be the best that I can possibly be, because why do something if you're not going to do it all the way? And man, this was the first time I have ever been perfectly satisfied with one of my presentations. They told me they wish they could bottle up my enthusiasm and distribute it to the other grad students, and that I've set the bar higher for what they expect. Holy fuck man, I was fucking proud of myself. Even better, I let myself be proud of myself. It felt so amazing.

I'm not trying to boast here or anything. Things have been going great in the lab, but I've still felt in limbo. Am I a real scientist? How much longer do I have to go? Do I have what it takes - the ideas, the balls, the luck - to be one of the guys that everyone knows? Will I ever feel competent enough? I don't know. But I do know that I fucking nailed my committee meeting, and I'm one step closer. All the hard work is actually starting to pay off.

I wish I could bottle this feeling up and give it to all the nameless faces fighting the good fight along with me. But since I can't, I will tip back a few beers for everyone who needs a boost after this long winter. The spring is coming. I promise.

404 Error: Synapse no longer exists

This has been a never-ending week. I did a huge experiment. Like, huge. Usually when I do these huge experiments, I inevitably fuck up something. Once I was harvesting cells at 6 different time points, one of which had to be done at midnight. I came in, harvested the cells, put them in the centrifuge - and then forgot about them and went home. The whole thing was ruined. I just looked in the centrifuge in the morning and stared at it for a few minutes, hating myself and everything. I had to do it all again. Because I am retarded.

Amazingly, though, everything worked this week. Also, it's horrible that everything worked. I've barely slept, and I'm so tired right now that I'm forgetting simple things. Thank fuck for spell check.

At any rate, it's good to be back to the bench at full-throttle. Maybe I'm getting older, or maybe I just hit it too hard to quickly after being at my desk writing for so long, but I am fucking knackered to fuck.

Thankfully, no weekend work is required. I am already dreaming of my bed. I'm just waiting for those last few washes to tick away, and then it's time for home and beer. But at the same time, I am already wishing for next week when I start getting the results. It's going to be awesome.

Yo Teach

I've neglected to discuss a very large area of commitment that has taken over my life: teaching. I think it has a lot to do with the the fact that teaching is totally masochistic, and I was a little embarrassed to admit my desire to destroy myself even more slowly and painfully than if I were just in lab all the time. But what the hell, here I am. Teaching.

Last semester I was responsible for a single lecture in a graduate-level course. As with everything I do, it ended up taking a lot longer to prepare the lecture than I originally thought. I had to learn some things, re-learn some things, and try to keep it from being stuffy but thorough at the same time. I thought very hard about all the things I complained about my first year in grad school in regards to shitty courses and aimed to do the opposite.

According to the class feedback, I succeeded. They loved it. I was so fucking happy, because this time I felt like it really counted. The people here in the lab tell me that I'm a good teacher, but I can't help but feel that they are blowing smoke up my ass. To hear it from an unbiased source through anonymous evaluations really meant a lot.

Then they took my portion of the exam.

The other instructors did multiple choice, but not me. And holy fuck did they bomb my section. I failed 2/3 of the class while two people received 100%. The reason that they failed was that they didn't answer the question that I asked. I have to know - how the fuck do you NOT answer the question? I don't understand! It was infuriating. I mean, the exam was open book and open note. What the fuck?? It was very disheartening and it totally deflated me. But damnit, I'm not dropping my standards.

So I found out earlier this week that I am now one of the co-organizers of the course for this year. I also found out that we have to completely overhaul the course and build it back from the ground up.

What have I done? At least I will be making bartenders and brewers very happy for all of 2011.

Shit.

Failure Haiku #2

Holy shit, this dumb
Assay finally worked. Beer
Is now optional.

In my opinion...

I haven't mentioned Lady Lab Dragon in a while, because, well, that's an interesting situation.

Lady Lab Dragon, as some might recall, made my life hell for an entire summer. In short, I developed this new assay, we argued over whether or not it worked (it did), and as a result she would not talk to me or help me in any way for several months. Because of this, the other people in the lab also stopped talking to me. To resolve this situation, I had to pretend to need her help. Then she was cool with me again. Seriously.

This woman is one of those people who thinks that the entire lab would crumble if she wasn't there. I'm certain that she believes she knows more than our boss. Because of this, she thinks that she is our boss. She won't get her own ice - she asks a postbac to do it. She doesn't do any routine ordering or anything. She also informed me that I should have shared my dissertation proposal with her before turning it in. I believe she secretly wishes us to genuflect when she comes through the door.

So for the last few months, almost every day, she has come to me to tell me about what she thinks I should be working on. It is always prefaced with "In my opinion". In my opinion, you should be working on X project. In my opinion, you should do this experiment with ABC timepoints. In my opinion, you should use this cell line.

Fucking. Hell.

I've talked to my boss about how I want to try for a "superpostdoc" position. The boss is cool with this and is totally supporting me. My boss is fucking rad and totally leaves me alone to fall on my face, rather than tell me no about something crazy she puts me in contact with people who can help me, and in general she just knows how to handle me. She's never told me what to do - she offers suggestions. It's wonderful. The constant input from Lady Lab Dragon is the exact opposite of what I need and want.

I wish that I could tell her to stop, but then I'm certain she would stop talking to me again. This would be very bad news. I need to discuss ideas and projects with people. Sometimes saying something out loud makes you realize that it's a stupid idea. Furthermore, someone may have tried what you want to do and can offer advice, or they can explain to you while it might be more difficult than you think. So if I say something to her, all of this will go out the window. Again.

In my opinion, she needs to grow up and start acting like a professional. One can dream. I am still constantly amazed that scientists can be so fucking childish and/or retarded.

The last of the vomit paper tags

I took some time off. I went home for Christmas break and totally fucking relaxed. Why? Because the vomit paper was accepted! Fuck yeah!

Maybe I built it up a little too much, but I felt more relief than excitement. Don't get me wrong - I am totally fucking stoked that I kicked the shit out of that big lab full of fucking idea-stealing cunts. But really, once I received the email the first thing I thought of was "I'm never going to have to look at that fucking paper ever again."

The vomit paper went through too many drafts. I spent an entire day trying to make my figures cooperate and look nice at publication-quality resolution. I had to stand my ground and fight to write in active voice, but other people's shitty sentence structure ended up in the text. Oh well.

It's fucking published.

The vomit paper endeth?

Well, I re-submitted the vomit paper. I've been obsessively checking recent publications to see if Fuctardio scooped me - but nothing has come up yet. So it looks like I just might have beat that group of assholes. I am not sure, of course, but I'm trying to stay optimistic. For once.

Submitting a paper is shitty. I really don't understand why it should take so long to do, and why there are always problems uploading documents. Wrong format. Session timed out. Randomly omitting a figure file. It's fucking horrible! For some reason, I couldn't upload my shit at work - so I had to go home to submit my paper. This is the kind of shit that makes people crazy. My PI said that it was actually easier to submit when you had to physically mail in the draft and figures. Man, I love irony.

So here I am, finally at peace for the first time since about January. It's been a crazy year. I mean, I'm not really done yet - I have to give a lecture in a few weeks that I have not started preparing yet. But hey, at least it's better than writing a paper, addressing and writing a paper revision, written comps and oral comp exams.

I got the feeling earlier this year that the stress will never end. There will always be something that I have to do, things I have to put off until the last minute, and things that will keep me up at night. It's for real now, man. There's no stopping it. I am a scientist.

Fuck me. I thought I was doing this to avoid a real job for the rest of my life. It reminds me of a little poem I wrote a few years back:

As it turns out, I was mistaken.
The unifying theory to all I've said and done is this:
I am learned, but I will never learn.

The scoop

Fuck, man. I could get scooped. Seriously.

I've been working on my project for almost three years. Since I thought I was going to submit it last fall, I presented my findings at a poster session. I went to a conference this week, and a huge name in my field essentially presented my data. I went cold and clammy. I thought my liver was going to rupture with fury.

This project has been crazy from the start. I had a really unique finding, but no one believed me. My boss tried to get me working on something else several times. I've documented pretty well how I was met with resistance by my lab mates. At the conference where I first presented the data, I saw people pointing at my poster and laughing. I got laughed at again this week.

I was really doubting myself for a while, and honestly I was a little scared to publish the data. Part of me felt so vindicated seeing him present what are essentially my findings. His conclusions were the same as mine. The mechanism was the same. I wish that I hadn't been so scared. I've said before that data don't lie, but like most things I didn't follow my own advice. And I could pay for it.

Of course, now that this titan is trying to publish almost the exact same research I have done, it means I have more weight behind my findings. But still - the dude is so well known and so successful that I am amazed he is trying to scoop me. Isn't his success enough? Apparently not. To make the matter worse, I really idolized this guy. Talk about some bitter disappointment.

Now they don't know my paper is already submitted and in revision. I'm hoping to have it in by the end of next week. I don't think I will get rejected, because it it a very mild review. I just hope to fuck they don't have theirs submitted too. It's an arms race - and I only have two arms. He has an army.

But I have to say, it will be the best feeling in the world to scoop a big lab like that. It might be petty, but that is what keeps me even more motivated to publish than I already was. Because fuck them. They fucked with the wrong person.

Failure Haiku

Kan resistant, but
Plated bacteria on
Amp-filled agar. Fuck.

My first venture in to comics