The Dreaded Wedding
This coming weekend, I will be going to a wedding in my hometown. I've already
complained blogged about it
here, but to summarize: It is a wedding for the girl who was my best friend in high school (we are not super close now) in our small and gossipy hometown. I am going by myself, which makes me a bit apprehensive, both because of the possibility of people asking annoying questions and the not having someone guaranteed to talk to should I get annoyed by the other guests. Well, it is coming up this weekend.
I went home for a bridal shower and bachelorette party a few weeks ago. It didn't make me feel any more apprehensive (nothing notably terrible happened) but it didn't make me feel any less apprehensive either...it pretty much was as expected. I also received the wedding invitation and forgot to mention it. [This is where I paused this post and moved my lab stuff, if you were wondering] The invitation was addressed to:
Mrs. Miss Immunegirl and guest
I am not joking. (Okay, so technically Miss was written over Mrs. but I don't know how to do that in html so that is close enough). It made me feel really enthusiastic about going and like they really cared about me enjoying my time there. [/sarcasm].
So...that's this weekend. Blech.
It has also sort of just dawned on me that it is THIS WEEKEND. As in, I AM LEAVING FRIDAY MORNING. This is not good. The invitation said "formal but not black tie." I'm not sure that I have an appropriate dress (what, exactly, does formal but not black tie translate into at a middle of nowheresville hicktown wedding? I'm lost.) So...I think I have to go dress shopping. And...I have to get a wedding present (quite possibly dealt with online once I get back.) And...another friend from home is having a baby shower the following weekend which I am going to miss, but I would like to send a gift to the shower with my mom...so I need to get a baby shower gift. And...my hair is looking a little icky and theoretically ought to get cut. And...I need to do laundry and pack. And...I am supposed to do a big experiment on Monday of next week but may have a wrench thrown in my plans but probably won't know until Thursday. And...my mom is kind of annoyed that I will be home for such a short time and will be at a wedding for most of it. (I could, of course, stay home for an extra day if I found out that I didn't have to do my experiment on Monday.) And...I desperately need to watch Lost on Wednesday (just like I desperately needed to watch Alias tonight)
GAH!!!!!!!!!!
Soooo...I think (hope) that I am going shopping tomorrow night (highly dependant on my experiment schedule) to get a dress and a baby gift. I really hope I can figure out a dress that goes with shoes I already have....
Wednesday will be Lost and maybe a hair cut if I can schedule one kind of early...
Thursday will be laundry and packing....
This whole plan falls apart if I can't leave the lab at a reasonable hour everyday for the rest of the week. Soooo....now I'm pretty stressed.
Why I am I going to this wedding again?
Movin' on up
Recently our lab got some new space. We have been expanding rapidly people-wise and we have gone from having 1.5 floors of a three story building when I started to having 2 floors (a year ago) to having all three floors. The third floor was recently vacated and there was much discussion of who would get moved there. I'll admit that most of my original interest in the move pertained to whether or not the group of people who work next to me (one of whom I don't get along with professionally AT ALL) would be moving upstairs, thus ridding me of my lab nemesis and making my life much more peaceful. It turned out that they (he) weren't on the list of first-to-be-moved after all. When I learned that they would be staying, I asked my boss if I could move. It was sort of a strange request: most people abhor moving their lab space because it is a lot of effort, but my boss said it was okay with him (although he was confused since he didn't know about the issues in our little area.) I wasn't entirely sure what was going to happen but I was somewhat pleased.
This morning at lab meeting our boss announced that the third floor had been cleaned over the weekend and that moving would commence today. I asked some of the people in charge of the lab what the plan was and sat back. I knew that I had a busy experiment tomorrow, so I tentatively hoped I might be able to move on Wednesday.
Around 4:30-5, I realized that another grad student was in the process of moving, and I started moving my stuff too...I went upstairs and scoped out a desk, figured out my plan and started bringing things up. It was kind of crazy (I had been in the middle of both a blog post and an email when I abruptly started moving) but it worked out well. I finally (with some wonderful help :) ) got all of my things (and lots of pan-third floor supplies) up to my area by 7 and had everything relatively cleaned and organized by 7:45-8. It was a long day (having arrived at 8 this morning) but it was nice to get so much done.
I LOVE my new desk. It is huge with lots of shelf space. It has large sunny windows with ivy growing around them. There is all the lab space I could want. I also really like the people who moved upstairs as well. I'm kind of sad because there were a lot of people who I really liked in the area where I was working before, but there was also one person who made me miserable due to space issues, and now I have way more space and also am working in an area with people who I am that I will not have the same problems with. Right now I am in a lab room with one other grad student who is very fun. We have already done "group" things like getting group equipment and supplies and I feel like everyone will be good neighbors. Like I said before, it's not like EVERYONE I worked with was difficult, but there is one that I am not sad to leave. You know what else is great about it? The whole space was EMPTY when we got there. Everything that is there is mine and is something I put there. No more other people's invading stuff and also no more other people's leftover stuff that they didn't feel like moving or throwing away. Everything is mine and is where I want it to be...It is sort of like starting fresh and I really feel like the area is actually my own, instead of my just adopting territory that someone had barely left.
The only down side is that most of my lab friends are still on the first floor. My tissue culture space (where I do a lot of my work) is on the first floor. The cytometer is on the first floor. There is an elevator, but it is something out of a horror movie and I refuse to use it unless I am moving something. My desk, and computer (that already has internet access! woohoo!) and bench are on the third floor. Sooo...there will be a lot of stairs for me. How long do you think it will take for my legs to get buff and awesome??
Anyway, I'm pretty psyched. I know, I know, I'm weird, but I am kind of happy that I have a sunny desk away from someone who stressed me out. I think I will get a lot done in the new place. :)
What a week
The past two weeks have been a little frustrating, experiment wise. I have been mostly working at optimizing a particular type of experiment, which is sort of a nice way of saying "trying to re-invent the wheel". I have been ridiculously busy for the past two weeks and in the end have basically nothing to show for myself...I still can't make the damn experiment work. On the positive side...I've been working really hard, have been quite motivated and quite productive so at least that is good.
The week in review:
On Monday I planned to do another attempt at the experiment. I also really needed to go to a symposium from 11:30-5. The week before I made the plans assuming that I could do the experiment either before the symposium or I could stay really late to finish Monday night, which was a good plan. I also signed up to use the cytometer to read the experiment from 10:30-12:30 on Tuesday. Not thinking, I also set up times for people to come look at our apartment on Monday evening. Sooo...I had to leave right at 5. I came in at 8 on Monday morning and started the experiment and quickly realized that it was going to take A LOT longer than I thought. I got to a step where the cells could be kept for a few hours/overnight at 10:30 and stopped there. I decided that I would just come in early on Tuesday morning (skipping my 8:30-10 meeting) and finish the experiment instead of finishing Monday night. The symposium and seeing the people about the experiment went well.
Tuesday was a rough day. I made it into lab around 7:15 to start the experiment. At 11:15 I got to a point where the cells had to sit for half an hour and I used the time to start programming the machine. I finally started running the cytometer at 11:50, making the 10:30-12:30 time a little tough. I finished around 12:45. The experiment failed miserably. I then ate lunch and then started working on another attempt at the same experiment. Around 4:30, someone came into tissue culture and started asking me statistics questions. I told them that I didn't have time and I would talk to them in two hours. They decided they didn't have two hours and kept coming in every 15 minutes or so to ask me questions until about 6:30. I ended up drawing statistical functions on the glass of the tissue culture hood for a while. I finally finished working around 7. It was not a good day.
Wednesday I came in and immediately read Tuesday's experiment on the cytometer. That one failed miserably too. I spent the rest of Wednesday planning the next experiment attempt and ordering reagents.
Yesterday I was a little burned out over the whole idea which is why I could spend so much time reading about hot monkey sex. I couldn't keep going with the experiments because my orders hadn't come in yet. The only good thing that happened was that I was apparently quite persuasive: I was able to convince my advisor to give a talk on this coming Monday, I was able to convince him to let me do an expensive experiment that I have wanted to do for almost a year (a microarray), I was able to convince him to let me move my desk to another part of the lab next week. I should have asked for a raise and a vacation. I went home and promptly fell asleep for the night, thus killing my plan to write about monkeys. (But I have a whole weekend ahead of me! Woohoo!)
Today my plan was to process some blood (separate it to get the cells I am interested in and set them up to grow). This usually takes me about 3 hours. The plan was to work alongside another grad student (who used to do this process but hasn't done it in two years) and help her teach two new people who have started working with her. It took us 6 hours to get the whole thing done. I was SO HUNGRY at 3 when we were done. It was so nice outside when we went for lunch...we considered running away. But we didn't, and now we are both in the lab. Blech. It is time to go home soon.
Oh...and I am feeling a little blucky. My stomach is doing weird things and is apparently unhappy. After some googling (I am too embarrassed to ask any of the MDs who work here what they think is wrong) I have decided that it is dietary and that I can fix it by eating the right foods. Off to the grocery store...
Science in the news?
So....I definitely want to continue the discussion of what I could be when I grow up that has started in the comments section of the previous post, but I also have an idea for a new post and I wanted to know what you thought before I started.
Would you be interested or bored to tears if I wrote about my opinion or explained science articles that are getting a lot of press? (I'm specifically referring to the human-chimpanzee hybrid ....
story right now, but I was thisclose to doing one last week too.) I'm in the process of reading the human-chimp journal article right now so I could write something later today (or probably tonight because I want to look something up in a college textbook that is at my apartment.)
(Important note for any of you who try to read the paper yourself: It is NOT in today's issue of
Nature as reported by the Boston Globe...it is an Advance Online Publication...available on the Nature website but in a different section.)
Thoughts on the future
Yesterday I went to a seminar on using some fancy flow cytometry software, the humorously named FlowJo. It was kind of useful, but also kind of boring. I mean, there is only so much that you can get out of a two hour seminar where someone demonstrates how to use software that you've already been using for almost 2 years. I definitely learned some things, but I also had plenty of time to think about random things during the demonstration.
The woman doing the seminar works for the software company and just does these sorts of demos/and hands on training as well as writing up "how to use the software" stuff. (I googled her to figure out that last part.) She also has a PhD in immunology (what I will eventually have). I ended up spending a lot of time in the seminar thinking about what her job was like, how one might decide to get a job like that, what sorts of special qualifications she might need, etc. etc.
You see, there are a lot of different job options with a PhD in the biological sciences. A lot of the time I feel overwhelmed by all of parts of going into academic science and the life of an academic scientist and I am not sure whether I want to do it. I've put some thought into a few different options outside of the academic box as well. Its too early (sort of) to be thinking a lot about this, but it always strikes me when I come across a job that is a little bit off the beaten track of science jobs. Sometimes I come up with plans (I have such plans!) for jobs I don't think actually exist, or I don't know how one would ever get into. The scariest part of all of it is that I know that my advisor can be very narrow-minded about what are appropriate next steps after working here and I can't imagine telling him that I'd do anything other than post-doc in the same field, but whatever. That is a problem I'd face if and when I came to it. Plus, I oscillate about whether or not I want to do the academic science thing a lot. I've been much more positive about the whole idea since I went to Keystone this year. We'll see.
I'm not sure that this post has a point. My head really hurts and I'm tired. Stupid beer.
The flow cytometry fairy
I've been rather productive lab-wise over the past few weeks. Most of the experiments that I have done, planned and/or analyzed involve using a technique called "flow cytometry." This technique involves using a very sophisticated machine (aptly called a flow cytometer) to examine the proteins on the surface of or inside cells which lets you determine what kind of cells they are as well as various things about the cells. This technique works by binding specific fluorescent antibodies to the proteins and then exciting the fluorescent antibodies with lasers and then detecting the emitted fluorescence with special detectors/computers. Scientifically, this is useful because you can look at multiple proteins at the same time and can look at them cell by cell. It is pretty much the major technology used by immunologists. (Non-immunologists who read this might be confused, since they sometimes use flow cytometers for other purposes, mostly for looking at DNA.)
Anyway, the average machine that every lab has can detect the fluorescence of 4 colors (and thus the expression of 4 proteins). Our lab has a 4 of the 4 color machines and also a machine that can detect 18 colors. I have recently been using the 18 color machine (but only doing ~10 colors) for most of my experiments and have been planning many more experiments for use on this machine. The machine itself is really easy to operate, although the analysis afterwards can be somewhat complicated. As I analyzed last week, I had a number of issues and ended up making myself a "to read about" list.
Yesterday I went to a seminar about flow cytometry...theory, issues that can arise and a lot about how you should properly do experiments involving lots of colors. The seminar was very informative but also very worrying, as I was planning to do a risky multicolor experiment yesterday afternoon and had learned about many things that I ought to have included. I was not at all disappointed to learn that one of my buffers had not arrived from the buffer store, meaning that the experiment had to be postponed.
I ended up doing quite a bit of reading and research about the technique during the day yesterday (while setting up other experiments and such.) I found most of the information I was looking for, felt a little better about experiment setup (now planned for tomorrow) and went home from lab around 6:20pm.
When I arrived this morning at 7:50, on my desk I found AN ENTIRE TEXTBOOK about flow cytometry that someone had photocopied and left for me. It seems
extremely useful. I have no idea who might have done it (both because it had to happen between 7:30 pm when other people left and 7:50 am this morning)...I asked the people knowledgeable about flow as well as the people who knew that I was looking up information yesterday-none of them are responsible. I would like to thank someone, but I don't know who. My only explanation is that it was the flow cytometry fairy who photocopied the book and gave it to me.
It's nice to have one of
those kind of days every so often.
It's the end of the world as we know it
Yes, it looks like I'm back. Sorry about that. I was in a funk and then I wasn't, I was busy and then I wasn't etc. etc. etc. And then I wanted to write a really spectacular post to make up for lost time. But whatever...suffice it to say I'm back. And I was not abducted by aliens. And am in the middle of lots of experiments.
However, this seems to be part of a disturbing trend...today, I returned to blogland. Today it is almost 80 in Boston. I posted at the orignial "other place" yesterday and today (on the Lost board). I have been replying to emails that have been waiting for replies for far too long. Last night/today I started planning a dinner party that I am going to host this weekend where I will cook food that is not called "macaroni and cheese" and serve wines paired to the food. And there will be courses. Most shockingly, today I am wearing a skirt (a
very cute white linen skirt at that) to work, even though it is just a normal day and I have no reason to dress up.
I don't know what has gotten in to me. Obviously, this means the world will end imminently. I hereby give you an excuse to quit whatever practical things you are doing and go out and enjoy the fantabulous weather, since it is the last day of the world and all.
:)
Oh....for those of you who wondered, the James Watson/Gilligan bobblehead has the website www.scivon.com on the back...I assume that is where it came from. (Someone gave it to me.) This site is probably not as cool as my favorite science geek site www.giantmicrobes.com (frankly, Syphillis is adorable).
Rosalind Franklin was the woman who contributed to the discovery of the DNA structure. She did the X-ray diffraction studies that gave Watson the idea for the double helix structure. She got no recognition at the time. There was a fourth co-discoverer as well, a man named Maurice Wilkins who
was credited on the paper but who died before the Nobel prize was awarded (Nobels are not given posthumously). James Watson is now notorious for being extremely sexist and generally a tool and those qualities (and the fact that he doesn't hide them at all when he talks) result in his lectures being unbelievably full much more than his science does.
