"Remember when...?"

It seems pathetic that at 22 years of age, I am starting sentences with “Remember back in the good old days when…”. I’m supposed to have my first job out of college now, slaving away in some menial position all day and living for the weekends, making just enough money to cover rent, food, and the weekend bar bill.

Friday afternoon, sitting in the oncology seminar surrounded by the three other first year PhD girls, I casually asked what everyone’s plans were for the weekend. The resounding answer: studying. We are approaching our third consecutive week with an exam, and every spare moment in which we are not in lab or class is dedicated to reading the 3,000+ page Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology book and studying for our Cellular and Molecular Aspects of the Transformed Cell exam. “Remember when we used to go out on Friday nights?,” reminisced one. “I remember the good old days of not coming home until 2am on Thursday nights,” I chimed in, and was met with “Thursday nights we used to stay out until 3, Fridays until 4, and Saturdays I wouldn’t stumble home until 5.” While I can’t say my average weekend was ever quite that intense, I had quite a lot of late nights out, especially junior year (or late nights in at other people’s apartments, as the case often was, since all my friends were seniors and 22 by then, and I was still the little 20 year old without a fake ID who couldn’t go out). Weekends used to be – dare I say it – fun. Sure, I would get up early the next morning to study and be exhausted, but it was worth it. What happened to the good old days?

Sunday morning I found myself in a position similar to the average Sunday back at GW. Alarm going off at 7am, groggily dragging myself out of bed, dark circles under the eyes after a mere 5 hours of sleep. The difference, however – the lack of a good story from the night before. Sure, I went out Saturday night – and by going out, I mean leaving the apartment for an 8pm trip to Safeway to buy groceries for the week. With the exception of the Safeway trip, the entire evening was spent sitting at my desk studying, reading chapter after chapter on chromosome translocations, epidemiology and etiology of cancer, multitudes of proposed apoptosis pathways, etc. Somewhere around 11pm, I hit that mental saturation point and needed a break, so being the obsessed neat-freak that I am, spent an hour vacuuming and scrubbing clean the kitchen and bathroom, and was back to studying from midnight until a little after two. When the old man moved into the apartment next door and realized he was living next to two early-20s girls, he probably expected loud noise on the weekends. What he probably didn’t expect was for the loud noise to come from a vacuum cleaner, but he probably also didn’t see me walking into the apartment wearing my massive backpack stuffed with biochemistry and immunology texts (before you think I’m a total jerk, he is completely deaf without his hearing aids, so I figured if he was asleep with them out, he wouldn’t hear me vacuuming anyways, plus the walls here are really thick and despite being directly in the flight path to National, we can hardly hear the planes overhead).

And thus it was spent – another exciting weekend home alone, isolated in my room studying. Honestly, I don’t understand why they say that scientists are nerdy and anti-social. I think Einstein nailed it on the head when he said, “Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.” And on that note, it’s back to studying and planning things out for the week in lab, with the occasional nostalgic daydream about the life which I once possessed.