Still Treading Water

Whew! It’s sure been a while, hasn’t it? Here I am addressing how I can’t remember to put on my pants in the morning and how I’m being flooded out of my apartment… and then I don’t update for three weeks. That’s just not nice of me, and I apologize. It’s not that I haven’t had the intent to blog during that time… just that usually by the time I got back from the lab, spent a few hours screaming on the phone to someone about the continual state of disrepair of my apartment, and wasted time sitting around scowling at the thought of having to spend yet another night uncomfortably squashed attempting to sleep on the couch, I just ran out of time. But, I am happy to report, that Sunday night was the first night I was able to sleep in my own bed, which was in my own room, for which I shell out a mere $900/month as my half of the rent despite the fact that my room was uninhabitable for thirteen days. It was a rough two weeks of fighting with the apartment complex, calling other apartments in the area begging to see if they had open apartments so we could just call it quits here and move, and I will confess to one mini-breakdown after I was promised work would be completed (and nothing had been done) in which I called the voicemail of the apartment, left a very long and winded message, and then just sat down in the middle of the still wet and mildewy carpet and just cried. I am glad to report, however, that after thirteen consecutive nights on a couch, I returned home for a few days for Passover, and came back on Sunday to a newly plastered, newly painted ceiling over my newly steam-cleaned only slightly smelling like mildew carpeting. Of course, I also returned to find water dripping out of one of the kitchen cabinets, which, coincidentally, was a result of a broken pipe three apartments above me. I just can’t get a break, can I? Next time around, I’m moving into the penthouse suite – the upstairs plumbing has not been kind to me.

So now, after my brief but necessary Passover seder break, we’ve reached the home stretch. Two papers (epidemiology, pharmacology), one take home slide identification final (pathology), and two in-class finals (cell biology, epidemiology) to compete by May 3^rd… and then first year is officially over! Sadly, first I have to finish everything and ensure a B average in all my classes which I am ashamed to admit is worrying me a tad, as I can’t remember anything that I study for cell biology (as far as the neurological problems are concerned, I’ve become very buddy-buddy with the neurologist and his staff as I have had about 4 liters of blood drawn on multiple occasions for testing, but so far nothing has been identified… and I’ve been quadruple checking to ensure that I am properly dressed before leaving each morning). I’m really looking forward to the end of classes though, because it means I’ll get to be in the lab full time and get to really move forward with my project. In other exciting (at least for me) news, last week in my first attempt, I successfully cloned the full-length gene on which I am working (see? I really am learning new things from graduate school!), tomorrow I get to learn insect cell culture from the post-doc who will be leaving for maternity leave so that I can help take over the RHA production while she is gone, and once finals are over I get to try my hand at PCR cloning. Then, once July rolls around, I’m being shipped out to the National Cancer Institute for a two-month rotation to learn molecular pharmacology laboratory techniques so I can tie in some pharmacology work with my thesis project. And just think – being in the lab full-time this summer means even more opportunities for me to screw up experiments and break expensive laboratory equipment, which means more disastrously humorous events about which to blog! But until then, I have two long weeks of writing, studying (and attempting to retain the knowledge that I attempt to learn with a mind like a sieve), laboratory-ing, not drowning in the multiple floods that continue to spring up in the apartment, and hopefully remembering to wear my pants.