New Years Meme

Okay okay okay, I've been tagged 4 times already, so I guess I better get to this...
Here's to a happy and healthy 2008 for everyone.

1. Will you be looking for a new job?
No. I'll continue to slave away as a Ph.D. student for several more years before "job" finds its way into my vocabulary.

2. Will you be looking for a new relationship?
Just the change in relationship from fiance to husband.

3. New house?
I hope not. If the answer to this becomes yes, then it means that the fiance will be doing BOTH his intern year AND radiology residency outside of DC and we'll be living apart even longer than expected and I can't afford to stay here and pay the full rent by myself. :( As it stands now, he should be staying here for intern year, and then heading elsewhere for residency, meaning we'll only be living apart 2-ish years post-marriage.

4. What will you do differently in 08?
I'd like to actually make some progress in the lab and maybe finally purify the protein that I've been slaving over for 23 months.

5. New Years resolution?
I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions... if I see something that I need to change about myself, I change it then and there rather than waiting for the calendar to change. That said, I'm currently working on the following:
a) Returning to my pre-back injury gym regime -- alternating days between the elliptical and running or lifting and stretching. I can't make it through 45 mins on the elliptical without a vicodin, but my doctor continues to insist that I don't need to go to physical therapy. I'm trying to learn to just deal with the pain and see if my body can adapt.
b) Drinking 8 glasses of some kind of liquid per day. Due to meds I was on as a child, my liquid intake was severely restricted, and my body has completely adapted to not needing more than 1-2 glasses of water per day. While I'm fine and suffer no side-effects of dehydration, it can't be great for me, so I'm trying to change. But man, having to pee every 2 hours is a PAIN. I don't know how you people deal.
c) Cutting back on spending once I pick up a few things in post-New Years sales. My spending has gotten out of control, though I am still paying off the AmEx in full each month, so it certainly has not been detrimental. We stopped by the jewelers when we were in Philly last and the wedding bands look like they will total a bit over $5K (I'm paying for both) and there is a honeymoon coming up, so this should inspire me to save a bit more.

6. What will you not be doing in 08?
Hopefully I will not be refilling any vicodin or percocet prescriptions!

7. Any trips planned?
Honeymoon. Location TBD but it is looking like either Tahiti or the Mediterranean. Probably Tahiti, if the fiance gets his act together and talks to a travel agent (seriously, I give him TWO THINGS to do for the entire wedding and neither has been done).

8. Wedding plans?
Several, involving both being a bride and being a bridesmaid.

9. Major thing on your calendar?
My fiance's graduation from medical school and then exactly one week later, our wedding. And then he will make me introduce him to everyone as "My husband, the doctor."

10. What can’t you wait for?
I can't wait to successfully purify the pain in the ass protein that has made my life miserable.

11. What would you like to see happen differently?
See above. Protein purification.

12. What about yourself will you be changing?
Potentially my last name, but hopefully not. We still "argue" on a regular basis about that -- I don't want to change my name, he wants me to change. I've agreed to hyphenate, but that's just not good enough for him.

13. What happened in 07 that you didn’t think would ever happen?
We got a new purification system in the lab! And I passed comps! But I guess I thought those would both happen, eventually.

14. Will you be nicer to the people you care about?
I'll try.

15. Will you dress differently this year than you did in 07?
If my two lost lab coats don't somehow make their way back to the lab, I'll probably wind up dressing more casually so that I don't ruin my nice skirts and sweaters with all the crap in the lab. I want my lab coats back, damnit.

16. Will you start or quit drinking?
I drink probably six times a year. That will probably increase slightly from spending 2 weeks laying on a tropical beach with drinks containing little umbrellas.

17. Will you better your relationship with your family?
I'm going to go with a giant PROBABLY NOT since it will be a miracle if my mother and I are both still alive by the time of the wedding. She is the #1 reason why I kind of deep down regret that I am getting married -- frankly, I'd rather spend the rest of my life single and miserable then have to put up with my Momzilla.

18. Will you do charity work?
I would if I had time, but I am often in lab 7 days a week. Instead, I just donate money to charity.

19. Will you go to bars?
A few here and there, but I'm not really a bar person.

20. Will you be nice to people you don’t know?
Depends if they are nice to me.

21. Do you expect 08 to be a good year for you?
I hope so.

22. How much did you change from this time last year till now?
I've become much more bitter and cynical. Thank you, graduate school.

23. Do you plan on having a child?
No no no no no no no no no. Regardless of how many times my future mother-in-law comments on how she cannot wait for grandchildren, there will be NO CHILDREN until I am at least 30, and I am going to immensely enjoy the next 6 child-free years of my life.

24. Will you still be friends with the same people you are friends with now?
I can't think of any friends of whom I am actively trying to demote to non-friend status.

25. Major lifestyle changes?
I'll be acquiring a husband.

26. Will you be moving?
Nope. I'll be in DC until I finish my Ph.D. I'm guessing around 3.5 more years, but I'm hoping to shave some time off of that, since obviously it will be less than ideal living several hundred miles apart from my husband.

27. What will you make sure doesn’t happen in 08 that happened in 07?
??? I don't think I can control any of the bad things that happened in 2007 to ensure they do not repeat themselves. I'd like to say that I can make sure the Steelers don't lose the league rushing RB 2 weeks before the playoffs to a broken leg, but I can't control these major annoyances.

28. What are your New Years Eve plans?
I've been living in DC 7 years now and I'm excited that this will be my first NYE in DC. We'll be partying with the college friends.

29. Will you have someone to kiss at midnight?
My fiance will be at the same party, but we never kiss at midnight. He always has single friends around and doesn't want to seem to be rubbing it in their face that they are single and he is not. Come to think of it, I've never gotten a kiss at midnight, despite having been in a relationship for something like 10 New Years Eves.

30. One wish for 08?
Truthfully? That my fiance winds up matching here for residency so we don't have to live apart at all. But that's not what he wants, so I can't REALLY wish that for him. Maybe I should wish to learn to become less selfish. I guess my real wish is that things take a turn for the better in lab -- I wish that my experiments all work so I can expedite the graduate school process. Or, you know, so that as a 3rd year graduate student I can finally get ONE FREAKING EXPERIMENT to give me some sort of positive result.

Thesis Committee Help!

I'm at the point where I've started putting together my thesis proposal and forming a thesis committee. Technically speaking, this is required to be complete within one year of completing comps. One year would be the second week of January... but while this seems like I'm waiting until the last minute, I'm actually the first student of my year to actually start to formally put together my committee (let's just say that the program let's this year deadline slip unnoticed). My background is complete, I have my big-picture general hypotheses written, and three main aims with multiple sub-aims. My PI/adviser said today that I have roughly 140% of a thesis on paper, meaning that I have more theoretical aims than I will need to complete, but we both think this is a positive since it's easier to cut out part of a project than add to it.
At this university, thesis committees consist of 5 individuals: the adviser, 3 other internal members (one of whom must serve on the program oversight committee), and one outside member. I know who my ideal internal members would be, but my adviser is the only one on the oversight committee and he doesn't count since he is my adviser. Unfortunately, this means that I have to eliminate a potentially very useful committee member to make room for another potentially less-useful member. As far as my outside member, I'm going to wait and see what direction my experiments take over the next year before I decide if I am pursuing a crystallography direction and thus would want a crystallographer, or if I am pursuing a helicase direction and thus would want an enzymologist. My PI had great suggestions for one of each, both within driving distance, so I am optimistic for finding a suitable outside committee member.
That said, I now need to formally ask the internal members to serve on my committee. Female Science Professor's recent post on seeking advisors has made me think about the best way to ask these individuals. After all, there is really little benefit for agreeing to serve on someone's thesis committee -- published papers will go under my PI's lab, not theirs, it's unlikely that (with the exception of one of my hopeful committee members) I will be doing major collaborations with them, and it's a lot of time and effort on their behalf. To add to that, my project is way out in left field in comparison with everyone else in my program. Almost all the Ph.D. students are studying cell signaling, mainly in breast or prostate cancer. As you can see from my above comments on crystallization or enzymology, my project has nothing in common with signaling or cell/molecular biology in general -- I may as well transfer to the biochemistry department at this point. Additionally, my project is really trying something new and unique that applies to the entire field of studying disordered proteins, much more so than just studying the particular forms of pediatric cancer studied by my lab. That said, I am super excited about the project, because it has the potential to wind up being something completely novel within biochemistry and widely applicable to the field of disordered proteins as a whole. I want to express this interest and excitement to the potential thesis committee members as a way to encourage them to agree to serve on my committee; while it may be more work on their behalf since this isn't a topic they see everyday, scientists should be excited by the new and unexpected, right? Especially when the new and unexpected is coming from a graduate student!
I asked a few older students how they formed a thesis committee, and most said they just sent an email basically saying "Will you serve on my committee?" My plan at the moment is to send a brief but well-written email stating why I think they would be a good fit for my committee (i.e., their involvement with biochemistry, their tie to the small molecular inhibitor side of my project, etc,), how much I value their opinions (particularly from those from whom I have already seeked advise), and attach a brief summary of my thesis proposal -- three paragraphs on background, my hypotheses, and the general aims and sub-aims, but without the proposed experiments. It totals 2 pages, and a significant chunk is in outline format. I don't want to send too much to read, but I want to show that I have put a lot of thought into the project thus far, and I am not blindly asking them to serve on a committee without a strong idea of the direction in which I want to take my research.
For those who read this blog who are faculty members, I'm hoping you can provide me with some suggestions as to the best way to ask these committee members. What impresses or disappoints you in regards to being asked to serve on a committee? I know it is a LOT of work for faculty members, and I really want to assemble the best possible thesis committee that I can.

IT'S HERE!!

Two giant crates were delivered to the lab today containing the new purification system.
YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!!
Happy Holidays to me!

(Frankly, at this point, I don't even care if I get to use the new system, even though I should kind of get priority over most people in the lab since I do the most purification with the most difficult proteins. I'll be thrilled just to get the old AKTAprime all to myself... no more having to sign up for purification 2 weeks in advance, or coming in at 3am to run columns... no more having my experiments pushed back because people forgot to watch the system and it leaked and they needed to start over from the beginning... no more having to track down people who left their columns on the machine overnight or forgot to flush out the system and clogged part of the tubing... it will be mine, ALL MINE!!!)

I'm a Two-Bit Tramp!

My fiance's mother found this and passed it along as her "suggestion" for the wording on our wedding invitation as a joke (or so she claims). My fiance finds this absolutely hysterical, and has taken to calling me two-bit. I'm continuing to remind him that it is not too late for me to call off the wedding, sell the ring on ebay, and use the money to take a nice long vacation someplace tropical with my best friend (any location preference, Mark?).


Also, we recently received word that a private donor will be giving our lab $75,000 for the purchase of a new protein purification system. I think I may have shed a tear of joy upon hearing the news. What does it say about my life that just the mere news that we will be getting a new purification system sometime in the upcoming months ranks among the top three events of my year, immediately behind passing comprehensive exams and getting engaged?

Julie vs. Laboratory Equipment, Battle #19

As you may recall, I have had really bad luck with centrifuges in the past. You would think that by third year, I would have figured out this simple piece of laboratory equipment. But alas.... no.
At some point over the summer, the really large old centrifuge in the freezer room across the hall turned into a really large, really expensive, new centrifuge across the hall that happens to play music at the end of each round (My Bonnie, to be precise).
I happen to be mass-producing bacteria at the moment since I am on purification attempt #21,943 (at least) and am going through my bacterial pellets at an alarmingly high rate. I was spinning down bacteria all evening yesterday with no problems whatsoever, and had the last batch to spin down this morning. Samples in, set centrifuge, push start, come back 15 minutes later and... rotor lid is stuck on tight. Three wrenches and a jar of motor oil later... rotor lid is still stuck on tight, and there is no way my samples are coming out, short of sawing through the gazillion dollar rotor.

Would now be an appropriate time to give the centrifuge one good, swift kick and just altogether quit?

Halloween Hangover

3,000 miles away, my PI is still ruining controlling my life. This week happens to be one of the rare times when both PIs (we’re one of those dual-investigator laboratories) are out of town at a conference in Seattle. And you know what that means – when Mom and Dad are away, the kids will play! (Although both PIs are male, so while we use the previous phrase frequently, we have yet to establish which is Mom and which is Dad). This event most fortuitously occurred during the end of October simultaneously with the traditional Medical Center Graduate Student Organization open-bar happy hour event. Hmm… no boss, and hours upon hours of free booze. A graduate student’s dream, yes?

With all the stars in perfect alignment, we took this as a giant green light to drink our little hearts out. The night was going really quite well up until the bartender gave us a round of random shots which happened to contain (unbeknownst to me) a new grape vodka. For starters, grape and booze is a bad, bad mix indeed (seriously, it tasted like cough syrup, which is not what I want when I'm out at a bar), but I also happen to have a most unfortunate allergy to artificial grape flavoring, which rapidly ended my night of free drinks.

I made it home a bit before 2am and climbed into bed with the smug satisfaction that there would be no alarm going off in the morning. We took bets on who would be the first to make it to lab the next day, but were quite positive that nobody would be strolling in before noon.

Most unfortunately for me, my PI is either capable of extraordinary telekinesis, or has implanted some kind of guilt-ridden microchip into my brain, because I was in lab by 9:30am. 3,000 miles away, and my PI still has the ability to physically drag me into the lab, even with a hangover. I believe this would be the exact definition of the term whipped, as he now seems to exert complete control over my life, even when not around.

In other news, I also went trick-or-treating yesterday for the first time in 10+ years. Sadly, rather than costumes and candy, I was forced to go lab to lab in my laboratory coat begging for DI water (perhaps a sign that my life has reached a new low?), as the building DI water system went down and I needed to make fresh buffers for a purification run. The confused stares I received while knocking on doors and calling out “trick or treat” were mildly entertaining, however.

Latest Data

I, like every other graduate student on the planet, go through periods of ups and downs with my advisor. I'm not going to get into specifics, but it is definitely a love-hate relationship.
I finished up some drug toxicity studies that I've been working on with some new drugs designed by a collaborator. They're not particularly relevant to what I'm doing, but lately I seem to be the go-to girl for any kind of cell assay (and we all know how much I LOVE copious amounts of cell culture - groan).
I finished up the latest assays on Monday, organized the data and made all the graphs today, and sent an e-mail off to my PI this afternoon with all the information. His reply e-mail? "Groovey!" [sic]
It makes me feel like such a bad person. I mean seriously, how could you possibly sometimes hate someone who responds to new data with the word groovy? Not a success, not a failure... just groovy. But someone tell me, since I'm not quite sure -- is groovy data publication-worthy?

Free Gift!

ScienceWoman is sending me something, so in return, I'll be sending something to 5 of you!

By the end of the calendar year, I will send a tangible, physical gift to each of the first five people to comment here. The catch? Each person must make the same offer on her/his blog.

If you'd like a little something from me (sorry, the afghan is not up for grabs -- it was made specifically as a gift for someone), leave a comment and post this message on your own blog. :)

Random Ramblings

My absence can be explained by the fact that if I can't say anything nice, I'm not going to say anything at all.... or, the more modernized version... if you don't particularly go out of your way to hide your identity, it is probably a wise idea to refrain from bitching / moaning / complaining / freely speaking your opinions in a public forum which may be discovered by the individuals superior to you about whom you are doing the bitching / moaning / complaining / freely speaking. That said, you can probably gather some idea of how my time in the lab has been lately. However, things seem to be (temporarily) improving and maybe, when I hear back from collaborators and finish running a few preliminary cell studies, there is an actual concrete thesis project looming in the future...

In the meantime, today I completed two milestones.

1) I (finally) finished an afghan I have been working on for the past 21-ish months. It's not that I'm the world's slowest crocheter, it's just, as you can imagine, there is not a lot of free time in my life to sit around and crochet. The pro: it's always nice to finish up a big project. The con: now I have no excuse to not focus on crocheting the kippot/yarmulkes for the wedding. Don't even ask how I had this horrendous task dumped upon me for my own wedding, but now I have to make 90 of these suckers before the wedding and I am not happy about it.

sneak peek of now-completed afghan

2) I (finally) used my (not-so-new) KitchenAid stand mixer! I was super excited to receive it as an engagement gift back in June, but despite cooking dinner every night and baking regularly, never actually got around to using it. Generally, I mix by hand if I can (fewer dishes to wash) and if a mixer is called for, I just pull out the hand mixer (easier to pull out, plus I can use it in any size bowl). We're going to a potluck dinner tonight, and I'm trying my hand at two new recipes -- a mint chocolate cake and spanakopita. With all the spinach, the spanakopita was looking a little thick for my hand mixer, so I gave the stand mixer a whirl. I especially love that I can walk away for a moment and it keeps right on mixing! I promised that I would bring in chocolate chip pudding pumpkin bread (another new recipe I am itching to try) to our lab meeting on Monday morning, so maybe the stand mixer will make another appearance this weekend....

Considering that none of my projects in the lab ever wrap up nicely, it's nice to have something in my life which gives me the satisfaction of a job well done...

Insect Encounter, Part 2

I think I must accidentally be dragging home chemicals from the lab on the soles of my shoes, and inadvertently breeding mutant insects in the apartment. First the giant centipedes, and now the largest cricket I have ever seen just sauntered across my living room floor. I am no wimpy girly-girl -- I spent four summers working in the middle of the woods living in a tent at a summer camp teaching riding lessons, and I have the lyme disease to prove it. Insects, spiders, snakes, etc., do not bother me, but I don't want them in my home so I have no problem squashing them. However, considering I have yet to heal from my last bug-killing incident, I'm a bit apprehensive to start chasing a super-sized hopping cricket around the apartment. It seems like the least I should do is wean myself off the vicodin before re-injuring myself and requiring a refill.
Anyone want to come play my exterminator??

Snip Snip

As I updated the header to the blog to reflect me with my new shorter hair, I realized that I never posted the before and after pictures, as promised. While every other girl I know has decided to grow out her hair before getting married, I took the opposite route and cut off 11" to donate to Locks of Love.

This "before" picture is from back in January, so when my hair was cut in June, it was actually about 3.5" longer than it is in this picture (my hair grows fairly quickly). In other words, it was pretty long. Yes, that is Dr. Scott, the hubby-to-be, pictured with me, and the picture is actually taken from where our wedding ceremony will be held, overlooking center city Philadelphia.


The "after" picture is from our engagement party, and I am with two of my best friends who are serving as ushers in the wedding (asking them to be bridesmaids and forcing them into dresses just somehow didn't seem right!). This is the shortest my hair has been in over 10 years -- I still haven't adjusted to it. I suppose both these pictures are false representations of my daily life, since my hair is actually curly when not beaten down with a flat iron.

What happens in Vegas... happens without me

At this precise point in time, I should be somewhere flying over the mid-west, en route to Fabulous Las Vegas.
Instead, I am lying flat on my back on my couch in my apartment. DAMN YOU, CENTIPEDE!

Needless to say, I am totally bummed. I have been looking forward to this trip all summer. If anyone happens to actually be able to walk out their front door and finds themselves in Vegas, you are certainly welcome to my Saturday night tickets to Blue Man Group or Sunday night tickets to Cirque du Soleil's Zumanity, as clearly I will not be using either.
Truthfully, I shouldn't be complaining (but that won't stop be from being bitter about missing my trip and losing out on a lot of money on the hotel room, show tickets, etc.) as I am at least able to hobble around bent over, which sure beats crawling on my elbows as a means of transportation. My mother came down to D.C. to help out, and brought her supply of vicodin and percoset from her rotator cuff surgery, which has certainly helped with the pain (since I was unable to skateboard myself down to student health). I am almost acting my age again -- I can actually use the toilet, and I slept on the couch and not the floor last night!
For the first time in ages, I wish I was in the lab. This has been the worst "sick week" ever, since I am mostly immobile, in tons of pain, and not able to sit up to watch TV. Of course, that's not saying much for the lab when it is just one step up from full-body debilitation.

"Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!"

The past 24 hours have been the most unbearable, excruciating 24 hours that I can recall in my entire life. Yesterday morning, while jumping around wildly swinging a shoe attempting to kill a centipede on my ceiling, I managed to pull a muscle wrapped around a nerve in my lower back. I have never experienced such intense pain in my life – immediately as it happened, I crumpled to the ground, writing and screaming in pain. A day later, I am still unable to get off the floor, stuck in the middle of my living room lying on my back, staring at the ceiling and wishing it would just cave in on me and put me out of my misery. I am completely unable to sit up, get my knees under me, stand, move to the couch, or do anything which one is required to do in daily life. Since my fiancé is currently in Philadelphia on an away rotation, I am stuck here on my own. Thankfully, a friend of mine came over yesterday to fetch the Aleve that was in the bathroom cabinet, totally out of my reach, and bring the heating pad, a few blankets, a pillow, my laptop, the remote for the TV, etc., so that I at least don’t die of boredom while I lie here and wait to atrophy. It took me 2 hours just to wiggle on my elbows from the living room to the front door, and to stretch up in excruciating pain to unlock the door to let her in (mind you, I live in a 750 square foot 1 bedroom apartment, so it is about 15 steps from the living room to the front door). Now, on top of everything else, I have such bad rug burn on my elbows, that they are bleeding all over the white carpet every time I try to move!

I am certain it is just a pulled muscle and nothing more serious, as I have complete function in my legs and no numbness whatsoever, just one hell of a pain in my lower back whenever my back moves (and half the time still when it is totally still). Because nearly overdosing on Aleve has done nothing but start to give me an ulcer, my fiancé suggested that I contact student health and see if they would prescribe something over the phone and then I could find a friend to pick up the prescription for me.

As we all know, I loathe student health. I have yet to make it through a visit without being forced to pee in a cup, despite the fact that half my visits to student health are because of problems with ovarian cysts and I couldn’t get pregnant now even if I wanted to do so. I am quite sure that if I make it in for a visit today, they will assume that my back pain is related to pregnancy and send me on my merry way with a bottle of folic acid vitamins.

Last night, I sucked it up and called the student health doctor-on-call pager number. Seven times later, I still hadn’t received a call back. I attempted to sleep on my back, but every time I would try to roll over, I woke up with unbearable pain shooting through my back. As soon as student health opened, I called and asked for a doctor to call me back. This is the conversation that resulted:

Nurse Practitioner: What seems to be the problem?
Julie: I pulled a muscle in my back, and I am incapable of sitting up or moving. I have been
laying on the floor since yesterday morning.
NP: And you are by yourself? You poor thing! You need to get up and walk around to help the
pain.
J: I CAN’T get up. I can’t even sit up. If I try, I get a muscle spasm that pulls me right back
down and leaves me with intense pain.
NP: You need to come in for an appointment, how about 1pm today?
J: I can’t move. I can’t get to student health.
NP: Take a taxi.
J: I can’t move. I can’t get to a taxi.
NP: Just pull your knees under you and stand.
J, attempting: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
NP: Oh dear. You need to come in for an appointment.
J: I am not currently capable. Maybe I will feel better in a few days and I can make it in then.
NP: No, you should come in sooner.
J: The only way I can leave this apartment is on a stretcher.
NP: No, you don’t want to call for an ambulance. If it is just a pulled muscle, the hospital will
take X-rays, not find anything, and send you home. You just need to come to student health
for an evaluation and we can prescribe you pain medicine. I will see you at 1pm.

Needless to say, there is no way I am going to be able to make it out of the apartment by 1pm, considering it took me over an hour this morning just to put on a clean pair of underwear (don’t laugh until you try it, laying on your back, unable to lift your shoulders forward so you can’t use your arms, and can barely move your legs). The only foreseeable way I see of escaping my prison of an apartment is by duct taping myself to a skateboard and pulling myself forward with m arms. Anyone have a skateboard I can borrow for the morning?!

Vacation... all I ever wanted!

Being on vacation reminds me of what it feels like to be happy. Having spent so much time completely miserable in the lab, I had forgotten. The fun, relaxing part of my time away doesn't even start until tomorrow, but it has been blissful thus far. A bad day out of the lab is still significantly better than a good day in the laboratory.
Normally, after a week out of the lab, I would be itching to go back. I think right now I would be quite content with never returning. I'm not sure if this is a testament to the fact that I am drastically overworked and need a month to recover (I haven't taken any time off since 3 days at Thanksgiving -- I refuse to count my 2.5 weeks out of the lab over "winter break" as any sort of a break, since I was studying 12-14 hours/day, every single day, for comprehensive exams), or if it is a sign that I need to run far, far away from the lab and find something else to do with my life.
Thus far over my time away, I have moved to a new apartment (after 6 years of friendship, 4.5 years of dating, and 0.5 years of engagement, my fiance and I finally decided to get with the 21st century and move in together), moved all the excess furniture to his mother's house, cleared out the spare bedroom in his mother's house and converted it into his new room for his away rotations in Philadelphia for most of next year, cut off 11.5 inches of hair for Locks of Love (pictures to come) and have the shortest hair I have had since I was about 10 years old, attended a lovely engagement party thrown by my future mother-in-law, and celebrated my father's retirement from 36 years of running mass transit safety for the Department of Transportation.
Now, I am off to enjoy 4 days at my parent's best friend's lake house, where I will do nothing but sit on the deck and work my way through a case of beer and water ski (although preferably not in that order), followed by 4 days at my fiance's family's shore house in Margate, where I will do nothing but sit on the porch in a vodka gimlet-induced daze, walk miles and miles up and down the boardwalk, and watch other people lose their money in Atlantic City (I will not be participating in the money loosing process, as I have a very spontaneous, very exciting trip to Las Vegas coming up in August).

I think I would be very content to never return to a tissue culture hood again.

It's like Christmas!

It doesn't take much to make us happy around here. We have two new undergrads starting research, and today I dug out a timer for each of them, to which one squealed with glee, "It's just like Christmas!" A few hours later, I too was giddy with my new find in the lab....
Notice that my pipettes are now neatly hanging on the wall. For a year and a half I have been secretly wishing that someone with a pipette stand would quit/graduate/move to another lab so that I could take over the stand. I'm a very tidy individual, and having to throw my pipettes in a drawer just wasn't cutting it (although, mind you, the pipettes were always in the drawer in size order, so I always knew when someone else had been using my things). It turns out these velcro-to-the-wall pipette stands had been in the lab the whole time -- it's amazing what a little bit of cleaning can locate. And please, no making fun of my craptastic Finnpipettes. They are the worst pipettes ever. If you're in charge of pipette purchasing for a lab -- STAY FAR AWAY! I have to calibrate them every single week, and the p2 has to be calibrated every time I use it. They are awful. Now I'm just hoping that someone with the Eppendorf pipettes quits/graduates/moves to another lab so that I can snag myself some actual functional pipettes.

And since I was taking pictures and everyone likes to be nosey and see what goes on in the lives of other people.... a picture of my lab bench. Like I said, I'm a little on the tidy side (minus the 6 coomassie gels which have been waiting to be imaged for the past 2 weeks). And if you notice that everything on my bench is labeled with my name.... it's not that I can't share, it's just that things have a tendency of walking off in this lab, and it's easier to locate them if they have JULIE plastered on the side in blue tape.

Now, if you don't mind, I am going to go admire my new pipette stands a bit more, because after 12.5 hours in the lab, I don't think I can handle doing anything brain-requiring while I wait for my gel to finish running.

I Hate Lab, Episode #2943

Please excuse me while I have a breakdown.

I spent over 9 hours alone in the hood on Friday. I came into the lab a little before 6am to work on my protein purification (the latest tally: Protein 4, Julie 0 -- no matter how many/what type of tags I put on this protein, it WILL NOT PURIFY. It outsmarts every purification bead/column/etc. I am working with the two most stubborn, pain-in-the-ass proteins in all of cancer and I am not happy about it), settle down in the hood around 9am, and stay until a little after 6pm. That's right. The whole lab leaves to go out to lunch, and where am I? Oh right, the hood. PI is out of town so everyone else leaves rolls in after 10am and leaves by 4pm and where am I both before and after they come and go? Oh right, the hood. Seriously, by the end of the day, my ass was numb and my eyes were crossed from sitting there for so long. Have I mentioned that I don't even like cell culture to begin with (hence why my project leans towards biochemistry and medicinal chemistry)?
I should also mention that when my PI dumped all this cell culture on me, he said it would take "a couple of hours to complete." In my book, NINE HOURS is not a "couple." Nine hours is ridiculous, when I'm also working on protein purification and crosslinking projects, plus working with a mathematician on campus to generate a formula to help with the screening of our small molecular inhibitors. Nine hours in the hood to make drug dilutions, split drug stock cells, set up 96-well plates for MTT assays, multiple 12-well plates worth of soft agar studies, and take care of my stock flasks, all which require different drug dilutions. And I'm supposed to do this twice a week for the next month, providing the rest of the lab doesn't riot and stab me to death with pipette tips over the fact that I am basically blocking off entire use of one of the hoods two days a week. (In my PI's defense, I don't think he was being an ass and intentionally lying to get me to do all this work, I think he's just so far removed from bench work that he has NO CONCEPT of how long things actually take. This problem happens a lot. Which is why a 12 hour day for me is now the norm, instead of the exception. Remember that goal I had of not working more than two 12 hour days/week? Hahahahaha.)
5:45am this morning I come in to discover that my cells are almost all contaminated. Mind you, minus the fact that I am left handed which is a GIANT hindrance in cell culture hoods in this lab which are set up for right-handed use (I am always crossing my hand over my plates through my "sterile field" to reach for pipettes, the vortex, and so on), I am always very cautious and aware of what I am doing. I've only ever once, in two years of cell culture, had any sort of contamination, and it was from thawing out a new cell line which someone else had frozen, so chances are that the contamination occurred prior to freezing. We appear to be the only lab in this university that tests for mycoplasma on a bi-weekly basis (or ever, for that matter), and I've never ever had mycoplasma positive cells. Never any fungal infection, no bacterial infections of my passaged cell lines. Maybe this is a sign that asking your graduate students to do nine hours worth of cell culture (with the same cell lines, meaning that most of my cells had to be sitting out for a good 6 or so hours) really isn't a good plan. Maybe, by the time your ass is numb and you have a giant sized headache from staring into a microscope counting cells for 2 hours (because he doesn't believe in the accuracy of the coulter counter so I have to count all my cells by hand/eyeball with the good old hemocytometer which only takes 1342 times longer), you start to get a little sloppy despite your best intentions. Maybe, when you're getting in the lab before 6am, you start to get a little anxious to leave by 6pm, especially when you have to head out of town for a wedding. My reward for doing all the cell culture without complaining is that now I get to sit through an inevitable giant lecture from my PI when he comes in later today and starts poking around my incubator to look at my cells, about how I'm not careful enough and not responsible enough and all I'm doing is wasting money, etc etc.

And people wonder why I am perpetually in such a miserable mood. Blame the cells.

Why I can no longer converse with my family...

A snippet of a recent phone conversation with my mother:

Social Scientist Mother: How was your day?
Disgruntled Julie: It sucked. I had a splitting headache all day and had to spend 5 hours in the hood doing cell culture and I was miserable.
Social Scientist Mother: Why were you in the hood all afternoon?
Disgruntled Julie: I have a lot of cell culture to do. At this rate, I'm going to make it through the 18 gigs of music on my computer before I finish this set of experiments.
Social Scientist Mother: Are you sure you should be listening to music? Don't you think you should be paying attention to your surroundings?
Disgruntled Julie: What? I don't need to listen to the blowers in the hood.
Social Scientist Mother: Blowers? Who are they? Just be careful.
Disgruntled Julie: Be careful of what? I can't get cancer from my cells.
Engineering Father, yelling from the background: A hood is a biological safety cabinet, not southeast DC!

Apparently, for the past several years, my mother has thought that I've been doing my cell culture in the ghetto-hood, not the laboratory-hood. And people wonder why I only talk to my mother every other week or so.

I'm still alive...

...just really, really busy and stretched way too thin. I have been in the lab 39 consecutive days and am averaging 72 hours in the lab per week. Besides, my mother always taught me that if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.... so I don't have anything to say right now about life in the laboratory.
Things should calm down mid-May, once I am finished with classes, finals, departmental data meeting, and have a good head start on my thesis proposal, so hopefully I will be shortly with more adventures to share.

Noah-in-Training

As you may or may not remember, this past April was a rather... shall we say, soggy time in my life, as I was faced with a flooded apartment and then an awful six weeks of waiting for repairs.
Because, apparently, one major apartment flood per year isn't enough, I came home from a weekend in Philadelphia to find this:
Do you see those vertical lines along the bottom of the cabinet and across the top cabinet which is above our sink? That's water, pouring out of my roommate's kitchen cabinets. That's the amount of water pouring out of our kitchen cabinets FOUR HOURS after the plumber came and shut off the water to the apartment above us, so just imagine what it was like when the water was flowing full force. Basically, all the plumber really accomplished was cutting two big holes in our kitchen ceiling:

And, for the record, the water is a nasty shade of yellow and absolutely reeks, to the point that just stepping foot outside of my door-shut bedroom into the main area of the apartment makes me nauseous. Instead of coming back from a whole entire weekend away from the lab feeling refreshed, now I'm just in a sour mood and ridiculously cranky. Seriously, TWO FLOODS in TEN MONTHS is more than I can handle right now. Give me a break. And an ark.

The Engagement

I find it funny that yesterday, Post-Doc commented that: "While I'm sure there will be continued misery in some sense, it has to be different with a ring and an excellent comps performance. Yay for you!" I swear that this lab is a giant happiness vacuum -- regardless of all other positive things in life, being in the lab just leaves me grumpy. I would, therefore, like to clarify that being stuck in the laboratory at 9pm with a splitting headache while waiting for experiments to finish is equally as miserable with or without an engagement ring and with or without the knowledge that I passed comprehensive exams.

Speaking of engagement rings, everyone has been asking me for the story of the engagement and for pictures of the ring. Considering that I spend nights in the lab until past 9pm, I don't have the time right now to personally re-tell the story to each and every person, so I figure if I explain it here, I can just direct those inquiring to this location. So, here goes (the very abbreviated, I'm more concerned with my protein refolding than my upcoming marriage, version):

Let me start out by saying that it wasn't a total surprise -- around November, as we were rapidly approaching our 4 year dating anniversary, we decided to sit down and discuss if we thought we had a definite future together. I know this seems like a funny thing to have to discuss, but staying together means the possibility of living apart for several years, as Scott will graduate medical school in a year and a half and probably head to Philadelphia for his residency, and I will be stuck in D.C. for at least another four years while I finish up my Ph.D. We figured if we made it through 4 years without strangling each other yet, we may as well try for a lifetime... so over "winter break" (i.e. everyone else relaxed while I locked myself in my room studying) he officially asked my parents for permission, and we started doing a little pre-planning (let the arguments with my mother begin!). I had (at Scott's request) been dropping hints about what kind of ring I wanted, and I knew that he had picked it up from the jeweler in mid-January, but I didn't know when or where he would officially propose (or what the ring looked like, as I gave him several ideas for things I liked).

Two weeks ago he finished up his psychiatry rotation and suggested that we go out to dinner to celebrate that night (when I noticed he was dressing up for dinner, I had a pretty good idea of what was coming). We went out to dinner at an Asian restaurant near our undergraduate school where we went on one of our first dates and afterwards walked through campus. Mind you, it was the coldest night of winter to date on this evening, and I was only expecting to go out to dinner, so I was not thoroughly bundled up. As we walked past his car, I knew he was dragging me down to the monuments and had I not known what was coming, I would have certainly protested out of fear of frostbite (meanwhile Scott had planned for the walk and was well prepared in his two pairs of socks.. but didn't bother to hint to me to wear something a tad warmer!). When we were undergrads, we used to walk around the monuments frequently at night, and right before we started dating I introduced him to the FDR memorial, which quickly became his favorite. After walking past the Lincoln and Vietnam memorials, we headed around the Tidal Basin and stopped at a bench across from the Jefferson and near FDR, where Scott stopped, talked a bit about our past, and then in true cheesy style, got down on one knee and asked if I would marry him and make him the happiest man in the District of Columbia (I warned you it was cheesy!). Of course, it was pitch black out so I couldn't even see the ring (had I been wittier, I would have refused to say yes until I saw the diamond) but I also had no desire to keep my hand out in the cold to scope out the new ring anyway. Afterwards, we walked the rest of the way around the Tidal Basin to the FDR where I ducked into the bathroom to check out my new asscher cut ring (which I am sure will start to dissolve the first time I spill acid on myself as per usual).

And now, in all my spare time (HA) I have to plan a wedding. It is perfectly acceptable to walk down the aisle in my white laboratory coat (I will, of course, have it cleaned for the occasion) and do all my registering on Fisher Scientific, right?

More Good News!

Last week an engagement ring, this week the news that...

I PASSED COMPS!!!!!!!

Not only did I pass every single section, but I actually aced most of them, which really surprised me. Apparently, my ability to bullshit long winded essays is better than I thought. I also find it ironic that my answer for the biochem/cell essay was worth of a 100% (by a professor who is generally a tough grader), and out of all the courses I have taken, I definitely did the worst in those.

Now, I can officially be miserable in my thesis lab for the next 5ish years! Time to celebrate by... working on my journal club presentation for lab meeting tonight.

Big News!

Haven't heard about my big, exciting news yet? Check out the new header image for a hint...

Celebration!

I survived. Barely, but all that counts is that I'm still here. Yesterday was manageable, today was deadly. I'm not making any predictions as to whether or not I passed -- if I did, I wouldn't be surprised as I felt fairly confident about most of my answers; if I failed, I also wouldn't be surprised, as I knew my answers weren't in as much detail as they could have been. But now there is no point in dwelling on how I did or what I should have studied differently... there's nothing else that can be done until I find out how I did, sometime within the next few months.

In the meantime, I have more important things to worry about, like trying to cram an entire winter break into three days. Since I spent my whole break studying, I now get a three-day weekend which has to satisfy my entire vacation need for the next 6 months since I probably will not take off another day until June (okay, maybe I'll get to take one day off if I can go home for a Passover seder). My mini-break started off on the right foot -- my boyfriend surprised me with a dozen peach roses (I'm impressed he remembered my favorite rose color) and dinner reservations at Jaleo, out favorite tapas restaurant, to celebrate the fact that I survived comps! (I think I should have been the one to take him out for putting up with me the past few days, but then again I had to put up with him for the entire month when he was studying for his medical boards -- at least I was away from him for most of my study period!)
As for the rest of the weekend, I plan on (hopefully) getting my first decent night of sleep in a month (hopefully sans the comprehensive exam nightmares that have been plaguing me lately), reading something other than Molecular Biology of the Cell or Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology, hopefully finishing up the border on the giant afghan I haven't had time to crochet in months, and watching the re-runs of Grey's Anatomy on abc.com since I've been too busy studying to watch any TV since before Thanksgiving. I think tomorrow I'm also go to go to the pet store to set up a new fish tank and then go back on Monday to buy new fish -- two months ago, I bought a fish for my tank that came with a parasitic infection and it wiped out the whole tank, so it's time to start over. Basically, I will be enjoying a totally SCIENCE-FREE weekend. Since my PI is out west for a conference and apparently has a good possibility of being snowed in on Monday, he canceled the lab meeting so I am going to take the day off like the rest of the world to just relax before I head back and immediately have to start working on my abstract for the poster session coming up next month.

STICK A FORK IN ME BABY, BECAUSE I AM DONE WITH COMPS!!!

12 more hours to cram!!

My day-before-the-start-of-comprehensive exams breakdown pattern:

Denial: Comprehensive exams? What comprehensive exams? I still have a long time to study! January 11th/12th isn't for weeks! Plenty of time to study.
Anger: SCREW YOU, UNIVERSITY, AND YOUR STUPID RIDICULOUS COMPREHENSIVE EXAMS WHICH ARE WAY HARDER THAN OTHER BIOMEDICAL PHD PROGRAMS HERE. AND MY FRIENDS AT OTHER SCHOOLS DON'T EVEN HAVE COMPREHENSIVE EXAMS - THEY JUST HAVE TO WRITE A GRANT PROPOSAL FOR QUALIFICATION AND THEY CAN GET HELP FROM OTHERS AND DON'T HAVE TO MEMORIZE ALL THESE STUPID PATHWAYS. I HATE THIS PROGRAM!.
Bargaining: Dear Biomedical Science Gods -- I promise that if you help me pass this exam, I will spend every weekend for the next 4 years in the laboratory pipetting my fingers to the bone in an attempt to make a new development in the field of oncology. Just please let me pass! I don't care if I do WELL, I just want to pass!
Depression: I can't believe I am going to fail out of this program. What will I ever do with myself? I am a failure. I don't even deserve to be here. Why did I ever think I was smart enough to go to graduate school?
Acceptance: I am fucked.

Tomorrow, I go in for part I of the beating. And then tomorrow evening I drag myself home, wash off the blood, and attempt to regroup to go back for the beating part II on Friday. Wish me luck, because I'm really going to need it.

Sniffle

Things that suck: comprehensive exams.
Things that really suck: comprehensive exams starting in 3 days.
Things that really, unbelievably suck: comprehensive exams starting in 3 days and waking up with a 103 fever and raging sinus headache rendering me totally dysfunctional on the studying front.

Clearly, the powers that be do not want me to get this Ph.D. :'(

I think my only hope now is knowledge osmosis... as I spend the rest of the day miserably curled up in bed trying to sleep, maybe if I put my epidemiology notebook under my head the information will pass through the pillow and into my poor overworked little brain. I didn't realize that figuratively being sick of studying would manifest itself as physical sickness, too.

>:o

It is Saturday.
It is a beautiful 70 degree day in January in Washington, D.C.
I am stuck inside, eyes glazed over staring at my laptop, trying to remember whether flipase or flopase rotates lipids inside-out versus outside-in in the membrane bilayer.

I've learned one thing from all this studying for comprehensive exams: I really don't like science.
New career suggestions, anyone?

Current Panic Advisory: SEVERE

It is after 2am and I am bashing myself in the head with my biochemistry textbook. I practically have to keep poking myself in the eyeball to stay awake. My index finger is literally dripping blood, as it has been snagged in my binder more times than I care to count tonight. My mind is focus solely on attempting to absorb as much information as possible, so I don’t dare dart my eyes off the notes for the three seconds it would take to look at the binder as I snap it shut. I cannot possibly cram one more peptide sequence or drug inhibitory pathway into my brain, and yet I still have all of epidemiology and biostatistics to cover, and I’ve already forgotten all the methods and pharmacology I studied two weeks ago during my miserable winter “break” which consisted of being locked in my room studying for ten hours per day. Studying which, by the way, has proven to be absolutely useless because I can’t even remember important facts like the difference between Bcl-X(L) and Bcl-X(s)… one is part of the pro-life pathway and one is part of the pro-death pathway in apopotosis but I can’t remember which one belongs where.

I have considered, multiple times, weaving all my printed out power points slides together into a noose and just hanging myself. I wonder how many Ph.D. students are sent to the loony bin due to breakdowns while studying for comprehensive exams. Ironically, my boyfriend is currently doing his psychiatry rotation at the moment – perhaps I will wind up paying him a visit. The least he could do is steal me some Xanax or valium, or at least some Ritalin -- I could use a little something on the side to help me focus more on the actual studying and less on what I will do with my life after I fail the comprehensive exams and am forced out of the program, kicking and screaming.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached full out panic mode. And it is not a pretty sight.