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.