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tarigwaemirSherman Fairchild, on the Feast of Ste. Jane Frances de Chantal
In case you were wondering why I've been so crazy (I mean, more than usual) for the past few days--if you even noticed at all, that is--I've just been through phase two of the Ordeal of the Primers that began this weekend. I've been waking up at six, coming into work at seven, and leaving at progressively later times (I came back a little past midnight yesterday, to a darkened apartment). That made for a total of seventeen hours at lab in one day alone. This morning I got up at five so I could make it to lab by 6:30. I haven't had a break all week since I worked all weekend, and for the past four or five days, I haven't had more than one meal a day because I couldn't afford any time for lunch. I'm sure that doesn't phase certain lab rats, but I honestly feared for my sanity.
Why this frenzy? I mentioned the massive amounts of PCR I had to do a few days ago, and while I haven't actually finished all ten plates yet, I've managed to complete the first six (which were arguably the most important ones). The CGR interns have a poster session this Friday, which marks the end of the program, although I'm staying until next week. (I also did a poster last year, so this whole process seems rather pointless to me, but oh well, I suppose I need experience presenting work in progress. Or rather, lack of progress.) In order to have something to show on the poster other than the same images that I had last year, I had to conduct all these PCRs, two 96-well plates at a time. What a farce! On Monday, Operon called me to inform me that there had been an error and that they were resending seven of the ten primer plates. You can imagine my horror. Luckily I don't think there was a problem with the sequences themselves because I checked my PCR products from Sunday's gels, and they are all of the right length. (Not to mention, it's pretty unlikely to have so many bands show up if the primers were all incorrect.) Nonetheless, I decided to wait for the new shipment before continuing with the PCRs. In retrospect, perhaps that was a mistake. I ran out of foil seals for the plates and ran around begging from the other labs to see if they had any extra. It also took me forever to finish labeling the other 300-something Eppendorf tubes (in which I made up the working concentrations). I had already started to panic during the weekend when I realized exactly how complicated the process was, but by this point I was utterly numb. The number of inane things that were going through my brain in this weakened and defenseless state...uh, let's not think about that.
Wednesday morning arrived, and I still hadn't done any more PCRs other than the first two plates I completed during the weekend. I spent all morning carefully transferring from the plates to the tubes (muttering to myself "H1 to A10" all the while, as if I were trying to play four games of Battleship at once). Then I spent all afternoon setting up the PCR reactions, which wasn't so bad since I tried to be smart this time and had already aliquoted the DNA into the plate in advance the day before. Nonetheless, transferring 192 primers, 1 μL at a time, into a total of four plates is an absolute headache, especially when you can't mix anything up and everything must be in the right configuration. I was definitely functioning oddly; people kept asking me if I was all right although for all I knew, there was absolutely no expression on my face. (Maybe that was why.) I barely registered anything that people said to me though. I was in a state where all other mental faculties were shut off. I ran two huge gels at a time, and at 7:00 PM, when I photographed the first set, I could have cried: there were nearly no bands! In despair, I loaded the next set of gels and sat at my computer to begin designing the poster, which had to be ready for printing at 11:00 AM the next day (i.e. this morning). Everyone I knew had already begun their posters days before; I was the only one who had straggled for so long in an effort to finish experiments at the last minute. By this point, I had gone past mere insanity. I didn't eat anything that day until my fellow intern came back with some eggplant parmesan she'd picked up for me at a store. I think I'll adore reheated eggplant parmesan for the rest of my life.
At about 10:30 PM, I went and photographed my second set of gels, and to my complete shock and delight, there were bands. It worked even better than my first two gels from the weekend. I had uploaded more PCR product in the gels, hoping that it would make a difference, and it did. I could have cried (again), but in absolute joy. Oh God, it was all worth it, everything, the stress, the pain, the anxiety, the horror of it all--everything, just for that moment when I saw the gel on the screen. Something went right. To be honest, I'd been wondering if I'd be able to handle grad school when I was brought so low so easily (you must realize, I was not normal--if I ever am normal--for the past few days; if I even sounded at all normal, it was only very good acting). Anyway, now I know I can because I would go through that all over again if it meant that I could be that happy at the end. I worked some more on my poster, but Mother kept calling, and I was too drained to really do more than stare numbly at the screen. (I still wrote a drabble though. I'm awfully stubborn about my commitments sometime, aren't I? Actually, I thought it out while setting up the PCR reactions. No wonder the past few drabbles have been a little...odd.) Eventually I decided to call it a night and went home.
But of course the poster still needed to be finished (Hah! Finished, as if it were at all started), and so I came in ridiculously early this morning (saw the sunrise on my way to lab) and finished my poster at 10:57 on the dot. You know, it's a good thing I spent so much time in high school procrastinating on Adobe Photoshop; otherwise I never would have managed it. I mean, Illustrator (which is what we use to make posters) has a completely different system of shortcuts that confuse me to no end, but I could adjust relatively quickly. And now my poster is printed out beautifullly and sitting in front of me right at this moment. Yay! I, er, still have a lot of stuff to do (including more PCR reactions, believe it or not) but I think I'm going to call it an early day.
I finished Sputnik Sweetheart at lunch, while eating one of the free Italian ices they gave out at the Bauer Café today. Finally. I had reached the turning point in the novel just when this whole ordeal began, and in the moments when I could think coherently, I really, really wanted to just sit in a warm armchair and finish it. Will share thoughts later, either here or at the blog.
It's just occurred to me that I have no idea what to write for today's![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
31_days theme. Life is back to normal.
Yours &c.
Post-script: Senpai are taking us out for drinks after Daera's MCAT this Saturday. For the first time in my life, I am in the mood to get drunk. O_O Yes, you may all be shocked and horrified, beginning...now. Although we did promise to save getting drunk for Alumni Weekend. For the record, stress about school, about exams, etc., is nothing like stress over experiments. They're just not comparable. It's not the same mentality at all.
Post-post-script: In a misguided use of time this past weekend, I looked at some of my old journal entries, way back in 2002 when I first got my LJ. (That was back in the days of invite codes, you know.) Mostly because I wanted to look up what I wrote about Camus, and wow, I sound so...immature. What was up with my polyglot pretensions?! The entries one summer later are a bit more bearable. How did I change so quickly in the course of a year? More on this later.
In case you were wondering why I've been so crazy (I mean, more than usual) for the past few days--if you even noticed at all, that is--I've just been through phase two of the Ordeal of the Primers that began this weekend. I've been waking up at six, coming into work at seven, and leaving at progressively later times (I came back a little past midnight yesterday, to a darkened apartment). That made for a total of seventeen hours at lab in one day alone. This morning I got up at five so I could make it to lab by 6:30. I haven't had a break all week since I worked all weekend, and for the past four or five days, I haven't had more than one meal a day because I couldn't afford any time for lunch. I'm sure that doesn't phase certain lab rats, but I honestly feared for my sanity.
Why this frenzy? I mentioned the massive amounts of PCR I had to do a few days ago, and while I haven't actually finished all ten plates yet, I've managed to complete the first six (which were arguably the most important ones). The CGR interns have a poster session this Friday, which marks the end of the program, although I'm staying until next week. (I also did a poster last year, so this whole process seems rather pointless to me, but oh well, I suppose I need experience presenting work in progress. Or rather, lack of progress.) In order to have something to show on the poster other than the same images that I had last year, I had to conduct all these PCRs, two 96-well plates at a time. What a farce! On Monday, Operon called me to inform me that there had been an error and that they were resending seven of the ten primer plates. You can imagine my horror. Luckily I don't think there was a problem with the sequences themselves because I checked my PCR products from Sunday's gels, and they are all of the right length. (Not to mention, it's pretty unlikely to have so many bands show up if the primers were all incorrect.) Nonetheless, I decided to wait for the new shipment before continuing with the PCRs. In retrospect, perhaps that was a mistake. I ran out of foil seals for the plates and ran around begging from the other labs to see if they had any extra. It also took me forever to finish labeling the other 300-something Eppendorf tubes (in which I made up the working concentrations). I had already started to panic during the weekend when I realized exactly how complicated the process was, but by this point I was utterly numb. The number of inane things that were going through my brain in this weakened and defenseless state...uh, let's not think about that.
Wednesday morning arrived, and I still hadn't done any more PCRs other than the first two plates I completed during the weekend. I spent all morning carefully transferring from the plates to the tubes (muttering to myself "H1 to A10" all the while, as if I were trying to play four games of Battleship at once). Then I spent all afternoon setting up the PCR reactions, which wasn't so bad since I tried to be smart this time and had already aliquoted the DNA into the plate in advance the day before. Nonetheless, transferring 192 primers, 1 μL at a time, into a total of four plates is an absolute headache, especially when you can't mix anything up and everything must be in the right configuration. I was definitely functioning oddly; people kept asking me if I was all right although for all I knew, there was absolutely no expression on my face. (Maybe that was why.) I barely registered anything that people said to me though. I was in a state where all other mental faculties were shut off. I ran two huge gels at a time, and at 7:00 PM, when I photographed the first set, I could have cried: there were nearly no bands! In despair, I loaded the next set of gels and sat at my computer to begin designing the poster, which had to be ready for printing at 11:00 AM the next day (i.e. this morning). Everyone I knew had already begun their posters days before; I was the only one who had straggled for so long in an effort to finish experiments at the last minute. By this point, I had gone past mere insanity. I didn't eat anything that day until my fellow intern came back with some eggplant parmesan she'd picked up for me at a store. I think I'll adore reheated eggplant parmesan for the rest of my life.
At about 10:30 PM, I went and photographed my second set of gels, and to my complete shock and delight, there were bands. It worked even better than my first two gels from the weekend. I had uploaded more PCR product in the gels, hoping that it would make a difference, and it did. I could have cried (again), but in absolute joy. Oh God, it was all worth it, everything, the stress, the pain, the anxiety, the horror of it all--everything, just for that moment when I saw the gel on the screen. Something went right. To be honest, I'd been wondering if I'd be able to handle grad school when I was brought so low so easily (you must realize, I was not normal--if I ever am normal--for the past few days; if I even sounded at all normal, it was only very good acting). Anyway, now I know I can because I would go through that all over again if it meant that I could be that happy at the end. I worked some more on my poster, but Mother kept calling, and I was too drained to really do more than stare numbly at the screen. (I still wrote a drabble though. I'm awfully stubborn about my commitments sometime, aren't I? Actually, I thought it out while setting up the PCR reactions. No wonder the past few drabbles have been a little...odd.) Eventually I decided to call it a night and went home.
But of course the poster still needed to be finished (Hah! Finished, as if it were at all started), and so I came in ridiculously early this morning (saw the sunrise on my way to lab) and finished my poster at 10:57 on the dot. You know, it's a good thing I spent so much time in high school procrastinating on Adobe Photoshop; otherwise I never would have managed it. I mean, Illustrator (which is what we use to make posters) has a completely different system of shortcuts that confuse me to no end, but I could adjust relatively quickly. And now my poster is printed out beautifullly and sitting in front of me right at this moment. Yay! I, er, still have a lot of stuff to do (including more PCR reactions, believe it or not) but I think I'm going to call it an early day.
I finished Sputnik Sweetheart at lunch, while eating one of the free Italian ices they gave out at the Bauer Café today. Finally. I had reached the turning point in the novel just when this whole ordeal began, and in the moments when I could think coherently, I really, really wanted to just sit in a warm armchair and finish it. Will share thoughts later, either here or at the blog.
It's just occurred to me that I have no idea what to write for today's
31_days theme. Life is back to normal.Yours &c.
Post-script: Senpai are taking us out for drinks after Daera's MCAT this Saturday. For the first time in my life, I am in the mood to get drunk. O_O Yes, you may all be shocked and horrified, beginning...now. Although we did promise to save getting drunk for Alumni Weekend. For the record, stress about school, about exams, etc., is nothing like stress over experiments. They're just not comparable. It's not the same mentality at all.
Post-post-script: In a misguided use of time this past weekend, I looked at some of my old journal entries, way back in 2002 when I first got my LJ. (That was back in the days of invite codes, you know.) Mostly because I wanted to look up what I wrote about Camus, and wow, I sound so...immature. What was up with my polyglot pretensions?! The entries one summer later are a bit more bearable. How did I change so quickly in the course of a year? More on this later.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 06:57 pm (UTC)I doubt this will be really HELP, but it's full of love and Walter spoilers. Someday I will write a slightly more cheerful one, I promise.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lazulisong/514263.html
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 07:07 pm (UTC)Also, gels hate everyone. *nods wisely* One day I should tell you about the six SDS gels I ruined within the same hour.
*hugs again* Welcome back to the world of the not benchwork. =)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 09:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 10:11 pm (UTC)I think I've also made every possible mistake with agarose and protein gels by now (including the *really* stupid ones! you have to see it to believe it!), so if you ever need to know why that gel looks so crazy ... uhh ... I did it first. ^_-
(And today, my FACS cells looked like crap. Sigh. Today is also my second-to-last day in this lab. -_-;;)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 12:08 am (UTC)drinkity drinkity driiiink!
;)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 01:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 03:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 07:16 am (UTC)