Yeah, I guess I’m doing this thing again. Pardon me while I attempt to remember how to write.

Aaaahhh!!! I am so, so, incredibly miserable… and have been (with bright spots here and there, of course) for several weeks now. The source of all this misery is a journal article entitled “Biomarkers for Cellular Senescence, Aging, and Longevity” which does not, as of this moment, exist. Why on earth should something so inocuous-sounding as the nonexistence of an article cause me such anguish? Well, you see, I’m supposed to have written the damn thing. And I haven’t. Because I suck.

It all began several months ago when a research associate in my lab was invited to write a review for a scarcely-known Chinese journal. Now, the impact factor on this thing is so low that if I decided to start my own publication and call it something like “Yvette’s Super-Awesome Journal of SCEINCE,” I could probably give this one a run for its money after a couple of years. As such, my colleague concluded that writing said review would not be a productive use of time at this point in his career. He was, however, generous enough to offer the opportunity to me, knowing that as a fledgling grad student with nary a publication to my name I would likely jump at the chance to get one under my belt.

And so I did. I took posession of the huge stack of references he’d assembled, dutifully entered them in Endnote, and in irregular bits of time scrounged together between lab and class and seminar presentations, I plowed my way through them with the assistance of a truly frightening amount of caffeine. They sit now on the corner of my desk, covered in red ink and looking impressively substantial. I’ve done all I can to prepare; I’ve even gone so far as to open a Word document, type in the title and some subheadings, and set up the header and pagination and all that jazz. But though my first due date has come and gone, I’ve yet to really write a word; and every time I even think about the merest possibility of considering the ramifications of attempting to do so, I melt into an overwhelmed and intimidated puddle and ooze off to aimlessly surf the internet. God. I just don’t know how I’m going to do this.

On the plus side, it is quite amazing how efficiently dishes get washed, flowerbeds dug, and bills paid when one is procrastinating with all one’s might.

OK, I know I should probably be grateful to the starlings that have taken up residence in our yard for helping rid the garden of slugs and other plant-eating ne’er-do-wells, but let’s face it: they’re jerks. First, there’s the shameless feeder hogging. While the catbirds and woodpeckers are content to perch briefly and take a few delicate beakfuls of suet from the block hanging on the front porch before continuing on their way, this is not enough to satisfy our friends the starlings. Oh no, they feel the need to settle in on the railing directly beneath the feeder for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, intimidating all other comers with their raised wings and tuneless squawks, pecking mercilessly at the suet until the block collapses into a mess of greasy detritus and of course coating all exposed surfaces liberally with birdshit in the process. Now this type of behavior is highly annoying, but the shenanigans I witnessed in the garden this morning really take the cake: I happened to glance out the window only to see a lone starling methodically ripping the leaves off a little pepper plant and just dropping them in the dirt. Asshole!

Last spring we planted an oriental poppy in the flowerbed. For reasons unknown it never bloomed but seemed to flourish otherwise, exploding into an unwieldy yet not particularly threatening-looking mass of scraggly leaves. This year, however, it’s feeling a bit saucier; sometime last week I found at least eight or nine of these menacing little alien heads lurking amongst its foliage. Any day now I expect to hear a chorus of “Feed meeee”s…

You know how when your thesis project depends upon working with large numbers of human cells, your schedule is forever subject to the caprices and whims of the vindictive little fuckers? And so every time you set up a new experiment you have to hunch at your desk with pencils and scrap paper and an Ouija board and a rectal thermometer and a gyroscope trying to conjure the perfect number of cells to be seeded in the perfect number of flasks at the perfect time on the perfect day such that each flask will be 70-80% confluent not at three in the morning on Thursday or one in the afternoon on Saturday, but at a point which falls not only during ‘business hours’ but preferably within a window of time during which you have the tissue culture room reserved? And then of course the night before a big experiment you realize your estimates were off once again, thus leaving you no choice but to work late at the lab alone in a stuffy little basement room treating and harvesting cells whilst keeping a nervous eye on your watch in order to ensure you can clean up, get everything packed into the freezer, dash home, and plant your sweaty-and-out-of-breath self on the couch just in time for America’s Next Top Model — which, embarassingly enough, is often one of the few bright spots in your week? And then you learn that ANTM has been preempted by a basketball game, so you drown your sorrows in a 40-oz of Icehouse?

And then you know how after the requisite amount of self-pity you pull yourself together, get some perspective, and head back to the lab with a slight headache and a rather go-get-’em attitude about the whole affair, and you sonicate your cells and quantitate your proteins and perform your immunoprecipitation and run your SDS-PAGE and start your Western and generally do your best to move on with things in a positive fashion? And then several days later when you develop your film in the bad and scary darkroom you find that your IP results are achingly beautiful, so you’re feeling pretty friggin’ awesome about yourself and decide to strip the membrane and re-probe it for poly(ADP-ribose)?

But you know how sometimes your protein of interest happens to be around the same size as the antibody heavy chain so if you use a monoclonal antibody for both immunoprecipitation and Western blotting, your labeled anti-mouse secondary will cling tenaciously to the antibody heavy chain band on your membrane and completely obscure the band you’re actually looking for? And even though you’re well aware of this fact, it totally slips your mind when you’re adding the primary and the blot is ruined so you strip the membrane and restart the protocol from the beginning, all the while mentally kicking yourself in the ass for wasting the bulk of two days?

And you know how when Primary Antibody Super Fun Time rolls around again, you’re really distracted because you’re thinking about how badly you need some coffee and wondering a) whether you have time to both procure and consume some before your weekly meeting with the boss-man, and b) whether you should make the trek to Au Bon Pain (which is further away but has marginally better coffee) or stick with Deet’s (which is closer but whose ‘coffee’ tastes like hot brown poopy water)? And so you add the primary antibody and run off, only to realize several hours later when the protocol is nearly complete that in your haste that morning you’d fucked up yet again and used the monoclonal rather than the polyclonal? And for a moment you think of stripping the blot and re-reprobing but in your heart you know that since the protein modification you seek is rather labile, the chance that any of it is still hanging around after such harsh treatment is next to nil? And the upshoot of all this is, basically, that you may as well have spent the past three weeks sitting around in the lab flickin’ your bean?

DON’T YOU JUST HATE THAT?

Wow! It’s really hard to take pictures of food that don’t look like piles of throw-up. And here, I have not entirely succeeded.

Today Adam and I prepared for ourselves a simply delectable breakfast: frittata with bell pepper, mushroom, and tomato (Adam’s specialty — the man has a way with eggs), hash browned potatoes smothered in garlic and onion and a truly obscene amount of black pepper, a fresh fruit salad of mangoes, pears, and berries, and biscuits hot from the oven. The only problem with the whole scenario was that by the time we’d gotten around to rousing ourselves, debating at great length the merits of going out versus eating in, dragging our hindquarters out of bed, performing various hygeine-related tasks, shopping for ingredients, chopping, mixing, cooking, etc., it was late enough that we felt no compunction whatsoever in accompanying the meal with a couple of glasses of leftover chardonnay. Par for the course for us, really; every other weekend or so I think to myself, “You know, we should just plan ahead for a nice brunch on Sundays; that way we could have supplies on hand, spend a leisurely morning cooking and eating, and still have most of the day ahead of us when we’re done.” Somehow it never happens.

For years I’ve been struggling to be more deliberate about the way I life my life, and for years I’ve failed miserably at doing so. I’ll never understand why I insist upon flying by the well-worn seat of my pants at all times when I know I’m the sort of person who thrives on completed plans, checked-off lists, and ideas brought to fruition. I could pretend that this propensity makes existence more exciting but truthfully all it does is cause me to sort of ooze from one day to the next, letting things happen to me rather than making them happen. I’m terrified that one day I’ll wake up from my perpetual daze only to realize that my life is more over than not and that looking back I feel compelled to define it largely by all the things I never quite got around to accomplishing. (What? I’m feeling melodramatic today.)

Since I stopped updating the site I’ve found that my attitude toward photography — and here, please mentally substitute a more accurate and less lofty term for whatever the hell it is I do with my camera, as you see fit — has changed drastically. Pictures can languish unseen and unloved in flash card limbo for months at a time. These, for example, were taken one unseasonably warm day in February.

Ostensibly, we were at something called a “nature preserve.” Adam had hiked there sometime last year with friends from school and thought it would make a pleasant family outing. While this was eventually the case, I confess to being a bit concerned on the drive up, a long stretch of which seemed to run straight through the backyards of various country folk.

I remember that day as balmy and beautiful, but the shots appear strikingly cold to me now.

The school Adam attends operates on a system of ‘blocks’ rather than semesters. While this setup is apparently beneficial to the study of medicine, it means that our breaks rarely align (and is thus one of the many things about said institution which annoy the everloving crap out of me). But this past week, his between-blocks-hiatus happened to coincide with not only the long holiday weekend but my advisor’s yearly family vacation — and when the PI is away, the grad students will play. Naturally, Adam and I decided to take advantage of this fact by making a quick jaunt to Chicago to see the Bodyworlds exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. I mean, if you know me, and if you know Adam — which you probably don’t but just bear with me here for a minute — then you know that a traveling exhibit of plastinated, elaborately dissected, and posed human cadavers would be right up our collective alley. We did meet in a brain bank, after all.

Unfortunately, there was no photography allowed in the exhibit proper. I presume this restriction was designed in part to coax visitors into purchasing the official Bodyworlds catalog for the low, low price of $24.95. Adam did, and it appears to be well worth the cost. I, on the other hand, bought a keychain featuring a small plastic cerebrum which pulsates softly with colored lights at the press of a button for $4.99 and am not sure I can say the same.

We spent the remaining day wandering about the city in a thouroughly touristlike fashion.

There was something so easy about this vacation. It was short and sweet and everything just fell into place. We flew standby (courtesy of Adam’s father’s Delta retirement benefits) yet didn’t miss a single flight; we arrived in town having neglected to note the address of our hotel yet somehow materialized at its front desk within minutes of disembarking the train; we were given a room with a view other than the side of the adjacent building (see photo at top of entry) for no extra charge; and though we never did manage to pick up a Chicago Transit Authority system map, we easily made our way around the city without mishap. In all I’d have to say Chicago agreed with us and I’d love to go back sometime for a longer stay.

Greyhounds are very short-winded.