Ooookay... time for another Catching Up post.

I saw a GI specialist at the beginning of September. He explained my blood test results to me and declared he was absolutely certain I don't have Celiac and should have no trouble at all eating gluten.  He prescribed fiber to help solve my issues.  Yeah. Fiber. That's it.

I started taking fiber and stopped avoiding gluten. After about two weeks I started a food diary.  I kept track of what I was eating and how I felt. Pretty much the only trend I could see is that I felt like crap all the time. So I stopped taking fiber (and I started forgetting to write in the diary) and I actually feel better again. I'm so confused. I don't know what is up with my body. I don't know how to make it better.  Jim is still convinced it's linked to stress.  It could be. I don't know.  If it is, I don't know how to solve that.

Work has gotten busier. Managing the lab has been going really well, and I feel pretty on top of things now, but I've gotten the "you're not doing any science" and the "you seem to spend a lot of time not doing anything" talks... so now I'm doing lots of science, and have very very little downtime. Which is good, and awesome, and I want that - but it's wearing me out.  I feel like I'm moving into the "old" category. I'm not 19 anymore. My body just doesn't seem to have those great reserves of energy it used to have.  Especially considering I feel like crap most of the time.

Knitting has been going well. I made a pair of fingerless mittens, so I can knit or use my phone at the bus stop in the mornings. It's gotten awfully cold over the last week or two.

They sparkle! They're alpaca!  They only took me two days to make!

My knitting goals for October are to finish Emily's freakin' hat, seam up the hat I made for my Dad in January, finish something for Mom, and try not to buy very much at Rhinebeck.

Rhinebeck is in two weeks. For those of you who don't know, it's a huge sheep and wool festival in New  York state, held every year in October, and I've never been. I have been meaning to go since 2007, and finally committed to attending this year's after being severely sad about missing last year's.  So I'll be driving to Connecticut and meeting up with some Yale friends, then driving up to New York for the festival.  There will be a TON of people there from my Harry Potter knitting group, so it'll be awesome to see and hang out with them. I anticipate this will be the best five days of 2010.

Of course, I've been saving (little tiny amounts of) money for several months now so I'd be able to spend without worrying and buy lots of fun things without guilt.  And then Jim's job fell through for a full week (if there isn't work to be done, he doesn't get called in), and thus he didn't make any money that week, and suddenly we're in financial trouble and all that money I saved up is needed to cover our bills.  I'm still going on the trip, but I don't think I'll be able to buy very much at all.  The main point of the trip is to see friends and hang out, but the secondary point was to cut loose a little at the festival and get some nice stuff, and I'm kind of upset that now I won't really be able to get anything.  And I will be stressing about money the whole trip instead of relaxing.
Sigh. I hate this stupid economy. I hate being poor.

...I was actually trying to write an upbeat post. I swear.  I blame the gray clouds and the rain.

Oh wait!  Did you see the yarn shelf Jim built for me?







I'm still working on getting everything into it and organized the way I want.  Actually, that sounds like the perfect thing for me to go finish doing right now. :-)

So, I spent the weekend in Reno. And before that I spent Christmas and New Year's here in New Haven, largely by myself, and had a fabulous vacation during which I said I would go to work but really just sat around the house playing Warcraft and watching a TON of West Wing. And I got a kitten. She's a very tiny 11-month-old orange tabby whom I have finally decided to name Claire, although she was very nearly a Thomasina and a Guinevere. If I am not completely exhausted by the end of this post, I'll upload some pictures.

Christmas was great. I'm really glad I decided to stay here instead of spending it with my parents. I had a very low-key day. I cooked a turkey and had three of my labmates over, and we ate a ton of food and drank homemade eggnog and two bottles of wine and then watched the Emperor's New Groove. We also played cards and sat around talking for a while. I've got amazing labmates, and this is by far the best Christmas on memory. No stress, no pressure, no worrying about spending money on gifts people may or may not like. The week after was pretty similar. I didn't go into lab, even though I really should have. I think I really needed the time off (I think I could really use a decade off, after quals), and I didn't even have the energy to feel guilty about slacking (which is really saying something!!). I went cat-hunting for three days after Christmas and finally brought Claire home on December 30th.

For New Year's, Aaron had a couple people over, and we ate pizza and drank really terrible vodka and I learned how to play Guitar Hero. I'm fantastically bad at Guitar Hero. It was a great New Year's, and for the first year EVER I did not cry AND for the first year ever I had someone to kiss at midnight. It was great. Again, it was low-key and very relaxing and I just don't know why more people don't avoid going home for the holidays.

I went home on Thursday, just to spend this weekend with my parents and Elena, and we had a pretty good time. There was a huge blizzard on Friday and into Saturday, so Saturday morning we took Elena sledding, which really meant Phil pulled her up and down a small hill in a sled, while she yelled in her tiny two-year-old voice, "More? More?" Then she spent the rest of the weekend yelling, "No!! No!!!!" which we finally realized meant, "Snow," or, more accurately, "Please bring me a bowl of snow so I can eat it."
All in all, it was a pretty decent weekend. I had a couple of really good conversations with my mom, and I think I have largely decided that I'm sticking it out until the end of the semester and then I'm saying Screw You to graduate school and am finding something better to do with my life. I have no idea what that Something Better will be, or if I'll end up just taking a one-year leave of absence or a permanent opt-out, but at any rate it was neat to talk about leaving school with my mom and not have her tell me flat-out that it's a terrible idea and I'm wasting my life. We watched the series finale of Gilmore Girls Sunday night before I left and we both cried. It was a good bonding thing. I think we're doing better now.

Anyway, I feel a lot better now. Stuff with my mom is on the mend, my little sister is exponentially more fun than the last time I saw her and is clearly a brilliant little kid, I've decided I'm getting out of this miserable miserable grad school experience, I bought a cat, and I currently have a very good relationship with Aaron. I think my life is still in SERIOUS need of some shaping up and taping back together, but for this moment right now, I'm okay. I am not a trainwreck. At how many points in my life have I really been able to say that I'm not a trainwreck? It's kinda nice.

( Unexpected babbling (and a strange dearth of commas) about the above decision that should maybe be in a friends-locked post but isn't going to be, so deal with it. )

I'm gonna go make some more tea now.

The waiting game begins again...

I've been trying to TAP-tag my favorite protein for the last five weeks (basically, this just means inserting a nucleotide sequence at the end of the gene so it will be translated with the protein) so that I can do various TAP-taggy sorts of things. Yeast is a great model organism for things like transformations--all I have to do is PCR amplify the TAP tag using primers with ends that are homologous to the end of my gene, then put the PCR product directly into yeast (no cloning, no vector, nothing), and the yeast will use homologous recombination to transform itself. I did the transformation several weeks ago, and have been trying for at least the last month to verify the tag by Western blot (this involves breaking open a bunch of yeast and extracting their proteins, then probing for the tag with an antibody). Strangely, my Westerns have been completely blank. Not faint, blank. No smudges, nothing. I got several different positive controls from labmates, and have been able to get those to show up perfectly, but still saw nothing in my sample lanes.

Yesterday I finally checked over my primers. Sure enough... not only did I leave the STOP codon in the sequence, I also took the wrong sequence from the end of the gene--instead of the last 50 nucleotides, I used the second to last 50 nucleotides. So my primers were both in the wrong place AND contained a STOP codon before the tag, so of course I never saw anything on the blot--the TAP tag never got translated.

Alas.

I ordered new primers and they should be here later this week. Meanwhile, I just have to sit and wait again.
At least now I know it's not my bench skills that are bad. Messing up primers is much, much better than being incapable of doing a proper Western.

While I'm waiting for primers, though, I get to pack. We move tomorrow and Friday! This weekend I'm going to head to IKEA and get lots of fun furniture-y things, like a dresser, and some more chairs, and maybe a rug or two (okay, rugs aren't furniture). I'm so excited!

My date this weekend was pretty great. I'll post more about it in a locked entry later... Hopefully there will be a second date. Fingers crossed!
Also, after we first met on Saturday night and talked for three hours, I had to ask him what his name was again (I'm so terribly, terribly bad with names. It's not personal.). At least I avoided this guy's plight.

I finally seem to have gotten into some sort of schedule rhythm. It doesn't bug me to wake up at 8 every morning anymore (a few months ago I was complaining about the dreadful consistency; I'd been so used to waking up super early some days and super late on others, and the variety kept me on my toes), and *gasp* the consistency is actually starting to be comforting (hurray for routine!). Also, finding time to go climbing has actually gotten easier. Since I'm not taking classes, I don't have any homework to worry about in the evenings, and all the papers I need to read for lab I can read while I'm in lab. I suddenly have... free... time.... (As I typed that, I sort of cowered a bit in fear that lightning would strike me down, or someone would run up to me and provide me with a heap of extra, excruciating work to do.)

Anyway. Climbing is good. Knitting is slow. The only time I knit these days is on the shuttle to and from lab. It's just too hot to knit. And too nice outside to sit indoors and knit if I have the choice to do something else. It doesn't help that all my fun knitting supplies are packed in some random box somewhere in the basement.

Only two more weeks until I get my life back and we move into a real house!
Also, I'm now officially a Connecticut driver. I have a CT license and CT license plates. All I need to do now is notify California and hope they don't fine me for not notifying them earlier. I really hope this doesn't involve actually calling the California DMV. I'm fine with internet legwork, but making phone calls to DMV employees is one of my least favorite things in the entire world. My personal hell would involve a rotation of things like calling DMV workers in other states, optimizing colorimetric quantification assays, and changing diapers on other peoples' children. While being exposed constantly to giant malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Today, I have nothing to do in lab. I'm waiting on four plates of yeast to grow. Then I will resume the constant litany of western blotting (can a repeated action be a litany? or does a litany have to be a spoken repetition? *goes to look it up...*).
In the meantime, alternating reading papers, listening to NPR, and finding pertinent webcomics is going to keep me from dying of boredom. Or bothering the other grad students.

Lab has been really slow lately. I gave lab meeting on Monday and it went pretty well, but I really haven't had much to do, besides downloading and reading papers. So I've been awfully bored. Today I'm actually doing a Western blot, so I have stuff to do, and hopefully it will give me enough work to do for the next couple of days (I mean, if I mess it up today, then I have to do it again tomorrow...). I can't wait until my project picks up and I have more than one thing going at a time. That probably won't be until after quals, but oh well. I'm looking forward to quals too.

I feel silly for not posting more (especially since I've been complaining about needing to talk), but things aren't actually happening right now. Life pretty much consists of going to lab, trying to amuse myself in between papers, and going home and trying to FEEL like I'm at home in someone else's house. I cannot WAIT for the move. Two more weeks...

Link: The Sorting Hat Test written by leeannslytherin on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Blah. It's Tuesday and yet it still feels like a Monday.... I'm finally actually getting a pile of work to do, and thanks to procrastination I might even be able to engineer a busy day on Thursday or Friday. In the meantime, since I'm still at the beginning of my project in lab, I only have a few hours' worth of work to do each day, and I'm spending the rest of my time trying to focus on reading papers. Friday I made it through three papers, yesterday not any, and today so far I've read about two pages of one paper. Mostly, though, I've been kinda bored, and very low on energy.

I finished the Harry Potter book Sunday afternoon (no spoilers, I promise). I thought I'd cry but I didn't, even when someone I was awfully attached to died. I will say that it's by far my favorite in the series, and that I've started reading it over again already.

I talked to Jamie on the phone Thursday night for about 40 minutes. Because of the time difference to the west coast, this meant that I was extraordinarily tired on Friday morning in lab, but it was nothing a large cup of coffee couldn't fix. It was a fantastic conversation. I'd been putting off calling him (even though he'd asked me to, after graduation six weeks ago), because I was afraid I'd fall all over him again. But actually, I felt a lot calmer after our conversation. One of the things I like about Jamie is how easy it is to talk to him. I never have to worry about what I say to him, or even how I say it--he always seems to know exactly what I mean, and he always seems to understand. We did talk, briefly, about my feelings, but the bottom line in that discussion was that I really, really, really want to be friends with him again. I miss his friendship and his presence in my life more than anything else, and while it is a bit awkward and painful for me to hear about his current girlfriend, it's more important to me that we be able to discuss anything and everything. So. I'm okay there. Hopefully we can rebuild a real friendship.
Now, if only he weren't so terrible at remembering to call people back....

Not much else is going on. I haven't touched knitting in over a week; I think after all that marathon knitting on the wedding gift I sort of needed a break. I think I've pretty much decided how to finish up the gift, so I need to sit down and spend a few hours on it, but I just haven't had the motivation yet. Also, the yarn and pattern for the Dragone shawl came, but I haven't gotten the needles yet, so I haven't started it.

Anyway, I'm giving half the lab meeting on Monday, so I should really go think about my talk. And I'm supposed to have an abstract of my thesis project written up by Friday, so maybe I'll go think about that for a while as well.

*I got a package from my secret pal last week! It's amazing!

So, this is a combined picture with stuff from both packages she's sent--the book and the big blue wool are from this package, and the cotton, needle case, and virus notepad are from the first package. There were some other things, too, but they seem to have wandered off and/or been consumed....

The cotton is still unfated, but I think the wool is screaming out to be a scarf. It's gorgeous hand-dyed thick and thin yarn (and it's in what are probably my favorite shades of blue), so I want to find a pattern that will show it off (there's a card around here somewhere that may or may not have suggested one, but I think I left it in my car...?). Any suggestions?

*Here's a picture of the birthday presents Megan sent me!

Not a terribly good picture, but since I already posted pics of the knitted womb I won't worry about it. She also knit me a strand of DNA, which several people have threatened to steal from me, and made me some stitch markers and a bracelet (which I had to take off to photograph)! This package, much like my secret pal package, happened to come on a morning when I was extremely tired and frustrated with the world, and just totally made the rest of that week bearable.

*I lost my cell phone again last week, and realized how really dependent on it I am. I couldn't do ANYTHING. I was crippled. I'm not sure how to resolve that issue (it does kinda bug me to be so dependent on a piece of technology), but I'm gonna go get insurance on my phone sometime this week so that I can get it replaced in case it doesn't find its way back next time as quickly as it did this time.
Also, someone found the phone I lost on the Genetics retreat back in October, and will mail it to me this week. Weird.

*I went to New York on Saturday with a bunch of friends, and we spent a couple hours wandering around in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I LOVED it. I spent half an hour taking pictures of French Renaissance sculptures, and got wonderfully and horribly lost (alone, without my cell phone) in the Medieval and Oceania exhibits, which was totally cool. My favorite part of museums is wandering through them lost and alone (I dunno why, but for some reason I think I have a really hard time going to museums WITH people; I always want to spent way more or way less time on an exhibit than they do.). I'm considering taking another trip down to the city sometime in the next few weeks, by myself, to wander around the Met or another museum, by myself. Could be a fun day.
I have a lot of pictures of sculptures, but there's really no point in posting them. Google Andromeda and the Sea Monster (of which I am posting a small detail photo), or Rodin, or Raphael, and you'll see most of the things I really got excited about.


*I am recovering nicely from what could have turned into a fatal crush on a boy who is extremely emotionally closed off. I have also redone my Match profile, but am considering taking it down again, because ugh, meeting people is such a bother, and who has the time? And maybe I'll just spend the next six weeks knitting, and not worry about relationships. Sounds healthy.

*Susan accepted both Emily and me into her lab yesterday, so today we both made it official and joined. ... !!! This means I am now officially getting my Ph.D. in genetics, and I have a home and a PI and will shortly have a thesis project! Also, I decided not to bother with the whole fourth rotation thing, so after a record 11 hours in the Breaker lab, I quit (well, it wasn't quite "quitting," and everyone was very nice and I think it was a friendly parting; I think they understood what the deal was). So life is awesome!

*I need to get my wisdom teeth out this summer, and my mom volunteered to fly out and take care of me. I'm ecstatic--as she said, it's really more of an excuse for her to come visit and go shopping with me. All the other kids' mommies have come to visit THEM, and I was starting to feel a little left out. So I'm really excited and will probably finally have the motivation to call and make an appointment with the oral surgeon.

*I've been exhausted and overworked and just basically totally overwhelmed lately. I mean, all in a (mostly) good sense, as things are going really well, but still--overwhelmed is overwhelmed. Sorry to be neglecting everyone; I'm hoping that now that I've joined a lab and am NO LONGER A FIRST YEAR, my life and schedule will settle down and I can start carving out niches of time to be a good friend again, both on lj and in real life.

Wow, it gets warm and suddenly I don't have time for the internet anymore.

Summer came on my birthday. I woke up and it was warm and humid and WONDERFUL. You go outside and you're immediately sticky and last summer I HATED it, but this summer it means the return of the sun and the warmth and the opportunity to wear all my California shirts and not lug around my giant warm furry coat. BRING ON THE HUMIDITY!
My apartment, and its sad little single window, is perfectly warm and awesome during the winter, and is AN OVEN in the summer. Must... move....

My birthday was pretty good. It sort of slipped away into obscurity, but I'm trying to make myself realize that I'm no longer a) a child, b) an only child, c) having important birthdays. Twenty-two is not a landmark year, and when your birthday lands on a Wednesday you just sort of watch it slide past. But that's okay. It was actually pretty good. My parents sent me a 7.1 megapixel digital camera (the Elph by Canon), and I'm addicted to it. I took 170 pictures between Wednesday evening and Saturday evening. I deleted a good half of them (I'm going to try really hard to keep deleting the crappy ones), and uploaded a fair portion of the remainder to Facebook. I'll make another post here and put some up. I LOVE the camera. I haven't had one all year, and have wanted to take pictures of SO MANY things--New Haven, yarn, snow, my car, myself, finished knitted things, my messy apartment, et cetera. And of course I get one and immediately start taking pictures of trees. Why do I have such a fascination with trees and leaves?

Anyway.

I spent the weekend studying for my last final, which was yesterday morning. I already know I missed up a couple of questions, but I don't really care. I had an absurdly high grade going into the final, and I did FINE (finely?), so my grade should be plenty high. I just have to maintain an overall High Pass grade, and I've already got my two Honors grades, so if I get just a Pass I'll still be in the green, and to be honest I'll be somewhat surprised if I don't get an Honors.

My current lab rotation ends on Friday. Next week I'm going to start a 3-week long FOURTH rotation (or fifth, if you count the three weeks I spent sitting in a corner in the Zhong lab before I fled screaming as a rotation), this time in the Breaker lab. They're uber-famous, and uber-rich, and they study RNA, which is totally hot. My PARENTS know who Ron Breaker is (they read Scientific American, and he had an article in SA in December that my stepdad asked me about). So hopefully I'll fall madly in love with the lab, and they'll fall madly in love with me, and I'll get over the fact that there are 25 people in the lab and some of them don't have benchspace. Aaaaauuuggghhh... Meanwhile, my first choice lab might not take any grad students at all this year, and I'm panicking.

Other than that, though, I'm done with classes. Well, if I join Genetics I have to take the Genetics seminar as a second year, and I'll probably audit something like Immunology. But I'm Done. With. Classes. A lot of us are, actually, but some people will still be taking classes for grades next year, which enables me to make the following claim: I have just squished six years' worth of classes into four.
I am scientist. Hear me roar.

I came home early from lab today, slept for two hours, then got in my car and drove to North Haven to sit in a Barnes and Noble. I sat there for an indeterminate amount of time (I have no idea what time I got there-7:30?), maybe two hours-ish, reading Mason-Dixon Knitting (which I ordered last week but which has not arrived yet) and thinking about patterns and just generally hiding between the bookshelves. It felt really good; I haven't hidden in a bookstore in a long time, and the act of driving ten miles to do so made it feel like better hiding (I could have walked the four minutes to the Yale Bookstore and hidden there). Anyway, it was relaxing and I feel a bit calmer about life. And lab.
And I bought the fourth Kushiel book.

All right, off to upload pictures, and then to bed.

(P.S. The series finale of Gilmore Girls was tonight. I can't believe it's over... I'll probably comment about it tomorrow after I download and watch it.)

Ow. This week has been intense.

I'm "done" with classes, so I've spent actual 9-5 workdays in lab (except they're more like 9:25-6:15 workdays) this week, working like crazy on my rotation project. I had a meeting with my PI Wednesday morning and told her that my postdoc was "difficult to work with," which is the understatement of the year. She's awful and stupid and mean and lazy and she's only in lab from 11 am to 4:45 pm every day (which happened to be exactly when I had class), so I NEVER saw her, and I NEEDED her supervision (I actually went an entire WEEK without seeing her towards the beginning of my rotation). Anyway, my (completely awesome) PI went, "Wow, I wish you'd told me this sooner," and immediately rearranged things so I'm now working with the grad student I really like, and MAGICALLY, life is 1000x better. I'm also working harder and getting WAY more done, and I attribute this to a) my grad student helps me plan things out, and b) the Amanda/Taso effect, which is, in short, that if you like the person you're working for, you'll work harder (Amanda and Taso were the editors-in-chief of my high school yearbook when I was a sophomore, and I ADORED them, which led directly to me being e-in-c two years later). I've accomplished more this week than in the last three combined. It feels great. Stuff is actually working, too; my digests this afternoon showed seven colonies with correct inserts, and I'm hoping tomorrow to have plates with colonies carrying different inserts. Oh, that reminds me, I need to split cells tomorrow...

Anyway, enough lab talk.

I've also been thinking a ton about transferring. Or, rather, I spent a ton of energy trying to not think about transferring. Finally, I made myself think about why I was trying not to think about transferring, and why I hadn't written that email to UCSF yet, and I realized that I didn't want to write the email or think about it because there was a tiny chance they'd tell me I could go. I didn't want to hear, "We have a spot for this fall! You can waive this this and this class, and start as a first year, no problem!" And I didn't want to hear it because that would mean I'd have to go.
And I don't want to go.

Now, that was a very strange revelation, and when I thought it to myself, I asked, "Now, Kara. Are you SURE you don't want to go? Are you sure you're not just scared of going? Are you sure you're not just afraid of losing the good things you have here?" These, admittedly, are sort of difficult questions to answer. But I think I'm sure. I think that I like what I have here, and that if I maybe just give it a little more time, I'll settle in, and the tiny hooks Yale has put into me will take a bigger hold, and slowly I'll fall in love with this place just like I fall in love with everything (TV shows, stuffed animals, types of food, small rocks). And I really really do think that I'm on my way to being happy here. Sure, it might be nice to live in a place with decent weather. But it's warm here from April to October, and hey, that's six months. It rains for three months in California anyway. So that's only a net three months of good weather I'd gain, and three months times the next five years is still only just over a year, and I'm not sure that I could justify trading that year of good weather for the year I just spent here. I mean, I've put a lot of energy into feeling at home here, and learning good science, and becoming an adult, and making friends, and all that sort of whatnot. And I don't want to throw that year away; I've let go of too many things in the last year to let go of the year itself. So I'm not trading the last 9.5 months in for 15 months of sun. I'm just not. I'm staying. And I'm getting a roommate and a cat. And if I live in an apartment that can't have pets, I'll make Andrew adopt it for me and then I'll take it from him and I'll still have a cat. And that's final.

And now, for the first time in more than a year, I feel like a human being. A whole one. I am here by choice, I am here by strength. I am a competent, intelligent, beautiful young woman, and I got here on my own merits because I wanted to, not because I was supposed to due to some higher fate, and not because someone told me it was the "right" thing to do. I'm here because I like being here.

And yeah, turns out that does make all the difference.

I'm gonna go make jell-o shots now. 'Cause my birthday is in a week and I have to write a fake grant/term paper this weekend and by god, I am going to write at least one of my specific aims drunk. Simply because I've never done homework drunk before, and this might well be my last chance.

This morning I finally made an appointment with a counselor. I saw them in January and they said they'd call me within four weeks. Nine weeks later they called me back, then told me that if I wanted to see someone over the summer I'd have to wait for them to transfer my info. And then, Monday, three months after I initially went in, I finally got a call from someone who can talk to me THIS WEEK and this summer. So today I called her back and made an appointment, go me.

I talked to Susan today (the PI of the lab I'll probably join), and I meant to ask her about thesis projects and funding and whatnot, and instead I mentioned that I sort of wanted to try a fourth rotation, and after a few minutes of questioning me, she said, "I think you don't really know what you want, and that's why all the casting about for the fourth rotation," and I said yeah, maybe, and she said I'm depressed, and then I got all teary. We talked a bit longer, and she said so many comforting awful things, like that I could still transfer, even though yes it's late and it would be hard, and that I could take a year off, or even a semester off, because I'm in academically good standing (and I took a moment to revel in this--I am in fantastic academic standing; I am an amazing student--at least I can do something right) and they'd let me take time off with very little explanation, and that she wondered if this was a grad school issue or a location issue. I said it was probably a location issue, and we talked about that, and I think she agreed. So I'm fairly sure now, especially because I've had this conversation out loud with a PI, that YES, I do want to be in grad school. I still don't know what I want to do AFTER grad school, but for now that's okay. I like grad school, and I like being a grad student. So that's good to know.

Also, I told her about the counselor situation, and as soon as I said "psychologist," she said, "Oh, the Yale Death Plan?" and I laughed weakly. After I finished the story, she said, "You should have come to me! I would have made them see you!" How is a first-year student supposed to know to go see a rotation PI if the counselors won't see you right away? Gah. Also, why didn't I just go talk to Susan? Stupid Kara.

Anyway, where was I?

So I went back to lab and developed the gel I'd started, and my post-doc yelled at me, because she is stupid and doesn't know how to interpret double digest results, EVEN THOUGH I HAD THE RESTRICTRION MAP AND FRAGMENT SIZES IN FRONT OF ME. So I set up single digests for tomorrow, to mollify her, even though they won't tell us what we need to know. She is stupid. I hate knowing more than a post-doc. It makes me feel... like the universe it out of whack. And like I want to whack her. With a gel box.

Also, I got a really good score on the piece of crap fake grant I wrote, and have been having flashbacks to sophomore year of high school, when I wrote a C paper and Lyla wrote an A paper (I know, I read it), and I got an A and she got a C. I feel guilty. I didn't deserve those 34 points; I should have gotten the 29. Damnit.

After class this afternoon I sobbed on Emily and Andrew and Elizabeth for an hour. I don't even know what I was crying about. I don't know what I want out of life, and I don't know what is making me miserable, and I don't know what to do about any of it. So I just sobbed.

After that I went to talk to the PI (Ron) of the possible fourth rotation. He said he'd take me, and then we proceeded to spend an hour talking about what it's like to be a professor, and how difficult it can be to adjust to new places, and how you go to the new places anyway because you're in science and unless you're freakin' amazing you don't get a lot of say in which institutions hire you, so you have to be able to live anywhere. And in some ways that was heartening, because Ron has clearly lived some awful places, and New Haven is awful but he clearly likes it, but in other ways of course it was terribly depressing, because a large part of The Plan (Version 3.0) hinges on getting post-docs and faculty jobs in California in general, if not the bay area specifically.
What I took away from that conversation, then, was that I just have to be freakin' amazing.

Also, Ron is going to a series of talks in Kansas this week, to talk about evolution, and I saw the flyer and saw that Harry Noller is going to be there, so we chatted about him for a moment, and Ron said he'd say hello for me. I miss Harry Noller. That guy was awesome.

I am, in fact, a complete trainwreck. Still/again.

And dude, it rained today. What's up with that?
(Also, I'm pretty sure my miserableness is NOT weather-related, because until today's rain it has been gorgeous for a week, and I've been happy on the surface, but that deep-seated hard cold core of unhappiness has still been hanging out in my stomach. Sort of right where the cysts were. So clearly sunshine can't make me happy, and therefore winter did not make me unhappy.)

The only thing I'm relatively sure about is that this is NOT over guys. This goes so much deeper than that.
Just thought I'd clarify that.

And I may have given myself carpal tunnel in my right hand. Bastard hurts like crazy. Can't knit.

I'm gonna go do some homework now, and wait for Gilmores to finish downloading. Silly me, I thought it was Thursday and that a new Lost would be up online too, but nope. Not till tomorrow.