starcraft

Yes, that's the name of the shuttle.

Thursday 01.21.10.
During most of the day, people were using the microscope room with the lights on, so I wasn't able to start taking any fluorescence photos until 6 PM at night. In addition, my friend/lab mate wanted me to attend the Eric Kandel lecture at Mission Bay because she didn't want to go alone. What's up with girls always needing a companion to go with them somewhere so that they don't feel lonely? Well, his lecture was pretty interesting, and he was comical, although a lot of people seemed to fall asleep. Most of his research was biochemistry stuff, and I enjoyed the connections his work makes from the molecular level to the behavioral. I was a little envious of how his findings looked so effortless.

So traveling to the other campus took up about 2.5 hrs out of my day, and I ended up taking pictures until around midnight. Then I had to start prepping my powerpoint for lab meeting. The week before, my lab manager had asked me to switch places with him, for reasons unknown but most likely due to his brother coming into the City to visit. Big mistake.

Friday 01.22.10
At midnight, before I went on to pasting the images into my powerpoint, I had to extract them from the microscope. Still, I felt dirty so I walked back to my apartment to take a shower. I was laying in bed for a while before showering, taking out my contacts, and returning to lab, which turned out to be 1:30 AM. In lab, I extracted the photos from our Leica microscope (awesome), setting the red and green exposure to 125 ms, DAPI channel to 5 ms, and the picture quality as JPEGs of 88%.

It was a mistake to place data on before working on the rationale, but I was in lab, the heaters had turned off, and mucus was flowing out of my nose. I pretty much didn't care at that point. Cropping pictures to 25% or 15% its size, depending on if I placed 4 or 8 images on one slide, I put them all into my work, even the data that wasn't relevant to the project. My body lost thermal homeostasis, so I was wearing my hoodie from American Apparel along with a windbreaker, the only two jackets I brought to lab. I was like this until about 8 or 9 when people started trickling in, turning on the lights, hurting my eyes. Around 9:20 I left with my postdoc to get dim sum for breakfast.

10 AM. 24 hours without sleep, and time for lab meeting. Totally unfocused. Such is the theme of my life.

Anyhow, sleep-deprived, went to the VA, took the shuttle back, and got hit by a car from the other side of the road. More deets on this later.