patient zero

EW EW EW. Someone's hair in my pillow that doesn't belong to me.

I almost volunteered 22 hours this week. I missed my shift, which took away 6 hours, and the guy I was going to cover Saturday found someone else instead to cover his shift. So I only volunteered 12 hours so far. I'll be doing another 4 hours tomorrow.

What was painful, though, was volunteering for 8 hours on Sunday, with a 1-hour break in between. My legs were so exhausted that night that I felt it even in the morning as I woke up. Yet I felt better about waking up in the morning, even though it was too sunny recently.

The weather has taken a turn, towards the usual gray skies and cold showers that attracted me to San Francisco.

I have some plans to travel to Italy, hopefully in the summertime while I apply to medical school. Should I be going through this all over again?

There are many moments where I begin to have negative thoughts during the day. Such as when I'm sitting outside the conference room, eating with my lab mates, while the other lab inside is celebrating the technician from their lab. It was his birthday on Sunday, he got accepted into medical school, and he will be leaving the lab soon, so it was a bit congratulatory, a bit of a farewell party all rolled into one. Maybe it was the envy and resentment that sparked my self-loathing.

It could probably be that everyone around me is having such success- even the medical student in our lab received an award for a prestigious neurosurgery grant application on the first try. This all happens, and I feel as though I'm the one in the race with the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll's novel. I run, but I have to keep running faster, only to end up in the same place.

My resentment spreads to my boss at times, seeing the way he helps everyone else in lab, helping them succeed. The trigger was probably observing how much effort he put into everyone else's applications, and he barely even took a glance at mine before I turned it in.

Thoughts flow from there to me thinking about all the effort I put in to raise everybody else, to help everyone else succeed. So where does that leave me? Should I have been thinking about numero uno all this time? Was it not strategic to think only of my self-interests and goals? It's this feeing of helping all and not being helped in return. All I do is give, and all others do is take away from me.

Excluding all that, I am now under a bit of pressure. Think Atlas holding up the world. I have to prepare my application, try to do enough experiments to get an abstract or paper submitted before I turn in my application, learn bioinformatics so that I CAN do the proper analysis to get the paper submitted, continue volunteering to earn enough hours for a letter of recommendation, and pick up the slack for people not doing their job in lab.

Quote that made my day: "I can't derive motivation from rare but transcendental moments of success amid a long drought of failure..." ~Ed Yong, in some interview on a science blog.

It feels good to write after a long time. I need to return to doing it regularly again. It's like sending away my consciousness into space. Just letting my day go, in anticipation of the new day, that is, tomorrow.