A breath of fresh Air..

Most people, when thinking of "fresh air" would think Yosemite park, Montana, Colorado, just somewhere in the woods. But me being me Of course I do not think the same way.
When I think of fresh air I think, "New York City".
I have been so stressed out with not getting results in lab and tests, and classes, and professors and God only knows what else that finally, my husband decided I needed a weekend in New York. It had been more than a year, near 2 years, since I had gone HOME. I was going crazy. Infact it sort of felt like I used to feel when I was little and a long time had passed since I had visited St. Domingo.
I would feel like over the years, I had slowly lost little pieces of myself. Pieces that somehow allowed me to be the real me the happy me. Yes, I know, you are not supposed to be dependent on places in order to be happy but thats the way it felt and thats the way it went. When I was little, going to DR was a spiritually electrifying experience, every single time.
I kind of lost that some years back with DR. Now I have it with New York.
So! When I was in the airplane I decided that I would try and be as objective about NY as possible. I would try my best not to idealize it and in the process condemn San Fran even more than ever. So I did it. I tried to see the goods and the bads. Here is a list of them.

Bads first:

• New York is dirty.
• The Subway system has deteriorated even more than when I was there.
• There are no street signs indicating where the nearest subway station is.
• The subway stations don't have subway maps anymore.
• I don't understand the purpose of having people working behind boxed windows if they are not at least going to be capable of keeping track of maps and hand them out.
• People are just plain pist off in New York.
• The village looks as bad as Harlem and yet it is 10x's more expensive.
• The Rockefeller cafe needs to add a lot more to its Brunch menu, it is pathetic really.
• Park Ave is going down the drain.

Some of the Goods:

• New York is just practical!
• New York is a very tight community in that the city is always doing something Artsy and always includes the whole population of the city in it!
• New York is a city that inspires you to be creative to READ! I say this because the whole time I've been in California I never really felt like picking up a book for the hell of it. In New York, as soon as we checkd into the hotel and walked out I felt I needed a book. I know the reason for this also, it is because when you go to the subway you see atleast 5 people in a car with a book. And when you go to the book stores in New York, they display a lot more of the cool front cover books. The city feels like it is a book club. Some how they make you feel like it is cool to read.
• The architecture is just PHENOMENOL!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Shopping is 10x's easier. This is probrably just me, cause I know where to go and why.
• The beggars are polite. I had never in my life met so many rude and violent poor people as in San Francisco and especially Berkeley.
• In New York, if you give the beggers money great if you don't it is okay. You can actually have a conversation with New York bumbs. They'll actually give you directions. In Berkeley you give a quarter and they'll spit at you. Which is very bad cause now I've grown resentment towards beggers.

Things I did in New York:

I met up with my cousin, Carol and her husband for dinner at this small Spanish restaurant on 19th Street called Sala. It was just as delicious and even more hip than I remember. The food was great. Specially that fried goat cheese (from Heaven). My cousin and I had fun talking about everyone in the family and plans for the future and the present state of our lives. That was fun. I went shopping all over the city. We almost visited every neighborhood, West and East side of SOHO, the village, 65th Street Lincoln Cntr area (My favorite neighborhood) , Union Square, around the Metropolitan Museum etc, East 33rd Street... We went to the Metropolitan Museum. Carlos says it inspired him. We saw an exhibition of black and white photos and some modern paintings. We also hung out a lot in our hotel room.... We went mostly to old restaurants that we already knew but we also discovered 2 new ones.

The first night I felt like a stranger in my hometown. It bothered me. It was a very uncomfortable feeling. I was afraid I had lost the New Yorker in me and had become a San Franciscan. Then I had a cup of wine and then felt better.

Carlos said to me, "You can take the girl out of New York but you can't take the New York out of the girl." I realized in the end how right he was. By the 2nd day I was walking just as fast and much as any New Yorker, I knew my subways and stops, I knew where to shop, and I was getting the New York cranky attitude. I was teary in the airport. The only thing that made me stop thinking of leaving New York and how miserable I felt was thinking about what the hell my next project was going to be.

The best thing about going to New York:

Not thinking of science and politics for 1 1/2 days! -PRICELESS......

A new and Dangerous Psychological Disease

We have concluded that we are going thru a very serious psychological disease.
It is called 2nd year syndrome.
In this disease you get really depressed for the following reasons:

• Your project is not working and your PI was expecting results 3 weeks ago.
• Because your project is not working you don't want to go to lab and be forced to think about ho you have failed and since you haven't been in lab you get paranoid and you believe that everyone is looking down at you for not working and for not producing results.
• You are completely exhausted because you are taking classes, trying to make a research project work, trying to find a new project, and you had a test recently.
• Also you can not believe for the life of you that next semester you are supposed to do your Qualifying exam. When you haven't even figured out your main project yet.
  

The symtoms include:

• Suicidal thoughts.
• Spontaneous hysterical crying.
• Feelings of extreme isolation/exclusion.
• Catatonic.
• Worthlessness.
• Loss of concentration.
• Walking around like you are a zombie.
• Headaches, grinding your teeth all day and night.
• Major procrastination.
• Exhaustion.
• Major hair loss (both in females and males).
• Spontaneous fits of arguing, competition, or crying with your classmates or significant others.

We are still searching for more signs of this terrible disease. Symtoms may vary depending on the graduate student.

Prevention:
DO NOT go to Graduate school
Keep your kids out of graduate school
Do not engage in Graduate like behaviours
Protect your self. Do not go to school at all.

Immunity:
You would have to be a genius with Photographic memory and an insomniac all at the same time.

Therapy:
The only known therapy is support. People have to tell you over and over and over that everything is going to be okay. But then if the graduate student believes these are just empty sentences it is not worth even saying anything. Concaine or Marijuana may actually be helpful here. I mean we need concaine to work day and night and we need Marijuana to help with the posttraumatic stress.

Cure:
There is no cure for this. In fact we believe this is a chronic disease that will stay with you even after you receive the nobel prize. There are latency periods in which the student may think that they are cured but NO the symtoms will return. Latency periods vary of course.

This is only a preventative disease. If you are in the sciences please stay being a technician or get a job doing something else. Trying to get a Ph.D is not a good idea. You will never get paid what you should be paid. You will always be treated like a smelly dirty dog. You will only get true recognition when you are close to your death if ever. And the general population does not understand or care about what you are doing. If you try to explain it to them they give you that disgusted look...

no presentation = interrogation

Today, I went into lab. (Evil test tomorrow)
I went to split my cells so that sometime this week I could transfect my cells and prove to my collegues that I am actually capable of transfecting despite my occasional stupid mistakes.
Anyways, I went in and splitted my cells. I went to the computers to check my e-mail and 2 of my collegues were there. One of them was the Post Doc manager of the lab. Just 3 days ago I had to exchange presentations dates with him because with all the stuff that has been going on with my transfections and the fact that I have a test tomorrow I told him, "It will be impossible for me to present anything good next week. Everything I've done can be summarised into 1 sentence 'I tried making virus but I couldn't.'"
So he began to ask me again why is it that I can't present. I told him, I had done some stupid mistakes that had made my transfections impossible to be successful and therefore I had not been able to make any good experiments. He asked me, "Who is helping you on this." I pointed to the other guy, the one sitting there with him, whom is like a post doc himself but is really a technician.
It was a little on the annoying side because other people have canceled lab meeting many times. Am I going to get such a hard time every time I cancel? I mean I am just a grad student I am just learning how to do all this. It is not going to be smooth sailing ever. He was trying to make me feel like I didn't have to push myself but at the same time it sounded/felt like an interrogation.

shoot me yesterday

2 weekends lost to this test, 2

My transfections didn't work. My fusion assay results look funny, even though I did everything perfectly fine. So the conclusion to this experiment is that I have absolutely no results for my next lab meeting.
This week I have a test on Thursday. yeah originally I thought it was Monday but then my friends told me it was on Thursday and I slacked on the studying. Now I am stuck at home studying for this test without results for next lab meeting.

This does not help my confidence at all. Some day I am going to have to get off this yo-yo of emotional rollercoaster. When I am doing good in presentations or in lab it is great I love my self and everything around me. When nothing is working I want to die. I wish I could be a little more uncaring about it all.

So eventhough I have a test on thursday. I am going to be transfecting cells on Wensday so that by the weekend I can have some virus and maybe do a fusion assay or two before lab meeting.
Rushed results never come out good so I need a miracle.

Shoot me now please so that my torture can end. :)

Too tired to be tired

So this friday I was dying cause I am still not sure if my transfections worked. You see the way things work is that I have to test out my viruses. I have to test them out on cellular entry under different conditions. In order to do all these experiments obviously I need virus. My next presentation is on the 25th of October.
If I don't have virus by this week then I can't do experiments. If I can't do experiments then can't have results for the presentation. Now I want to have results for this presentation because on my first, I didn't really have any. Most of my presentation was about making viruses and the troubles we were having with it.

What scares me about my transfections, what could have been wrong this time? Well there is the DNA which I precipitated with EtOH instead of iso-propanol. Then there is the cells. I discovered last week that one HUGE problem is that the shelves in the incubator are NOT leveled. So basically what ends up happening is that my cells accumulate on one side of the flask and then those become too crowded while the other side is not so crowded. They are supposed to be evenly distributed. I guess one thing that I can do is leave it in 1 position for 2 hours and then turn it the opposite way for another 2 hours..... Maybe they'll be even then?

In the mean time, in this transfection, I had bad DNA (as far as I am concerned) and then I also had uneven cells. Also I waited 1 hour before putting the precipitate to the cells. But it took me a long time to prepare the cells after that one hour so I might have left the precipitate growing for too long. I noticed a lot of flakes once I added it.

Sorry kitties, I am trying to write all the possible failures here.
I am going to run an ELISA on these today so that I can see if I have virus or NOT. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, next week monday is my first immunology test and "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." Thats the attitude I have right now and I can't shake it off. I played video games with Carlos for 3 hours last night. Thats how much I don't give a crap about this test.

Dead en el Piso

So today, hmm what did I do today?
Well, I went to class, I did a presentation, then I went to work, I attended lab meeting. While lab meeting was going on I was in the middle of a large prep so everytime someone finished their presentation I had to go do some stupid step in my large prep.
I needed this DNA for today so I was very enthustiastic.
SO finally I got to the part where you run your DNA thru your column. Check, well done. But the next step where I am supposed to add Isopropanol to the DNA so that it will precipitated while centrifuging I fucked up. Instead of adding isopropanol I added ethanol! Yes my friends your beautiful lovely friend Isa fucked up majorly. So I called Maria. I called Sheri. I called Quiagen. I looked in the internet. Apperently no one in the world had ever done such a stupid thing in their life cause no one knew what to do.

I swear to GOD I was "Dead en el Piso"!

So I saw the precipitate but according to the website that white stuff you see is not your DNA it is SALT. So I was scared to death. Sheri said that it shouldn't make such a difference since EtOH is not that different from Isopropanol and either way some DNA extractions are done with EtOH. I had thought the same thing but I didn't believe it. I prayed to God. But I am not exagerating I heard him say in my head, "NOw you want me to turn EtOH into PropanoL? Now you want me to change chemicals? You know there is only so much I can do about your FUCK UPS." I begin to doubt everything. Why am I trying to become a scientist? I suck. But then I remembered that in less than a month I have done 3 perfectly beautiful presentations! Conflict conflict conflict. I remember that while I was grinding my teeth none of my experiments failed. Maybe grinding my teeth and destroying them and getting migraine headaches is worth me not doing mistakes?
Dead en el piso. Thats what I was.
THEN I specked the samples anyways... And the Angels sung. Ahhhhh!
I got DNA!!!!!!!!!!
YEY
I got DNA. Watson and Crick were not as happy as I was
(I know this for a fact because they were Stiff British thieves).