Ambivalent Academic

I would totally give to the Obama 2012 campaign if this happened:

2011-06-03T15:41:00.001-05:00

Food for Thought

2011-04-27T15:19:00.004-05:00

"Academic science is a pie-eating contest, in which the prize is............more pie."

(This is not an AA original, but I don't know where it comes from. It rings true though, and if anyone can point me toward the original, I'd like to credit properly.)

Guest bloggin'

2011-04-20T10:08:00.002-05:00

I've got a post at Neurotic Physiology today on how to make a retina in a dish - please go check it out. Thanks to Scicurious for hosting!

Sorry, it's not my day to watch them.

2011-04-18T17:33:00.004-05:00

It seems that I am often mistaken for some kind of administrative or professional assistant around here. Thankfully, not by my colleagues, but often by strangers.

You see, I work with my office door open. Mostly because I share the office with other people and it's just easier that way. On that office door is my name and title, "Dr. AA, Ph.D." (yeah, I double-barreled that thing, bitches. Fat lotta good it does, too.)

Somehow, for some reason, strangers feel free to wander in while I'm working and make requests such as:

"Do you have a stapler I can borrow?"

"Hi, I'm in Dr. X's class and I need to turn in an assignment but he's not in his office. Can I leave it with you?"

"Um, hi? Can I get some white-out?"

"Do you know where Dr. Y's office is?"

"Um, do you have a copy code for the departmental copy machine?"

"I was supposed to have an appointment with Dr. W 15 minutes ago, but I'm late, and he's not there anymore. Can you tell him I stopped by?"

The answer to all of these queries is "no". (Sometimes when I'm feeling generous I will lend a stapler, but really?)

Do I look like I am the professional assistant to Drs. X, Y, and W? I don't even know Dr. W! (And I'm pretty sure Dr. X is on a different floor. Possibly a different building.)

My favorite was today. I was writing, with my headphones on, and not only did this person neglect to knock on the door (granted, it was open) before entering, but they stood there clearing their throat not-so-politely until I interrupted my work to say, "Yes?"

"Hi, do you know where Nancy is?"

"I don't know anyone who goes by Nancy."

"Oh, she's a professor - her office is down the hall?"

"I don't know her."

"You know, Nancy..Dr., um...I'm not really sure how to pronounce her last name..."

"As I just said, I don't know her."

"Oh, well, do you know where she might be?"

(WTF, really? I told you several times that I don't know her, and yet you think I keep track of her whereabouts?)

"If she is not in her office then I have no better idea of where she might be than you do."

This shit happens at least once a week. And after taking a quick poll, never to the male grad students in my office or those in the offices down the hall. Undergrads, newsflash: if you see a woman working at a desk, do not assume that she is by default the assistant to all the other profs in the building. It is not her day to watch them.

Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, where did the day go?

2011-04-07T16:20:00.002-05:00

It's 4:20 here and only about half my to-do list has been slayed. Ugh. How did this happen?

Also, I have empirically determined that a new Pandora station improves productivity by 32% +/- 2. Which, unfortunately, is still insufficient gain to kill the mountain of stuff that requires attention before tomorrow.

2011-03-22T13:04:00.000-05:00

An Open Letter

2011-02-16T14:30:00.004-06:00

Dear Reviewer #2,

You do realize don't you, that you are not in fact Reviewer #3, right? There are only TWO reviewers on this manuscript, thereby absolving you of any obligation to fulfill that detestable role. So, wherefore the vitriol? I mean seriously, I addressed all your points from the first round, and now in this second round you're saying that I failed to demonstrate something that you praised the everliving fuck out of on the first submission. I'm confused. Are you off your meds?

Also, this one thing that you have been stuck on since the first revision - I've done everything you said I should do to placate your concerns on that matter in the resubmission. You still don't like it. I'm beginning to think that you're just being cranky and obtuse. We've talked about this - if you want me to show that something is NOT expressed, you're going to have to be happy with a negative result and a fuckton of controls to show that this result is valid. There is NO WAY I can show you a positive detection of a gene product that isn't there. You do understand how such a request defies the rules of logic, right?

I'm getting a little tired of all this. Please stop fucking with me.

KTHX

Happy Wednesday, You FUCKS!!!

2011-02-02T17:55:00.001-06:00

You're a mean one, Dr. Grinch....

2011-01-31T17:08:00.004-06:00

I had an awesome weekend peeps. Which definitely made up for the Lack of "weekend" on the preceeding Saturday and Sunday. It was really great. Well, Friday was great, Saturday was mostly hungover, and Sunday was also good and restful and just what I thought I needed.

But today, I am decidedly Grinch-y. What's worse is that I'm feeling Grinch-y over a number of things, some of them pretty stupid and inconsequential, and some of them over stuff that I should be pretty excited about.

Because:

Opportunities = AWESOME!!!

But:

Opportunities = some very tough decisions, or actually, some not-terribly-tough decisions For Which I Will Have To Explain Myself, and turning down some opportunities that many people would give a limb for in order to make the right stuff happen for myself, which makes me feel like a spoiled little shit, and therefore Grinch-y about the fact that I have no right to feel Grinch-y.

grumble

2011-01-19T18:46:00.001-06:00

I planned poorly this week.

Forgot there were only 4 days until the next weekend, Tuesday felt like a Monday anyway, and plotted out a 5-day protocol. Dumbass.

Oh well, so I lose a Saturday. Not like that's never happened before.

Then the fucking reaction on day 1 degraded so I lost another day to repeating it. No weekend for AA.

/grump

Albatross #2

2011-01-13T18:55:00.001-06:00

See ya later, sucka!

(Dear readers, whatever positive influence you have in the universe would be most appreciated. This paper is a good one, but it's gonna be a fight to get it through review I think. I hope I am wrong.)

What. The. Fuck.

2011-01-13T09:41:00.001-06:00

FERPA, anyone??

Apparently, a pregnant student's grade at UC Davis Veterinary School was put up to a class vote.

This is so wrong on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin trying to dissect all those layers. Fortunately, I don't have to. Or rather, I shouldn't have to. We have legislation in place for this shit. This is precisely the sort of thing that FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) - the clue is in the name, folks - is meant to prohibit. It does what it says on the tin. It protects student privacy. ALL students have a right to this privacy, and to fair grading, not a class vote, regardless of whether or not they have a fetus in their uterus. Her grade should not be in question, and neither the grade nor her pregnancy is a matter of her classmates' concern. Period.

The prof who put that out there to her classmates fucked up. Big time.

I hope that the student who has been subjected to this extreme violation of her rights and privacy gets a speedy and satisfactory resolution and I hope it is made clear to the prof in no uncertain terms just how badly he cocked this up.

h/t Isis

...aaaannnnd ACCEPTED!

2011-01-11T15:43:00.000-06:00

Shazam!

Albatross #1 has left the building!!

2011-01-07T10:42:00.000-06:00

Woohoo!

What to DO instead of DON'T

2010-12-16T16:25:00.003-06:00

Hermitage recently hosted a great intertube panel discussion on Wimminz in Academia, Now with 100% less Behbehs. The link goes to the hub, blog carnival style. Go read.

One thing that really struck me - very consistent answers to the question about "how do you command respect from your male colleagues/peers/students?" Everyone said something along the lines of "I don't 'command' respect; I earn it via my work and professionalism."

Which made me think - if the answer is so universal, why the question about "commanding" respect in the first place? After some thought I realized that this is an issue that has been brought up by speakers in a lot of teaching/career development/work-life/ladies in science workshops I've attended. Interestingly, it's almost never brought up by attendees, but rather addressed right from the get-go by the presenter.

And the advice given is usually in terms of "don'ts": Don't undercut your own authority on the subject matter, don't allow confrontational students (or conference attendees) to draw the discussion off track, don't let asshole colleagues provoke you into an emotional response. Admittedly, these are all things that perhaps women fall into more easily, or maybe other people are prone to reading into women's actions. In any case, the social narrative is there, and it's an obstacle to women's overall success as compared to men in academia. So I don't think that the don'ts are entirely off-base. It's important to be aware of our subconscious actions that may be ham-stringing our success.*

Which is all well and good, but you know, don'ts are kind of hard to follow. They leave us wondering, well OK I will try not to do that, but what should I do instead? What does *not* undermining my own authority/allowing someone to drag the convo off track/projecting emotion really look like?

It's like teaching my dog not to jump on people. "Don't jump" is not a useful command as he has no clear idea of what he should be doing instead. "Sit" works much better - he's got a clear action that replaces the one that undesirable one.

The answer that all these women have arrived at is a simple "do": Do conduct yourself like a professional, do produce good work, do make yourself heard as a serious intellectual by asking questions that show you've got some smarts. Much easier to execute than the don'ts.

I really appreciate all of the panelists addressing this query with a list of "do's" instead of "don'ts". Great job, and thanks to everyone for sharing their wisdom.

*And of course, the corollary, that since this is also a matter of social narrative dictating how we respond to women in the academy, then the onus is not just on women to change their ways, but on everyone to change how we react.

Primal Scream

2010-12-15T14:26:00.002-06:00

YYYYAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

These papers need to just fuck off already. They are the papers that WILL NOT DIE!!

Get out of my damn life, you pieces of shit. (Actually, they are pretty good work, not pieces of shit, but I am sooo fucking tired of them that thinking about them makes me want to puke!)

I liked writing them, I even like editing them (for the most part), but seriously, this, "can you show Panel 6B in a different orientation - perhaps rotated 37 degrees counter-clockwise? Oh. No, I like it better the first way, but maybe we could show an inset...no, not a rectangular inset - make it triangle" bullshit has got to stop! It does not change the data!!! They still tell us the same thing whether the inset is rectangular, triangular, or polyhedral!!!

I need to get these things out of my life, preferably before the motherfukcing holidays so I can safely retreat into a mulled-wine induced stupor for about a week and emerge on the other side refreshed. If I still have to cater to this shit while I'm on "vacation", homicide is not out of the question.

The Grind

2010-12-14T14:52:00.002-06:00

Well, in spite of other people's fuckwittery, I am getting shit done, keeping my cover, protecting my assets (that phrase always sounds kinda dirty to me), and making new opportunities for myself. *yay, new opportunities! ~~~~****~~~~* - (that was me doing the butt-dance of happy - it's sort of hard to illustrate - the tilda equals a butt-waggle and the asterisk a fist-pump)

It is damn hard work, but I am doing it.

So there, douchecanoes. So there.

I have my list of Thing Which Must Be Done Before the Motherfucking Holidays, and I am steadily crossing them off. I will not be deterred from the path to success by all of this extraneous nonsense. So there.

Now, for the slightly less task-oriented part of my list - resubmission of Albatross #1. Yeah, that fucker is still hanging about. Not much left to do except the ABCs. That stands for Apply Butt to Chair (and just DO IT already!). Stole that bit of wisdom from Clio's blog, which is also what reminded me of the Moscow Rules.

So there.

Rules to Live By:

2010-12-09T17:17:00.005-06:00

The Moscow Rules a la the wiki:

Assume nothing.
Murphy is right.
Never go against your gut; it is your operational antenna.
Don't look back; you are never completely alone.
Everyone is potentially under opposition control.
Go with the flow, blend in.
Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.
Any operation can be aborted. If it feels wrong, it is wrong.
Maintain a natural pace.
Lull them into a sense of complacency.
Build in opportunity, but use it sparingly.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. (borrowed from Muhammad Ali, aka Cassius Clay.)
Don't harass the opposition.
There is no limit to a human being's ability to rationalize the truth.
Technology will always let you down.
Pick the time and place for action.
Keep your options open.
Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is an enemy action. (taken from Ian Fleming's novel Goldfinger)

!(@#$#^&#@~!!!!

2010-12-08T15:13:00.002-06:00

Motherfucking assnugget slimy duplicitous douchecanoe forked-tongue fucking snakes!!

What in the fucking fuck is wrong with people!?!?

That is all.

Seriously, Universe, could you cut me some slack?

2010-12-07T19:27:00.003-06:00

Wow. It's been a bit of a nightmare of unbloggable stress around here lately. I think last week took a year or two off my life.

But.

I got it settled. Sought advice frantically, incorporated many bits of disparate advice and tried to make sense of it all, then negotiated a solution that was actually....exactly what I wanted.

I'm pretty proud of that, though it may have less to do with my negotiating prowess than with the other parties finally screwing their damn heads on straight, but whatever. (People! You are all older and more experienced than I am - why is it always on me to be the goddamn adult around here!?) I will take it, and I will call it a victory for AA getting her grown-up science shit taken care of. That's a good thing.

Meanwhile, I am swamped with manuscript edits (seriously, can we just be done the drafts already? I am ready to effing submit!), and charging up a new project in post-doc lab. Ooof. Counting down the days until I leave for Xmas, that's for sure.

You'd think that would be enough on my plate - but no!!

There are some exciting new opportunities on the horizon which may or may not become something real. I need to do a lot of leg work and make some big decisions to get that off the ground. It will be totally worth it if it works out and I am very, very happy about these possibilities...but also feeling completely emotionally and intellectually drained and just stretched too thin. I don't really trust myself right now to make good decisions about these opportunities because I am running on fumes. Plus, there is still all the uncertainty which doesn't do wonders for my mental stability.

These drained feelings are causing me to question whether I really truly want to keep hacking away at this career path. I love the science.I really really do. But the other crazy that comes with it is killing me. I'd like to take a moment to really sit down and think hard about this stuff, about what I want from my current and future career, and do I really think I can get it like this, and if not like this then how else, but I am not finding the time when I can rarely even manage to put on my underwear right-side-out (not kidding about that one). I want to do that kind of thinking with a clear head, and I just don't have such a thing at the moment.

Hang on, just a few more weeks. A lot to do, but then I can rest.

The "Snake Fight" Portion of Your Thesis Defense

2010-12-06T16:23:00.002-06:00

Several of my friends and grad school cohorts are defending this week. In their honor, I am breaking the silence and taking up the wikileaks banner: this is the part that no one will tell you about your thesis defense. ~~Initiates~~ survivors are sworn to secrecy: "I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you." So let's hope my pseud is as tight as I think it is.

For all of you facing your defense in the near and distant future:

The "Snake Fight" Portion of Your Thesis Defense

You can't say I didn't warn you.

Ugh

2010-11-21T13:00:00.002-06:00

I don't cope with uncertainty very well. Not in the "wheeeee! let's have an adventure sense" - I like adventures. More in the "this is big decision that I need to make and I don't have all the information I need to make it". I'm pretty crap at dealing with that.

I like to have a plan. It is totally fine with me if the plan changes over time, but I need to have one to work from so that I feel like I'm actively making steps and decisions toward the desired outcome.

I'm facing some big (unbloggable) decisions now, and I can't actually make any of them yet. I have to wait, wait, wait on other people to make theirs first. This is killing me.

I am just barely keeping a lid on my internalized anxiety over this right now, and occasionally the lid blows off completely. As you might imagine, this is not a new experience - I have well-developed coping mechanisms. However, my normal coping mechanisms are proving completely ineffectual. I realize in the rational part of my brain that it is completely ridiculous to spend so much energy worrying about something that I can do nothing about at the moment, but that realization is having zero positive effect on the physiological stress I am experiencing.

Unfun.

Plus, the anxiety is exhausting, both physically and mentally. So much so that when faced with the simple daily tasks of editing a manuscript draft or setting up a restriction digest, they sometimes seem completely overwhelming and insurmountable, and sometimes just thinking about doing them is enough to send me over the edge. And this provides a nice little feedback loop for generating further anxiety.

I am seriously considering drugging this problem just so I can stay functional. Just not sure that this is really necessary/a good idea if I know (from previous experience) that I will feel fine once all the other players in this situation make their decisions so I can proceed to make a plan that takes these into account. I'm not sure what the time line for that looks like and I know that things like SSRIs take some time to take effect. Not sure if that's really going to help given the circumstances. In the meantime I'm quitting caffeine, and trying not to over-sedate with EtOH at the end of the day. And working out a lot. And trying to avoid people/situations that feed the beast. Ugh.

I have a plan....

2010-11-12T13:37:00.002-06:00

...and friends in high places. I think I can work around the disappointing limitations of the tools I have here. Never underestimate your professional network people.

In which I pretty much FAIL at teh Skienz

2010-11-10T12:36:00.001-06:00

Cloning is the fucking bane of my existence.

Seriously. I do not understand how something so simple and straightforward as cut-and-paste could thwart me thoroughly at every turn. It should have taken me seven days tops to generate this construct. We’re going on fourteen now. Part of the delay is that nobody bothered to reorder the appropriate antibiotic when it got used up, but most of it is just that shit isn’t working, and since there’s no good reason it shouldn’t work, I must be fucking something up. Except I don’t know what I’m fucking up because this makes no goddamn sense.

It’s not that I don’t have any experience with this. It’s not that I don’t understand it. I plan very carefully and do everything “right” and then get a fucking incomprehensible product (or none at all). This is child’s play and I’m a motherfucking postdoc. I should be able to do this shit in my sleep.

I mean really, I cloned this fucking fragment into the vector with the same fucking sites so that I could send it for sequencing, confirmed the insert by blue/white screening AND colony PCR and now the same fucking enzymes won’t release it. What the fucking fuck?

This is not difficult. I routinely do six more difficult things than this before breakfast. So how is it that I suck so damn hard at this?

I want this done so I can do some actual science. That’s why I’m here, right? Right?

Weeks like these I want to hang up my lab coat.

What am I doing here?

2010-11-05T16:37:00.000-05:00

This post is almost entirely a bunch of navel-gazing and is probably uber-boring. You’ve been warned.

I’m feeling pretty eeeeehhhhhhh about my research and about being a postdoc lately. It’s weird.

I like my research question. I like it a lot. Most of the time, I really like doing the experiments too. I’m pretty hooked on the primary technique and I get kind of giddy about analyzing the data.

I like my mentor. I like him a lot. We communicate well, and I’m learning a lot of skills from him that were really lacking in my grad school training. That’s pretty cool.

So, I’m feeling a little weird about feeling apathetic about my job and my continued position as a postdoc.

There’s probably several reasons for this:

I tend to go through a trajectory of career and research excitement that runs from “OMG! This is the best job EVAR”! to “DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM I hate everything about my life and it’s all because shit never works in the lab and I can’t pay my fucking bills and that suuuuuuccccckkkkkkkssssss.” I’d say in an ordinary 30 day period I probably hit the high and low of that trajectory at least once. So, maybe I’m just in a down-swing.

But maybe it’s more than just that. I’m coming up on the end of my “contract” period (which, let’s be honest, is not really a contract at all since I live in a state where your employer can basically fire you on a whim if they so choose, but whatever). My original “contract” was for 12 months, with renewal contingent upon me securing my own funding. This is quite typical nowadays in my field. My PI is pretty new and has not yet secured his first R01, though he writes for them like a fucking machine. I recently got scores back on my NRSA – they were decent – but we won’t know whether it’s funded or not until after council review and the Congressional NIH appropriations bill or some shit is decided. I’m choosing not to worry about the NRSA scores since they’re out of my hands at this point.

However, I am thinking about the what ifs…What if I don’t get this NRSA, and what if PI still doesn’t have an R01? Can he still support me? Will he still support me? What if he can’t/won’t? What if I end up unemployed? How long will it take me to find another position? Should I start looking now, just in case? Would that be a faux pas? Should I look outside of academia? What if I do and I get offered a position? Do I want to leave academia? Do I really want to stay? What if this is the only job I could ever be happy at? What if I choose to do something else for a while and find that I hate it and can’t break back into academic research? What if I don’t take that risk, and stay in academia, and end up living hand-to-mouth for the rest of my life? What if my life/job/whatever is meaningless?

Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between an existential crisis and melodrama. Anyone else have this problem?

There’s also this thing: I was hired to this lab to lead a particular project. (Let’s not kid ourselves with that “lead” business though – my minions are undergrads with full class schedules, so this really means that I *do* the particular project.) I was hired because I have a particular skill set that this lab did not, and our interests meshed really well in a way that would allow me to really take this skill set and my BigQuestionBiology in a new and exciting direction, while also taking the particulars of this new lab’s questions into new territory. Everyone was pretty excited about this, so we started plotting our world domination before I even started here.

There’s one small problem though. I was hired to do this particular project, and was told that everything was going to be all sunshine and unicorns because the department just got a big fucking grant to buy the shiny new toy that makes this project possible. Awesome!, says I, “when can I start?” But then, the shiny new toy didn’t show up for another 8 months. No problem, I had some new techniques and a new system to learn, and some new reagents to put together. I kept myself busy, and made some progress so that we could hit the ground running once it showed up. And then, when it got here, it turns out that it can’t actually do the thing upon which I had premised the most central aspects of this project. I was pretty crushed.

I’m also feeling a little like, “why am I here?” about this. Why would they hire me to do this job for which we do not actually have the tools? Well, because they thought we did. Why would they tell me we were going to get these critical tools when we got something else entirely? Well, either they didn’t think through why this wouldn’t really work, or since they are not experts in this particular technique, they just didn’t know any better.

Can we work around this problem? Sure, but not gracefully. The analysis will be a total mess with any conceivable work-around strategy. It will also ratchet down the impact of this project quite a few notches. We simply aren’t going to be able to make the same conclusions with these work-arounds that we would have been able to with the original strategy (but hey, sometimes that’s science, right?).

The thing is, I can do the work-arounds, but I’m pretty fucking bummed about that. I was really looking at this postdoc as an opportunity to really push things forward with this research question and at the same time sort of establish myself as someone who can do this pretty fucking awesome thing which can answer a whole host of questions for your fields and mine and so don’t you want to hire me? Now, instead of that, I’m going to have to McGyver a bunch of shit to make some tiny incremental advancement in a narrow question that not that many people really care about. If we can even get it published what with the messy analysis. McGyvering shit is cool, incremental advancements in stuff nobody cares about is less so.

I just…this is not what I signed on for.

But I don’t have any other hot options just waiting for me either.

I had another side project, just in case things got sticky with the primary one, which is always a good idea. But after spending several months on it, PI just killed it to save resources. I totally get why he did this – he’s really starting to feel the heat with respect to his funding situation, and he’s trying to be responsible and put time and money and effort into the stuff that’s going to get us some papers and him some grants and fast! But it also means that now all my eggs are in one basket, and resources-wise, that one really wasn’t a big drain.

And then there’s the fact that I’m starting to feel the heat. I’m getting a lot of “I really need you to be a role model to the grad students AA and that means getting out a paper per year. You’ve been here almost a year and your project isn’t close to publication yet.” I know that this is him dealing with the pressure to publish so he can get some more funding, and I do think it’s important to be a good role model to the grad students. I would be pretty fucking excited to have a paper ready for publication about now. But that’s not realistic.

I came to this lab with the expectation that the tools would be in place for me to hit the ground running with adapting this technique to the new labs system. I anticipated that this would take between 3 and 5 months, considering that I would also be adapting *myself* to a new system, and that I would be the only expert in this particular technique, so I’d have to do most of the trouble-shooting without the advantage of other people with this experience.

That’s not what happened though. The tools were not here for the first 8 months. That’s OK, I got a head start on learning a new field, and building some reagents, and I even got a fellowship written! But then the tools arrived and I find that they can’t do what I needed them to do, and so if I want to keep pursuing this question it’s going to take realistically at least another 6 months to adapt some kind of work-around and generate some data…assuming that it works. I repeat: what am I doing here? And will it get me where I need to go?

Part of my dooooooommmmmmm feelings might also be attributed to the fact that I’m facing some pretty strong impetus to move overseas at the moment and so there’s a good chance that I’m sort of psyching myself up for being ready to leave here if circumstances dictate.

And part of it is also watching my PI and other young profs keep running into that brick wall of funding (or lack thereof) and pick themselves up and try again, and again, and again, even though they’re worried as fuck about whether or not they’ll make it, and probably asking themselves all those same what ifs that I am.

I repeat: what am I doing here? And do I want to stay here in this limbo for the next 10 years? If not, where else should I be?

The stupid, it burns

2010-11-02T13:32:00.003-05:00

I have wicked allergies.

And I just ate a bahn mi sandwich with extra jalapenos and sriracha.

Then I rubbed my eyes.

Oh fuuuuuuuck.

I would use the eyewash station in the lab, but the water comes out rust brown. Somehow I don't think that will be soothing, so I'll just sit here with tears streaming down my face until that shit clears on its own.

Today is one of those days....

2010-11-01T14:08:00.001-05:00

....when I kind of just want to say "fuck it!" and apply for editorial positions.

An Open Letter

2010-10-26T12:10:00.004-05:00

Dear Office Mate,

A few things:

If you are going to bring a guest to the lab with you for an entire week, and that person has no professional business in our lab, and during that week your guest will be occupying our *shared* office, it is generally courteous to inquire of the other person(s) with whom you share said office whether they mind. You know, out of respect for the fact that it is also *their* office and that accommodating another person in an already cramped space might be a teeny bit inconvenient for them, and might possibly disrupt the work that they are here to do. (For the record, when asked in the above manner whether it is OK with me for your guest to come to work with you, and spend some of that time in our shared office, the answer is yes, it's fine. However, I don't feel quite so charitable when I am informed, rather than asked, whether this will be OK.)
As per #1, your guest is a potential disruption and inconvenience in my working space. Which means that ~~requesting~~ demanding that I go to further inconvenience by disrupting my workspace is really over the top. No, I am not going to "tidy my desk" to accommodate your guest. I have two stacks of papers on it: one for papers I need to read, and one for papers that I have read but intend to revisit. Your guest will not be using my desk during his or her visit, so there is no reason that the relative tidiness of my desk should be an issue. Also, as for the "clothes" under my desk. I keep a gym bag under my desk. I have (washed, never unwashed) gym clothes in it. But there is no reason that you should know that there are clothes of any sort in it, unless you have taken the liberty of snooping. I am sure you're aware that this is completely unacceptable behavior.
Finally, I do science. For a living. Doing science is what puts a roof over my head. Ergo, I am a professional scientist. I have a desk. It looks the way it looks, with a couple of stacks of paper on top and a gym bag underneath. It is my desk. It belongs to me, a professional scientist. Ergo, this is what a professional scientist's desk looks like. So when you ask me to make my desk look "more professional" for when your guest (who I have not invited) comes to our shared office, I'm not really sure what you mean. I'm a professional scientist; this is what my professional scientist desk looks like.
Please go suck an egg.

Uncharitably yours,

AA

Story of My Life

2010-10-20T15:33:00.003-05:00

Ha! So true! Thankfully, I have some good ones.

From here.

Also, I just noticed that this is my 300th post. w00t! And, I have 39 followers. (Who are you people???)

Avian Update

2010-10-19T12:07:00.003-05:00

Albatross #1 is off my neck! And I didn't have to kill anyone to make that happen. Huzzah! Despite attempts to buzzkill in the comments, I am unafeared of the torture of reviewers. This is sort of a weird manuscript/submission circumstance which I think/hope will circumvent a lot of reviewer quibbling. Fingers crossed on that.

Now for Albatross #2, which I thought was ready to go, but now GrAdvisor says it's way too long and this will piss off the reviewers. Last draft was "too short". I am feeling like this is very subjective, which is the nature of the review and editing process, I am well aware. However, some objective criteria would be much more helpful and result in a more expedient submission of the fracking thing.

Albatross #1

2010-10-18T11:39:00.002-05:00

If it is not submitted by the end of today I will very likely kill some innocent creature (not my fantastic minion though, because he is working his ass of on fixing the codecs on the final two videos). Just waiting on the last two pieces for uploading, then I get to click "SUBMIT"! The heady feeling that follows a manuscript zipping off into the ether is like crack, and it's been waaaaaaaay too long since I've had a fix. I am getting very, very twitchy over this one.

Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

2010-10-07T17:50:00.003-05:00

...is what has been inflicted on my sense of self-worth and accomplishment recently.

No huge assaults on my sanity or integrity. No terrible failures. Just a sense of scrambling all day to keep on top of the things that need doing, and a sense at the end of the day that I've been spinning my wheels.

Then there's the lack of weekends. I spent last weekend gutting and reworking TWO ~~manuscripts~~ albatrosses from my dissertation, and sent them off to coauthors. It felt really good to do that, but now they're back with edits. One has a submission deadline, and the other has competition. Urgh.

I didn't want to take time away from post-doc lab to work on that, so I did it over the weekend. And I will do it again this weekend...in addition to covering some hugely time-intensive experiments for my fantastic undergrad minion who would ordinarily do all of this really hard work himself, but not this weekend because he will be interviewing for medical school admissions. So proud of him.

And all week I wrangle my schedule to try and solve this completely unfathomable problem with my BigFuckingDeal Experiment, and still provide adequate (I can't hope for good at the moment) guidance to my minion-in-training. I don't want her to flame out for lack of mentorship from me because she is already well on her way to being another second set of hands on my projects.

I am exhausted by all of this, but more than I should be. The weather has finally started to feel like fall (it occurred to me on my walk to work this morning that I could "get away" with wearing actual pants again, instead of shorts), and it is soooo nice. After an interminable summer of rushing from one climate controlled building to the next in order to avoid a heat index well into the 100s, this weather makes me want to play hooky, to run around like a fool in the courtyard outside our building, or to just sit on the deck with a nice Oktoberfest and watch the sun go down.

I haven't done any of those things because there is still too much work to do at work. Instead I come in early and leave well after dark, and feel sad and tired and a tiny bit desperate about that. Then I do it again the next day, and the sadness starts to feel cumulative, and I sit at my desk and try to work up the motivation to actually make a dent in this mountain of work that I need to finish, and instead of doing the work, I wallow. Sometimes I feel like crying, and there is no good reason why. Nothing terrible has happened. I have a little too much to do for my comfort at the moment, but this is nothing compared to the stress I was under in grad school and I was able to hold it down most of the time. Now I just feel kind of helpless and useless and like a bit of a burden to other people. I'm sure that will change some when I get this problem with my experiment sorted out, and when I get these albatrosses off of my neck, but in the meantime, it's hard to make progress on those things when I don't even feel all that functional.

My mom gets seasonal affective disorder. I have always noticed a change in my mood with a change in seasons, but never to this degree. Perhaps it's heritable.

Twiddling my thumbs

2010-09-30T11:36:00.002-05:00

Yo! ShinyNewEquipment Peeps! Whazzzzup?

I think it's pretty awesome that you provide free downloads of the "light" version of the software that runs ShinyNewEquipment so I can do my data analysis offline.

But do you think that you might get around to actually giving me said download sometime in the next century??

I applied for the download, and you approved it, and told me to expect a "confirmation email" with the link to the actual software package and the code I need to get it. My inbox has been looking pretty fucking empty for over 24h now. How long does it take you clowns to send out an auto-generated email?

I'm sitting on a steaming-hot-awesome pile o' data from this thing and I would really like to, you know, DO SOMETHING with it. Hop to it!

Sciencegasm!!!

2010-09-23T17:08:00.002-05:00

ShinyNewEquipment is IN THE BUILDING!!

And it is sooooo niiiiiiiice.

I'm still a little bummed that it's the sub-optimal (for my purposes) rather than the super-optimal model, but it still eleventy times better than I was using before that I will get over it being not exactly perfect. Someday, when I am a grownup scientist I'll get the super-optimal one for myself. (Santa? Are you listening? I've been a very good scientist, and plan to continue along the same veins, so if it's alright with you let's just skip Christmas for a few years and bank all those presents for one of these when I get my own lab, ok?)

I'm looking forward to spending a lot of time with this thing in the near future. Hopefully BH won't get jealous.

You know what else sucks?

2010-09-22T14:06:00.006-05:00

Fire ants.

Proof that if there is a God, he surely hates us.

Since the water line to our house has sprung a leak, we have no running water at home (the ants do not care about this), and the front yard has become a giant mudpit with a small geyser in the center (the ants care about this very much). Since it has flooded them out of their home in the soil somewhere in the vicinity of my front lawn, they have moved to higher ground. Namely, into the potted plants which house my herbs on the second story balcony. This is not good. Fire ants are quite protective of their homes and resent any disruption (such as me picking herbs for dinner). Normally, to evict them I would simply turn on the automatic waterer that feeds my pots, which would make them feel rather unwelcome, and make neighboring pots equally unattractive. BUT! I have no running water!!

So instead I went nuclear with a can of RAID. (Bad hippie-kid!) This made the little fuckers squirm in agony, then come after me with a vengeance. I am now covered in 3/4 inch welts with a necrotic blister in the center of each. They itch like the devil. And, while I was successful in evicting the ant colony from their preferred pot, I have succeeded only in rendering my chives inedible due to the poison, and convincing the ants to move to the neighboring pot.

Also, I definitely have some kind of virus, and really really need the water to work again so the toilet can flush.

And my shit at work hasn't been working - crappy samples which are a supplier problem, not mine. Good: not my fault. Bad: kind of stuck with the crappy samples I can get at the moment.

And our ShinyNewInstrument is almost up and running...but it is the sub-optimal model. I have been under the impression all along that it would be the super-optimal model. Balls. I can deal but this really throws a monkey wrench into the works.

This is the Week of Crap.

Ugggh-gh-gh-gh....

2010-09-20T18:14:00.003-05:00

Feeling stuffy and sore-throated. It is not allergy season here in the sub-tropics. Which leads me to conclude:

1) I've got some shitty little virus.
2) I've got the dreaded strep throat (if I have one more bout of that shit, I swear I'll take my tonsils out myself).
3) I've got residual symptoms from the cleaning binge I went on yesterday.

Please, for the love of all that is good and right in the universe let it be three. Let it be three. DangerDog has started his biannual coat blowout and the apartment hadn't really been cleaned since we got back from vacation (I'm not even going to tell you how long ago that was). Let's just say that it was dirtier than two possums fucking in the garbage can. As of yesterday, it's a lot cleaner, various closets are a lot sparser, and the Goodwill is a lot richer in terms of nice pre-loved things. All of which are good outcomes, but damn, the dust that was kicked up in the process!

Please let it be three. I cannot afford a sick day. I have two manuscripts to finish this week and my last round of fussing with the protocol for BigFuckingDeal Experiment before the ShinyNewToy is installed. Then it's all systems go. I need to be ready, not two steps behind. Please let it be three.

Fie upon you samples!!!

2010-09-13T20:14:00.001-05:00

I did all the prep work just how you liked, but better than half of you wanted more time. So here I am, all by myself, my most excellent minion has gone home for the day, and now I've got to finish the rest of you with only this one set of hands. Why couldn't you have just been with the program and I could have processed you with everyone else? I hates you.

2010-09-12T09:53:00.000-05:00

Inertia

2010-09-08T13:14:00.002-05:00

OK, so I'm not totally gone,but posting will continue to be light for a while.

See, I'm having this problem with inertia lately (an object at rest cannot be stopped!). Usually when I have this problem it is because everything fucking sucks and I have trouble working up the motivation to do anything when it is all tres sucky (but I have coping mechanisms to deal with this conundrum). That is not currently the case. Things are going pretty fucking awesome on several fronts, and I really, really want to take advantage of that stroke of good luck and momentum. However, I am struggling to actually do as much as I should be about it.

I think it's mostly because I am juggling a squillion different balls at once, and so it's been very difficult to put several of them down and really focus on just one (or a few) that need to be my top priority at the moment. It would be a very good thing if I could make myself do this, because then I could just finish with those top priority ones and take them out of the rotation. Then I would have net fewer balls in the air and I focus my attention a little better in general.

A friend of mine said to me the other day that her favorite motivational strategy is to tell herself that any wasted day or wasted effort or just a day spent not as productive as she could be, is one more day prolonging her time here. (She's in grad school, so the getmethefuckouttahereandfast! sentiment is one I can sympathize with.) Thing is, I'm not sure this is a good strategy for me. I'm liking what I do and (for the most part) my working environment. Of course I don't want to be a postdoc forever, but it seems to me that I ought to be focused on quality (of publications, training, etc.) rather than counting down the days to just get out. Because what's on the other side? I don't know yet, and I should probably figure it out before I start racing toward the finish line (or so that I can start racing toward the finish line with some kind of prize in sight).

Any collective wisdom out there?

Blogging hiatus

2010-09-05T18:16:00.002-05:00

Unbloggables afoot that are 5 parts exciting and superhappyfunland and 6 parts confusing and infuriating and making me alternately want to puke, punch someone, or hide under a rock for the next century or so. Probably won't around much for a bit, but have no fear, I shall return at some point.

Zomg grad skoll carnival!!!1!

2010-08-19T22:50:00.001-05:00

The zomg grad skool carnival!!!1! is up at 49%. Go read.

Venkat is cracking my shit up.

2010-08-11T22:51:00.000-05:00

That is all.

Everything I Needed to Know About Grad School...

2010-08-05T11:30:00.000-05:00

...I learned the hard way.

The new academic year is just about upon us and shiny-faced new grad students are about to jump into the shark pond. This is a disjointed list of AA's rules for surviving grad school. It by no means covers everything, so leave more advice in the comments, or write your own post and send it to Samia for the ZOMG grad skool carnival!!!1!!

Rule #1: ~~Cardio.~~ No more A's for effort.

My first-year class got our asses handed to us on our Genetics final. The course director was a young prof who felt he had made the test too easy the previous year since a significant proportion of the class aced it. In an attempt to make it a little more challenging, he swung way too far in the opposite direction. Nobody got an A and we all knew it walking out of that lecture hall. We were all commiserating on the way to the pub afterward, and one of my classmates said something to the effect of, "well, on question #2 I really tried hard to answer it with the information given. I know I got it wrong but I think he should give some points for the attempt." Sorry, no. This isn't grade school. I got it wrong too and I worked my ass off, but I am still arguing against points for effort. We're scientists now; we're not just practicing anymore. We're trying to figure shit out. We're looking for the real answers. The ones that are true. The ones that tell us something meaningful about the world that we didn't know before. We might work really really hard and still not get to that answer, but making one up because finding the real one was too hard doesn't do anyone any favors. On a more practical note, nobody's getting funded for asking dumb questions with their research. You gotta go after what's real, not what's easy or convenient. Spinning your wheels on putting in a lot of "effort" is meaningless if you're not approaching a real answer to your questions. The sooner one disabuses oneself of the notion that science is like school, the easier one will have it. It's a tough transition to make, but a necessary one.

That being said, hard work is important so long as it is directed toward a meaningful result. BUT, working hard isn't enough - you need a little luck and some smarts too. Sometimes you're going to have a great hypothesis, flawless experimental design, and still turn up nothing. Other times you're going to be bumbling along with some dull line of questioning and have one of those Eureka! discoveries. These things are not in your control. If you're smart about your interpretation of the literature and your experimental design you can tip the odds in your favor, but some of it is just plain luck. The most important finding of my dissertation was a completely unexpected outcome in one of my control groups that I discovered a few months before my defense. That result turned my dissertation from a ho-hum characterization and confirmation of hypotheses that we always thought were true but had never really demonstrated to an important body of work that overturned more than a decade of dogma. There is no way I could have predicted it. Just plain luck. That sounds kind of scary, but it's actually a good thing for those of us who tend to load ourselves with the personal responsibility of being perfect in every way and having all the answers. You just can't be. Let it go. Embrace the good luck when it comes your way, and don't beat yourself up when it doesn't. Even when your luck is rotten, if you've got a good plan you can get something done. It might not be OMGWTFBBQ!!!!1!1 awesome findings, but it will be something.

Rule #2: You have to look out for number one (that would be you, not rule #1).

No one else has your back. Grad school is a hazing ritual, and even with the best of mentors they can't be holding your hand or looking out for that douche who wants to give you a swirly all the time (heaven forbid that they are that douche) - they've got grants to write and shit. You gotta take care of yourself. Be your own ally. Be careful not to burn bridges. Get everything in writing. Protect yourself. Trust, but verify. Even if you do all of this, you're still gonna get burned at one point or another. That's grad school - I don't like that reality either, but I personally can't change it at the moment (and as a grad student you probably won't be in a position to do so either) and this is a post on how to get through it with your soul intact. Watch your back. Know the chain of command so that if you do get into trouble with your mentor or a committee member, you know who is in a position to help you out. Ideally, get to know these people *before* you need their help in mediating shit. Hopefully, you'll never have to use them as such, but chances are you will at one point or another because you're navigating a system that is no longer designed around your best interests - this isn't undergrad - and you probably won't have a playbook.

Rule #3: Know your exits.

The hardest thing about the bench work is knowing when to cut your losses. Everything else is trained monkey work. This is the toughest lesson that I am STILL learning. When have you given it the old college try and when does it need just a little more finessing? I can't answer that question. In all likelihood, no single person can. This is where your advisory committee is absolutely key. You have a built-in jury for your ideas, so use it. If you have a choice in the composition of your committee you need to pick people with different things to bring to the table. It's no good stacking the whole group with protein biochemists because you're only going to get that singular perspective, not some creative solutions when you're up against a dearth of useful data. Having a diverse committee means that you will get a more rounded discussion about how your projects proceed, and likely when to say enough is enough, this line of questioning is getting us nowhere (or somewhere) so it's time to try this other thing (or keep plugging away). No one is born knowing how to make good decisions about this stuff - it's built from experience, so form a committee you can trust and then LISTEN to them.

Your committee is also there for other exit strategies, like when to set that ever-elusive defense date, or when your advisor needs to just let go of hir pet hypothesis and acknowledge that your data refute it. It is really really important not to stack your committee with a bunch of your advisor's yes-men. A few of them are probably a good idea, especially if you've got an advisor that really has your best interests at heart, but it is really really important that you have at least 2 who are capable of saying "hey, Advisor, cut it out!" and getting some action from that, in case you need that kind of advocacy. Your committee is your exit strategy (and you don't want to be in grad school forever) so I would argue that choosing a good committee is as important as choosing the right advisor. A lot of programs will let you change the composition of your committee as things progress. If so, you can get rid of the deadwood as necessary and replace them with people who can be of more help to you. Take advantage of that flexibility.

Rule #4: Exercise extreme caution in choosing your associates.

Good mentoring will get you far...good luck identifying a good mentor. This piece of advice has been done to fucking death, so I won't say much more other than to acknowledge that yes, the personality, communication style and scientific training chops of your mentor are way, Way, WAY more important than the project. Period. Don't ask me again.

Rule #5: Maintain your grip on reality.

Fundamentals of scientific method = rigid empiricism. You will be tested on this. In reality though, every good scientist (even your most heinous hard-ass committee member) knows that objectivity is NOT REAL. The key to doing objective science is knowing that the lens through which you see the world is not the same as the lens through which everyone else sees the world, and *managing* those biases is what brings your science closer to the Platonic ideal of objectivity. Knowing the limitations of the dominant paradigms is what makes your science *original*.

Purge the following from your vocabulary now:

"These results prove that...." Science doesn't prove shit. Ever. Never ever. We can use the scientific method to disprove our null hypotheses (and your results are only as good as the assumptions you hold when you build those hypotheses) but we never ever ever prove anything. Full stop. Proofs are for geometry and Logic 101. Unless those are your Ph.D. programs just eliminate the word proof right now, and activate your death-ray for any scientists who use it in your presence.

"I believe that...." Nobody gives a fuck what you believe. Not in the context of your dissertation anyway. All that matters is what your data tell you, and data can't tell you jack about belief. You are a scientist now, not a gospel preacher. Beliefs are based on personal experience and are often held even in opposition to factual evidence. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have beliefs, or that personal experience is irrelevant - both are actually quite important to being human. What I *am* saying is that belief doesn't really mean anything in the context of empirical inquiry (assuming that you are doing a decent job of managing your own biases when designing your hypotheses, which you should be). What a lot of people mean when they use the "b" word is that while they don't have the evidence to support it (yet), they postulate/posit/hypothesize that.... Use these words instead. Beliefs can't be tested empirically; hypotheses can.

While we're at it, this is not something that is particularly critical to the foundations of scientific discourse, but is a huge pet peeve of mine, so please, please, for the sake of my sanity, get the singular/plural subject-verb agreement sorted out for the word "data". "Data" is the plural of "datum". A datum is a single data point (from which you can draw no conclusions). Therefore, "this datum is representative of phenomenon blah-di-blah" and "these data suggest that variable X has Y effect".

Rule #6: Enjoy the little things.

Have a hobby - something you're good at. Your self-worth or "goodatitedness" should not be tied to your bench chops - they will let you down. One of my undergrad advisors knew I was into SCUBA and horseback riding so he really drilled into me the necessity of continuing to pursue these things while in grad school for the sake of my own sanity. What he didn't realize is that the relationship between stipend and cost-of-living had changed significantly since he'd been a Ph.D. student. :( So I got some cheaper hobbies. You should too. Make them a priority.

Rule #7: Adopt a personal mantra.

This is useful for talking yourself off the brink of desperation when you're in the 3rd year slump and nothing is working, or you're in a particularly horrid meeting with your advisor discussing what disappointing student you've turned out to be. Just to give you some ideas, I'll tell you mine. I still use it. Are you ready for it?

"Yay! I don't suck!"

Tell yourself this every time you complete something successfully. Even something as mundane as running your electrophoresis gel in the correct direction. The trick is to bank this idea so you plenty in reserve for the times when you do suck...then you can withdraw some of the "I don't suck!" from your bank to get you through without losing all self-confidence. It sounds kind of stupid I know, but I found it to be a pretty adaptive survival strategy.

Rule #8: Don't take yourself too seriously.

Remember that this is not your whole career. You will make mistakes, and that is just fine. Neither the whole world nor the rest of your life depends upon this dissertation. When things get miserable, remember that you have a choice to be there. You can choose differently. I didn't choose differently, even when things sucked so hard that I didn't think they could possibly get worse (and they did get worse, but then better), but knowing that I could choose differently if things got truly intolerable gave me the umph to get through it.

Under the same theme of taking oneself too seriously, avoid the attempt to compare and compete with other grad students. Everyone's project takes a different trajectory so there is absolutely no objective way to judge yourself against other people's projects. Also, all the insecurity and impostor syndrome that's rolling around in your head is also rolling around in theirs. You're not saying how scared you are and neither are they, so rest assured that you're all equally insecure and equally capable of making it big.

Rule #9: Have fun!!

Don't be that guy or gal who sets up a cot in the lab and develops a severe blink when exposed to rays from the actual sun. You are allowed to be a person, even during the indentured servitude. You are a young and interesting person, so don't suppress that for some monastic ideal of sacrificing all on the altar of the bench. Live your life while you're at it.

Most of all: GOOD LUCK!!

Playing nice

2010-07-29T17:28:00.005-05:00

OK, there are some nice things about where I work now. People are nice (with a few exceptions). I like that (even though I'm not always very nice, but we'll get to that in a moment). It's not that people weren't nice at grad institution. Nobody was mean. We were just all perfunctory. I liked that too. I'm doing my job, I treat you with the respect and courtesy you deserve as my colleague and a human being, and we go about our day with minimal fuss.

Postdoc U is different. I was greeted in every office I visited my first day (parking services, payroll, department, benefits) with a sincere "Oh! Are you a new employee? Welcome to Postdoc U! We're so glad you're here!" Which sounds sort of creepy and cultish in retrospect but the sincerity sort of obscured that for me at the time. And the fact that people continue to be nice. Which is nice.

Except when they start policing the nice. See, I'm perfunctory rather than nice. I am courteous (no, really, I am!) and respectful so long as other people behave that way towards me. I also maintain a keen separation between my personal and private life while I'm at work, and I compartmentalize critique of my science v. critique of my person pretty well.

So it kind of blows me away when people get all offended and shit when someone (OK, me) points out a flaw in their science. This service is often, but not always, solicited. They ask for my help, and I point out where things are probably going wrong and how they can fix it. I'm good at that. This is what they purportedly wanted, and I delivered. So what's with getting all butt-hurt about it?

I also give pretty candid feedback (again, usually solicited). When someone says, "what if I try this instead (of doing what you suggested in your infinite wisdom AA)?" and I say, "If you do that, it will look like shit." I'm not being mean. I'm stating a fact. A fact that (if they heed it) will save them a lot of time and shitty-looking data. I think that saving them that trouble is nice. After all, I could encourage them to do it wrong and then snicker behind their backs when it turns out looking like shit. But that wouldn't be very nice.

Nonetheless, people here at Postdoc U tend to be a little taken aback when I open my mouth. I don't really get it. I'm pretty genuine - it's easy to know that I'm being sincere and I rarely express negative opinions of people aloud. The only time I've given anybody the what-for is when there's a lot of carrying on and slinging of racist, sexist, homophobic garbage in and around my workspace. I don't tolerate that crap, and I say so. I can't change anybody's mind about it, but they can keep a lid on it at work. I'm a fucking professional and I'm not in on the jokes. It's not nice. So the nice-policing goes both ways, I guess.

An Open Letter II

2010-07-28T12:40:00.002-05:00

Dear Thing1,

It is very sweet of you to keep me company while I am lying in bed with a migraine. As you may have noticed, I am trying to get some work done on this proposal in the periods between raging pain. During these times, I would really appreciate it if you didn't try to park your ample butt on the keyboard or rub your drooling face all over the screen. It makes it hard to type. Not to mention the fact that the magnet on your collar which lets you use the cat flap could do bad things to my hard drive. When I'm not trying to type though, the purring and head-butts are quite charming. Just please don't head-butt my head.

Love,
AA

An Open Letter

2010-07-28T12:15:00.002-05:00

Dear Migraines,

You can fuck right off. I've got this fellowship proposal, see, that's due in short order. It's written, but there is still a fuckton of stuff to do, like polish the verbiage, coordinate all the myriad documents contributed by various persons, triple check the page limits for each document, ghost write yet another document for yet another contributor, sort out the formatting issues in my preliminary data figures, and ride the grants officer until zie figures out why I could log into the funding website yesterday but today I cannot. None of this is very easy to do when I feel like my skull is coming apart at the seams. So cut it out OK?

-AA

twitch

2010-07-19T11:08:00.004-05:00

It occurs to me that I have not had a vacation in 15 months. And the 15-month-ago vacation was tacked onto the beginning/end of a conference, which was lovely because I could not have afforded the ticket to confer-cation location otherwise, but it did mean that I spent a considerable proportion of the "vacation" finessing my talk. (Yes, I was nervous.) Since then, I wrote and defended my dissertation, started a new post-doc position immediately thereafter, continue to wrestle with some publications from grad school, and pulled together what I hope will be a successful fellowship application. I have been working my ass off.

I need a vacation. Really, really bad.

I got a fuckton of shit done last week - superhuman productivity. So, on Saturday I rewarded myself with a do-nothing day in which I sat around eating junk food and watching junk TV in my PJs. All day. And I didn't even feel guilty about it. God, it was good. Then on Sunday I made the epic error of checking my work email. (On a Sunday...why?) A message regarding my fellowship application was enough to send my planned weekend of relaxation into an anxiety-ridden tailspin. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. To ameliorate the anxiety (or rather to beat it into submission) I went to the weight room and lifted until I couldn't lift anymore. It helped, a little. I need to get a handle on this. I need to take a break. I need to start pinching pennies to put into a vacation fund so that I can plan one, have one to look forward to, and actually take one before I burn myself out over here.

Learn it, Love it, Use it

2010-07-15T14:21:00.002-05:00

People, I cannot believe that I have only just now happened upon the Better Posters blog. It is nothing short of The Bestest Thing Evah!!

I am a huge huge stickler for good presentations. Content *and* style. It matters. Bad presentations make me itch. You don't like to give them and nobody else likes to see/listen to them.

There are soooo sooooo many absolutely TERRIBLE posters out there. There is no one way to do it right, but there are so many more ways to do it wrong and it seems that a lot of people presenting at conferences are making a valiant attempt to try all the wrong ones first before they move on to something actually intelligible. Please don't be one of them.

The next time you need to make a poster, spend a coupla hours perusing this blog first. You will be so glad that you did.

I make pretty fucking good posters already, but there's always room for improvement so this one's going on the blogroll.

What's Hot and What's Not

2010-07-02T18:06:00.003-05:00

What's hot:

Uber-cheap on-campus parking!

What's not:

Still having to walk roughly a mile in a thunderstorm to get to car.

Exactly how not-hot this circumstance is can be calculated by the following equation:

Suckitude index = {[(D)^(P)]*(H)*(R)*(U)*(L)}/(S)

Wherein,

D = Distance from office to on-campus parking
P = rate of precipitation in cm/h
H = total hours since thunderstorm began
R = total campus area now underwater or acting as a river
U = likelihood that one has left umbrella in car (this value may be treated as a constant: 200%)
L = number of lightening-to-ground strikes in the last hour within a 5 miles radius of present location
S = likelihood that your post-doctoral (that's staff mofo's!) ass has been included on the "staff" email list informing you that all staff have permission to leave at 2pm today an accounta the flash flooding (this value may also be treated as a constant: 0.000001%)

Today I hate everything

2010-06-30T12:09:00.004-05:00

Today is data collection day. I expect less than 50% survivorship of my samples after experimental manipulation on a good run. This is just due to the experiment itself, excluding other factors. On average, about 33% of the survivors are productive in terms of usable data. Which is why prep work is such a fucking beast - this is a numbers game and I routinely prep over a hundred samples, each one requiring an average of 4 minutes of attention. Of these, fewer than 50% turn out to be not-dead and correctly staged for the experiment, and these proceed for experimental treatment (from which there are survivors and non-survivors). So when I come in this morning and find that 10% of my post-experimental treatment samples succumbed to some kind of infection, thus further reducing the chances of getting good shit out of some non-zero number of samples, it puts me in a pretty foul mood.

ETA: OK, so I don't hate *everything*...it turns out that even amongst those tiniest percentages of survivors I got some fucking awesome outputs. w00tang!!!

May I Have Your Attention Please

2010-06-23T13:41:00.005-05:00

A brand shiny new batch of grad students will be cutting their scientific teeth in short order here (I know, I know, where has the summer gone?), and they want your advice.

Samia at 49% is hosting a the zomg grad skool carnival!!!1. She is soliciting posts from fellow n00bs who are looking for a space to voice their concerns, and posts from current and former grad students who can offer some "I wish I had known [x] when I started" nuggets of wisdom. I'm willing to bet she'd be happy to hear from faculty on what they think a grad student needs for success too. Feel free to offer advice on more than just academics too - a lot of us struggle(d) with stuff that wasn't just the bench and classes.

She's calling for submissions by August 15, and I'm sure she and her readers will take as much advice as you're willing to offer, so get crackin'!!

Question:

2010-06-22T19:17:00.002-05:00

When you are thinking of trying something new, and you need to get reagents/information from someone else to do it, do you:

A) tell them that you are interested in trying something new and would like to try it with their stuff, and ask for info/reagents point-blank?

B) help yourself to their lab notebook, and then get all huffy when they ask what you're doing with it?

C) concoct some red herring about why you want their reagents/info in the first place which has little or nothing to do with what you're actually intending?

D) offer your help or collaboration on a marginally related project and hope that the info/reagents you actually need will just sort of rub off on you?

Just to make it a little more fun, does your answer change if you are requesting reagents/info from your labmate, someone in friendly neighbor lab, someone in unfriendly neighbor lab, or a complete stranger?

Dear Universe,

2010-06-21T18:25:00.005-05:00

Stop fucking with me. Seriously. I mean it this time.
Thanks for the minion. She rocks. But if you don't stop fucking with us, her other-worldly enthusiasm for pissant cloning projects is going to dry up in a hurry. Which will not rock.
I want to do some real experiments. I am a fucking post-doc. I have neither the time nor patience nor shattered self-esteem to do that whole, "well, at least the digest worked, so I'm not a total failure" thing anymore. I need to have this reagent in hand so I can do the motherfucking experiments to write the motherfucking fellowship that will (if I get it) allow me to still be a post-doc for another coupla years, which might (if I'm very lucky) leverage into a real grown-up scientist position. As you can see, there are several more steps in this trajectory in which you could continue to fuck with me in infinitely more creative and original ways, so could we lay off the fucking cloning already?
If you don't fancy any of the above, could we maybe negotiate a different pursuit? I'm thinking windfall inheritance from some unknown relative (you and I both know that the known relatives ain't got any cash) - it needn't be much - just enough to settle this mountain of student loan debt, and pick up a nice little grass-thatch shack on a tropical beach somewhere. So whaddya say, Universe? Vector or windfall?

EndNote, you are a pain in the ass

2010-06-15T11:47:00.002-05:00

I have a shiny new computer and a shiny new version of EndNote. (EndNote has never had the easiest user-interface to deal with, but it is still *worlds* better than typing your bibliographies by hand.) The new version *looks* a lot more streamlined but it moved a bunch of functions around to different menus and now I can't figure out how to put my damn search results into my fracking library - it's obviously worked before - I have about 1000 references in there already. There's a drag-and-drop function, but it won't drop into the damn library. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Also, the Help menu is useless.

On a completely unrelated note...

2010-06-10T11:48:00.005-05:00

One of my fav things about my new post-doc gig is that it is on a college campus with a sweet new rec center. I pay for membership there (on accounta being "staff" now), but it's not too exorbitant.

I've been on a weight-lifting training program since January, and it is AWESOME. I have been trying to shed some 40 (eep!) pounds that crept up during the last 14-18 months of my dissertation (*shakes fist at the universe for this*) and it has been slow going. But!! I have muscles!! I can finally see them in the mirror. I am so pleased about this. They've been there for a while, but there's still a rather thick layer of padding covering them up. That is still there, but it is less dense. I still look a little soft on the outside, but the muscles underneath? They are stone!! Yeah.

I am pretty excited about my clothes fitting a bit looser (in large part because I don't have the spare cash to replace my wardrobe). Though I might have to buy some new t-shirts anyway, given that the sleeves are getting a little snug around my bulging biceps - I am so not even kidding.

I like this one. It might even mitigate my officemate's alarm over my not-enough-pink wardrobe and "manly" fitness pursuits. Heh. (I kid, the officemate seems to have grokked the inappropriateness of her critique, and has mostly shut up about it.)

SHUT UP!!

2010-06-09T14:17:00.002-05:00

Dear Jackasses in Meatspace,

Could you please stop yammering on about inane bullshit and offensively *wrong* ~~facts~~ opinions about which you have not a shred of experience from which to base your judgment (yeah, I said judgment, bc that's what you are pronouncing - not objective observation - judgment). It is really fucking distracting and I'm trying really hard to finish this funding application and I really don't have time for your stooopid today. KTHX!

-AA

HORK

2010-06-08T16:12:00.002-05:00

That was the sound that the cats make when they puke on things. Because, really, that's what this deserves.

See Zuska and Dr. Free-Ride for takedown.

ETA: Oh yeah, FSP has got it too.

This is all the analysis you're getting from me. No time for tired one-trick ponies that get trotted out every time some guy gets pissed off that there are too many women playing in his sandbox. Tierney, the horse is dead. Disproven and dead. Did I mention that it's dead? Stop beating it already.

The Other Shoe

2010-05-24T16:58:00.002-05:00

Well, post-docing has been mostly good. Much better for my sanity. But I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later.

I'm having one of those days in which I suck at everything.

I spent all weekend wrestling with a stupid motherfucking confounding piece of shit reagent problem. Not my ideal weekend preoccupation but it needed to get done. Of course it didn't. It just kept getting curiouser and curiouser.

So I'm still wrestling with it today. Which I thought was Wednesday on accounta the two work days prior. Of course it is not Wednesday, but in so believing I managed to miss an appointment that happens on Monday (which is in fact today).

Absent-minded scientist indeed.

Not to mention a bunch of fucking rookie mistakes: retrophoresis, failed markers, you name it.

I need a drink.

A day in the life of a post-doc

2010-05-18T12:54:00.004-05:00

0600 - Turn off screaming alarm while still half asleep
0800 - Fuck! It's late! Let dog out to pee, gargle coffee, shower, realize you forgot to rinse out conditioner, hop back in, scramble to find lunch and gym clothes
0837 - Dash out the door, lock it behind you, realize you've left keys to bike lock inside. Open door, see dog doing the potty dance (again), let dog out and encourage to take a crap already (seriously, how many places in the yard must he circle before finding the perfect spot? is it really that much different from yesterday?)
0841 - Shoo dog back inside, retrieve appropriate keys, dash to lab
0856 - Look at to-do list, hyperventilate
0907 - Get cracking
0923 - Sit down to scratch head over yesterday's results while rxn incubates. Hrrmmm....these make no sense.
1118 - Check email - have finally gotten a reply from people you've been pestering about fishy reagent for the last two weeks
1119 - !@)(!*)@#(%)(*@#%$#@*&^)!@^%!!!!!! No wonder yesterday's results look fishy - your vector map was incomplete!!
1120 - Trash everything you started this morning and start over. Grumble incessantly
1207 - All rxns go - finally have something to eat.
1208 - Instead of eating lunch, spend 40min explaining technique to new lab member
1249 - Rxns finished. Fuck, no time for lunch, on to the next step
1350 - Next step incubating, stuff face, hammer out blog post, beg tech to make some solutions for you, pray you'll be finished in time to meet workout buddy at the gym
1430 - Set up new matings, do some colony maintenance, in the process splatter bleach solution all over your (only) new shirt, send snarky email about broken dishwasher and minimum wage to people who mosst assuredly won't give a fuck about this
1515 - Rush back to save rxns that have now been incubating for just a wee bit too long
1516 - Snipe and glower at d00dly labmate about how you're not here to be his Princess Leia fantasy and that you don't really care what he thinks about how you wear your hair
1523 - Run gel, pray for expected bands even though you're an atheist - what could it hurt, right?
1608 - Hop up and down throughout ~~insanely long~~ purification kit protocol, remind self of Homer Simpson bitching about how microwave burritos take too long to cook
1630 - Spec samples, do the math to set up the next reaction
1635 - Convince self you've done the math wrong, start over
1645 - Fuck it, you're pretty sure it's right and it's not really rocket science anyway, assemble reagents to set up rxn
1647 - Holy Mother of Mongeese, will this buffer never THAW!!!??!?
1700 - Throw shit in the incubator, dash to gym, destroy self in the weight room
1750 - Head home in state of exhaustion, realize you've forgotten something important, decide it's not actually so important that it can't be done tomorrow, suck down gin and tonic
0600 - Later, rinse, repeat

Aimated gif is so 2002, get with the program!

2010-05-14T14:07:00.004-05:00

Hooookay. Let's suppose that you run a company which provides a service to research scientists. In order to make sure that you stay in business, you must provide excellent service to these scientists, because there are about a bajillion other companies that also provide this service. What makes you unique is your personalized service, door-to-door pick-up and delivery, and excellent word-of-mouth references.

AA is tres impressed.

So AA checks out your website (which sports lots of flash and animated gif bling - not impressed), notes that you say you get optimum results when the scientists' samples are prepped and submitted in a certain way, so she preps and submits her samples exactly as the website specifies. You turn around AA's results in 18h.

AA is giddy with your service.

Except that the results are crap. Not so impressed.

So AA rings you up, and gets the actual dude who performed the actual assay on the phone. Kind of impressed. He tells AA that in fact, they prefer that sample prep and submission be performed in any way EXCEPT the way it's stated on the website now, because some reagents in their website-recommended strategy have changed and this effs everything up. Grrr. Actual dude who performed the actual assay is happy to re-prep and re-run AA's samples himself - no need to resubmit - and will drop off some free aliquots of their currently preferred reagent (they don't make it) directly to the lab on Monday so we can use that next time we submit. AA is distinctly NOT impressed with the maintenance of your website, but rather pleased with the customer service.

Moral of the story - website maintenance is KEY people, especially if you are a small boutique sort of company that has to compete with the big dogs. Lose the gif animation and make sure your info is up to date.

Self-Improvement

2010-05-10T16:41:00.002-05:00

In an effort to become a self-starting go-getting highly motivated and efficient human being, today marked the start of AA hitting the gym *before* going to the lab.

It may well mark the end too.

Thing is, all that momentum and efficiency generated by getting up and active first thing in the morning got all used up (or sucked out by a stooopidly long and unproductive lab meeting). I was neither efficient nor momentus(?) this afternoon.

Gah.

And now I'm trying to fend off the nodding-then-face-planting into my desk while I finish reviewing a paper. In short: "The authors present an intriguing hypothesis, and the study is quite promising. However, the plethora of typos and downright sloppy figure presentation make it nearly impossible for me to conclude anything meaningful from the data shown here. Also, I need a nap."

Open Letters

2010-05-04T18:37:00.004-05:00

Dear Scooter Riders,

Or should I just call you scooters? Look, your preferred mode of transport is a motorized vehicle. It requires license plates and you must drive it on the road and obey traffic laws just like a car. So what gives with parking it at the bike rack? I realize it's right there next to the front door which is very convenient (for you), but it's really inconvenient (for everyone else) when you effectively remove six available bike parking spots on an already crowded bike rack. And you're not even locking it up! So now I have to shove other people's bikes around and pick my bike up and shake it as if I'm disentangling wires behind a computer desk, and pull some contortionist moves just to get at my lock, simply because you couldn't be bothered to park in the parking lot where you belong. Please desist.

Sincerely,
AA

*********

Dear Colleague,

I am terribly sorry for having offended you. I am sorry that I do not conform to your rigid gender stereotypes. I am sorry that I do not wear pink, or skirts, or dangly earrings as often as you would prefer. I just don't think there's much point in advertising the fact that I am indeed a woman with all the usual trappings when it is already so fucking obvious. I mean, my boobs are freaking huge! It's not like anyone might be confused (and heaven forbid if that were the case /eyeroll). I am sorry that you disapprove of my egalitarian relationship, and even sorrier to deprive you of the pleasure of saying, "you'll never get a man if you make him do the cooking." It must be terribly difficult for you to be around me. I'm sorry that I engage in unladylike activities like cycling and hoisting heavy objects and cursing like a sailor. I'm sorry that I have my own opinions and high expectations of myself and others. I'm sorry that I don't dislike myself enough to meet your approval.

But mostly I'm sorry about all the lies I just told in the paragraph above. Because I'm not actually sorry about any of it.

Fuck off,
AA

**********

Dear Bottle of Agarose,

What the fuck is wrong with you? 0.8% is not asking too fucking much, but that gel has been sitting on the bench all fucking day and still has not polymerized.

You suck,
AA

**********

Dear Other Bottle of Agarose,

Thank you for saving my sanity, and for doing your job, and making a fucking gel that fucking polymerizes.

I heart you,
AA

Plants are sluts

2010-04-27T12:41:00.003-05:00

I don't know who is going at it at the moment but they should get a room instead of spreading their sperm all over kingdom come.

I thought I had finally kicked the seasonal allergies that I developed only upon moving to PhD City. I survived Oak Orgy 2010 with only a few sniffles. Went out of town for a weekend and inhaled the local treesperm and I'm right back to snot-skulled and stupid from the drugs.

At least I'm not alone - I can hear grad student sneezing in the office next door.

On a completely unrelated note - my external hard drive seems to have eaten all my archived data. Motherfuck! I need that shit!

A follow-up to family planning

2010-04-23T11:39:00.004-05:00

Context.

I have been soliciting effective STFU responses to one particular angle that's been grating on me: the Moral Imperative to Reproduce imposed upon those of us with a pair of X chromosomes and a terminal degree. You know, the "educated women are reproducing at lower rates than uneducated people!" exclamation followed by an accusatory eyebrow waggle in your direction. (Is it just me? Does this happen with alarming regularity to other women out there?)

First of all, who the fuck cares? Is this really a problem on a planet facing overpopulation in the very near future? Is it possibly symptomatic of the fact that some educated women might wonder if bringing more bodies into the world is not a long term solution?

Secondly, even if we assume that it is a problem and that it is apocalypse-smashing-critical that more educated women start popping out sprogs, is it specifically MY job to save the world? 'Cause you know, I'm pretty sure superhero savior is not in my job description. I didn't sign up for this.

Thirdly, if children of educated parents really are some kind of panacea for all the world's ills, why are you going on and on about how educated WOMEN have some unique responsibility to reproduce? Are you telling educated men the same thing? Why not? I mean, I'm a pretty good biologist, but even I have not yet developed parthenogenetic abilities yet.

So in response to this particular uterus-hijacking tactic I propose a couple of smackdown retorts:

Oh, and how many children do you have? Only two!?!? Well, that's only replacement rate for you and your spouse! You have not increased the proportion of educated people in the world, only maintained the status quo. You're an educated woman; you should have MORE children. And while you're at it, maybe you could have a few for me, since I'm kind of busy with other things.
Oh, and how many children do you have? Only one!?!?! Gosh, that's below average. I think the average number of children per couple is now 2.3. You'll need at least two more to be better than average. Where does that put you on the curve? If C is average, this earns you, what?, a D in Reproduction? tsk tsk. As for me, I can't fail a class I'm not registered for.
I also like Zuska's method.

Any other good comebacks readers?

(To be clear, I am not stridently opposed to women reproducing, whether educated or not, as it suits their fancy. By necessity, I am also not stridently opposed to men reproducing, again regardless of their educational status. I am merely stridently opposed to people gettin' all up in my uterus - or anyone else's - because my fancy re: reproduction doesn't suit them. I'm actually stridently opposed to people gettin' all up in my uterus for any reason whatsoever, fancies and suits aside. So there.)

Secret Reagent Man

2010-04-22T10:47:00.003-05:00

A pox on people who publish papers without telling you what the reagents are!

Alphabet soup acronyms are only OK if they are so commonly used in the field that you can be reasonably sure that a) everyone knows what you're talking about, AND b) the actual description of the reagent is easily Googleable from the acronym.

Hint: if you feel the need to define "4% PFA" in the methods section, you're not going to get away with an antibody against "F5y34g.2b" without telling us what protein you're actually detecting. Jerks.

A Word to the Wise

2010-04-15T15:12:00.003-05:00

This post will describe a recently discovered phenomenon (at least recently discovered by me).

I have learned that certain characteristics of writing assignments (in this category I include various and sundry things-which-need-to-be-written, such as applications for courses/fellowships, manuscripts, letters of recommendation, experimental outlines, lab notebook updates, blog posts, you get the idea) bear a striking resemblance to certain characteristics of rodents and other vermin.

Namely, if you leave two or more of them together, unattended, overnight, they will invariable spawn and produce hordes of little baby sprog things-which-need-to-be-written.

Also, they appear to be r species, and if not culled quickly there numbers will increase exponentially.

I recommend never leaving more than one thing-which-needs-to-be-written on your to-do list unattended.

You have been warned. Now pardon me, but I need to call the exterminator.

Family Planning

2010-04-13T15:28:00.002-05:00

I have had it up to fucking here with random people, coworkers, parents, etc. feeling free to inquire as the to the current status and future plans of my uterus.*

The next person who makes such presumptions will be "answered" with inquiries as to the to the current contents and future plans of their colon.

Specifically, whether or not my foot will be in it.

That is all.

*(If my uterus has plans of its own, it ain't sayin', 'cause it ain't none of your damned business.)

The Creative Processs

2010-04-08T15:24:00.002-05:00

a.k.a. AA's How to Write [fellowship application/experimental design/manuscript/clever blogpost/anything] Guide

Yeah, that really is about how it breaks down.

h/t Murray the Nut via 49 percent

Nomenclature

2010-04-05T16:08:00.005-05:00

When you are giving a talk on your detailed scientific methods, it is important to keep in mind the distinction between "tweezers" and "forceps".

"Tweezers" are for plucking your eyebrows or removing splinters from your fingers.

"Forceps" are for doing some bad-ass science stuff.

If you confuse them, people will laugh at you.

Figure 1: Tweezers.

Figure 2: Forceps.

They are totally different, obviously.

WHAAAAAAA????????

2010-04-02T15:26:00.004-05:00

Geez, I wish I found this yesterday. Be careful, the island of Guam might capsize if the military puts more people on it!! Apparently, he is not joking about this concern.

From Wonkette.

ETA: The representative from Georgia (Hank Johnson -D) apparently has Hepatitis-C. This is a debilitating disease which can cause cognitive impairment (hepatic encephalopathy) and that's likely what is going on in this clip. Which is unspeakably sad and tragic, however, one must wonder if he is in a fit state to lead at this point. Perhaps he should take medical leave.

That being said, the straight answers from the military dude to his misguided questions are still fucking HIGH-larious! "No sir, we do not anticipate this happening."

Soldiering on

2010-04-01T13:08:00.002-05:00

I've got a writing to-do list as long as my arm and though my fellowship proposal is really coming together the deadline is fast approaching and there's still a lot of work to be done.

My brain is mush, and my eyes are about to fall out of their sockets from staring a computer screen for too long. I really though that the new computer with the spiffy new monitor would help, but to no avail.

Am tempted to walk to the coffee shop across the quad for a change of scenery and a pick-me-up but I'm afraid this will break my concentration.

PI spends far more of his time writing than I do...I don't know how he manages. Not sure that the PI gig is looking all that attractive at the moment.

PSA

2010-03-31T15:58:00.003-05:00

To all persons who work in labs:

It is never ever OK to mess with other people's stuff. While you may have the best intentions re: organizing and consolidating and effeiciencizing things, and you may be the most organized and fastidious person on the planet and your lab mates may drive you crazy when they are not, it is still NOT OK to "reorganize" other people's shit.

Especially other people's experiments in progress.

You see, what looks disorganized to you actually is not. It is meticulously organized. It's just that you don't see it because you don't have the secret decoder ring. So when you fuck with other people's organizational systems, you bork the code. Data points will be lost and those other people are gonna come down hard on your ass.

I repeat: your good intentions to do other people a favor and "reorganize" their shit, or conversely your obsessive need to maintain everything in neat little symmetrical rows, are irrelevant. DO NOT FUCK WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S SHIT. Even if you are the PI.

Nerd Love

2010-03-25T15:14:00.002-05:00

Today marks 3 years since the departmental retreat at which BH and I met. Our posters were opposite each other's and since we were both doing interdisciplinary work only peripherally related to everyone's favorite topic du jour, nobody came by to talk about our research. So we talked to each other instead...and the rest is history.

I feel pretty fucking lucky to share my life with such a stellar guy. Three years may not seem like much, but I hope it's the beginning of many more to come. It is such a liberating experience to share your life with someone who is not always trying to change you. It sounds cliche but it really is the best thing ever to be with someone who loves you for being yourself. He just fits.

Happy Anniversay BH - I love you.

Updating the Blogroll

2010-03-25T11:45:00.001-05:00

It's messy, very long and includes a fair number of long-defunct blogs. I'll be cleaning it up shortly. In the process I'd like to add some of you who are not currently on it. Especially those of you who read and/or comment here frequently. I often click over to your place after you comment, and do some reading and/or commenting there myself. But I'm lazy and forgetful and sometimes don't manage to add you to the list.

I'll try to be better about this in the future, but if you notice that you're missing from the blogroll, leave me a comment here telling me to get off my sorry ass and give you some props already. I won't be offended. Likewise to lurkers: leave a comment and let me know you're out there. I'm always interested in knowing more about my readers so give me a link to your place. Or, if you don't have a blog, feel free to leave a comment here to introduce yourself. I won't bite. :)

$$$$

2010-03-24T10:55:00.003-05:00

Landlord's business office has lost our rent check...again. Third time in 2 years. Last time their "solution" was to ask us to pay by cashier's check. Um, so, you want us to shell out extra $$ every month because your business manager is incompetent, then send through the mail a form of payment that could be cashed by anyone, after your business manager has already demonstrated a propensity for misplacing such things? I don't think so.
I won a VISA gift card at the vendor show a few weeks ago. They sent it to my campus address (apparently), but it hasn't turned up. They are now sending me one to my home address, with instructions to spend both in case the first one ever escapes the campus mail vortex. w00t!
MegaResearchInstitute (home of GradLab) had me do a fuckton of paperwork last year so that they could retrieve from the IRS the ~$4K in tax that they erroneously removed from my stipend during the 4 years I was supported by a training grant. The first installment of this money was supposed to be in my hot little hands sometime last month. I still have not seen hide nor hair of this money, nor the fuckton of paperwork that I need to do in order to get installments 3 and 4. Is this some kind of hoax?

Come on over to Neurotopia...

2010-03-18T12:41:00.000-05:00

...where I'm blogging ejaculation.

I get mail...

2010-03-16T13:05:00.003-05:00

I just received an email from a company I buy reagents from, which is addressed to
"Mrs. AA".

WTF!?!?

These clowns started sending me emails addressed to Dr. AA, when I was a second-year grad student* and now that I have the doctorate they assume that 1) I don't, and 2) I'm married.

A pox on vendor-who-shall-not-be-nameed!

*I figure you're always safe with "Dr.". The people that this actually applies to will not be annoyed, and the grad students will feel like they're getting away with something. I know I did.

FML

2010-03-12T11:23:00.002-06:00

Remember when the AA residence was under siege???

Well, it seems it's happening again. The joys of living on a corner lot -- they finished the street that runs north-south past our place sometime last fall.

This morning (with no warning at all) they began similar siege tactics on the street that runs east-west past our house. I was hoping to sleep in this morning since I was imaging til eleven last night. No such luck. Seven AM on the nose I awake to find the light fixtures shaking and the pets acting very nervous. Earthquake? Not likely around here.

Oh wait...is that the melodious sound of heavy machinery right outside my bedroom window?? You bet!!

When I tried to leave this morning I discover a 4-foot deep PIT OF DEATH right outside my front gate, surrounded by three front-end loaders. I fail to understand the necessity of three of these things (only one at a time can get near the hole) other than to completely shut down traffic flow through the intersection as well as my ability to leave my front yard.

I inquired of the ~~workers~~ enemy combatants when they thought I might be able to open the gate and depart for work. They advised me that they had not blocked my driveway. Well that's awful nice of you folks but I don't drive to work. My bike is locked to railing of the deck that is situated in the front yard, which is surrounded by a fence, which has only one gate, which you have dug a PIT OF DEATH immediately in front of. The driveway really doesn't come into the scenario at all.

So I just decided to leave when I felt like it and they got all pissy about having to move 2 of their 3 pieces of heavy machinery and direct traffic so that I could leave my house without getting squished. Sorry for the inconvenience fellas!

I do science in my sleep

2010-03-10T12:56:00.003-06:00

When my alarm went off this morning I was dreaming a new cloning strategy for some vectors I've been working on. I was lucid enough to determine that this was in fact a valid cloning strategy and that it would actually circumvent some of the more complicated steps in my previous strategy. Thus, I decided it would be beneficial to turn off the alarm and finish dreaming the cloning strategy to its conclusion.

A few minutes later, BH snuggled up for some sexy-time. I wasn't done dreaming the last step of the cloning strategy at this point.......................so I rolled out of reach.

OMG WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME!!?!??!?!???!?!???!?! (In my defense, I wasn't fully awake yet, but really.)

Science is making me frigid.

I'm talking about sperm

2010-03-10T10:21:00.000-06:00

at Neurotopia today.

Your daily dose of funny

2010-03-09T15:53:00.002-06:00

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials.

Published in the BMJ.

The abstract is funny enough, but for the full effect you really ought to read the article. Some delightful snippets:

From the text:

One of the major weaknesses of observational data is the possibility of bias, including selection bias and reporting bias, which can be obviated largely by using randomised controlled trials. The relevance to parachute use is that individuals jumping from aircraft without the help of a parachute are likely to have a high prevalence of pre-existing psychiatric morbidity. Individuals who use parachutes are likely to have less psychiatric morbidity and may also differ in key demographic factors, such as income and cigarette use. It follows, therefore, that the apparent protective effect of parachutes may be merely an example of the “healthy cohort” effect.

From the sidebar:

What is already known about this topic
Parachutes are widely used to prevent death and major injury after gravitational challenge
Parachute use is associated with adverse effects due to failure of the intervention and iatrogenic injury
Studies of free fall do not show 100% mortality
What this study adds
No randomised controlled trials of parachute use have been undertaken
The basis for parachute use is purely observational, and its apparent efficacy could potentially be explained by a “healthy cohort” effect
Individuals who insist that all interventions need to be validated by a randomised controlled trial need to come down to earth with a bump

From the Acknowledgements/Author Contributions/COI Statements:

Contributors: GCSS had the original idea. JPP tried to talk him out of it. JPP did the first literature search but GCSS lost it. GCSS drafted the manuscript but JPP deleted all the best jokes. GCSS is the guarantor, and JPP says it serves him right.

Funding: None.

Competing interests: None declared.

Ethical approval: Not required.

You're welcome.

I'm not at home...

2010-03-08T11:21:00.002-06:00

...instead I am guest-blogging at Neurotopia today. Go check it out!

Cranky pants

2010-03-04T15:35:00.003-06:00

I'm impatient. Coming off the final year of grad school, when everything magically started working (thank the thesis gods!!!), and manuscripts started writing themselves, and I turned around one day and found that I had permission to defend, I've grown a little accustomed to the fast pace of data production.

It wasn't like that at the beginning, and now I'm beginning again. The difference this time is that now I know how it *should* go, and so now that it's slow again I'm starting to get a little twitchy.

It's the learning curve to be sure, it's the newness of my new lab - things are not quite the well-oiled machine of GradLab.

It's the impending fellowship deadlines. It's the stagnation of one of my manuscripts while we wait for yet another data set from GradLab. It's the feeling of spinning my wheels. It's the worry that I won't have much to show for the last two months when I give lab meeting for the first time.

It's making me itch.

Pot, please meet Kettle

2010-02-25T12:23:00.009-06:00

I wanted to have a post up about this several days ago when I first heard about this incident. It's taken me several days because this makes me so angry that my writing is completely incoherent. It also makes me feel really ill, and well, nobody likes to feel sick. However, this is a really important issue and the more people who say something about it the better. Please write something yourself.

To summarize: UCLA recently hosted an important dialogue on animal research. The event was co-sponsored by animal rights group Bruins for Animals, and pro animal research organization Pro-Test.

It featured several viewpoints from prominent positions on either side of the issue. Despite the best efforts of extremist ARA organizations to intimidate participants via their websites and to disrupt the dialogue or turn it into a debate, the event went off really well. You can read more about it at Adventures in Science and Ethics. I think that this is a HUGE WIN for everyone involved. Being able to have an open, respectful and informative conversation about something as important as animal research is absolutely crucial to improving protection for animal research subjects while at the same making the research process more transparent to the public. These are all good things.

Unfortunately, some ARA groups do not agree. Instead of making productive steps in furthering the dialogue they've taken a particularly low and despicable tactic. They've launched a terror campaign targeting the children of one of the dialogue participants who spoke in support of animal research. They have done this before. Harassment from ARA terrorists included people in masks coming to Dario Ringach's home and banging on his children's windows at night. It got so bad that the cost to his family's sense of safety was too great - he got out of primate research in 2006 and now has security personnel outside his home. While the loss of his contributions to the research community are a travesty, one can hardly blame him. Now, four years later, his children are being targeted, again, because he participated in a discussion about animal research. Some organizations are planning demonstrations at his kids' school to scare them and "show them what their father does for a living."

(I would like to point out here that Bruins for Animals, one of the co-sponsors of the event that has precipitated unwarranted attacks on children, has publicly condemned acts of terror and violence towards researchers and their families. BfA's continued commitment to ensuring animal welfare, by promoting such dialogue and taking a stand against all violence toward both human and non-human animals, is to be commended.)

A number of other people have written about this. Dr. Free-Ride, of course, who was also targeted in online intimidation tactics. PalMD has expounded upon the hypocrisy of de-humanizing the persons targeted to level of animals so that attacks can proceed in the name of elevating animals to human status. DrugMonkey talks about the problem with ARAs conflating "sentience" with "sapience". Orac exposes the fallacy in targeting one innocent under the guise of protecting another. Sci makes an excellent case for the very real ethical motivations and actions of researchers themselves. MarkCC points out the continuing necessity for animal research even as computer modeling advances.

All of these folks are making some really excellent points and I really encourage you to go read them. I'd like to talk about another hypocrisy that I see here.

The language used by some ARAs to incite violence against researchers and their families strikes me as particularly troubling. It is not accurate for starters, but I don't think that we're really expecting that. Most ARA terrorists clearly have no first-hand experience with how ethical animal research is conducted, and they sensationalize their rhetoric to amplify this ignorance into an inflammatory statement.

What really strikes me is that a lot of this rhetoric reads like snuff-porn.

There is intense focus on graphic descriptions of grisly procedures (which would never be allowed under any IACUC), illustrations of the targets wearing bloodied clothes (or none at all) and carrying medieval torture instruments, caricatures of researchers taking pleasure in exacting pain upon animals. It's all very sadistic-sounding, and it's all untrue.

It's a hook. It's meant to grab the reader. Shock is a very effective tactic for accomplishing this and they're employing it well towards that end. But there's more to it than that. There is an undercurrent of appetite for the kind of violence they describe. It reads as if they take pleasure in imagining the violence they describe (starting to sound familiar?), and they are inviting the reader to join in that sadistic pleasure. You can almost hear the drool. The reader is encouraged to be titillated by violence too, to want more violence --this time, not imagined violence. The reader of this rhetoric is explicitly encouraged to act out this desire upon their chosen dehumanized targets, the researchers that they have characterized as monsters. And worse, the "offspring" or "spawn" of those "monsters". In their snuff-porn fantasy, they've made real people, including children who are not involved in the activities that ARAs purport to rationally and ethically oppose, the targets of their lust for violence.

I am utterly gobsmacked that they cannot recognize their own sadism and hypocrisy, even while accusing researchers of precisely this. Frankly, it sickens me. This kind of acute lack of self-awareness smacks of sociopaths. This post was really really hard to write. Sadists creep me out and make me feel nauseous. It's very disturbing pathological behavior and I find it to be very distressing that it carries any appeal to recruit people to a cause.

Any of my readers vote in Texas??

2010-02-24T15:16:00.004-06:00

Why do I ask?? Because there's some asshat on the State Board of Education who is screwing with the science education of kids all over the whole country. This pisses me off, and it should piss you off too.

Creationism and Intelligent Design are NOT "alternative explanations" to the Theory of Evolution with respect to how life as we know it came about. They invoke a supernatural being, and that's not science. Therefore it does not belong in the science classroom.

So why should you care if you're not voting in Texas? If the Great State of Texas is successful in introducing these "concepts" to science text books, it will effect science education all over the country. Texas is the number one publisher/consumer of classroom textbooks and most other states will buy the ones published for Texas simply because there aren't many others available, regardless of their own Board of Education's position on these non-scientific concepts. Even if your state understands the difference between science and religion and upholds the separation of church and state when it comes to education, chances are their classroom textbooks will not. Won't someone think of the children???

Look, I have no problem with people of faith having the freedom to believe in any deity they so choose. That is their individual right. But their deity has no business in the science classroom.

Science speaks to and about observable, reproducible, natural phenomenon. It does not invoke the supernatural. If any deity is allowed there, and elevated to the same level as hard, reproducible evidence when trying to teach kids how science comes to understand the world around us, we are in a whole mess of trouble. How confusing must it be for kids just learned about the scientific method, how we use experiments to test hypotheses about natural phenomenon, and then we throw in these "exceptions" to the rules?

If these positions are allowed to be taught as "science", then I should be allowed to teach Darwinian evolution in every Sunday school in the country. Fair's fair.

Here's some more info:

The Texas State Board of Education oversees public school education in Texas. This 15 member board is elected from state districts. Our elected representative is Don McLeroy, a College Station dentist who believes that the earth is only 6000 years old, that humans walked with dinosaurs, and that supernatural explanations for scientific phenomena should be taught.

These are not hyperbole -- Mr. McLeroy has repeatedly stated and reinforced these positions.

Don McLeroy is a huge detriment to better education in Texas. A group of concerned citizens have formed a PAC to oppose his re-election in the GOP primary on March 2. You can find their web site here:

http://sites.google.com/site/smartstateboardofeducation/

If you vote in Texas, please, for the love of children and their future and the future of this country, go vote in the primaries. Texas has open primaries, so even if you're an avowed Democrat you can vote in the Republican primary and keep this nonsense off the ballot. If you're not a Texas voter, please check out the link anyway and do what you can, be it a donation to the PAC, or a blog post to spread the word.

ETA: Please also check out drdrA's post on this issue at Blue Lab Coats.

Things I've learned

2010-02-23T16:15:00.005-06:00

It is absolutely critical to be able to separate Socratic questioning from "I think you're an idiot for not having arrived at this on your own".
It is absolutely critical to be able to separate critique of your data from critique of your person.
It is really hard to do this in the early years of grad school when every time you turn around you are being examined or tested or asked to validate your existence.
It gets a lot easier to do this once you make the transition from grad school to somewhere that appreciates your skill and expertise.

Being able to do this is a learned behavior. Just like no one is born knowing how to do a flawless patch-clamp assay, it's a bit much to expect people to instantly recognize the difference between benevolent critique to improve the science v. gotcha questioning to make them sweat. It's kinder to point this out a time or two and then let them practice letting it roll off their egos on their own.

Foiled again

2010-02-18T18:41:00.002-06:00

I'm supposed to be hitting the gym right now while my plates are drying so that I can get home in time to actually make dinner. There's a perfectly good chicken in the fridge and we've eaten out way too many times this week.

But sneaky people kept getting their stuff into the autoclave ahead of me! It's like they have some kind of autoclave pager or something. As soon as one person's cycle was finished, someone else's was in, while my LB languished on the benchtop. Who are these people with the super autoclave timing? I don't even know who they are. They're like autoclave gnomes or something.

So I didn't get my shit autoclaved til way too late and it is stiiiiilllllll coooooolllllliiiiiinnnnnngggg......

Blergh.

Whaddya think?

2010-02-11T15:54:00.002-06:00

As a new post-doc in a undergrad/grad student-rich department, under explicit directives from the PI to be a leader and mentor to the UGs/GSs, and needing to get some all-important leadership/mentoring opportunities lined up for myself as a part of some fellowship applications, I am considering the following course of action.

I might propose to the PI/Dept. Chair to give a series of seminars/workshops on some (hopefully relevant) research skills for the UG/GS contingent.

Some possible topics include:

Data presentation (may be split into multiple sessions - statistical analysis, imaging, etc.)
Working with Model Organism X (a new addition to this dept.)
Using online databases (ENSMBL, UCSC genome browser, MGI, etc.)

It would be pretty minimal effort on my part since I will be mining slides and info from previous stuff I've done on these topics, and I think it would be both beneficial to my fellowship applications as well as to the students who could use these skills (assuming I do a good job).

Some questions for my readers:

Do you have other suggestions for good topics?

Were there any particular topics that you wish someone had told you about earlier in your research career (particularly any which a brief 45-minute introduction to might have made things easier for you)?

Suggestions on how to propose this without looking like a know-it-all asshat and/or pissing off the students who really don't want yet another seminar to go to?

Underwhelmed

2010-02-09T18:13:00.003-06:00

I got a postcard from my graduate school saying that I am eligible for some kind of tax credit. I look up the qualifications...yep, that's me. Oooohhhh, a maximum of $2500 per student depending on how much it cost you to go to school!! I am positively giddy!!

I tried doing the calculation myself but there's all these boogery forms (seriously, at least 3 of them requiring cross-referencing of figures from one to the other with arbitrary arithmetic in between). Become convinced that I will likely drop a decimal place somewhere and then get audited. So I decide to see what one of those free e-file sites will get for me.

Drum roll please.....

$4. Yes, four. What the boogery forms neglect to tell you is that if you are in graduate school, as opposed to your bachelor's degree, the vast majority of your expenses don't count. Even more so if you're in a grad program that pays you a stipend. Nevermind that you still had to take student loans to make ends meet.

Actually, they do tell you this, but only after you've filled out three different forms, double and triple checking your math as you move numbers from one to the next.

So, woooooo! I will be $4 richer than I otherwise would be for about 2 hours of trying to sort out all the forms. That's way less than minimum wage. Isn't the IRS liable for that?

On a more positive note, the IRS tax returns are still easier to navigate than the NIH funding website. I never thought I'd say that. Hang your head in shame NIH.

Holy Recursive Clusterfuck Batman!!

2010-02-08T18:57:00.003-06:00

Listen NIH funding website, you need to pull yourself together. You look like a freaking databomb disaster site.

Seriously, I just spent over 3 hours trying to find the relevant info for applying for an NRSA. I got a link from the F32 general info page to my Institute, which under funding opportunities for post-docs then linked back to the same bloody F32 general info page which contained exactly zero useful information.

I tried to find the application deadlines with some success...I know when I should have submitted for each cycle....if I were applying in 2004. Since I will be applying in 2010 this is not particularly helpful, unless the same page also supplies the algorithm for projecting deadlines into the ~~future~~ present. However, it does not. FTLose.

I stumbled upon the pay rate table for NRSA awardees while looking for the "previously funded awards" (which I could not, for the life of me, find last week), which included the pay rates for awards in FY2009, along with a link to some blurb about % increases in stipends mandated for FY2010 by the ARRA stuff, but no hard numbers in a simple table like the one you provide for previous award years.

I thought it might be fun to recreate the virtual scavenger hunt that I've just been on via links for the amusement of my readers. But then I thought, No! That would not be fun! It would be painful! So I did not.

I did finally find the page for downloading the application, which contains the very well-noted caveat that I should ONLY use Form A if I am applying for the pre-February 4 2010 submission deadline, and that AFTER February 4, I should use "Form" not "Form A". OK, potentially confusing but I think I got it. Trouble is, the links do not provide a "Form", only "Form A", which you just told me in big bold shouty letters is now defunct.

So I figured that I'd just download "Form A" and fill it out and import to "Form" when it does become available. "Form A" appears to be one of those interactive PDFs so cool, right? Bzzzzt! NO! It's a read-only file! Despite the button at the top of the interactive PDF which opens in its own webpage and says "click here to save your info and continue later" I can neither click save nor even input any info into the required fields. Perhaps this is because "Form A" is now defunct? I DON'T KNOW! Also, there is another PDF file which provides the instructions for filling out a different required form (STF? no, you STFU!), but no PDF of the form itself, nor links to where I might find it. If I search for that form on the umbrella site, I get a bazillion hits and none of the top 10 provide the form itself nor links to it. However, I did find a page that would allow me to select all of the forms required for this particular mechanism (with the exception of the STFU form and "Form" of course) , and download them all at once. Only it didn't. Allow me to download them all at once, that is. Or even to download them individually.

Look, I know that the NIH has a lot of other more important shit to spend money on (like funding some research proposals, maybe even mine!), but balls! A ~~trained monkey~~ intramural intern with some web design skillz could do wonders for the efficiency and efficacy of the grant/fellowship submission process. Or even just fixing broken links,and making sure that search queries take you to the most recent info, not a stand-alone page of paylines from 8 years ago. Somebody did a great job reformatting the NCBI database, so how's about throwing your extramural funding applicants a bone here?

It occurs to me that the difficulty of the finding the required info just to submit the freaking fellowship is all a part of separating the wheat from the chaff, and also cutting down on the total number of applications that will then need to be reviewed, which may increase efficiency at the reviewing end. Any projected data on how many potential applicants just throw their hand in the air and say "fuck it!" before even submitting? I vow not to be one of them, but Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick! It's tempting.

Terminal degree for the Mars rover

2010-02-02T16:43:00.003-06:00

This gives me flashbacks.

Comic by XKCD.

Plusses and Minusses

2010-02-02T15:13:00.003-06:00

Plus:

At my previous institution, post-docs were classified as "trainees". Here, we are "staff". The actual differences are only nominal as far as I can tell, but hey, I'll take a little respect any way I can get it.

Minus:

Since undergrads>>grad students>>>>>post-docs here, the folks who spend much of their time dealing with/instructing UGs and GSs sometimes forget that I can manage most basic lab stuff with relative competency. "Remember: you have to store dry ice in an airtight cooler or it will sublimate." Yep, thanks, I got that one covered.

2010 goals

2010-01-29T13:18:00.002-06:00

Now it's almost the end of January. I think you're supposed to put this stuff up at the beginning of the New Year, but whatever. I have had goals in mind for this year since the end of November but I might as well put them here.

Get grad papers published goddammit!! Do not allow GrAdvisor's neither-here-nor-there attitude to hinder them any longer.
Publish a review paper in early 2010 on post-doc project to give self a leg-up on the lit.
Have a data paper from post-doc lab outlined (or if very good/lucky submitted) by end of 2010.
Attend conference in new post-doc field. If possible present data at said conference.
Get a fellowship to support self's sorry ass in 2011.
Get DangerDog and self back in shape.
Go to RecCenter and work out 5 days/week. It is literally next door to the lab - no excuses.
Lose dissertation-fat. If loads of women out there manage to lose the pregnancy weight post-partum then surely I can get rid of the dissertation weight post-defense.
Run a half-marathon or sprint-distance triathlon.
Pay off credit card before student loan grace period expires. Eeep!

In which I am reminded that it's good to be a grown-up

2010-01-28T11:19:00.004-06:00

The other night I was standing outside the gym waiting for my ride home. Three undergraduate men came out the doors discussing their "get ripped" strategies.

UG1: Dude, I'm totally gonna try to get a six-pack before this summer.
UG2: Yeah man, me too. But I don't wanna try too hard. I'm just gonna work out a lot and it'll happen.
UG3: Yeah, me too. 'Cause I totally wanna get laid, you know?
UG2: Ooooohhhh, shiiiiiiiii......

I must have shot them the hairy eyeball or something at that last remark because they all suddenly and simultaneously noticed me, a vagina, standing there in plain sight right next to them. To their credit, they were appropriately mortified, and after much blushing and squirming and embarrassed laughter one of them says to his buddies, "Uh, let's like walk away really fast."

I briefly considered sharing with them some important advice. Namely, that washboard abs are not a golden ticket for getting into a woman's pants, and that they'd probably have much better odds if they worked on getting rid of the douchery rather than the ab-flab. I thought the better of it though, and just said, "Stay classy dudes!"

I can't decide if I am encouraged that they were aware that they were being offensive/making asses of themselves, or disheartened that they seemed to think that their aspirations and motivations were some sort of big secret.

Eh, I'm just glad I'm not in college anymore.

A Quick Rundown on the New Gig

2010-01-27T15:12:00.002-06:00

Boss - Awesome! Took a few weeks to get over the getting-to-know-you awkwardness, but now I am quite pleased by our working relationship. Enthusiastic, easy to talk to. Quite a nice change from the previous.
Lab Facilities - Generally nice, lots of windows and a nice view, newly renovated, but missing a few tricks. Why is there a line-in for tap water in the tissue culture hood but no vacuum line anywhere in the lab? Why are the -80C freezers at the other end of the building?
Labmates - Great so far. Small lab, with lots of undergrads that come and go, nice officemates. Everyone is very helpful and seem glad to have me here.
Admin - A little discombobulated, but very helpful solving problems. Didn't get my contract until after I started working, or the list of stuff to bring to HR on the first day until a week later, but when I ask for something specific I get an immediate (and helpful response).
Resources - Somewhat disappointing, but I've been a bit spoiled by the flush department of my previous gig. I am still using my nearly-dead 6yo laptop because there are no lab or departmental funds to buy me a new computer. Could I get one on fellowship $$? Sure, but in the meantime, I'd be writing said fellowship on the Nanodrop workstation. So guess where that hike in my salary's going? Dell, it's your lucky day.
Perks - Good benefits (including retirement!), cheap(!) parking (but walking distance from home), gym membership.
Campus - Fantastic. So nice to be back on a college campus where other people do equally important but different things than you do.
Project - Exciting, full of potential, but still not off the ground yet. I'm pioneering some stuff for this lab, so it's been fun, but I'm itching for some data already.

I'm bAAAAAaaaack...

2010-01-06T16:42:00.004-06:00

After several weeks of neglect, I return to find that this place positively reeks of dissertation (and post-dissertation) angst and malcontent. I'm going to let it air out here for a few more days and then get started fresh. It is 2010 after all; I've got a new job, new boss, new digs, and a new project.

More later.

Happy Holidays

2009-12-20T18:56:00.000-06:00

I am off to beautiful homestate for the Christmas. I will not be online because my folks live in the middle of nowhere and the only available internet connection is painfully slow via satellite...even slower when there's snow on the receiver.

So I will not be spending much time ~~online~~ waiting for pageloads. Instead I will be working offline on dissertation revisions, because NO I didn't get them all done this week. GRAH!

OK, I'm done being a grinch - hope you all have lovely holidays.

My favorite Christmas song

2009-12-17T00:11:00.003-06:00

"Hallelujiah" from Handel's Messiah, performed by a group of novice monks who have apparently taken a vow of silence.

The applause at the end more than makes up for their quietude.

Ranty McRanty-pants

2009-12-15T16:28:00.012-06:00

Unfuckingbelieveable.

I am currently embroiled in a "discussion" with one of my labmates over whether or not feminism is still necessary.

His arguments against:

Men *should* be paid more than women because they have to spend more money on women's upkeep. (This argument went from zero to circular in about 2.5 seconds.)
People are hesitant to give women jobs or loans (his assertion not mine) and that's OK, because the women might go and have babies and ruin the employer's/lender's investment.
Men are the real victims because women are always taking advantage of men's inferior control over their own sex drive.
*He* doesn't take women less seriously because they have boobies (which I find hard to believe given the TMI about his love-life that we are all subjected to); ergo, I totally imagined all those times that men intellectually blew me off because my ovaries obviously make me a bimbo.
I should just shut up and be happy because women in Saudi Arabia have it so much worse than I do - I should just count my blessings and roll over and take the "very minor" discrimination that occurs here.

The dude is a total caricature of misogyny. But - get this - he's totally *on my side* because if he were my employer (over my dead body) he would totes make sure I had equal pay and good maternity leave. "Geez, AA, don't have a shit-fit. If there were still something to fight for I would totally help you out." Nope, he's totally not the problem. [I am confused by this since one of his justifications for lower salaries for women is that they will not be working while on maternity leave.]

Here's the best part: he is a member of a racial minority, and when I point out that one can substitute "white" for "men" and "POC" for "women" into his arguments, he concurs that yeah, these attitudes are totally wrong and discriminatory. Dude, I'm just trying to help you see a point here: white people don't get to be the authority on POC's experiences and say that discrimination doesn't happen *ever* just because it doesn't happen to *them*. We agree on this one, yeah? Same holds true for men telling women about just what is and isn't real about their own personal experiences. But he maintains that while racial discrimination is still a very real problem, gender discrimination doesn't exist (I'm totally making it all up!) because he's never been on the receiving end of it. And his white wealthy female buddy is backing him up on all this shit so it *must* be true.

So let me recap:

I, as a woman, am an expensive housepet.
My strongest desire in life is to reproduce, and in so doing, I will not hesitate to screw people out of the career productivity that they are paying me for.
All women are whores just out to manipulate men into getting whatever they want.
I am clearly delusional and irrational since the gender discrimination I have experienced could not possibly have happened.
Women in this country are a bunch of whiny bitches - we should feel totes lucky that we aren't required to cover ourselves completely and solicit the company of a male relative in order to leave the house.

No, you're right. There's totally no need for feminism anymore. [/stabs eyes out with a fork]

FUCK!! I am so looking forward to leaving this lab. Please help me not to kill anyone during my remaining time here.

Holding it down

2009-12-13T20:53:00.001-06:00

Well, I'm finally decompressed from the defense. I can tell because I'm sick. This always happens to me after a prolonged period of chronic stress. Dammit.

Thing is, I really can't afford this now. I've still got one more week to get a shit-ton of work done before heading to beautiful home-state for the holidays. Dammit, dammit, dammit.

I missed the H1N1 jab-day at work because I forgot about it and took a well-deserved day off after the defense. Please, please, please let it not be that. I know someone who was out for like 2 weeks with that shit.

Cryosectioning is making me dizzy. I should go home and lay on the couch and moan and make BH bring me some soup, but instead I'm in the lab at stupid o'clock on a Sunday night trying not to fall out of my chair while cutting samples. Which would be both fun and funny if it were alcohol-induced, but it is not.

Ambivalent Academic

I would totally give to the Obama 2012 campaign if this happened:

Food for Thought

Guest bloggin'

Sorry, it's not my day to watch them.

Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, where did the day go?

An Open Letter

Happy Wednesday, You FUCKS!!!

You're a mean one, Dr. Grinch....

grumble

Albatross #2

What. The. Fuck.

...aaaannnnd ACCEPTED!

Albatross #1 has left the building!!

What to DO instead of DON'T

Primal Scream

The Grind

Rules to Live By:

!(@*#$#^&*#@~!!!!

Seriously, Universe, could you cut me some slack?

The "Snake Fight" Portion of Your Thesis Defense

Ugh

I have a plan....

In which I pretty much FAIL at teh Skienz

What am I doing here?

The stupid, it burns

Today is one of those days....

An Open Letter

Story of My Life

Avian Update

Albatross #1

Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

Twiddling my thumbs

*Sciencegasm!!!*

You know what else sucks?

Ugggh-gh-gh-gh....

Fie upon you samples!!!

Inertia

Blogging hiatus

Zomg grad skoll carnival!!!1!

Venkat is cracking my shit up.

Everything I Needed to Know About Grad School...

Playing nice

An Open Letter II

An Open Letter

*twitch*

Learn it, Love it, Use it

What's Hot and What's Not

Today I hate everything

May I Have Your Attention Please

Question:

Dear Universe,

EndNote, you are a pain in the ass

On a completely unrelated note...

SHUT UP!!

*HORK*

The Other Shoe

A day in the life of a post-doc

Aimated gif is so 2002, get with the program!

Self-Improvement

Open Letters

Plants are sluts

A follow-up to family planning

Secret Reagent Man

A Word to the Wise

Family Planning

The Creative Processs

Nomenclature

WHAAAAAAA????????

Soldiering on

PSA

Nerd Love

Updating the Blogroll

$$$$

Come on over to Neurotopia...

I get mail...

FML

I do science in my sleep

I'm talking about sperm

Your daily dose of funny

!(@#$#^&#@~!!!!

Sciencegasm!!!

twitch

HORK