The Postponed Day

Interesting day! Will post more about it tomorrow. Maybe.

Sleepyhead

Today was brief. There was some confusion over where (almost) all 13 of my project's cardiac mice cages went (ACK) but they were found eventually- the guy cleaning the cages ran out of space and moved them to another rack. Whew.

Craig, Tahmina, Helen and I finished Day #3 of genotyping, which was just making the master mix for the PCR and running the PCR. Pipetting is fun :)

Hmm...I guess overall today was sort of slow. Not much else exciting to report. Did EKG on the mice left over from last week. We got new neocardiac needles, which are much better fitting on these mice, since they're smaller than the other ones, and, as Meghaan so aptly puts it, it doesn't seem like we're shoving the equivalent of a pencil into a person! I feel quite bad for the mice some times.

So got back early and took a very long nap- still sleepy though, I'm ready to hit the mattress soon enough. Sadly, didn't get to go gymming today, but I'm going to be crazy and go early tomorrow morning. Need to practice MCATs and study up tomorrow before class too- first day of organic chem to commence! Yikes.

Lab rat, Part I

Ek, it's been a while now.

So much to post, and so little inclination to do so :) Where did the habit go? I think it's because I'm not using my laptop in class anymore (by which I mean the awful grueling MCAT classes from 7-9:30 pm Monday to freakin Thursdays).

ACK- I can't believe I didn't post about some other fun events dating a couple weeks ago-

Went with Kiel, his Taiwanese girlfriend (eeirely, also named Christine- but we called her KC for "Kiel's Christine") and Morgan off to Santa Cruz to cruise the boardwalk. It was great- the weather was sunny but not too hot, there weren't massive numbers of people, but just enough to make it lively. Went on some, er, rather ricketly roller coasters (nothing like the fear of kicking the proverbial bucket for entertainment purposes, right?) and played mini-golf at the Neptune area. Even got to play DDR and get some sticker pictures!

It's weird to think that those friends have almost all graduated...makes ya sort of melancholy and wistful. I hate it when you realize that things are never going to be the same, just sort of how permanent things are.

Sorry- getting introspective and wishy-washy. Bleck. Liminality and whatnot. On to more solid ground.

Our lab is chock full of undergrads (+1 high schooler) now! It's good times, albeit crowded ones. It's a good thing we've got that other lab room. Things are moving along and I'm really excited about my honors project. We're running mice on different physiological tests and getting to see some of the results for the older mice (we've been through a lot, haven't we Y17-1, 2, and 3 and Y14-1 and 2...not to mention the BD-29, -31, -32 mice!).

Worked on some genotyping on Monday and Tuesday. I got to put in an isoproterenol pump (put mouse under anesthesia, shave it, weigh it, incision, insertion and the somewhat difficult but then quite fun suturing!!) and then did some EKG probe work. It was really neat to actually do what we learned about in lab meeting. Lab is AWESOME! :) Yay!

Oh, and Rani fixed some hearts the other day, which was pretty gruesome, but still interesting. Afterwards, I had the chance to (and did) do a mouse dissection (the critter was gone anyways). You really do learn some neat anatomical stuff from it- for instance, the liver is HUGE! I mean, it was engorged because Rani had pumped saline to clean the heart (so naturally it goes through your systemic system and into the major organs) but still, there was so much of it, and it was (of course) still really reddish. The stomach is actually positioned sort of sideways, and the intestines were also configured a bit differently from the textbook image I had in my head.

Then there was boredom...Wednesday thru Friday we had to go to Santa Clara to get trained for the microarray software. The program (Genespring) itself is pretty darn cool, but the training was sooooo dull. Like, let me scoop my heart out with a spoon to end the pain dull. Plus, for some odd reason, I was stupid enough to sit right in the front row, sort of sandwiched between the presenter AND to the front right of my PI. Yes, that meant no playing solitare. I did do a lot of MCAT physics review in my head- good time to learn the Big Five for constant accceleration :) Got those down Pat. Also made some to do lists- for this week, the weekend, and long-term (i.e. own a cat/dog at some point, live in England for a while again- a long time from now though).

On Thursday night, a bunch of us Patterson lab rats got together to go to the movies too, as a sort of mini-lab outing, to see Mr. and Mrs. Smith. It was actually pretty good! We went to the 10:10 pm because everyone was nice enough to go at a late time since I had MCATing before that. The tickets were still mad expensive for a Thursday night (and no student discount) but the movie was sort of fun and light and we were nearly the only ones in the theater. Marissa and I just kept sort of cheering at the few scenes Adam Brody was in ("Sean" from the OC) and commenting on how pretty Brad Pitt is (he is! haha, weird, but pretty is the best word that seems to fit him!). Angelina Jolie is really gorgeous in the film too- although certain parts are enormously disproportionate :-P

Tahmina lost her keys at the end and we pretended to be secret agents whilst looking for them. I'm glad we didn't see a scary movie though- cause even with most of the lab there, I was sort of freaked out at being the only ppl the the theater. We found them in the end.

Friday, more software training. Arduous, yes. Over? Thank goodness. It'll be cool to actually process the data though.

Friday night- Natalya's belated b-day party at her place in EV! It was fun, but also slightly bizarre for yours truly, because almost everyone there was Russian! Academic KGB like :) Even my fellow Chinese friend Emily had a connection to Russia (was born there and speaks a couple lines, apparently with amazing fluency!). There was a lot of Russian said, but I couldn't tell you what- I have no clue :) Natalya had a great, mostly healthy food spread too- nice fruit arrangement! We did some (creative?) "dancing" to really really random tunes, including old Russian ones (by a scandelous who has had 5 husbands, and whose songs are old enough to have been played at Natalya's mom's 21st b-day party), Indian music, Bon Jovi, 80s music, and the Apple iPod theme song. Sonya, the officially crazy Russian friend, went slightly crazy, I think. Man, that girl can dance (and force others to, too, hehe).

Today was mostly unproductive. Woke up late. Brunch. Transferred some stuff from one lab notebook to another while watching a bootleg version of Pirates of the Carribbean. Slept some more. Ran my version of the loop and Lake Lag. Shower. Dinner. This. Some more slacking, and then hopefully some MCAT studying! It remains to be seen.

Not much else to say! G'day and hope all it well with the rest of the world- cause I'm feeling sort of Stanford Bubbly.

Week highlights:
Wed- finally getting MRI trained
Thurs- the parents and Oliver (kid brother #2) are coming to visit for the weekend!!!

:D

MCATs...mkay?

Seems so, so far!

Yes, shocking, I know. MCATs are sort of fun to practice! :)

Wow...I am a dork.

But really, some of the physics is actually coming back to me- it's all about practicing and practicing (but I want more practice problems...I feel like an MCAT junkie...). Not too good with some of the tension problems, or the torque stuff. Rememorizing formulas is sort of hit and miss at present, but getting better.

Haha, my weekends are going to be fun, aren't they?

No, I think I just need to focus when I'm studying. It hasn't been entirely efficient at present. Let's see...the presentation on Thursday went okei, mostly because no one actually asked me questions or to explain the research (haha, it was benign!) but I got to show off my poster and get some good eats. We had our first lab meeting on Friday and it was AWESOME- got to learn about reading EKGs, science-y and clinical stuff along with it, and a good review of the research we're doing. I did end up presenting the data to our lab, but it wasn't too bad (I feel bad that lots of lab folk had to hear it some 3x from my practicing earlier in the week). My poster looks soooo cool too!!!! V. proud of it (of course, the PI changed a lot of it, so it's way better than what I first came up with).

Hmm...what else? Oh, last week, a bunch of us lab rats got to go dress up in blue scrubs and go to the OR to see an operation- they were putting a balloon pump in- it was incredible! Seriously, the guy's chest was completely open, you could see his heart beating! I could hardly believe he was alive and could recover from this! There were so many tubes and things going in and out of him, and his blood was being pumped by a machine (which is why they were putting the pump in). It really changed my perspective on medicine and where we stand in terms of technology- part of it was just jaw-dropping (that it works) and part of it just seemed so rustic! Rounds was tiring- just on your feet for so long. We saw Jim put a wedge probe (Swanz catheter? not sure) into this lady to check for blocks.

Buuuuut, i'd better get back to MCATs. It starts to feel sadly neglected.

To do:
Hang out with Navneeta! :) Crossing my fingers you get a job here at S of 'ford!
Talk to high school friends via the phone
Keep from going waaaaay over my phone bill
Practice Gen Chem MCATs
More Physics review for MCATs
Genotyping at lab on Monday
Some PFC contacts to contact

...and other such things

General :( ness afoot

So stressed. Almost too tired to post...

MCAT prep class continues to royally freak me out. Big time.

I NEED to start studying/reading/doing the practice problems- feel like such an idiot otherwise. Ugh.

The main item on the plate this week is the Dept of Anesthesia dinner on Thursday night. I've been working on the poster for it, and just got the final proof in to the visual art services people at MSOB this afternoon, after some annoying moving. On the bright side, moving in total only took 2 hours, to get everything from my room in Robinson to the single in Lantana (not that much stuff to haul around...weird to think that a bulk of my necessary worldly belongings can be moved at once- it only took one trip, with my uncle's minivan partly full and mine with a few things, like a microwave and stack shelves).

I'm getting incoherent...tired. For serious, this MCAT stuff sucks- recommendation to all those taking it later- try to take it just after you've had your physics and chemistry sequences instead of years later. Relearning everything is no fun.

The last few days have been eventful and fun/uber-busy, but I really don't have the time to write it down today....dunno when that will be, but maybe as a break from massive trying to catch up with MCAT hw this weekend? Remains to be seen,

So tomorrow's agenda (tonight is occupied by much sleeping) is to prep for this presentation- review data, enter new data, practice for lab folks, make sure the poster is ready. MCAT class again tomorrow night.

Thursday night: Anesthesia Dept dinner!!!!! Poster pres! ACK!

Friday: Lab meeting in the morning, then MCAT studying begins in earnest
Sat: Same as Friday minus the lab stuff.
Sun: See Sat

Oh...and unpacking and slightly lofting my bed will fit somewhere in there...I hope. I want a vacation, DARNIT.

Monday: starting to genotype at lab. Hight time, too.

Yakitate! Solar hands! Azuma! 

20 minutes and counting

until the Cultural Psych final! Whohooo!!!!

I always get so strangely hyper before a final. Just wanted to say a couple things:

THANKS JENNY! I absolutely positively LOVE the card!!!!!! It's this brilliant Edward Monkton card about fanciful chocolate castles and, oh, wistful wishes for the way things are (in relation to chocolate). Good stuff. For those uninitiated, Edward Monkton is a genius. Pure genius. You must visit his website and oooo and aaaa in wonder at the greatness that is Monkton. http://www.edwardmonkton.com/

What else? Hmm....lots and lots and lots to do after this. I've got MCAT classes starting tonight, it turns out (whoops...I thought it started tomorrow), so the long awaited shopping expedition will have to be postponed yet again. On the bright side, I do get to go to the Hwimori dinner tomorrow night because there isn't class tomorrow :) Sweet! Oh Korea House, it has been so long (about time we were reunited).

This is another cool comic, although very perturbing at times www.nataliedee.com

Neat bugs: http://www.insects.org/entophiles/lepidoptera/index_2.html
And also quite amusing: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/archives-aut02.php

I've also become hooked on this show called "Yakitate" about bread making and this guy with "solar hands!" It's so ridiculous, it's funny! REALLY funny. Freaking hilarious, I dare say. Actually, I don't. It's not that funny. Just funny. Check it out: http://www.jascii.net/newanime/jascii.php?jascii_view=199

You can see how well I study.

Anywho, really should start constructive cramming. Ta-ta!

Ya! Si Dios Lo Quiere

and other such quotes from Cultural Psych:

A monkey dressed in silk, is still a monkey (Mexican Proverb)
The nail that sticks out get hammered down (Chinese)
The squeaky wheel gets the grease (European American)
If I hear mutual constitution of culture and psyche just one more time...I will scream (Christine)

Speaking of screaming...I didn't hear any primal screams on dead day/night. Did you? Then again, would you scream the midnight right before, or after? Both? Hm...that was an all-nighter for me too.

Unlike tonight! I am getting (some) shuteye, the good ol' 40 winks (er, or at least 20).

The cultural psych final is tomorrow afternoon and I've still got reading to catch up on, but otherwise things are looking all right. I do like psych classes. They're always interesting and because of it, the studies tend to stick in one's mine more than random junk like the RDA for Vitamin K (in mcg, I think. Can't remember the actual number, but I think there was one).

All the PHE papers are due tomorrow too, though. That includes the Observation Field Site visits, the big PHE intervention group report (ours looks good! go team!), the individual PHE intervention report (hello? slightly redundant?), the PHE journal (including a reflection on the PHE journal, which itself is a reflection on our personal change project...reflections on reflections? my PHE group agrees this is just silly), the paper for our "personal retreat" project...and hopefully that's all, because that's all I've done. Whew. A heck of a lot of busy work.

So tired...finals week is uber unhealthy for moi as well. No good!

Oh! Saturday went relatively well. We had the Breast Cancer survivor (Lam Luong) from the American Cancer Society come speak (in Vietnamese). Not a huge turnout (pretty worried for a while) but we did end up getting some patients to go, and they were all animated and engaged in talking. I have no idea what they were saying (as I don't speak Vietnamese at all), but it seemed like good conversation/communication to me. Quite a few of the people there were survivors, and they ended up sharing their experiences with one another. In any case, we've learned from this and have good ideas for future health talks. I'll post pics as soon as I get them up!

Otherwise, I'm looking forward to 6:30 pm tomorrow! FREE AT LAST!!!!! By which I mean free to start working on a massive amount of currently neglected lab work, free to start studying for MCATS (and the prep classes), free to get off my butt and start running/gymming regularly again, and free to start packing up my stuff to move to the other side of campus in about a week. Hm...well, I think I'll live in happy denial for a few hours after that final at least. Maybe take a nap, or perhaps go shopping. It's been a while.

P.S. Thanks for the comments, John and Jenny!

Nutrients, Likes and Dislikes

Howdy

Studying for the human nutrition final (tomorrow afternoon's upcoming exam, supposed to last the whole 3 hours dedicated to it). There's so much memorization, I feel a bit fatalistic.

Instead of whining too much about it, I've decided to keep an ongoing list of likes and dislikes as they strike me:

Likes:
Bare feet on cool tile floor (reminds me of home and Miami)
Most things chocolate and sweet!
England, for the most part
Grass jelly, the deceptively jiggly tan food
Squeeze-hugs
Crackling sound of dry leaves when you tread on them
Making scones
Tortricid moths (very pretty)

Dislikes:
Coconut...yuck
Scientific articles with very few words in them (could be Greek, with all the alphas, betas, gammas etc)
The smell in the Chinatowns of major cities
Sappy movies with no plot (e.g. a great many chick flicks)
All-nighters and general sleep deprivation
Driving up mountains

Other highlights of the day: got stood up by my women's health class TA this morning :P was supposed to meet to go over my paper but she forgot (eh, no big deal- glad I got the darn thing written up and actually got some more feedback from e-mail than I think I would have if we'd actually met). Got to talk to Jackie for a while on the phone (always interesting news when that happens!)

Not much else. Massive procrastination via IMing. You know how it is.^_<

Getting some shut-eye before waking up early to seriously CRAM for this final, cause I have to go to lab tomorrow morning.

Was messing around with Picasa2 (photoshop type of thing) and fiddled with colors and whatnot to get these :)  

Was messing around with Picasa2 (photoshop type of thing) and fiddled with colors and whatnot to get these :)  

Was messing around with Picasa2 (photoshop type of thing) and fiddled with colors and whatnot to get these :)  

Okei, I officially hate Frosoco

That is all.

Heck no- let me enlighten you on the current situation: Just woken up by the sounds of a live band from the dorm RIGHT NEXT DOOR. Oh, it's just not fair...i want to freaking sleep, not listen to people pretend to be Jet or whomever.

Stupid Frosoco. It's the night before the day before finals!!!!! Let me sleep, I say!

Very bitter.

Well butter my buns and call me a biscuit...

unless you're British, cause that would make no sense at all.

There's a great article in the New York Times on "Watching New Love As it Sears the Brain" (sounds painful, doesn't it?). It's about these MRI studies on people in relationships- romantic love vs. passionate love, etc. Lights up different areas of the brain. Personally, I think they should have titled the piece "Going on a caudate" or "Will you caudate me?" Read the piece (or look at the pictures), it might make a bit more sense ;)

One of the main researchers on the topic has this great book out called "Anatomy of Love" (Dr. Helen Fisher, I think) that is pretty readable and interesting. I started perusing the first few chapters on a paper for a gender class while in Oxford (in the formidable Bodelian library!) and but ended up changing topics so didn't finish the book. Hm. It's on my reading list, along with stuff by Marilyn Yalom, who came to speak to my women's health class earlier this quarter.

I am officially EXHAUSTED. So sleepy. Walking everywhere sucks because it takes so much freaking longer. I like getting to chat on the phone though :) Didn't get much sleep yesterday cause of cramming for the ions quiz, which was still rather difficult. I had a mini-powow with some of the other students in the class afterwards and we were banging our heads against the wall to try to figure out if some kinds of adynayl cyclase actually did have external ligands, or whether it was a 12 transmembrane spanning domain with 2 ATP phosphorylation/binding sites, or if it was phosphatases that dephosphorylated an active protein or phosphodiesterase (the former, yay!).

Julia and I are officially done with the ions paper. Sent and sent via the magical powers of e-mail. We actually managed to get that beast of a paper down to 850 words too! No mean feat, that.

I took a very short-seeming 2 hour nap before heading off to cultural psych class and then women's health class. Everyone's writing papers that sound so interesting! Mine is going to be on heart failure and biological differences in men and women. Doesn't sound as fun, but I'm into the topic- there's some really neat research suggesting significant biological differences.

I've currently crashed in the writing center couches, tried to take a nap but felt sort of self-conscious about it, so (all else failing), of course started bloggercising. Have to stick around the area because my ions class is have a pizza/discussion weird session thing. Just goes to show, you're never really done with ions (or intracellular transport).

Here's to hoping I can get some sleep after this and then power drive through that women's health paper. Lots of errands to do tomorrow, a meeting or two, and I have to study/cram for the lovely human nutrition final, which has so much detail!

Calcium and Arachnidonic Acid: what do they have in common?

Well, for one thing, they're both going to be on my (last!) ions quiz tomorrow morning!

:SIGH: it is painful to study for this. There are loads and loads of webnotes to plough through and I'm very tired...have been for the past 6 hours or so, but loaded up on caffeine so no nap in sight (believe me, I tried).

Congrats to Morgan though! On the job offer! :D

Hmm...so today I woke up for the last ever human nutrition class for this quarter, then off to lab to run the mice (did the whole thing completely by myself, very proud indeed), met one of the new students- from Bryn Mawr (v. nice person! Will probably be working on the PDE4D project with me) and then to studying and trying to study in the bookstore, then Tresidder. I was so hungry around 3 pm because of lack of lunch and had a really delicious Grilled Chicken tostada salad from Treehouse around 4 pm (huge, and really good! Taste buds jumping for joy). It's weird, but most of the lab people I know don't eat lunch. They just don't! Hm. I tend to get that way too, especially since I start running the mice around 11 am and don't end up finishing until maybe 2 pm-ish.

I know, I know...irrelevant details. So it goes.

Anyways, terrible time concentrating for this test. I zoned out around 5:45 pm and took an excellent (if tragically short) half hour ("power?") nap before meeting Julia at the Coho to go over our ions paper and review/study G coupled protein receptors, G proteins, and cAMP/cGMP. For serious- everything has got an inhibitor and an activator. The activators have inhibitors and activators which also have inhibitors. There's a ridiculous amount of detail and the last quiz was so difficult! Our ions paper is fairly impressive though (I think) so hopefully that'll be the deciding factor. In any case, I didn't get out of the coho until around 11:15 pm or so...meaning a grand total of, what...nearly 5 hours spent there? Sheesh.

Now I'm wired on caffeine and can't sleep. Have got a fear of the information I've worked so hard to stuff in my head slowly leaking out during the night while I sleep. Honestly, the neuroses...

Anyways, I've still got to get through calcium as an intracellular messenger and cram a LOT about arachnidoinic acid, since it's making up a third of the quiz. Hmm...still have two classes in the afternoon too. Have to write a paper tomorrow night, and start studying for a Friday. What am I doing blogging?

P.S. Not sure if Natasha reads this, but thanks! The chat really helped.