snailmilksolution

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10/6/23

last day!!!! :D

I'm so excited to leave!! and on a pretty okay note too thank god

It's been putting me in such a good mood all week it completely canceled my PMS

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they always put the knife in my hands

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grief regarding leaving this field sneaking back up on me :/

4A ribosome. u can see the rna ribbons and the alpha helices and the beta sheets so clearly. at least on the large subunit. where else am i gonna get results this rewarding :/:/:/

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okay i calmed down

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9/19/23

holy SHIT i want to leave this job so fucking bad

like this is all compounded by the fact that im so, so close to leaving this lab and that im splitting time with another lab that i like a lot more, but oh my GOD everything is so much harder than it needs to be. had to spend 30 minutes running back to my lab to pick up some YPG plates for the colonies and he caught me as I was waiting for the shuttle to come back around and asked how it was going. told him i was only there to grab plates and we spent ten genuine minutes going back and forth over the point of streaking on YPG vs YPD and for some reason i could not get through to him that it was simply a point of comparison to ensure theyre actually respiring. like oh my fucking god im not trying to run a TMRE on this thing its literally just to see that theyre capable of respiration and not solely relying on fermentation after, you know, editing the proteins that go into allowing them to fucking respire. its not that deep because it shouldnt need to be at this stage. jesus fuck. literally had to come back at 5:30 and get it ironed out.

the fact that its only tuesday and i have to spend the rest of the week there and not at the other lab makes me want to throw up for real. i already know the presentation tomorrow is going to go poorly and im probably going to sob in my car about it. and even then itll only be wednesday. cant even pretend to have covid to get out of a week of work because only now am i actually responsible for things and i need to turn shit out at the speed of fucking light. i know that isnt his fault at least but god i could have used some of this energy back in like june and july when i was just sitting on my hands.

at least the tagging worked. baby's first western went well and honestly was pretty fun.

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9/15/23

it's funny that things started happening only after it was official that i need to move labs. worm ribosomes (wormosomes is my elision. no one else uses it but i like it) looked okay on the fractionator (200 uL 1,2; 200 uL 3,4,5; 170 uL H; 100 uL 3,4,5 all at approx. 5 A260 units) in spite of my doubts about the concentrations. the worms have been so much kinder to me than the yeast. i cannot wait to never grow yeast again (fingers crossed anyway).

i guess next is to concentrate and probably negative stain them next week. i don't want to do that, but i also don't want to do anything here anymore. breathing feels embarrassing in this room sometimes. but it's better than sitting on my hands and waiting for the time to go by until october, anyway. idk why my PI was so uneasy about me leaving then if hes going to be gone the latter half of that month. no shot i was staying that long, especially since he told me initially that i had until november to find something else.

excited to put a negative stain image on here next week. little picture :)

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haven't made a new blog since 2017. did not recall how difficult it is to find people to follow lol

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my greatest joy in science is taking things that would have been nobel-worthy like 60 years ago and coloring them pink

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so i guess the plan is for this is to be like a little diary for myself as I start out w this new lab and sort of keep track of the kinds of things i've done and learned and how I'm feeling about it

lab notebook, but with feeling

so today! :) 9/13/23

Just got the unofficial offer to join Dr. W's (J's?) lab and I could not be more excited :):):) I think the plan is to leave this lab in the second week of october? but it depends on how much i can get done in my lab that I'm currently in. I really really really want to leave asap, but that's just not realistic at the point I'm at right now. Hopefully I can get the tagged strains and speedrun a purification and let that be my gift unto them as i fuck off into the sunset.

lots and lots of big feelings today. the idea of being desired remains intoxicating, especially in concert with the fact that i did this pretty much all by myself--didn't have to leverage connections, really, and now that I have this, I will have (hopefully) hella connections to leverage in the future. really did myself a solid on this one. im so excited!! this really seems like a great opportunity to work on myself in so many ways.

i feel really weird about leaving this lab. i'm not really close with anyone here (my two favorite colleagues are gone to med school and started classes) and i only kind of get along with my PI a lot of the time. but still, being a foundational member of the lab sort of gives me this weird sense of ownership over it even though i barely feel like a member most days anymore. i literally have next to nothing to do except wait every day. the point which my project is at is next to completely irrelevant to everyone else's, so i dont get told things that are happening until wayyyyy later than everyone else, if at all, and then i fuck up and waste time and resources. theyve got jokes im not in on and problems they solved that i didnt know about. its all very isolating a lot of the time. im so low priority here, and i think thats compounded by the fact that he knows im leaving and that im really gunning to leave.

im not excited about being a baby again, but there is a comfort in knowing that i dont have to be producing right out the gate because they know i have so little experience with this kind of work. thats okay though, because i trust that im going to be trained really well and (maybe) gently. we'll see. it's going to be a huge huge huge culture shock when i get there. i really gotta read their papers a little more in-depth before october.

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