Damn the man!

Most of the time, I feel like whatever I want to do in lab is okay.   If I want to leave a cage of mice in the lab for three days, I do it.  If I want to pour a weird cocktail of PBS, PFA, Triton-X, and dry ice down the sink, I do it.  Why? Because it's really not a big deal.

Honestly, this is my normal state after being in lab for more than an hour:

Until the inspectors come.  The first time that I worked in a lab and the animal safety people came, I didn't know what to do.  So I just hid in the room that I was testing the animals in, hoping that they wouldn't want to disrupt my experiments just to check on how I was doing things.  

 

We had a health and safety inspection today.  Knowing that I am a walking safety hazard, I cleared out of lab for two hours. But once I came back, I began feeling horribly pathetic about my avoidance of authority.  So, to get back at the Man, I went re-labelled things in lab.

 

 

(By the way, this post gives tremendous insight into who I am as a person.  Most notably, the fact that I don't have feet.)

Additional Information

Grad school apps drive me insane.  Letters of rec, personal statement, filling out the same exact shit on every. single. application.  (Seriously- make a fucking common application.  This shit is stupid.)

And then the "Additional Information" section.  Where you put anything that "is not covered elsewhere in the application."  I always feel like I need to put something here, because there are a lot of things that the applications don't cover, but I assume it's supposed to still be moderately science related.  Last year, I uploaded my illustrated personal statement, but I'm thinking that might not be the best idea this time around, since it obviously didn't work last time.

I've thought about highlighting some of my more unorthodox skills, like my ability to imbibe obscene amounts of alcohol and still talk about science. 



But while this is a very important and useful skill, it's probably not one that I should admit to perfecting to an admissions committee. 

So my current thinking is that I need to use this Additional Information space to really set myself apart, accentuating what makes me different from most other aspiring neuroscientists. The obvious difference: I am ridiculously good looking.  Now I just need some decent pictures of me, preferably in a scientific setting, with just a hint of suggestiveness.

 

Who could possibly turn that down?

Things that make me happy pt. 1

I'm a lab tech in a pretty awesome lab.  While this means that I'm constantly surrounded by awesome science and awesome sciencey people, it also means that my job sucks.  I do the same exact shit.  Every. Single. Day.  So, to combat this, I've started to focus more on things that happen during the course of my work day that make me really happy. 

Like when you go to grab gloves and you discover that there are exactly two gloves left in the box.

I think I spend too much time focusing on my gloves.  When I go to grab some, and there's three stuck together, it makes me really sad.  It's like I'm breaking up some beautiful glove love and ruining everything.  

And then I feel terrible because eventually, there's only one glove in the box.

I don't know if there was just an uneven number of gloves in the box to begin with, or if managed to lose one somehow, but either way, it makes me feel like a terrible person.



And then there are those times when there are exactly two gloves left in the box.  Nobody was lonely, and I don't have to worry about how much glove love I broke up, because eventually that one glove found another glove, and everybody wins. 

Sometimes it's the little things in life.

Things about my CV that bother me

With grad school applications right around the corner, I figured I should update my CV.  In the process, I started feeling rally self-conscious about all the things I say I can do.  And while I don't want the admissions committees and PI's who are writing my letters to know that I spend most of my time bumbling around, hoping that the glassware I just broke wasn't too expensive, I figured that I could at least be honest with the internet...