my apartment building's radiators just got turned on today and they
started banging about an hour ago and it hasn't stopped. so i'm
listening to that right now and it's awesome. i actually do think
it'll help me sleep tonight - that and not being freezing.
hopefully that will make it easier to get up in the mornings too.
i've been having to get up earlier than i'm used to because i've
started my second rotation, not knowing it would be a 9-5
obligation. now that it's fall break, i'm just fully working that 9
to 5. well, they keep telling me to come in at 9 but then i do and
i'm the only one there until 9:40. i thought i was late today
because my bus was super late and i got there at 9:30 and still no
one was there. the whole schedule is super foreign to me. i'm used
to doing lab work at the strangest hours of the night and not
really having to do anything most of the time. this being a wet lab
and all, that doesn't really work. i guess i didn't know what i was
signing up for. it's fun though. today i got to finally do stuff on
my own after having to be shown everything like 3 times. i got to
expose some cancer cells to cytokine and do fast imaging. the whole
software side of everything i'm doing hurts my heart. all of the
software is some variant of some awful massive disgusting java
program and everyone's running windows. i feel like i've entered an
alternate reality. it's fine though. running the imaging experiment
was fun - especially getting to choose which regions of the wells
to image. it was about 3.5 hours total of just clicking around
looking at cells and thinking "that one is disgusting" but mostly
just that they were too close together. or, it would be really nice
ones but there would be something really bright in frame that blows
the contrast of everything. once i picked the spots it was also
awesome to get to see the complexes forming in real time as photos
were taken. we have a gfp-tagged protein that's part of the complex
and you can see it go from diffused in the cytoplasm to really
concentrated in some number of spots across the cell membrane. i
love watching it. once the videos are made too it's really cool
being able to watch their trajectories and formation and all that.
i'm also doing some structural analysis stuff for a related
project. it's fun but i'm also running into software annoyances. i
miss being part of a lab where we rewrite everything. it's more fun
that way. i'm also taking care of a plate of these cancer cells.
well, most of the time i'm ignoring them. but today i did split
them which basically means throwing 90% of the cells into the
trash. i got to do that alone for the first time today and messed
up part of it but not in a big way. i just forgot to bang around
the plate after i added the trypsin so nothing was coming off of
the plate right. once i got it going i watched balls of cells start
rolling along the bottom of the plate under the microscope and bump
into other cells. it kind of made me sick. i've never seen them
roll before, only float. there was something about it that was
messed up. i also felt sick looking at some cells today that were
shaped really weird. they were folded up in a way. i think in both
cases it was just more clear that these were 3D objects instead of
2D things and then it reminded me that they were alive and human
cells. moreso that they were alive but it definitely wouldn't feel
the same if it was bacteria.