Well, everything fell apart.

I can't say it came as a terrible surprise, just one of those wrenching life lessons. That actually sums up most of the last year, actually. My cells all died again, and after six weeks of being homeless and working 80 or 90 hours I decided I was putting effort down a black hole and I needed to reassess. So I packed up my stuff and headed back to Albuquerque. That part is going pretty well - I love being home, and I feel like I've been able to be useful here. It's been great to be with my parents and to spend time with Ryan and Jessica. I still don't have a job, which has been extremely difficult to handle; I feel like a complete loser, and my finances are in shambles. On the other hand, the economy is rotten, and I have decided not to do what I am trained to do, so I must expect some difficulties. In the long run it will be better, but for now it stinks.

I'm not sure whether I'll be able to finish my degree. I'm trying. I'm switching to a library research based thesis, which will help, but it's hard to do that on top of the other things I'm doing -- for an unemployed person, I've been keeping pretty busy. I should be significantly less busy, though, since my best friend in Albuquerque just moved to Japan. :( Guess that will help the paper writing, in any event. And now I have a good excuse to visit Japan.

It's been a difficult time emotionally - I'm so confused about what I should be doing with my life, and I feel really overlooked and left behind. I know, though, that in the most important things I'm doing ok: my testimony is strong, and I'm continuing to improve in my ability to live the gospel, I am on great terms with my family and have been able to help them, and I haven't given up. Patience and quiet endurance have always been strengths of mine; I just need to get my shoulders under this and keep moving.

Is it too late to be a librarian?

Recent dramas, the fun kind

OK, firstly I promised an update on the play I saw last month. A friend of mine teaches at a private religious school, and they did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the kids who participated in the summer drama camp. It was adorable. It was especially fun to watch the little girls who play brats (especially Veruka) figure out how much fun it is to play the bad guy - all the attitude, none of the consequences. I felt that way giving an in-character report on Athena in grade school. Actually, the whole thing reminded me of dramas of my youth: I was an oompaloompa in our 5th grade production, which meant I got to narrate. I handled my orange wig coming off correctly, not stopping or breaking character. I was proud of myself. We used to put on plays for my parents a lot, too. They would go out on their date night, and we would compose a drama. They were never scripted, we would just plan "And then you say something about where he might have gone, and then I'll run out and do the special effects!" We liked our special effects. They were always mild and extremely homemade, but they were fun. I miss that improv. For some reason I can't do it with anyone but siblings; I'm just too self-conscious. We had a great time, though. Back to the performance that sparked this little nostalgia kick - I did think having all the little girls perform "Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend" from Moulin Rouge in fishnets was a bit risque for a grade school production (every golden-ticket-holding child had a theme song, and that was Veruka's), but the music was fun, the scenery well done for the budget, and there is some real talent among those kids.

On a new but not entirely unrelated note, I saw Get Smart last night, and was very pleasantly surprised. I often have difficulty with Steve Carrell because the ratio of pain to any other emotion is a bit high and the humor cruder than I prefer in his characters. As Maxwell Smart the awkwardness was dialed down just a little, the endearing traits dialed up a touch. In fact, there was a lot about Max and 99 that felt startlingly genuine in a movie that relies so heavily on slapstick. 99 was played by Anne Hathaway (in her first truly adult role that I've seen) , and her slowly diminishing frustration with Max felt reasonable, the vulnerability beneath her super-sexy ultra agent present but not overplayed. Gentle fun was poked at Max, the analyst oblivious to the fact that he might be a little too detail oriented and trying just a little too hard turned often inept field agent who's still trying a little too hard, but it did not deny him (or invalidate) his triumph, or his virtues as a man who's man enough to be honest and to see the person in the people around him. I noted the same treatment (with very good effect) of several of the supporting characters: gentle fun with obvious weaknesses and/or stereotypes, but a triumph granted without condescension that lets you remember the movie without the cringing I usually do when reflecting on episodes of The Office. The dance-off was one of my very favorite parts, and there were some fun lines. Lots of fun little surprises with the casting, too -- shout out to Masi Oka, who I love. "The spiders have to be individually milked. They don't like it." :)

When I'm not seeing the one movie I've been to since spring, I've mostly been in the lab, which is a bit of a mixed bag. I really, really do love molecular biology, I'm just _so frustrated_ with the inordinate amount of things that go wrong, especially since I can almost never trace them to their source and eliminate them. Can I just be the person who designs experiments and analyzes them? I totally bonded with a guy in the lab yesterday while designing an experiment. Well, bonded is perhaps too strong a word, but I certainly experienced a rapport. :) I'm such a nerd. But it was fun! I am slogging away at my project, though, and it might eventually get done. If it doesn't get firmly off the ground in the next week and a half I'm just calling it quits and going home. I miss my family, and I've been homeless now for nearly a month (although I really appreciate all of those who have either made that more pleasant or offered to, especially Tanya for lending me her amazing bed). I've also been considering other career directions, but more on that later. Hopefully my project is underway for real, and I can get on with my life.

This post is already inordinately long, so I'll take a break now, but I'll be back soon, I promise!

Why does moving always take 40 times longer than it should?!? It would be enough to make a girl swear off material possessions, except that most of my material possessions are books, and they are my friends. I am super grateful for Carolyn and Ryan this week; without them, this whole moving business would never have worked.

So it took longer than it should, but I am officially out. Which means I am officially homeless (shhhh!) at least for the next few weeks. It's kind of weird, but not so bad. Of course, I'm getting a very cushy version of homelessness. The only thing I'm really going without is my mattress. I miss it, but somehow I think I will survive.

My project is progressing. I've ordered all the supplies for my last big segment, and they should be in any day now. Once they're here, it will be two weeks start to finish, assuming nothing goes horrifically wrong. Please, please pray that nothing goes horrifically wrong. I need all the help I can get. I've tried to set everything up so that it will work even when I'm a sleep-deprived zombie (I have a labeling system involving stickers -- it rocks!), and I've made templates for all my data analysis, so my results should pretty much be plug and play. I will admit to a sick and twisted delight in making my templates. They are things of beauty. :)

And, pathetically enough, I think that sums it up. I saw an adorable production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory recently; I'll write about that in a bit. Still babysitting my niece as often as I can -- I'm really going to miss that. She's crawling now, and she's gotten really fast. Mobility has given her all sorts of fun new options for gumming. Oh, and I have a really cool and exciting conference coming up next month - an immunotherapy conference at the NIH, in Bethesda. I'm really looking forward to that.

My real data doesn't make sense.

I'm going in tomorrow to talk to a professor who has done this assay before and may be able to help me fix it, but for now my numbers are all over the place. It looks like I may have to redo the whole thing. Aaaarrrrgh!

On the upside, I just got back from a great trip to Albuquerque. I'll post details of that, and the long-awaited rant, soon, but for now, it's late. Sleep!

No rant today either, mostly because I have reached the stage of exhausted where you half feel like you're floating and half feel like every heartbeat is some enormous effort that requires your whole body to accomplish. My schedule has been torn to shreds by the demands of my uber-finicky cells (which I think may be possessed - 5 generations in 12 hours? Simply not possible. And the cell counter and excel did the calculations for me, so I'm pretty sure it's not sleep-math...). I have been at work at all hours (and I do mean all hours) in the last week, and everything else has dropped by the wayside. The good news, however, is that I am currently home, on my bed, having decided that the alamar blue assay can wait until tomorrow. I'll catch up on work then -- now I sleep.

Where to begin?

My niece is adorable. I've been having the best time going over every week or two and playing with her while my sister and brother-in-law get some grown up time; mostly they use it to go grocery shopping, which isn't all that exciting, but from my days as a nanny I remember what its like when doing a chore efficiently or eating an uninterrupted meal or reading a chapter in your book is a huge privilege, so I won't malign the shopping.

I have a plan for next year, and it is to go home. It is a not insignificant triumph for everyone involved that my family and I are really looking forward to this. When I first moved out, an undisclosed number of years ago, no one would have predicted my return to residency, much less the joy had by all at the prospect. Of course, it helps that three more of my siblings have moved out, so there is considerably more room in the house than when I first vacated it, and it helps more that I am now the reinforcements for dealing with the angsty teenagers rather than being the angsty teenager myself. There are advantages to raising a large brood of independent, intelligent, determined (read: stubborn) kids, but ease of parenting during the teenage years is not one of them. But on to the plan. After determining that benchwork really isn't for me (or, rather, that I am not for it, a conclusion which may have been reached too soon), I steeled myself to investigate the dubious promise of bioinformatics. They claim that I can do biology, but on a computer. Advantages: I am good at computers; there might be actual right and wrong answers, discoverable by following discernable and consistant protocols; I am good at organization, another key bioinformatics skill; I could occasionally work from home, or another state or, you know, China, if I was so inclined. Disadvantages: Math. That pretty much sums it up. It's not that I dislike math, its that I'm going to have to teach myself some higher level calculus, a lot more statistics and, oh yeah, how to program. That part is actually going pretty well -- Java's not so bad, and I hear C++ is pretty similar. So I'm going to move home, take a temporary part time job, bond with my family, study, and endure another excruciating round of PhD applications, which is in and of itself practically a full time job, but with opposite cash flow. At least my parents aren't going to charge me rent.

So if all goes well, or at least well-ish, I'll spend two semesters in good ol' Abq, and then be back in school in time to do my first rotation over the summer. The time at home will be a great chance to write some more music with Ryan and some more story with Jessica, and learn how to play the bass guitar (I decided that will be my reward for enduring this stupid program -- the degree itself feels more like a requirement than a commendation). I miss NM, and I won't miss driving in snow, so all is well there.

This all hinges, of course, on me actually graduating some time, which I am happy to report is looking slightly more likely than it has for a couple of months. My adviser is out of town until late July, my committee is more or less off my back, and my cells have miraculously decided to grow! Actually, we just finally tried enough things differently to figure out what they like and what they don't. Research is a very time consuming process. I have started transfections and will actually be collecting real data from here on out. I'm delighted.

The data looks good so far, too. I can't get too excited about it because I have a single reading, and that doesn't count for squat in anyone's book, plus I am severely sleep deprived (started the transfections at 5 pm or so on Tuesday, had to go feed them at 3 am Wednesday and so didn't sleep at all that night, woke up (for 1/2 hour or more) 6 times between 6:30 am, when I finally got to bed, and 4 pm, when I finally decided to give up on trying to get sleep and go back to work already, and its now... oh dear. 1:30 am. I get to be back at school to feed cells and take samples at 7 am. Who needs sleep?) and thus prone to overreaction and illogical thinking. But still, it's encouraging. It looks like this project, unlike my last one, might actually lead to a feasible cancer treatment, assuming dosage and delivery obstacles could be overcome and this happens in all p53 WT cancers (that's about half of all cancer, btw!) and not just this one particular cell line. Hey, I didn't say it was going to happen soon. I just said it might eventually lead to something, which in research is about as good as you can ask for, especially if you're just a lowly grad student.

I'm still trying to handle the side effects of all of the last few months' stress. I'm (mostly) successfully avoiding old bad habits for handling freak-out level pressure, but I'm now experiencing pronounced insomnia (no! it's true!), frequent migraines, frequent normal headaches, chronic fatigue (which certainly doesn't have anything to do with the insomnia), panic attacks, and other things that I thought would go away when the stress let up a bit but so far seem inclined to stay. I'll see what I can do to fix that when I have more research out of the way. Now that my lab time is actually productive, I intend to throw everything in and just live there until I have this project wrapped up. I'll have a life then. Right now I need to graduate.

Speaking of graduating, I have rants on behalf of my fellow grad students, but they will have to wait. It's late, and I should at least attempt sleep before I go in tomorrow, lest I sabotage myself with muddled thinking even worse coordination. For now, let me just say congratulations to Daniel and Wendy, and to young Spencer Brent: welcome to the world.

Okay, I know I've been horrible. It's been forever since I posted. If its any consolation, you haven't missed much. My life at this point is pretty repetitive - class, cells, sleep (not enough of that), with intervals of high drama which aren't much fun to be in. Lately I've been trying to decide what will become of me when I finish with this degree (assuming such a thing is even possible - it still feels like I will never escape). PhD work with UT Houston, affiliated with the MD Anderson Cancer Research Center, is a possibility, but I have to go interview with them before I will know if they will give me the chance. If that doesn't work out, I guess I'll have to leave the ivory tower and experience this "real world" I hear rumors of. I don't really know what I'll do when I get there, but I'm told I have options. I think science programs really need to do a better job of preparing students for the transition from school into the professional world. I'm pretty much helpless when it comes to doing anything other than pursuing a professorship. Thank goodness BYU has a great business school willing to offer help to us eggheads.

We have made it again to the end of the semester, and I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, statistics is finally over. Definitely a good thing. Don't get me wrong, it's useful stuff and it was a lot easier this time through than other times I've tried to tackle it, but 3 straight hours of lecture, with multiple homework assignments every week? That's just not right, especially not for me. I'm the kind of girl who wants to just read the book, take the test and be done with it. This approach works great for me for everything short of calculus (and I include in that category all of biology, the social sciences, chemistry, english, the arts... pretty much everything. Except math). I should be done with all of my teaching responsibilities, which is good in that I will have more time and less frustration, but bad because I actually do think what I do is great and I love sharing it. It also means a big turnover in the ward, and I'm really going to miss a lot of people. Not that I ever do anything with them outside of church, but still. Maybe I'll have some fun this summer. I really do miss being a human being, with well rounded interests. I used to have time to write creatively, to read non-academic books, to be outside... I did get a little of that last week, though, and that was fun. Branding at the Bartschi ranch -- great people, good food, sunshine, and cows, which as everyone knows are inherently funny. Also, a lot of really happy dogs. It's hard to be depressed or burnt out when you are in the company of an excited dog.

It's also hard to be unhappy when you see a baby smile. My niece, who is now just over 4 months old, has figured out how to do this. She loves music, and she has a great sense for when the crying is driving people crazy and she needs to work the cuteness to compensate. Hopefully we'll figure out how to fix the crying soon, and then she can just smile because she likes to. I think she's probably a very happy baby, when her tummy doesn't hurt her.

On a completely unrelated note, my current playlist is a mix of Breaking Benjamen and Spamalot. Is that normal?