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.