But how long are you gonna make me wait?
And how long are you gonna hesitate?
'Cause I love the way we carry it on...
But baby, how long?

- Matchbox Twenty, How Long

-+-

“The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.” - Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

-+-

I wonder if you get as nervous as me when I'm getting ready to see you.  I panic a little whenever I apply my eyeliner a little too much, or when my hair doesn't look just right.  Oh god, what am I going to do about these bangs?  I can't be seen like this.  Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.

But it never really matters, does it?  Our faces always light up the same way whenever we first see each other.  You're always as easy on the eyes as I remember, and I can only hope that it's the same whenever you first see me.

...

-+-

I spent my Labor Day at a lab dinner... that wasn't with my own lab!  It was a gracious invitation that was an AMAZING culmination of how much I want to start mingling with all of the other labs.  

Their lab tech handed me the little toy mouse and joked, "Okay, show me how you kill your mice."

"Really?" I threw my hair back and laughed, "Okay...!"

In my hand, I ran my fingers up the "spine" of a little plush purple mouse with a feather tail - normally it was a beloved cat toy.  Today, it was my dissection model.

I verbally walked through my motions, "So you find the cervical vertebrae, and you pinch it between your fingers, and then grab the tail with your other hand, and you PULL!"  They laughed at my animated explanation, and the way that I punctuated every gruesome step with a basket of giggles.

This transitioned into a discussion where we all contrasted our own experiences of performing dissections on cats, frogs, and fetal pigs in our middle school and high school educations.  Namely, for those of us that are from California, we brought up how the animal specimens were always given to us already dead.  However, in France, students would be given live animals, and were responsible for sacrificing their own specimens prior to dissection.

"They don't trust us with killing them," I said, in a very manner-of-fact way.  The group all laughed, much to my befuddlement.

"Man," they shrugged, "only biologists could talk about this stuff like it's nothing."  I finally realized how morbid my statement was, and laughed nervously.

"Yeah," one laughed, "it's definitely a biologist thing."

I don't know how much more love this heart can lose,
and I'm dying,
dying from the exit wounds.

- The Script

-+- 

So I think I had a cute day in the laboratory today. 

I very casually told the other undergraduate in the lab that my classmates were playfully teasing me for being a huge nerd, and my lab technician was outraged.  I guess I said it out of context, because I earnestly was being truly nerdy – I was just gushing about my awesome lab report format, and how I was freakin’ stoked that I took photos of my agar plates so that my report could look legit.  I really 100% deserved that "nerd" comment. 

However, my lab members took, “My classmates were teasing me that I’m a nerd!” as that my classmates were insulting me, and my lab technician became very defensive of me, “WHAT?  CHRISTA, NO.  YOU’RE AWESOME.  You know what, fuck these kids!  Watch them say that when you’re their boss!”  The grad student that I was shadowing gave me a similar pep talk, except she did so with substantially fewer amounts of entertaining vulgarity and moral outrage.  So I was pretty taken aback, not only because I thought I was making such a casual comment, but I mean, wow.  It was already enough to realize that my lab members were fond of me, but there’s still yet another kind of warmth to learn that they’re protective of me, and to see them all get ready to just leap out of their lab chairs and fight whoever dares to cross their precious "wondergrad."

Afterward, the other lab members treated me to some coffee while I was running my protein assay, and I just felt like a SCIENTIST.  “Oh, yeah, I’m so busy and tired running this long experiment, so I would love if you could get me a latte!”  And I always perceived coffee as undergraduate duty (even though they’ve never made me get them coffee, as much as I really do offer), so it was really something when the lab members wanted to get me coffee!

I also actually really love it when the entire lab is bustling with nonsterile experiments, which is what happened today – our tech was doing cell counts of bone marrow samples, my post-doc and I were running an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay while I was shadowing a cell stain, and another grad student was doing transplant analysis.  The neat thing about nonsterile experiments, is that we're not all separated because we're in the various sterile rooms.  Instead, we all sit at our respective lab benches and chat with each other across the room while we’re all pipetting reagents and cell samples.  All of us in our lab coats, just driving science forward! 

I contributed to the conversation by inspiring the aforementioned rage, and by cheerfully telling everyone that it was my sister’s first day in her lab at Stanford, and I was wondering out loud about how her first day was going.  I told them, “Yeah, she’s normally really really sarcastic, so it’s really something to see her so enthusiastic and sincere!”  While looking at his mouse analysis, a grad student replies, “So basically, she‘s the complete opposite of you.”  He immediately transitioned into a flourished impression of me, “WEEEEEE TIME FOR SCIENCE, TEE HEE HEE~!~!~!~!”  This, of course, inspired my lab technician to also do an impression of me, followed by, “Right, THAT’S what I still had left on my to-do list. ‘Make fun of Christa.’  Sweet!  Thanks Christa, good day!”

I concur. Good day!

except for the part where i got zero time to study for my midterm, but that's a story for another day LOL D: