Ninth Post

I realize it has been a very long time since I have updated, oh loyal readers mine. I apologize. I suppose I have been tired and busy, busy and tired, and also I have been having SYTYCD parties. Luckily for you, the season finale for SYTYCD is tonight from 8:00-10:00, and after that I will be SYTYCD-free for approximately three weeks. That is a total guess. I have no idea when the fall season starts because I always fast-forward through Cat Deeley’s plugs.

Besides the fact that SYTYCD is ending and that I have been doing chemistry, I suppose there’s not all that much to be said about my life. Oh, right, except for the fact that FX has taken himself off to France for two weeks and left me here in the lab to fend for myself. “Treat it like independent research,” he says, trying to sound reassuring. I thought I would humor him; I didn’t point out that I’ve never done independent research before.

In any case, I’ll admit that he is good about emailing me back every night. He even answers my questions, as long as I format them like this:

Questions:

1. This is a question?

2. This is another question?

The question marks are rather perfunctory, because clearly, what I have written is a statement rather than a question, but if it is a question, it needs to be punctuated by a question mark. Hey, if you think about it, I’ve just handed you a catch-22! If it is a question, it is asking something and needs a question mark. However, it is clearly not a question because it doesn’t demand anything from anyone. The clear conclusion is just that I’m lying to you, and doing a pretty bad job of it.

Anyway, he answers the questions like that. He actually goes back into the body of my email and inserts his answers after the questions, like we did on little homework sheets back in high school and middle school and, oh, I suppose once in a while in college, too.

Dave Kiemle is quite put out with FX (“Fran”, he calls him, as in “How is chemistry going without Fran?” or “I need to send a nasty little email to Fran”) because Chris brought in a gypsy moth pheromone for some purpose that required that Dave work with it. Dave got mobbed by gypsy moths. It’s basically impossible to wash off a pheromone, so Dave has to live with being mobbed by gypsy moths for another couple of months or so. If I was Dave, I would be pretty unhappy, too.

It is halfway through Thursday right now, and lest you think I am not doing anything (that was what happened yesterday, due to circumstances nearly entirely out of my control – mainly that FX is 5 hours ahead of me), I am running mad distillations. That’s mad as in quantity, not emotion. In any case, I’ve kept relatively busy for four hours, which is more than I can say for yesterday.

Justine is quite pleased that FX is not here, because he scares her for some reason, and unfortunately, he seems to always pick the times when she has decided to pay me a visit to, well, pay me a visit. Now my lab can be a sort of refuge for her, because she knows that FX is not going to randomly drop by. Brendan doesn’t scare her because he’s friends with Jeremy, who is in her lab.

I really miss FX a lot, though. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit that, but I wish he’d come back so that he could conclusively tell me something, or offer me solid advice, rather than “use your judgment”. I don’t know. I guess I miss him coming in and jumping out of my skin – not because he’s here, but because the door slams JUST that loudly. I am not kidding you in the least here. It is an extremely loud door.

One of the nice things about this lab is that it is on the third floor, which is not only where Justine works, but is also all yellow. The second floor is turquoise, the fourth floor is salmon. But here, everything is kind of sunny yellow, which tends to bolster the spirits unless they’re lagging quite spectacularly, in which case it seems to be laughing at your misfortune.

Bad news of the day: the left channel of my earbuds has cut out entirely. This is extremely unfortunate. I feel like I’m the only person in the entire world who has this much trouble with earbuds. Maybe there’s something wrong with my ears. My ears break earbuds. Lame.

Anyway, here I am, waiting for my distillations to run and dreading having to run a column tomorrow for the products of the cleavage reaction – because that’s inevitably what is going to happen. It is going to make me fully appreciate flash filtration, I’m sure of that. There is no WAY I am doing a gravity column. I will think on my feet. I will make something happen. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I’ll do it.

I just keep reminding myself that the experience of having to improvise (only to a degree, you understand) and of being relatively unsupervised in the lab is going to have really awesome aftereffects down the road, because I keep getting ridiculously stressed out. I think, instead of stressing, I’m just going to not think about it. That tends to work pretty well for me. Nonconfrontationalism ought to be my middle name, but it’s much too long, and besides, Microsoft Word is protesting its status as a valid word.

Hahahaha!! I just found a substance in Aldrich that costs more than platinum oxide: 2’,3’-dideoxyinosine, which is a nucleotide antagonist and just so happens to cost $31 for ONE MILLIGRAM. How do you even package one mg? Awesome. I want a copy of this book.