heartbeats & daily deets

I just have to say something.

Today has been a weird, adrenaline-y day.

I arrived at work, I had my morning coffee, I went back to my desk and read my ASAPs - that's "as soon as published", for article abstracts. I keep them organized in an RSS feed so that I have access to all the most happenin' science as soon as it happens. Or, more correctly, many months after it happens, but as soon as it becomes available online.

We had lunch together in the lounge. Most of the group is here that's going to be here, and we still seem to be on a lunch schedule that is similar to the schedule we all had back at Yale, so I took a walk with Clark and Denise down to the carts that lurk behind the Kendall/MIT T stop, then back up into the workplace to settle in the lounge and eat the salad that I'd packed, and Kate, Ben, and Steve joined some time later. I had another coffee.

Exhausted as I always am by the prospect of having to meet new people and make new connections, this built-in legion of our research group is really nice. Large lab lunches at tables in kitchens is something we've been doing for a few years now. It feels comfortable and familiar.

A person from IT came up to my desk with an absolutely monstrous monitor (24") and an adapter for my computer, a mouse and an expanded Mac keyboard. The keyboard makes me feel a lot better, because it has a real delete key and not just a backspace key that has 'delete' printed on it instead. It also has 'home' and 'end' buttons. The buttons you don't know you need until they are gone.

I sent off an email to my old housing contacts, because I still haven't received my security deposit from my old apartment and I was more than curious about that. Adding that deposit to my financial security blanket is something in which I have a substantial interest.

With a few of my transplanted labmates, I headed to a meeting that fell under the heading of 'science of therapeutics'. There were some mini-talks about small molecules and their gene targets by current graduate students and postdocs, and more importantly, food and coffee. So I supplemented my lunch with whatever the food was (most of it was sort of unrecognizable... various toppings on flatbreads, something that might have been a poor man's approximation of falafel, something that was probably gyoza of some sort, but it all tasted good) and another coffee.

This coffee turned out to be a mistake. My heart started racing in the middle of the first talk, and I made a mental note that three coffees by 3:00pm is apparently my limit. This is, I feel, probably a good sign for my health, but is unacceptable in terms of graduate student coffee intake. Hopefully we can avoid heart palpitations in future.

[Aside: when we were in New Haven, packing up the lab there to move it here where we will have to unpack it (BIG NO here), Andy bought us dinner. We sat around over our Chinese takeout while he regaled us with stories about bicycling competitively. At one point he mentioned that he had never taken anything stronger than caffeine as a performance enhancer, and then he followed it up by saying he took 6-10 grams of it. Later I broke in to register my astonishment that 6-10 grams of caffeine doesn't immediately blow out your heart, and to make a statement that if I had guessed the lethal dose of caffeine in humans, it would have been somewhere before SIX GRAMS of the stuff. His response? "well, I can tell you that 10 grams isn't lethal, but it felt awful."

I still don't believe him. Maybe he built up a resistance to it. End aside.]

Then I checked my email on my phone between talks, and found that my deposit has not been released to the welcoming arms of my checking account because they do not yet have my keys.

Dear reader, let me tell you a little story.

When I was moving out of my apartment, my moving team of coworkers and I first moved all of the things out, and then I went back in and cleaned it as thoroughly as I could with what little energy reserves remained in my tired body. I did a good job.

I then read the instructions on the envelope given to me for the express purpose of holding my keys. I had done as much as I could for the apartment, and now I had to relinquish the keys. This was hard for me. I felt a sentimental attachment to those keys, because I was still attached to the apartment, which I had finally come to think of as 'home'. Still not there in the current apartment, even though it is more homelike in every single possible way than the one I recently vacated.

The envelope instructed me to drop my keys inside and then to take them to the dropbox located by the mailboxes in Bellamy Hall. So I headed over to Bellamy Hall, wondering all the while whether or not I could remember Betsy telling me to just leave the envelope outside of my door, and then rationalizing (like a RATIONAL PERSON) that if these directions were printed on the envelope I'd been given, I should just follow them. Who could blame me?

I located the dropbox and tried unsuccessfully to put the envelope through the slot. The keys didn't fit. There were three of them. A building key, an apartment key, and a mailbox key. Finally I took them out of the envelope and off of the keyring, and then put all three keys and the keyring back into the envelope. I dropped the envelope into the locked box, and then left the building. I couldn't go in anymore. It was time to drive northeast!

I tell you this to register my frustration and disbelief that somehow housing does not have my keys, as I put them in an envelope, followed the explicit directions on said envelope, and put it in a dropbox to which presumably only housing has a key. WELL.

My security deposit hasn't been refunded because my keys haven't turned up, and I can't stress enough how much this is not my fault. I worked myself up into a righteously angry lather, not just because of these reasons but also because

1. if you can't release my deposit to me because you don't have my keys, and you've rented that apartment to someone with start date August 1 or 15, you know I am not there and you have no excuse for not contacting me to tell me that you don't have my apartment keys.
2. I paid a key deposit of $30 on top of my one-month-rent security deposit, and you're telling me that those $30 are holding up the rest? really?!?

So as my anger contributed to my fluttering heartbeat, I kept hearing a buzzing very close to where I sit, like a fly against a window. I couldn't identify the source.

"Kate?" I asked (I moved into the desk next to Kate's when its previous occupant vacated, and there were no keys OR security deposits involved, and unfortunately my desk phone found me soon after), "do you hear that?"

Kate listed for me a number of things that she heard, but a fly buzzing was not one of them.

"Really?" I asked, as the buzzing began anew. "You don't hear that?"

She shook her head. I felt like a crazy person.

I lifted the black desk organizer that sits across the borderline of our desks. There was a little piece of styrofoam...

AND THERE WAS THE BIGGEST BLACK FLY I HAVE EVER SEEN. Literally at least 300% the size of a regular housefly. Terrifying.

"I'm not crazy!" I yelled at Kate. I mostly yelled because the fly had chosen to buzz off of the desk, now freed from its plastic desk-organizer jail cell, just as I started to tell her sort of calmly that I wasn't crazy, and it hitched my voice up into fifth gear. The fly decided to chill out behind my newly acquired monitor, back where I couldn't get at it, but Kate pulled a blue-and-red running shoe out of her backpack and handed it to me.

The fly buzzed around amidst the cables and behind the monitor. It turtled for a while, struggling on its back. (This was weird. I have never seen a fly behave this way before.) I set the shoe down calmly and walked away.

It was the kind of fly that you don't want to kill because it's big enough that its guts will probably go everywhere and be gross and leave a greasy fly smear across everything.

I came back a minute or two later, and the fly finally flew drunkenly off of the desk and onto the floor. Maybe it was disoriented by all of the light after living (days? I have no idea how it got beneath that organizer!) in perfect darkness. Maybe it had forgotten how to fly in its exile. Kate handed me the shoe, and I smashed the fly.

Job done.

Then she handed me one paper towel so I could scoop the fly into the trash instead of leaving its huge insectile corpse on the floor by my desk as a warning to all future flies that dead flies buzz no tales, especially not here. And then she looked at the fly, looked at the paper towel, and grabbed me about five more so that I didn't have to feel the crunch of its exoskeleton. I picked it up and put it into the trashcan, with a little eulogy. I don't remember what I said. It was dumb, but it was appropriate.

Honestly though, I am kind of in chemistry so that bugs aren't in my workplace. Eeeeeesh.

I've come down off of the adrenaline now, and just feel a little bit tired in my bones. I will update about the security deposit enigma as I feel led.