Swifty

This is just a quick update, with (of course) no news of real substance.

• I ran ten miles Saturday. I'd like to treat this fact with casual indifference, to make it sound like it was no big deal to me. But I'm not going to lie: it was awesome and I'm both proud and surprised.
• The plants in our garden have sprouted. There are lots of baby herbs and some little pepper sprouts. I hope things continue to go well, regardless of rogue, off-season snow storms.
• Because there are five full work days ahead of me, filled with hastily-made lunches and thrown together dinners, I'm going to (fatly) reminisce about Saturday's dinner. We've been attempting deep dish pizzas lately, using cake pans and protein crumbles (which sound... gross). This is just before covering the whole thing in cheese. It was no Chicagan deep dish... But right now, as my boring work day lunch microwaves, even this terrible quality picture of it is enough to make me weep.
  Not really. But it was pretty good. Especially after that run (I'll keep bringing it up until I'm no longer astounded that I actually did it).

• I really don't know why I keep posting food pictures on here. I've no talent, really, in the kitchen, besides the basic obedience of following recipes and the ability to learn (wing it) from experience. And rarely am I inspired enough to actually pull out a REAL camera to document anything. And I'm certainly no food blogger/photographer like this'n or even this part-time one.
  Yeah, I literally have no reason to be posing food pictures. I can't even think of a theory. Maybe I'm just busy enough with working that I think even my meals are enough of a diversion to be worthy of documentation.
• Well, don't worry. And I say this mainly to myself, I guess. This will be the last phone/computer camera taken photo of a meal I've made, unless I have a good reason.
• I ran ten miles.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

(I hope you know from exactly where the title comes.)

Yesterday wasn’t necessarily a terrible day, and I hate to join the masses and get all complainy about Mondays. But yesterday was Monday X-TREME. So extreme that the e of extreme just gets in the way, rendered useless in the expression of how off the charts Mondayful it was.

I’ll try not to go into exhaustive detail, but the contributing factors were: 9000 things to get done at work, staying very late at work despite my best efforts, forgetting that March 22 was staff evaluation day, the heat in the lab so high I might have suffered heat stroke, getting bad results on a straightforward experiment, the absolute necessity to do a minimum of three loads of laundry, no time to fix dinner, headache edging on the definition of migraine, and the inconvenience of only 24 hours in the day. Sorry, sorry for being self-centeredly complainful. Not my intent, I promise. I did manage to get a 4.5 mile run in after work, which helped. It also jammed my Monday night schedule pretty tight though.

ANYWAY. I don’t want this post to become a shrine to one magical event that turned around my whole outlook on the day and caused the heavens to open up and dolphins to jump through glittery hoops with laughter in the air. I’m still just as disgruntled about the 40+ hour workweek as the next worker.

But I should probably draw your attention to Exhibit A (ignore the fact that it's sitting on a chair in a messy apartment):

Knowing of my MONDAY XTREME, Jeremy quietly knocked on my door at the beginning of Skype Homers, came in and laid this fresh, hot Middle Eastern feast before me, then quickly bowed out (please note the homemade hummus and fresh falafel).

BOOYAH, Monday. I have a Jeremy, and I had a good conversation with Rachelle, and I slept with vengeance (medicated, yes, but still). How I wound up with such rare people in my life, I will never know.

(Sidenote: I find it mildly obnoxious that the off-brand meal-replacement nutrition shake prefers to have WEIGHT LOSS SHAKE proudly plastered on its label in such a large font. There’s nothing I want my coworkers to know more than where I sadly shop AND that I’m drinking a weight loss shake. Maybe it’s not for weight loss. Maybe I just didn’t have time to make lunch (which is true) and that I shop thriftily (which I try to make true). Thanks again for the classiness, Wal Mart.)

FINALLY

Dave Eggers is one of my favorite authors. And I didn’t know that he put out a new book, after What is the What? So when I was innocently browsing Amazon, I was beside myself to discover this:

And I ran to get it as quickly as possible and read it within a few days and I am quite pleased. It’s the true account, based on personal interviews, of a man who stayed in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, after which he traveled around town in his canoe to check on and aid anyone in distress.

I don’t have anything very valuable to say about this book, honestly. This isn’t a review or anything otherwise reflective about the book. I just wanted to say… Eggers is a good writer and such a good story teller. Every once in while I find a book that is so well written, with a story so perfectly told, that there is little else I want to do but consume the book entirely. And I’m not saying this is the only good book or good writing I’ve come across recently. I’ve actually had a very solid lineup lately of writers I love and have come to love (see the sidebar: Tolkien and Krakauer, to name a couple). But it was so nice to come across the surprise of a new Dave Eggers book, and to find it easily at the library (it’s usually pretty easy to find books at the library here, unless you’re looking for romantic Christian fiction or useful research materials, a hot, rarely available item and nonexistent resource, respectively).

And of course… Sadly… All of this makes me more and more disappointed that most jobs in the "real world" don’t have Spring Breaks, during which I could devote my time exclusively to appreciating the art of the written word and experimenting with recipes I’ve found lately and dusting off my camera and my dear bike, neither of which have been outdoors in far too long.

Sidenote: Jeremy and I have decided to combine our efforts and attempt an apartment garden. He used to grow tomatoes there and maybe something else? But he's talked about expanding, and he’s allowing me to use his balcony for some herbs and peppers, which he will add to with plants of his own. Small scale? Yes, very. But this is another thing I’d be spending my spring break on, if I had one.

I am thankful for my job, though, despite its stinginess with days off. It was hard-won and I would hate to find myself taking it for granted.

21 Strawberries

So you may remember this fiasco from last year...

Well March 6 rolled around again and, yes, I decided to feed my brother again for his birthday. At least I didn't drop it this time, though this picture hides its many imperfections.

Maybe later I'll show you them. I did take pictures, though not for the sake of photography, just for the sake of reporting.

Apologies

I'm sorry, but the following contains a word that I kind of despise. Maybe nobody else minds it, which is fine and totally acceptable, but regardless I'll apologize, if even just to myself.

Anyway.

Do you ever have totally random* memories surface for no apparent reason? You'll just be minding your own business, walking into work, disinterestedly regarding some construction or traffic, and then all of the sudden you find yourself thinking, on some level, about something very specific and utterly random?

Dave Eggers gave this really relatable, for lack of better word, description of his mind in one of his books... I can't remember which but I'd guess You Shall Know Our Velocity! was it. He (the speaker in the book) said he thought of the inside of his mind as an office of sorts with several workers that bring up files (memories) and work tirelessly to keep things running and organized. My view of my own mind has always been something similar, though not identical, to that. And in this case, it would be like business is going along as usual (the correct files are where they need to be; relevant ones on my desk, others accessible if necessary, etc), but then a completely unexpected file shows up on the desk and suddenly you're thinking of carnival night in elementary school.

That was today's, anyway. Yesterday I was suddenly, inexplicably thinking of the time a friend and I went out one evening in Nazareth (the Nazareth), and after exploring were totally lost. Long story short (it's a story for the books, I think) we wound up back at our hostel, but only after much Hebrew/English confusion and with only the help of some very gracious taxi drivers.

Anyway. This is all totally irrelevant. It's Friday night and I have some sleep on which to immediately catch up. I just thought I'd write myself to sleep. In a public setting. Sorry. This led nowhere. I'm in the middle of two books I don't particularly like so this seemed like a better idea.

*This is the word I hate. Its overuse has made me so hesitant to want to find place for it in speech or writing or anywhere.

Heme Oxygenase I

Alternatively Titled: How, Exactly, I Spend Most of my Time

In case you were wondering, which I don't know if you were because... no one has ever specifically asked... I thought I'd provide you with a general summary of what I do. Feel free to disinterestedly skim. I got a little wordy.

SIDENOTE: While the mileage between work and home is pretty low, the trip involves three separate highways and all of the associated interchanges thereof. So thanks to rush hour and construction, etc, on average I spend about 45 minutes sitting in traffic every day. At least it adds up to a lot of NPR listening. While I still don't understand politics fully or the economy very well at all, I can toss around the jargon like a pro.

Okay, so I work in a scientific research laboratory. Our specific lab has one primary investigator (PhD), one post-doc fellow (PhD), one associate researcher (MS), the new guy (MD), the experienced lab tech (who has worked here longer than anyone), and me (BS). Please note the education/experience gap and infer as much intimidation as you can.

Add to that the challenge of learning extremely delicate lab procedures and techniques from scratch, the pressure of maintaining healthy cells for various experiments, and the looming requirement to produce meaningful results from those experiments, and you have quite a confidence killer. It's challenging and exciting, in a way, and cool. And I'm happy to have a job with a steep learning curve; it's extremely educational. But I still approach almost everything I do with nervous posture and extreme insecurity. Even after nearly three months of working here, the only thing I do at work with absolute confidence is go to the bathroom. And I'm sure it shows, too, but I'm usually just so relieved to have something to do that I've totally mastered. So all day long I'm hunched and lacking any show of confidence, careful and slow, so slow, and double-checking and quad-checking. And then all of the sudden, with unadulterated visible confidence, my back straightens, my jaw sets, and I briskly walk to the bathroom, shameless and determined. It's ridiculous, I know. But totally necessary. It gives me a break from the ice I'm otherwise walking on all day.

So anyway. I do little experiments on cancer cells. I add drugs to them and add DNA to them to make them respond differently to said drugs. I'm currently focusing on heme oxygenase 1, and if you ask me to explain, I would either answer very evasively with complicated vocabulary to make it sound like I knew all about it, OR the answer would take me a very long time because I'd have to sort through it for myself.

I also have my own flasks and dishes of cancer cells to maintain, which takes a surprising amount of effort. They're like very fragile pets that need to be tended to and fed every day. And tumor cells are lame pets.
(Another sidenote: I was lamenting to Jeremy after a particularly disasterous day in the lab that all of my cells had died. He asked "Cancer cells?" "Yeah." "Isn't that the point? Jori... You killed cancer." I then had to explain the irony and necessity of keeping the tumor cells healthy in order to kill them scientifically. Stressful.)

Oh, and my boss recently found out that part of my degree is in art, so I've been working on a lot of illustrations and animations for his various presentations and lectures. I immensely enjoyed doing that until, earlier yesterday upon completion of an illustration, I sadly realized it looked like someone made it in Microsoft Paint and that probably no one would appreciate its perfect alignment and carefully selected color pallet, and that it had little scientific value and almost no artistic value at all. I'm currently working on a short animation of apoptosis (which is cell suicide, basically). I'll show it to you sometime.

Right then, that's it. I know it was self-involved and long. But at least now you have some idea of what I do. Sort of.

ICEPOCALYPSE 2010: LIVE FROM THE TRENCHES

The reports you probably heard on the national news were only a laughable fraction of the catastrophic conditions before my eyes as I fought the wind to open my front door this morning. I mean, the catastrophic conditions that looked likely and based on forecasts were still a couple hours away. BUT STILL. The sky a threatening gray, the streets dry but begging to be encased, nay-- entombed in ice, and the winds still low and mild but with foreboding arctic torture on their [potential] agenda, I pushed forward, through the probably-soon-to-be-dangerous streets with tunnel vision; the cells in the incubator needed me. They would literally die without me and their poor, microscopic lives were the key to determining whether docosahexaeonic acid's up-regulation of HO-1 was inhibited in the PPAR alpha or gamma pathway in tumor cells. Not to mention the lab dishes. WHO WOULD WASH THE BEAKERS AND FLASKS IF NOT ME, AND IF NOT TODAY?
Thankfully, those in charge of my workplace must have known of this, my consuming suspense at determining the answer now, this morning, and no later. And knowing of it, they stood firm against the grain. The entire city shut down, bracing for the meteorological beating of lifetime. But not them. Thanks to them, oh thank you, thank you... Thanks to them... I am one of the very few people in this city not currently enjoying a snow day.
One of the downsides of no longer being a student.

I kind of don't like it, usually, when people write up dramatic blog posts... But I really wanted to use the word icepocalypse because that is exactly how this city is treating it. We'll see if the conditions deliver to the city's fear-laden expectations... Meanwhile, I'll be warm at home, because they did finally decide to let us go.