Of Mice and Men (is that a trite title yet?)

I have a mouse in my house…or perhaps mice. Whatever the case may be, it’s not exactly an ideal situation.

I live in student housing provided by my graduate school and we all share a kitchen (which is complicated enough in its own right, plus I keep kosher). This mouse either has a fancy for whatever it is I buy in particular or just found a hole right near my kitchen supplies. I have baking stuff (really just holdovers from my old place until I move out) and spices in my cabinets. Last weekend, the mouse helped itself to a piece of a Ghirardelli chocolate baking bar and a few other small things and didn’t bother cleaning up after itself. So it was up to me on ours (mine and R’s) anniversary weekend to wipe down the spices, disinfect the cabinet and put everything back in order. The exterminator came and put traps down, so I thought the ordeal was over.

I was wrong. Imagine my surprise this morning when I wake up. I’m supposed to be observing teaching at school, so I’m up early, ready to go, then look outside and see…SNOW!! Glorious, class-canceling snow! I tell myself I’ll straighten up a bit, then head downstairs to do some programming (I’m in a plant bioinformatics rotation now…comment if you’d like to hear more about it ;-) ) until the driveway is plowed (it’s a steep hill, not one I’ll be attempting in the snow). Wonderful! I’ll be productive and get stuff done.

Then I get downstairs and open the cabinet, and see chocolate powder all over everything, including the spices in the adjacent cabinet.

Round 2. It’s on mouse and this time Ima take you down! Or, you know, clean up after you.

I take stock of the damage first, and notice that the mouse has chewed through the lid to my Ghirardelli’s Natural Cocoa (another holdover for baking…word to the wise, when they say Dutch processed coca, this is not a good substitute without some tweaking) and gotten into a bag of shredded coconut. Enterprising little fella. And unlike last time, where all I had to go by was mouse droppings to figure out where the mouse had been, this time, there were chocolate footprints. The mouse had been kind enough to leave a trail, which was great because I knew exactly what to clean to prevent R and me from getting the dreaded “Mouse Poop Disease”. That is a clinical definition.

After wiping down everything and setting aside all the spices and other items that had gnaw marks on them but the package wasn’t broken—which were wiped down anyway but needed new spice jars—I took a deep breath and at 11 AM headed down my freshly plowed driveway and started my day.

At school, we had a lecture from a biotech company before I headed off to my lab and I told everyone who would listen that I had sworn vendetta on the mouse. How dare it come into my food and eat it!? Certainly, such a dastardly act is deserving of some sort of capital punishment. I would give it to a cancer lab and have it infected with tumors! It could donate its body to science! Unwillingly! To make up for its trespasses!

I can be dramatic sometimes.

Then the silly thought occurred to me that the mouse maybe ate a total of $10 worth of food. Is that worth killing it over? Is it worth killing anything over? If it gets trapped, that’s one thing, but outright killing? Perhaps not. Ah well, no lying in wait for the little rodent, then scrambling around trying to catch it. I guess I’m a softie. And very much a bioinformaticist.

(Side note: if you do want to catch a mouse, one my labmates tells me that peanut butter chocolate Clif bars are like crack to mice. He put down one and caught two mice in 20 minutes.)

Everything else is great around here. R and I celebrated our first anniversary in style by seeing Chicago on Broadway and then going out to eat. Her present floored me, and continues to floor me. When I move out of student housing, ask me to show you the present, and I’ll drag out an orange 6 ¾ quart Dutch oven. That baby’s gonna last forever. And so will we.

Sorry for being delinquent in posting, I’m working on a new schedule. But more later!

Back to the Five O'Clock World

More likely to be 6 or 7 o'clock world, but it's certainly not vacation. I've been meaning to write many times over the last 3 weeks (a few posts are still drafts that I should really look at when I get back), but it's hard to focus sometimes, especially when there's Hulu to watch. Hulu is about 2 or 3 days from being blocked temporarily on my computer just to restore my sanity.

So this was my last winter and "school" vacation and hopefully the last time I spend more than 3 or 4 days away from R. From now on, I get 10 days (give or take) a year and we will be traveling together. Vacation was full of great memories, both in NYC and Chicago. R and I spent every free moment together when I was in NYC and I think I did a good job of starting to make up for all the times she came out to the island to spend the weekend with me, only to sit there patiently as I slept for 10+ hours or read and worked most of the weekend away. She's a saint.

I spent the second half of my vacation in Chicago, which was also very good, but sadly, sans R. I missed Chicago a lot, and Evanston a lot too. I missed a lot of my friends also. I didn't get to do everything I wanted, or see everyone I wanted, and if you're one of the people I didn't get to see in Chicago and you're reading this, I am deeply sorry and hopefully I'll see you next time. It was great, but it would have been better still if R and I could have spent it together. A week and a half apart is far too long for us. I know there are couples at there who have to go through weeks or months apart, and I don't pretend to know how difficult that is, but this seems to be our limit now.

I will say one stand-out moment in Chicago, in addition to seeing old NU friends on New Year's Eve and seeing people I haven't been very good at keeping in touch with, was seeing Tom Cruise dancing to Ludacris in Tropic Thunder. I don't see very many movies anymore, and most of the movies I see are with R, who's not a fan of violence (which I have no problem with honey!), but that scene made the whole movie worthwhile. To me at least.

Tonight I went to the wedding of two good friends of mine, A&E (like the channel!), which was great. They're two people I'm proud to know and who I'm happy to be friends with for what will hopefully be a very long time. It was also the last day before I head back to NY and school.

Ultimately, it seems like weddings and vacation have a lot in common. Both aren't nearly long enough to spend the time you want with the people you want to. There were teachers and advisers I hadn't seen in years, and all we had was 5 or 10 minutes to talk. I've spent countless hours with so many friends in high school and college, just hanging out, never realizing that one day (and hopefully not permanently), our lives would become harder and harder to coordinate, that the time we'd taken for granted is now gone. I didn't even see my parents enough. It's a little sad, but at least I have R to spend all my time with. I am very lucky to have many amazing and wonderful friends in my life, but she is firmly my bestest friend for life. I should call a lot of you more often. It's probably a good idea.

R was in Florida this past weekend to celebrate her grandfather's 90th birthday and we spoke a lot over the weekend (as we've been doing ever since I left her side a week and a half ago) and when we spoke the day she was heading back to NY, she told me she wished she could have stayed longer. I wasn't sure what she meant, but I get it now. There's not enough time. There may never be enough time. Ideally, we should have had 6 weeks, everyone we know should have been on vacation too and Florida and Chicago would be minutes from each other. Then we could have spent the whole time together and maybe have come close to spending the time we wanted to with everybody. But this will have to do.

It was a great vacation, and an excellent way to finish off school vacations. Vacations will be a lot different now, better because they'll be with R, but not as easy because the time we have to spend with other people is less than it used to be. I guess it's just weird that only now have I figured out what I'll be missing.

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I don't like to think I'm guilty of much, but my blogging vigor has been flagging the past few weeks as school peaked, then petered out, then vacation got underway. I'm not sure what to write, but I figure that with so much time having passed since my last decent post, there's got to be something.

So vacation so far has been amazing. I keep telling R that too. That's because I see her every day. Which is pretty much the reason why this vacation has been so wonderful. R came up to the island for Shabbos last week after finals, where, for the first time in a while, I didn't have to split my time between her and a few papers and essays. It felt luxurious. R doesn't get vacation yet at work, so the goal has been to make her time after work feel like vacation. We've seen movies, done dinner, hung out at her place and eaten chestnuts while walking through New York. I missed this. This past Monday marked a year since we first met. R says we actually met at Hillel one Friday night during my sophomore year, but I was too silly to not take a chance then and I'm glad I got another opportunity to ask her out. It's been a very good year.

Permit me to reminisce.

Last fall quarter (Northwestern is on quarters and this still mixes me up), I was living on my own in Evanston for the first time, having recently decided that although I had (and still have) a deep and abiding love for my parents, it was time for me to strike out on my own a bit. I was living in a nice apartment with some very friendly neighbors, who happened to have been friends with R for quite some time. It started off as a bit of a joke (I'm Jewish, so is R, it's a match made in heaven!), but by the end of the quarter, they were convinced we'd be a good pair and in my everlasting (and soon to be rewarded) optimism, I wished them to be right.

There was only one problem: R was in France studying abroad. I was patient, I was hopeful, and on December 15th, she flew back from Paris to Chicago, and my neighbors insisted on throwing a holiday party (in deference to the Jews), whose express purpose seemed to be to get me and R into a room together. It worked. She flew back the next morning to her home to see her parents, I stayed up all night "grading" (I was teaching a class, so this was pretty legit) and had my feet on my futon and my shades open. It had snowed a lot the night before. She came down early to take a taxi to the airport and I came out quickly to say goodbye (shyly) and then she disappeared for three weeks. But I liiiiiked her. So I friended her on Facebook (always a safe move, right?) and was too scared to write anything on her wall or send her any messages. Ah well.

A month later she came back and we started to find ways to see each other. We'd bump into each other in line getting a drink or something for lunch so we could talk alone for a few minutes before we joined our other friends to share lunch. We'd go to movies with our friends, but made sure we were next to each other. I had a party at my apartment for a friend of mine after he finished the MCAT (a party-worthy occasion if there ever was one) with the hope that she would come. She was the first there and the last to leave. I don't remember how many people were there, but she was.

Our first full-fledged date was January 25th. We saw Juno. I bought the tickets and she brought the snacks. Cut up fruits and ants on a log (not real ants, nor real logs, but still yummy). Slowly, the other friends stopped coming to movies, we'd pretend to split up after lunch with friends, only to meet up again in 5 minutes for coffee alone. Then we stopped making excuses and started dating. It's been wonderful ever since.

I don't quite remember (or want to remember) what I did before me and R were together and I can't really imagine what I would do without her. It's been the best year of my life and the reason is her.

I have more to tell later, about the study section that made me reconsider (once again) what I want to do with my life, my upcoming rotation (plant computational biology lab, anyone surprised?), and my newfound appreciation for literature that does not involve science; but it's late you're all probably a little nauseous by now anyway ;-)

More soon!

A Time for Reflection

It's the end of the term and I'm about to go through the ordeal of finals (remember in grade school when the last day of a term was celebrated with cookies? why did they get rid of that?), so naturally, while I'm poring over notes, papers and problem sets, trying to figure out how to make it all come together into one easy to remember scientific axiom I can write again and again on my test to pass with flying colors, my thoughts turn to different topics. They may be somewhat pertinent, but so distant from what I should be thinking that they don't quite count towards productivity. So that's why, after almost a month of being "too busy" to write, I find myself here again.

There's plenty to write about post-finals. I went to Florida for Thanksgiving, picked rotations, saw R a lot, but somehow not nearly enough.

And tonight, when I should be going over something, anything, science-related, my thoughts turn to social habits and graces.

When I was a kid, I was quiet, shy and reserved. I picked my nose a lot (still do sometimes), read a lot of books, kept to myself. Sometime in elementary school, I had mastered reading while walking, to the point that I could read the words and see people's feet in front of me at the same time. I'd get away from the table as soon as I could to read a book. Weekends, I read. I spent time with friends too, but social situations always had a bit of melancholy. I was short, unathletic and not very funny (though I was decent on defense in basketball, it was more aggression than actual skill). So you can imagine I was a hit with everyone. But I was always nice. I could always help and I'd always find a way to. I felt useful. Like even if I wasn't good for very many other things, I could listen. I could be a shoulder.

So over the years, circumstances changed. Different intervening events shaped my life in ways I couldn't imagine until I got to where I am now. Now, I tease. When I get teased, I don't do much about it. If it's funny, I'll laugh. If it's not, I'll ignore it. I like to think people feel the same when I tease, but sometimes I just don't know.

I'm still self-conscious though. Still a little shy inside. Still very insecure in a lot of ways. Still unsure of a lot of things about my future (not R though).

So why does this come out now?

Because over the last few weeks and months, I've gotten the distinct impression that the way I've handled myself hasn't gone the way I'd hoped. I teased too much and maybe not been as sensitive as I could have been, laughed and smiled at the wrong times, cracked jokes when I didn't need to and not been serious enough when I should have been. I used to feel serious. I used to feel like a good man. I used to feel like I was doing something useful. If nothing else, I had good interpersonal skills, I could be there for people. Now I'm not sure if I've lost those feelings or if I've just taken on the role of the clown and given up a lot of the good things I knew I was for vaguer thoughts and ideas. If it weren't for R, I'd feel adrift completely.

It's not that I don't want to be able to laugh and have a good time. But when you're the only person laughing in the room, you start to feel that perhaps the joke is on you.

Blogito Ergo Sum

I started writing this blog post Sunday night I believe and abandoned it in a glassy-eyed torpor since it was probably too late for me to be up. Then again, it's 2 AM now and here I am anyway. I think I'm getting to like this blog thing.

This past week was good. And by good I mean lazy. I think I was productive Monday and I know I wasn't productive Sunday. Tuesday, I was counting down to elections and partaking in Starbuck's and Ben and Jerry's new-found election day enthusiasm. Both were disappointments. Let me just offer a word of warning. If you ever wonder what could be bad about an ice cream flavor named "Peanut Butter Cookie Dough", let me tell you. Plenty. It's salty. I still shudder. But it was free, so it wasn't that big a deal.

R came over for election night, and while I was convinced that I would do work while we were watching the results, I was, in fact, lying to myself. It's good I'm so forgiving. There's something fascinating about realizing (or pretending) that the next four years of your life or more can be affected by this one night. I'm a fan of Barack Obama and have been following him since the primaries so I was very happy to see him win. I'm not very political though, but I will say I'm very reassured about some of my uncertainties by the way he's been handling things since the election.

I also stayed up until 3 AM reading election night coverage that night, so I spent the rest of the week paying for that. The one thing I do recall was talking a lot about picking rotations. I have it narrowed down to four (I think) after some hemming and hawing and I really should have it down to three, but that looks hopeless.

There's the plant computational biology lab, where the professor, who works for the school and the Department of Agriculture and said her lab was all about yield, yield, yield. If you've read my post from yesterday or the one from last April, you'll know I don't need to be told that twice. Then there's the lab(s) that work on genetic profiles for various diseases, including cancer and autism (I've mentioned that one before also). Then there's the more procedural lab, which is huge and has lots of opportunities, but may pigeonhole me as a computers guy, where I'll live out my days looking at increasingly cool computer screens while the world moves on around me. Lastly, there's the guy who does protein analysis with chemistry techniques (proteomics) in ways that have never really been done before. He's already done some amazing stuff that I kinda grasp and he might be interesting. Then there are the ones I don't want to rule out, but kinda have to. It's good to have to choose from options like these.

I suppose with all the uncertainty, I'm lucky enough to realize that my thesis project isn't set in stone as what I do for the rest of my life. One of the professors (the proteomics one) used to be a plant biologist and never had any PhD chemistry study...and look where he is now. My supervisor at my old job was very helpful when he said it's not worth banking on technology you have now to carry your career for 20 or 30 years at least when that technology will be gone in 10. Oddly enough, one of the lessons I've already learned in getting a biology PhD is that the key to succeeding is evolving. So while I may work on this stuff for the rest of my life, I might also be doing something completely different. And I'm alright with that.

Today was a good way to wind down from last night's all-nighter. I napped between and after classes, then gave myself the night off (from when I woke up at 8:15 PM). Knowing that time off is invaluable, I headed to the kitchen and made myself some stir fry. An hour and a half later (the prep was loooooong), I had some lovely chicken/broccoli/green pepper/mushroom stir fry with a soy sauce and mirin. Yum. And I have enough for me and R when she comes to visit this weekend. If there's one thing I got out of this summer, it's that you don't have to be afraid of cooking. Once you do it enough, you get a sense of what should go in a dish and what shouldn't and it just works out. You also learn neat little tricks along the way, like how to blanch broccoli and how to get chicken in stir fry to look like those tender white chunks you see in commercials. It's easy. And yummy. And after making about a stir fry a week over the summer, I can safely say that I'll eat what comes out of my frying pan (no wok yet :( ) and I'll probably be happy. Plus, cooking with the people you love (me and R usually spend some portion of every weekend cooking one thing or another) can be especially rewarding. Especially when said person is R.

When I think about cooking, I think about how great it would be to have a garden with all my herbs. Then I think it would be so great to work in a lab where I get to do that for a living. Then I wonder if I want to take a hobby and turn it into a job. Then I wonder if I'd need to heat up the stir fry if I go down now to have some more. Then I realize it's time to pack it in for the night, because I'm tired.

Side note: thanks to everyone who reads this blog and I'm really touched. Also, please please please comment. I'd really like to hear what you guys think about what I write hear. It doesn't even have to be clever or witty! Lord knows I'm not...

Feeling Human Again

I pulled an all-nighter last night and this post was going to be all about how great it is when you push hard and give something your all and it actually works out for you. I have a problem set due Thursday that I hadn't started as of 8:30 PM yesterday and now I have 2 questions left of 19. So there you have it, yay all-nighters.

When I have the chance, I like to read the NY Times front page. It's part of what I do while I slog through science papers and classes to remind me that I'm still human and that things are going on outside my little bubble. Up until last Tuesday, my news time was all about the elections. Now that it's all over and Bush is handling himself like a gentleman and Obama seems to have himself more or less in order, there's a lot less to read on that front. So I get to read about the real world instead. The real world isn't doing so hot.

Last April, in my first post on this blog, I wrote about how biofuels were inflating prices of basic cereal grains that people in Third World countries rely on to sustain themselves, so while there's plenty of grain to go around, it's too expensive for poor people to get enough of and it's too expensive for food organizations to purchase enough of for those people. So far as I know, that hasn't changed.

Imagine my heart-break today when the headline for the Times reads: When the Cupboard Is Bare. Apparently the economy has gotten so bad in parts of these United States that food pantries, food banks and soup kitchens are struggling to feed the people who come through their doors, if they're still open. People with jobs and kids can't afford to put food on the table and pay rent, even with food stamps, and have to figure out ways to scrape by. According to the figures quoted in the article, 35.5 million people don't always have enough to eat and 10.1 million people often go to bed hungry. One in three households will have someone go hungry sometime this year because there wasn't enough money for food. Many people who do contracted work such as plumbers or electricians haven't seen a decent paycheck in months and don't know when they'll see one again.

Personally, I've never gone to bed hungry if I wasn't too tired to eat. My family might have struggled in years past to pay the bills and balance the budget, but my parents always put food on the table. It's shocking that now, some people can't even have that.

It might seem quaint, but people do deserve the basics. That means food, warmth and shelter. When a society fails them in that most basic sense, something is wrong. Hopefully it's just the economy, but if it's not, I'm hoping the "Change that's coming to America" gives that back to these people.

When I wrote last April about the way biofuels were affecting world food prices, it was a step in a direction that I'm still exploring. Increasing crop yield is an important step in making sure people have enough to eat. And I'd be remiss if I didn't even give a try at helping out in that regard. But this is a little different.

I pulled an all-nighter last night and when I got home, I had a hot shower and hot meal. It seems now that's a commodity for far too many people. So this year, and this upcoming holiday season, help feed a family. If my words count for anything, it's worth more than a new iPod or iPhone or whatever new gadget there is out there anyway.

This is Major Tom to Ground Control

I've been a little delinquent in my self-imposed once-a-week post-a-thon (putting dashes between words is addictive...), but happily, I'm back, well-rested (see?) and ready to start cannily letting details of my life slip out online.

There's been a very good reason, you see. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my grad school program, I only have four months of classes, whereas I believe most programs have between 1-2 years of classes. The logic is fairly good--I'm not going to be done learning forever once classes are finished here in grad school, at this point the premium is on knowing how to learn new things rather than polishing a few last details before I let my grad school knowledge get fossilized over time. Affectionately, this part of the program has been called a proving ground. Less affectionately, we may call it boot camp. In our darkest moments, which sadly can be fairly frequent, it seems like hell. Needless to say, it's not easy.

The past few weeks have been focused on neuroscience. "Neuroscience" is a very broad field encompassing topics like electric circuits, cell biology, cell signaling, physiology, systems biology, genetics and something some people like to call "neuroeconomics", among others. I didn't know it was a word either. Suffice it to say, my head's been in a lot of places. I've cursed the school, the class, the homework, the teachers and almost anything else (except of course, R) all under my breath. I've also learned to reserve judgment now more than ever. Because at the end, I actually think I understood a lot of the class. And enough to pass as well.

One of the things you get to see a lot of in classes here is what I'd like to call "science personalities". There are plenty of us grad students, post docs and professors (our numbers dwindle as you climb the ladder though I think) who are fairly normal. Then there are others. I like to think their "quirks" stem from having been the smart kid all through school, always having the right answers in class, getting good grades throughout school and generally cruising, because let's face it, they're brilliant. I exclude myself from their company because in my honest opinion, there have been times and there will always be times when I will be way off, from college math and physics to who knows what in the future. These people are in fact nice people, good people, but might have very different values than me. I recall one professor who described his good days as: "You come in, you kill an animal, let it sit (or whatever it is you do to a rat before you harvest its brains), go to lunch, get your slices, kill another one and do some tests". He thought it was great. I have nightmare visions of poor mice being chained to walls in dark dungeons with no food or water (this sometimes is actually the case) and then being killed while no one looks on. Think of Russian gulags. Again, these people aren't bad people, not mean-spirited or anything. They just think of things differently than I (and others like me) might. So I'm happy I got to think about it, learned to appreciate the professors for who they are and what they do, learned to separate the person from the (sometimes anti-social) attitude and got to learn about brains in the mean time. Braaaaaaains!

This is also the time of year when I have to start thinking about which labs to rotate through as I get to the research part of grad school. If you haven't guessed from the above paragraph, my interest in performing research on animals is precisely none. Which is why in writing to my adviser to discuss mentors, I had this paragraph:

. . . I'm realizing that I don't feel comfortable with the idea of using animal models for research. While that doesn't mean I won't work in a lab that uses animal models, I'd want to have some certainty that the models are used sparsely and with high confidence of getting good results.

Also, not mentioned explicitly, is that I will never be the one dissecting, killing or generally coming near them. I want to keep my distance. I've talked to people about how they cope with handling animals in research (including a vegetarian who works in a mouse lab) and it seems to me like the people who are bothered by sacrificing an animal for research do find solace either in the fact that these mice are bred for research purposes and for the fact that this is in fact for a greater good. The research they do now on mice could lead to untold scientific advances that help humanity, the earth, other animals, and hopefully mice too.

I completely understand the value and applaud the people who do this research responsibly. But I'm a kid who used to cry when my parents killed a mosquito or a moth or an ant. I cringe when I see road kill. Papers that talk about killing mice or flies make me cringe. A week ago, I was reading a neuroscience paper and I glossed over a sentence talking about how a mouse was killed for some experiment. When you gloss over a death, you've crossed a line. I chose to step back. In my mind, you have to be damn sure when you're sacrificing a living animal for research. Damn sure. And IF I ever reach that point, I'm going to use those animal models carefully and sparsely. So this is why I'm a computers type of guy when it comes to biology. I certainly see my horizons expanding and I definitely do want to be able to carry hypotheses from the computer to a practical application, but it's gonna be a long and winding road. And hopefully one that doesn't involve any killing of anything.

In lighter news, R and I went to a cousin's wedding this weekend. It was a pretty calm affair, morning wedding, good food, plenty of family and of course, time with the loveliest woman I know. R got to meet more of the family, she likes them, they like her, so all is good. My aunt told my parents that she's a keeper. While I value my aunt's opinion (she happens to be very smart), this is not news to me. We're visiting her parents for Thanksgiving, so hopefully the good news can be reciprocated.

After the wedding, we drove my brother and his wife back to the heights, went back to R's hood (which is awesome), got a lap desk to keep my lap from burning when I sit the computer on it, got a Steinbeck to keep my brain from overflowing with scientific jargon, and watched The Office on R's Tivo. Okay, her roomie's Tivo, but still. It's way better than Hulu. I'd been kicking around the idea of going into plant biology for a while, when it occurred to R and I (okay, really it occurred to R, who then told me . . . she is my second and better brain) that we'd like to have a good life and I have what is considered a "shit ton" of student loans (that is the term I believe), so I'd better make sure that whatever I'm getting myself into, it doesn't pay too badly. Of course, R's plans involve me and a successful and rewarding career in law, so who knows, maybe I get a sugar momma. And the thought of a real honest to god herb garden is damn tempting.