Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Daily Douchebag: BALB/c mice
DOB: the strain originated when Halsey Bagg purchased a pair of albino mice from a mouse dealer in Ohio in 1913
Occupation: I'd say "guinea pigs," but since they're mice, I'll say "experimental subjects"
Hometown: Memorial Hospital, New York via Ohio
Current residence: my lab's infrequently used chemical fume hood so J-Sexy and SisterChristian won't bitch about my rodents stinking up the lab
Douchebaggery: No matter what a grad student works on, whether it be yeast, worms, flies, cells, viruses, bacteria, mice, rats, monkeys, or whatever else, there's one thing that everyone has to do which is the scourge of our existence: a timecourse experiment. This involves setting up whatever you're doing and taking samples at different times afterward, usually as inconveniently as possible. In my case, this means infecting mice with virus and dissecting out their respiratory tracts, then making smoothies out of them with my trusty power tissue homogenizer. It's the time of my life. There's nothing more entertaining and delightful than spending a very long day whipping up infected tracheal homogenates. It's better than sex. It's...also apparently opposite day.
I had to get up this morning at 4:30 a.m. to start an epic experiment involving
I shouldn't complain too much because this was the lot I cast when I signed up to do mousework in a virology lab. Lengthy timecourses are part of the package. When I get this experiment to work and can demonstrate that rhinovirus is growing in my mice, I will get to write a banging first-author paper and graduate. However, I'm seriously annoyed because I could have been working on this experiment months ago if it weren't for the stupid mice. My mice are housed in what's called a barrier facility. This means that there are certain procedures and controls in place to prevent outbreaks of mouse diseases. Obviously, when you have thousands of mice all living in close proximity, epidemics can be devastating. Unfortunately, my stupid mice decided to go and get mouse hepatitis virus anyway because some dipshit wasn't following barrier protocol, and I had to stop breeding them for three months to clear out the epidemic. While this wasn't ALL bad (I got some face time with this hot veterinarian, and spent it dropping sexy virus talk all over his fine ass), it really set my work back. Then, when I begged the hot DVM to let me resume breeding and he grudgingly gave me permission, my mice were all old and not at the height of fecundity. Mice only reproduce until they're about a year old, and many of my breeding pairs were eight or nine months old, so the females were disinterested in the old, fat males they were caged with. The few pairs who still apparently had an active sex life produced small litters. I had to use what remained of my young, virile, experiment-worthy mice to set up new breeding cages, thus making me wait another few weeks for sires to rape the dams in estrus and produce some pups for me to experiment on.
Finally, after a month of trying to get my mice to get down and get pregs and not eat their young, I managed to scrounge enough mice together to do half of this lousy experiment. Hopefully enough of the recently born mice will avoid consumption by their mothers long enough to be weaned and participate in the other half of this experiment next week. With my luck, there will probably be an outbreak of mousepox in the barrier and all my mousework will be delayed another six months. I swear these bastards are conspiring to keep me in grad school via epidemics of every disease EXCEPT human rhinovirus and a refusal to reproduce like the rodents with nothing better to do that they are. It's pretty sad that I'm being outwitted by a strain of witless vermin inbred via twenty-six generations of brother-sister mating. Pretty sad, indeed.
Labels: Daily Douchebag, epidemic geekery, grad school bullshit, mice, Rxxx Sxxxxxx, science, viruses rule
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Bill Nye the Surprisingly-Razzy-Like Guy
Blair didn't much appreciate this, and decided to take out her aggressions on Bill's vegetable garden. Late at night, she crept into his garden and tried to spray weed killer all over it, but fled when he caught her. Like a total dumbass, she started running as soon as he said, "Blair?", essentially confirming her identity. So he went to court and got a restraining order to prevent further threats against his "food produce" and his eyesight from her deadly toxic solvents/herbicides.
I've always liked Bill Nye because not only are science nerds cool (a notion validated every time I look in a mirror), he's from the P-N-Dub and got his start on a local sketch comedy show called "Almost Live" that I used to watch all the time. That show was fucking hilarious. Just thinking about those skits on "Almost Live" (especially the fake Kent and Ballard episodes of "COPS", the TV ad for the "Lynnwood Beauty Academy," and the "Dale Chihuly: world-famous glass artist and vigilante crimefighter" sketch) is cracking me up as we speak. But I digress. Bill Nye was one of the most successful "Almost Live" alums, and I love that his whole game is science-related. He really has geek chic down to the polka-dotted bow tie. It sucks to be just going about your pimptastic business only to have some honey go nuts and disrupt your life with stalking.
Stalking is just not fucking cool. I've been stalked a few times in my life, mostly by harmless dudes who would leave shit on my porch or write me inappropriately lengthy notes or blow up my phone. They would annoy me, but not really scare me. When I lived with Miss Corbutt in Tacoma, our exploits about town ensured that we got stalker gifts at least once a week. We used to joke about it. However, there is NOTHING funny about a stalker who comes ready to kill--even if the intended victims are Bill's tomato plants. I had a stalker this past year who was of that scary stalking variety.
The Ja-Fake-An who wouldn't eat pussy--who henceforth shall be called Rxxx Sxxxxxx, because that's his name and I don't feel any reason whatsoever why I should protect his fucking identity--didn't like what I wrote about him on my blog. I only wrote about him because I was furious that he seemed to feel like constantly sexually harassing me was acceptable, and I wanted to get all my anger out of my system constructively. He did not respond well to this, and came to my lab raising hell and threatening me, menacing me at my lab meeting, and trying to get my PI (ie: boss) to agree that I was a stupid bitch who needed to be put in her place. My PI said he was concerned for my safety, because Rxxx was obviously crazed. Rxxx was told by our department chair to stay the hell away from me, but after getting kicked out of his SECOND lab at Columbia for behavioral issues (he got kicked out of the first for sexual harassment), he decided that he wasn't going to abide by that anymore. He started showing up on my floor, showing up at Free Friday (grad student happy hour), where on one memorable occasion he took two beers out of my hands. This was after I was assured he would ESPECIALLY stay away from me when he was drinking.
Now he has a formal disciplinary letter advising him that any contact with me will result in serious disciplinary action, and I have informed the deans, my department, and Columbia public safety that I will not fuck around should he bother me again. I will go straight to the courthouse and get my own damn TRO, because malevolent stalkers are not to be trifled with. Therefore, I applaud Bill Nye for exercising his legal right to not have solvent sprayed on his veggies or into his eyes by a scorned ex-not-wife with abysmally bad coping skills. The Blair Tindalls and the Rxxx Sxxxxxx need to just get served. Served with legal papers saying that they are ordered by a judge to stay the fuck away!
I feel Bill Nye. It's hard to be a not-really-that-attractive-but-still-possessing-a-certain-something type of sexy geek. I've got basically the same thing going on, but I'm more stacked.
Labels: assholes, crazies, crime and punishment, grad school bullshit, oh the horror, P-N-Dub, Rxxx Sxxxxxx, science, sexual assault
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Breaking up is hard to do, but rejecting assholes is easy
I'm talking, of course, about my relationship with cigarettes. I had my first cigarette at 11 (a Salem Ultra Light 100), started really smoking by 13, and was up to a pack of Marlboro Reds per day by 16. In college, after a brief dalliance with Camel Reds, I switched to the bitch sticks that have been my undoing ever since: Parliament Lights. Because they are light cigarettes, I smoke them all the time. I smoke when I first wake up in the morning, I smoke after I walk the dogs, I smoke after the gym, I smoke as soon as I get home from work, I smoke after I eat, I smoke while I drink, I smoke after sex, I smoke right before I go to bed. I smoke ALL THE FUCKING TIME, and I absolutely hate and despise it. It makes me stink like an ashtray, it bleeds me dry financially, it makes my hands yellow, it makes my skin break out, and it makes me lie to my parents ("uh, no, Mom, I'm not smoking anymore" as I hold the phone away while I take a drag so she can't hear it).
There is nothing else in my life that is out of my control, except for this blindingly powerful addiction. I am a fucking nicotine junkie. So last week, after seeing yet another commercial of a dude with no larynx talking through his throat stoma, I decided to once again dare the dread course which has thwarted me so many times: I decided to quit smoking. I am breaking up with Parliament Lights, because I don't want to look like this in 5 years:
Granted, Aileen Wuornos looks particularly careworn on account of years spent sleeping under highway overpasses and hooking on rural Floridian trucker routes, but you bet your ass that if I keep up with the smokes, my hair will be equally lank, my teeth equally rotten, and my face equally sallow and strung-out (although hopefully I won't be mean-mugging everyone with the same crazed serial killer expression). I am at the point where I can reverse my inevitable decline into looking like a female death row inmate on methamphetamine, but I have to quit NOW.
As of today, I've gone 5 days with no cigarettes, and things are not going well. I'm cranky, anxious, and have a splitting headache. I am restless and can't sleep well. Even though I'm using the patch, it's not the same as cigarettes. Right now I feel like the only way the patch will be of any use to me is if I can roll it up and smoke it. Whenever I pass someone smoking, I want to rip the cigarette out of their hand and start sucking on it greedily. I even caught myself looking covetously at the cigarette butts floating in an overflowing storm drain this morning. Right now I just keep repeating a litany of "I'm a non-smoker, I'm a non-smoker" to myself in the hopes that I will eventually believe it and stop obsessing about cigarettes constantly. Without cigarettes, I am a wrathful and hot-tempered RAGING BITCH, and not to be trifled with. Goading me antagonistically or attempting to seduce me with poorly crafted insults is very ill-advised.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what this guy did yesterday. There was a party for this postdoc from another lab, and there was beer there. I said I was just going to drop by for a minute to eat some free Indian food. Then, I decided I was just going to have one beer. Three beers and a glass of wine later, and J-Sexy and I decided that we were going to go over to this guy's apartment and drink more. The buzz I had going relieved some of my anxiety and discomfort from cigarette withdrawal, and J-Sexy assured me that she would vigorously prevent me from smoking should I be tempted. Even though the guy hosting us had some rather negative history with me, we were getting along fine, and I didn't anticipate any problems.
Three years ago, when I came to New York for grad school interviews, I hooked up with this guy, a fellow interviewee. We ended up not having sex because we didn't have any condoms, and it was 4 a.m. and my ass wasn't getting dressed to find an all-night drugstore. I said, "No problem, we can still fool around."
"Just so you know, I'm Jamaican and I don't do that," he said. (This guy is Jamaican-American...he is as Jamaican as I am Norwegian).
"Do what?" I asked.
"I don't go down on girls."
"So...you just expect me to give you a blow job and you won't do shit for me?"
"I'm Jamaican. We don't do that." At the time, I was totally unsympathetic regarding his alleged cultural restriction for pussy eating, and needless to say, that motherfucker did not get head from me that night. I don't always adhere to the Lil' Kim policy of "If you ain't lickin this, you ain't stickin this," but I'm certainly not going to fellate someone who declares up front that they won't under any circumstances reciprocate.
Once I started school, I told J-Sexy and several of our other female classmates about this incident, and the word spread. I considered it a public service to warn fellow loose women, since he seemed to be hooking up with half of our first-year class. He confronted me about this at a party, where he vociferously blamed me for cockblocking him with the other graduate students. I was unapologetic, and told him that's what he gets for not being interested in pleasing his partners. Then, unbelievably, he said, "So are we going to go fuck or what?"
"Or what!" I exclaimed, and ditched his company immediately. I'm not interested in hooking up with a dude who is so obviously proud of being a selfish lover. Our interactions since then have been mainly polite and perfunctory greetings when we run into each other around campus or at social functions. Enough time had passed that I figured bygones were bygones, and we could drink beer in a social setting and play nicely together.
I figured wrong. Once we got to his place, he brought up the whole oral sex issue again for the benefit of all the people gathered there. J-Sexy and C-Money disputed his assertion that this refusal to eat pussy was a Jamaican custom, and they are both actually from Jamaica. To authenticate his Jamaican street cred, he started talking in patois and was really pissed when C-Money said that my patois pronunciations were better than his when I told him to "gwan den, bwoy." "Mi rasta," he said. "Dat gyal (meaning me) no fi ti no dey speak lak in Kingston." I called him a bumbaclot. This encounter erupted into a massive argument, and on account of the many beers I'd consumed and my non-smoking moodiness, we were trading insults like a couple of three-year-olds. I decided to leave.
He walked out with me, and while I waited for the elevator, unbelievably tried to hook up with me again! I told him to go to hell. "Do you think I'm fucking stupid?" I asked. "Do you think you can spend all night picking on me and fighting with me and I'll be falling all over myself to suck your fucking dick? Don't insult my fucking intelligence!" He then swore that he would go down on me. "Oh, so you don't care about your fucking principles anymore?" I asked. He said that he was just saying that, and that he didn't mean it. Then he tried to kiss me. I smacked him in the sternum and pushed him away from me and declared him "fucking insane." I was so angry that he was wasting my time and actually had the audacity to assume that I would inevitably want to fuck him. I shouted, "Well, I don't fuck people who change their stories every five minutes to get what they want, you DISINGENUOUS PRICK! I'm LEAVING! Get out of my way!"
As I stormed home, I realized that if anything was accomplished by this hostile exchange, it was that it made me forget entirely that I wanted a cigarette desperately. For anyone trying to quit smoking, I highly recommend getting into a screaming match with a ridiculous guy who actually just wants to fuck you, so that you can win the fight by rejecting his ass. It's not as satisfying as feeding your addiction, but at least it's an interesting distraction.
Labels: Rxxx Sxxxxxx
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