That's one small step for (an) Eva...
“Like a band-aid, Eva. Off like a band-aid. That’s how it has to be. Real quick, no questions or asking anyone for help. No histrionics beforehand and no dwelling on the sting when it was over.”
I’m not ashamed to admit that this little pep talk has nothing to do with an effort to be brave and stoic about some real physical injury. This fuss is all about the process and emotional fall-out of moving my work bench and desk approximately ten and two feet, respectively, from where they have been for the past four and a half years of my graduate career.
Let me explain…
Imagine that one night during your later teenage years, about a year before you’re set to leave the nest and head off to into the big world, you arrive at to the dinner table to eat. But as you pull back your chair to sit, your parents tell you that your seat there, where you are about to sit by the window, is no longer your seat. They’ve moved things around a bit and there’s more room for you now on the other side on the right next to the sideboard. You sit down in this new place, startled, but hungry and focused on the task at hand: eating dinner.
Throughout the meal though, you grow increasingly unsettled as you become aware that this place at the table, though surrounded by the same people and set with the same meal, feels utterly different. The candles you’ve watched for hours reflected in the glass pane of the framed picture behind your mother’s chair are now hidden, at totally the wrong angle to catch the light. The legs of the table are shifted from where they should be, too, .and each time you stretch you find yourself cracking your shin against some unexpected beam.
You look at your parents, each eating peacefully and totally unaware of the turmoil rising within you. You suspect that they know of but are not saying what other changes are to come just beyond this abrupt if minor upheaval. You’re leaving for college in a year or so, and then what? Is it possible that this place, and specifically that window seat on the left will ever NOT feel like the place you’re supposed to eat your dinner?
Later that night you continue to wonder about the other tables you’ll sit at in the future. Will any of them feel as cozy, as ‘right’? Will you always be comparing the ease of the new chairs, the quality of the light hanging overhead, the tastiness of the food? Will you find after a while that you’ve sat in so many different dinner chairs and across from so many faces that the sense that you had at age 17 that there is a place to sit and eat a meal is lost?
For about a week now, I have been coming into lab in the morning and rather than turning right and walking to the far bay to the last desk on the left, I take an immediate left into the center bay to drop my bag at the far desk on the right. Instead of getting up and walking across the my bay ten feet to a bench wedged between the refrigerator and the freezer, I now simply shuffle a few steps to my new bench with isn’t crowded by anything but a long-abandoned iMac.
The morning sun no longer obliterates my computer screen, but beams right past me to torture my new bay’s other inhabitant Kim. Sunny and Catarina, my former neighbors who have patiently listened to my stream of consciousness mumblings for countless experiments are now separated from me by shelves of bottles and tubes, blissfully unaware of my roller coaster days.
The science is the same, like the food. But it feels odd to be able to remain seated and simply stretch to reach the drawer full of cuvettes but have to get up and walk to the fridge for the 10% APS instead of the other way around. Rather than the low hiss of the speed vac and the rustling of mouse cages used by my immunologists bay mates, I’m now serenaded by the sing-songy hum of the PCR machine as it heats and cools tiny tubes all day long. I’ve only moved 10 feet! Why does it feel like I’ve just moved planets?
But the thought that’s really creeping me out, and this is where my dinner table analogy breaks down, is that I know find myself sitting at the desk where I know I will write my thesis, and working at the bench that I know I will bleach down for the last time before I pack up my rubber devil duckies and leave Roy Lab for parts unknown. These events are still many months off, but I can imagine them more clearly now that I’m installed in the space promised to and coveted by the ‘senior’ member the lab. (An honor dubiously bestowed upon the one who’s been hanging around the longest, no consideration of actual merit involved…)
I do realize that this obsessing about such a wee move seems like much ado about nothing. But it feels like a catalyst of sorts. I actually started looking at post-doc labs the other day. When I tired of that, I drew up a list of all the major experiments I’d like to attempt before putting my pipets in mothballs and admitting that some other future member of Roy lab will have to figure out what on earth YlfA and YlfB are doing during the course of Legionella’s intracellular life cycle.
Now I’m waiting for the tingle of excitement. It should be around here somewhere, right? It should be exciting, not just nerve-racking, that in a year I’ll be standing with a laser pointer in front of my science family and my family family, explaining the correlations and causations of this and that at my thesis seminar. Right?
It should also give me a couple of goose bumps that all this means I only have to face one more winter in New England. That thought alone should have me on the floor, kicking my legs in the air and whooping with glee. A few weeks ago, I started a blog entry titled “Ceci n’est pas un hiver” (trans.: this is not a winter, a al Mr. Magritte) due to the full January and half of February that had passed with temperatures in the 50’s and not a flake of snow to be seen. I hadn’t worn socks since I’d been home for Christmas. My lab mates and I complained at length…
“It was so WARM this weekend,” said Shira, her brow furrowed. “My bulbs are starting to come up and my lawn is so green…” Obviously distraught, she trailed off midsentence, squinting into the bright morning sun streaming in through our third floor windows.
“Yeah – Jan and I went hiking at Sleeping Giant with Tim. We just…we just don’t know how long this will last. How long until, until IT returns.” Anja’s awkward use of and emphasis on the pronoun ‘it’ was part native German speaker, part commonly-held fear of what unknown horrific weather patterns were surely lurking just around the corner of the next seven day forecast.
“My snowboard’s depressed, I can hear it whimpering under my bed at night,” I added. “And I can’t figure out what to run in. I wore my fleece hat this morning and my head almost evaporated.”
But that’s all over with now. This past Sunday I ran in that same fleece hat, and instead of the shorts and t-shirt of a few weeks ago I piled on running tights, wind pants, two shirts, a hi-tech fleeze zippy and a shell. I left my usual fleece gloves at home and wore my snowboarding gloves instead. It took two miles to get the blood circulating back up into my face and about two days to recover from running for an hour with mercury hovering around 10 degrees. (I should explain that it is the policy of most of my running peeps to avoid checking the thermometer before we go out to run. It would so often suggest such dire conditions that we’d never go out. We do check on when we go back inside though, just for giggles. In this case, I probably should have dialed up weather.com first. Sigh.)
Winter’s here and it’s making up for lost time. And March, Garrison Keiller says, is the month God created for people who don’t drink to know what a hangover is like. Tomorrow, March 2nd, we are predicted to get four to six inches of snow. Or sleet. Or freezing rain. They’re not quite sure which, but they are certain that it shouldn’t start falling until after 9 a.m. which means that I will put on my eighteen layers and my fleece hat and meet Amy for our usual five mile loop. One thing I know I will miss when I leave New England is how good my hot shower is going to feel at the end of it.
I’m not ashamed to admit that this little pep talk has nothing to do with an effort to be brave and stoic about some real physical injury. This fuss is all about the process and emotional fall-out of moving my work bench and desk approximately ten and two feet, respectively, from where they have been for the past four and a half years of my graduate career.
Let me explain…
Imagine that one night during your later teenage years, about a year before you’re set to leave the nest and head off to into the big world, you arrive at to the dinner table to eat. But as you pull back your chair to sit, your parents tell you that your seat there, where you are about to sit by the window, is no longer your seat. They’ve moved things around a bit and there’s more room for you now on the other side on the right next to the sideboard. You sit down in this new place, startled, but hungry and focused on the task at hand: eating dinner.
Throughout the meal though, you grow increasingly unsettled as you become aware that this place at the table, though surrounded by the same people and set with the same meal, feels utterly different. The candles you’ve watched for hours reflected in the glass pane of the framed picture behind your mother’s chair are now hidden, at totally the wrong angle to catch the light. The legs of the table are shifted from where they should be, too, .and each time you stretch you find yourself cracking your shin against some unexpected beam.
You look at your parents, each eating peacefully and totally unaware of the turmoil rising within you. You suspect that they know of but are not saying what other changes are to come just beyond this abrupt if minor upheaval. You’re leaving for college in a year or so, and then what? Is it possible that this place, and specifically that window seat on the left will ever NOT feel like the place you’re supposed to eat your dinner?
Later that night you continue to wonder about the other tables you’ll sit at in the future. Will any of them feel as cozy, as ‘right’? Will you always be comparing the ease of the new chairs, the quality of the light hanging overhead, the tastiness of the food? Will you find after a while that you’ve sat in so many different dinner chairs and across from so many faces that the sense that you had at age 17 that there is a place to sit and eat a meal is lost?
For about a week now, I have been coming into lab in the morning and rather than turning right and walking to the far bay to the last desk on the left, I take an immediate left into the center bay to drop my bag at the far desk on the right. Instead of getting up and walking across the my bay ten feet to a bench wedged between the refrigerator and the freezer, I now simply shuffle a few steps to my new bench with isn’t crowded by anything but a long-abandoned iMac.
The morning sun no longer obliterates my computer screen, but beams right past me to torture my new bay’s other inhabitant Kim. Sunny and Catarina, my former neighbors who have patiently listened to my stream of consciousness mumblings for countless experiments are now separated from me by shelves of bottles and tubes, blissfully unaware of my roller coaster days.
The science is the same, like the food. But it feels odd to be able to remain seated and simply stretch to reach the drawer full of cuvettes but have to get up and walk to the fridge for the 10% APS instead of the other way around. Rather than the low hiss of the speed vac and the rustling of mouse cages used by my immunologists bay mates, I’m now serenaded by the sing-songy hum of the PCR machine as it heats and cools tiny tubes all day long. I’ve only moved 10 feet! Why does it feel like I’ve just moved planets?
But the thought that’s really creeping me out, and this is where my dinner table analogy breaks down, is that I know find myself sitting at the desk where I know I will write my thesis, and working at the bench that I know I will bleach down for the last time before I pack up my rubber devil duckies and leave Roy Lab for parts unknown. These events are still many months off, but I can imagine them more clearly now that I’m installed in the space promised to and coveted by the ‘senior’ member the lab. (An honor dubiously bestowed upon the one who’s been hanging around the longest, no consideration of actual merit involved…)
I do realize that this obsessing about such a wee move seems like much ado about nothing. But it feels like a catalyst of sorts. I actually started looking at post-doc labs the other day. When I tired of that, I drew up a list of all the major experiments I’d like to attempt before putting my pipets in mothballs and admitting that some other future member of Roy lab will have to figure out what on earth YlfA and YlfB are doing during the course of Legionella’s intracellular life cycle.
Now I’m waiting for the tingle of excitement. It should be around here somewhere, right? It should be exciting, not just nerve-racking, that in a year I’ll be standing with a laser pointer in front of my science family and my family family, explaining the correlations and causations of this and that at my thesis seminar. Right?
It should also give me a couple of goose bumps that all this means I only have to face one more winter in New England. That thought alone should have me on the floor, kicking my legs in the air and whooping with glee. A few weeks ago, I started a blog entry titled “Ceci n’est pas un hiver” (trans.: this is not a winter, a al Mr. Magritte) due to the full January and half of February that had passed with temperatures in the 50’s and not a flake of snow to be seen. I hadn’t worn socks since I’d been home for Christmas. My lab mates and I complained at length…
“It was so WARM this weekend,” said Shira, her brow furrowed. “My bulbs are starting to come up and my lawn is so green…” Obviously distraught, she trailed off midsentence, squinting into the bright morning sun streaming in through our third floor windows.
“Yeah – Jan and I went hiking at Sleeping Giant with Tim. We just…we just don’t know how long this will last. How long until, until IT returns.” Anja’s awkward use of and emphasis on the pronoun ‘it’ was part native German speaker, part commonly-held fear of what unknown horrific weather patterns were surely lurking just around the corner of the next seven day forecast.
“My snowboard’s depressed, I can hear it whimpering under my bed at night,” I added. “And I can’t figure out what to run in. I wore my fleece hat this morning and my head almost evaporated.”
But that’s all over with now. This past Sunday I ran in that same fleece hat, and instead of the shorts and t-shirt of a few weeks ago I piled on running tights, wind pants, two shirts, a hi-tech fleeze zippy and a shell. I left my usual fleece gloves at home and wore my snowboarding gloves instead. It took two miles to get the blood circulating back up into my face and about two days to recover from running for an hour with mercury hovering around 10 degrees. (I should explain that it is the policy of most of my running peeps to avoid checking the thermometer before we go out to run. It would so often suggest such dire conditions that we’d never go out. We do check on when we go back inside though, just for giggles. In this case, I probably should have dialed up weather.com first. Sigh.)
Winter’s here and it’s making up for lost time. And March, Garrison Keiller says, is the month God created for people who don’t drink to know what a hangover is like. Tomorrow, March 2nd, we are predicted to get four to six inches of snow. Or sleet. Or freezing rain. They’re not quite sure which, but they are certain that it shouldn’t start falling until after 9 a.m. which means that I will put on my eighteen layers and my fleece hat and meet Amy for our usual five mile loop. One thing I know I will miss when I leave New England is how good my hot shower is going to feel at the end of it.
posted by Eva Marie at 10:04 PM
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