Monday, July 25, 2005

Worst. Summer vacation. Ever.

The truth is, I love being here, in the abstract but also in the quotidian details and the busywork. I love learning this stuff, it's very cool, and even the most odious of tasks, which loom unpleasantly on the "to do" list, become something interesting, and even fun, once I'm actually into the work. What's new today is that the anaesthatizing thrill that came from the newness of it all has begun to wear off. Now this is my job, just like I knew it would be. And I'm at work at quarter to nine in the evening.

I have a junior migraine with big ambitions, more than I myself feel just now. I have some oddball lower GI deal going on. I have a sleep debt running from the weekend. But I have a huge paper due tomorrow. All things being equal I'd rather be in bed, at home. If I listen to my inner voice, I hear the Miami-tinted voice of one of my EM resident cohorts, good-naturedly saying "enjoy it now, bee-yotch, because it gets WORSE." And then laughing. I guess you'd have to know the guy; he somehow makes that seem encouraging and sympathetic, because he's right there with you.

This is just a momentary break. The paper is actually not such a huge project; actually, whittling it down to ONLY five to seven pages might turn out to be the tough part. And the PowerPoint for Thursday will be very much in the vein of those med student lectures I sat in on, so many times. Booya.

Everything I am assigned to do for class turns out to be cool. (Ask me about my slime mold!) But there's just so damn much of it, sometimes. Plus, the super-compact five-week version of the courses that comes with summer term is a hell of a way to get started. It's like, muscle fatigue sets in after the cells run out of energy from ATP stores, and after respiration has shown that can't make enough available quickly enough, and on top of that the anaerobic route is running out of glycogen from fat stores. It actually takes quite a bit of exertion to do it, but once you're there, you can stimulate that cell all you want, it's not doing anything.

Come to think of it, I'm nowhere near that point yet. And my paper is obviously calling me. I should go.

Oh, and the reading room is in the wireless cloud for the computer lab. Which very kindly has half a bazillion songs on their iTunes. So I'm fine. I'll sleep when I'm dead. Thank you Cell Biology, may I have another.

1 comment:

Febrifuge said...

Oh, plus not only did I get the new Harry Potter book, I read it in three days -- without torpedoing my study stuff.

So the zen lesson from that is, if I can reach whatever it is in each assignment that has 'Potter Nature,' I can spend three intense hours on it without feeling the time go by.