Great - now there goes my hat.

Well the camera crews should be arriving any day now, because it's time to make a fucking movie out of my life. The blog just doesn't do it justice any more. I don't even have time to write this, but I'm doing it anyway, because I need an outlet today, and that's what this is. So let's rewind to about 3 days ago, could have been more, who the fuck cares? No, actually let's rewind even further than that, back to about 1 month ago. When I slice brains at the lab I have to put them in cryoprotectant. They go into a fridge that's supposed to be -20 C, so that they don't rot (they are meat after all). They can be kept for months in there. When I started my last run of slicing I used the cryo that was in the freezer already, since it is a bit of a bitch to make, and the stuff that was in there was liquid I thought "why not, obviously it works". I was pretty sure I'd mixed it up months before for another project. I ran out of cryo, and since the slices need to go right in, and we didn't have time to order one of the substances we need for it I decided to borrow a recipe and some supplies from our neighbouring lab. I mixed it up with their recipe, hoping it wouldn't freeze. I've had trouble with this shit before, so I threw it in the freezer in a little vial to test it. It worked, so I used it. Basically, if the cryo doesn't freeze it works. If it freezes you're fucked, since the ice crystals poke holes in the cells and turn your tissue to mush. Try freezing an apple, thawing it, and eating it like it's not applesauce. Not happening. Aaaaaanyway. After that day I went to class and joked with two girls in my lab about how it was totally going to freeze anyway. We had a good laugh. See what happened was someone discovered that the freezer had risen in temperature, and so a massive cleaning was undertaken to melt all the frost out and get the efficiency back up, so the freezer would drop to 20. My joke was "what freezes between minus 10 and 20 degrees celcius? Bad cryo. I'd been f'ed too many times, and we laaaaughed and laaaaughed. The fridge was fixed, I threw my stuff back in, the temp dropped, everything was fine. I had 2 more batches to slice. I did it, and then to make up for some bad slicing, ordered some more rats in. I got around to slicing these about 3 days ago. I looked in the fridge and saw some of my vials frozen solid. You have got to be kidding me. I thought "crap, the new recipe is bad." I looked at my older vials: solid. You really are kidding me right? How did even that cryo freeze? I felt like collapsing. 2 weeks of staying up past midninght in the lab slicing for 6 frickin hours a day, down the drain. I went back to slicing, halfheartedly. I mixed up new cryo with the old recipe, now that we had all the ingredients. At the end of the day I had dealt with it emotionally, and was ready to start from scratch. I came in the next day to test my new cryo, and when I had another look at the thermometer in the fridge I noticed something. Yes, it was -20, but -20 F, which is -30 C. riiiight. No way of blaming anyone for this. Besides, there was some other tissue in there which was still in liquid cryo! WTF. I sent an email to Francesco, no answer. Francesco gave a talk in our grad TOX course, and just left after. Very out of character, he's the type to deal with this kind of thing right on the spot. What happened next? Well I went into the lab to fill out an order for more animals, and I asked him if he had a moment to talk about it. He didn't but later found me in the wet lab, transferring my latest slices into my new, working cryoprotectant. This is when the shit hit the fan. Francesco confessed that we had a problem here. He could not support me as a graduate student, we were incompatible at this point. It wasn't a personal thing, much the opposite. He still wanted to hang out, go skiing, do things together (this smacks of a break up doesn't it? "It's not you, it's me." It certainly felt like it.) Francesco is too young, too "poor" to support repeated attempts at things like this, there just isn't enough money to go around. There are others that do have the money for it. He was also very candid about the fact that he noticed that I didn't like the lab work, that my heart wasn't in it. I couldn't deny that. I cant' say I "like" slicing brains or killing rats. The research topic is growing on me, but I don't like the lab work, which means I am not thorough with it, it's not what I want to do with my life. I have to give him credit for calling me out on that. I never would have brought it up, I thought grinding through this shit came with the territorry of being a grad student. He told me that the more he looked at me the more he saw an animal in a cage, that I was just not meant for this kind of work. He's right, I'd rather be outside or in a class. . . He was almost in tears when he said that if he had the money he would give me everything I needed, a technician to do the dirty work, order new things in go over things meticulously in the lab - I guess all that softened the blow. Anyway, he informed me that he was going to contact the head of BioMed and see what other options were available something to me, possibly something more 'course based'. Frankly, that has a lot more appeal to me .. . Maybe even a change of topic? I was really depressed about it, I felt like I just wasn't good enough, like I'd been kicked out. Francesco did make sure, however, that I knew this is not what it was, that he was not allocating blame, and that he felt incredibly responsible for it. Kinda broke my heart to see him like that. I still am down about it, but I am looking at it more as an opportunity, an open door, rather than a closed one. Honestly I felt like I was so stuck for the next year and a half, now I feel like I'll be a little freer, which is unexpected, and very good. Honestly, it was the classes I like in my undergrad. What I like about grad school is interacting with people and teaching, so hopefully this will open some doors that way. I am meeting with the dept. head on Friday I think, so that will be that. The thing is that now I am really halfhearted when it comes to working on my talks and posters, because in all of them I have to speak as though this is what I intend to do, when by Friday the story may be completely different. . . My head is still spinning from all this though. Somehow everything got turned upside down when a freezer dropped 10 degrees C. So some water molecules slow down enough to hold hands and not let go, and my life turns upside down. So much depends on so little.

Maybe one day I will find the person responsible and thank them - or kill them on the spot. With my hands. Probably both.

Back to you Dale.