Lazy Saturday

Today's a one-day breather from my tightly packed schedule stretched over these two weeks. I've been juggling classes, seminars, planning and executing complex experiments, data analyses, and social life in a manner I could only best describe as phrenetic. Monday saw me running from lab to office to class to cafeteria to office again to lab again. I've even broke my personal record for staying back working past midnight and spreading some 200++ agar plates with a colleague in a neck-breaking speed of 100 plates/hour. The massive data collected demanded analyses on the day after, as I run from lab to office to class to lab again. As the analyses were going on, another massive experiment planning was underway.

Although it had been a very busy week, it had been fun because I get to work closely with my colleagues and learnt many new things. I get to understand the joy of team-working, the frustrations of managing task delegation, the emotional implications of working with people coming from different training and background. I also get to brush up my techinques with the equipments I was not so familiar with, and appreciate the pains of preparing for a humongous experiment and the analyses that follows.

In fact, the mother of all experiments will commence tomorrow. This experiment is so large scale it involves the entire lab and several days of prior preparation. We made agar plates in thousands, and prepared tubes in thousands. I've never made so much agar or aliquoted so many tubes a day in my life! For the entire day, everyone in the lab was efficiently manouvering back and forth the lab and the autoclave room mixing agar, sterilizing agar, pouring agar, drying agar, packing agar. Nevertheless, I find the scale of the experiment exciting and am really looking forward to (another tiring but fun) next week.

Although I had been very occupied with my work, I tried to make time for socializing with my friends. Somehow, after graduation, meeting them (university mates) was not as easy as before, and it seems to take a little more effort to keep in touch with them. Probably it had been that way, but I didn't feel the impact of it until my previous housemates and I started living apart. Previously, they will somehow be just in the next room, or in the kitchen, or simply just in the house. Now that we no longer live together, we can only see each other in the weekends, when we are not occupied with work or other things. The same goes to my coursemates. No longer are there the days we see each other in class or grab lunch together. When the emptiness encroahes, it makes me feel quite sad and lonely because it makes acquaintance seem so superficial. Out of sight, out of mind..kind of thing.

Last weekend, a friend had organized an alumnus gathering, and I was glad to have attended it. I get to meet with friends I have not seen for a long time, and had a great talk with friends I had so enjoyed their company all these while. It served to remind me that I still have ties with many people whom I have not been keeping in touch with. It makes me realize that I should put aside time to meet with with them once in a while, no matter how busy I would become. Because being with friends makes me feel like I have life apart from work. Which is why, tonight I'll be going to Natsu Matsuri with Shiyun-san!!

So excuse me while I soak in the remaining of my lazy Saturday....

～みはる～