Fake N Bake
I'm tired of being white. Or rather, since I'm asian, yellow. There's no beach/pool here where I can work on summer color but the warm weather means I want to wear skirts and sandals and these always look a little better paired with a golden tan. I'm afraid of tanning salons since there's a chance to develop something like melanoma. Besides, even if I didn't get invasive cancer, I would surely develop premature wrinkles and nothing is more gross than a middle-aged super-brown woman who has the skin of an 80-year-old woman.
So, if there's 1) not enough consistent sunglight to slowly get tan and since 2) tanning beds are out, what's a girl to do? Take a deep breath.... FAKE IT. Loreal has developed a DIY airbrush tan in a spray can that's been getting really good reviews. Gone are the 90's, when fake tan in a bottle was first introduced in all of its day-glo, streaky neon orange glory. The body lotions which gradually build tans with each application take too long and often don't work. I'm far too impatient for that.
So I'm sitting around in my room making sure my airbrushed arms and legs don't touch anything, letting the chemicals seep into my skin. Apparently, it takes at least an hour for the color to show up. We'll see. Fingers crossed that I don't end up looking like I'd obviously faked it.
Decisions, Decisions
Life is full of decisions. Cup or cone? Paper or plastic? Would you like fries with that?
I tend to be very indecisive, so when the options are narrowed down for me, it usually makes my life easier. The U.S. and Korea were both knocked out of the World Cup last week so I no longer have to decide on who to support. England it is.
However, life is never always that simple, so in order to avoid having to decide purely on my own, I'm going to ask you all for help with two non-life-changing decisions that I've taken upon myself to make.
Case Number 1: My Laptop
Decision to be Made: Whether or not to bring this computer home
Pros: This computer still works 98% of the time. Despite its finickiness, I have devised a system which allows me to deal with most of its quirks. I'm no hard-core gamer or anything so I don't really need a computer with better specs. It's been to Japan and England and has served me faithfully in treating boredom and writing my masters dissertation. Despite it's heaviness for a laptop, it's still FAR more mobile than my desktop.
Cons: The 2% of the time that it doesn't work is when for no reason, without warning, it refuses to start up and requires me to reinstall Windows. I've lost some data due to this, but fortunately nothing important. There's a problem with sound output, as the right speaker (as well as the right side of any peripherals I plug in: speakers, headphones, etc) doesn't work. The CD drive doesn't read movies on DVD and had issues reading burnt data DVD discs.
Summary: The cons are all annoying but they're not severely detrimental. The whole system works, but not without both software and hardware problems. If I end up not bringing it back home, I'll still have a fully functional desktop, but to reiterate, my laptop does actually mostly work.
I'm at a complete loss for what to do.
Case Number 2: Shoes (it's been FAR too long since my last shoe-related entry!)
Decision to be Made: Which shoe I should purchase
Candidate A: The Safe, Functional Sneaker
This is the shoe that I was originally going to go for. Nothing out of the ordinary. It will serve me well on a daily basis and cradle my non-skater foot in cushiony comfort. I would be perfectly happy wearing this shoe, even if it's not edgy.
Candidate B: The Flashy Rockstar Boot
I found this shoe while browsing the web for shoes as I often do (shame on me, I know) and fell in love instantly. It won't be functional, but what it lacks in dependability it will more than make up for in coolness and boldness (qualities I always find useful in shoes since I tend to wear plain clothes and prefer wearing crazy shoes/accessories). I am almost sold on this shoe and am on the verge of clicking the "put in shopping cart" button, but I have two main concerns. First, I am afraid that wearing these boots the wrong way could lead to a white-trashiness look, but I figure that being a generally conscientious dresser (ie, I would never pull a Britney-esque cowboy boots, hippie skirt, bare midriff combo) and being Asian would negate the white-trash thing. Secondly, and more importantly, I'm afriad that by the time the weather gets cool enough for boots, these will be passe or something. Sooo winter 2005/6. Are red cowboy boots to pop-star trendy for me? I think I can pull it off, but not too terribly sure.
Hook, Line, and Sinker
England, along with every other nation in participation minus the U.S., has a bad bad case of World Cup fever. Its symptoms include an undying and somewhat maniacal devotion to one’s home country, an incapability to pry one’s eyes from the TV set when a match is on, and an acquired ability to memorize lots and lots of trivial facts such as player stats, scores to all previous matches, who scored what goal for what team in what manner in which match at what exact time down to the last minute and second, etc.
Weirdly enough, I have taken the bait and have fallen for it all.
Quick, get away from me! I might be contagious! It’s true. It’s hard not to get excited about something with which EVERYONE around me—every man, woman, and child—is obsessed. It’s like an unstoppable disease which manifests itself in the form of team jerseys, copious amounts of beer, mini-flags to attach to car windows, the list goes on. No, I’m not embarrassed by having given into this non-American past time, but I do have one very big problem with it.
Which team should I support?
Before the whole World Cup thing went into full swing and before I cared about a bunch of Europeans and South Americans kicking a ball around, I promised JP that I would support England. Now that I’ve been watching the games, and now that I’ve seen that America might not get its assed royally kicked, I feel my patriotic side kicking in and I feel like I should support the good ol’ U.S. of A. But then there’s that nagging Korean in me that keeps wanting to break out and cheer on the players from my mother country. What to do??!? England is the strongest of the three teams, but one of their key strikers tore a knee ligament yesterday and won’t be able to play for about 6 months. Their other main striker just got over breaking his foot and hasn’t played a full game in about two months. Korea is everyone’s underdog favorite, seeing as how they made it to the semi-finals in the last World Cup. The U.S., despite having been put in a difficult group, aren’t doing too badly. They managed to tie with Italy over the weekend even though two players were red-carded and the team had to face Italy with 9 instead of the usual 11 players, and they can still make into the next round of games if they win their game against Ghana tomorrow. Well, I guess I will at least wait until tomorrow to see how the Americans do. I may or may not have to decide between three teams after tomorrow.
And for your enjoyment: pictures from the England vs. Jamaica friendly match that was played the week before the squad was sent over to Germany for the tournament.
Claire, Dave, and JP outside of Old Trafford stadium in Manchester (where Manchester United play their home games).
England fans do their little card trick and make the England flag. Good start, but I still think the Cal Big Game ones were way better.
hot dog : American baseball game :: meat pie : England football match.
Bonus: I managed to fix my computer (temporary solution, but hey, I'll take what I can get) and I found out that each time I reinstalled Windows, a new user folder was created under "documents and settings" which contains all temp files, history, etc etc and this was taking up LOTS of extra memory. I wiped out extraneous folders, cleaned and organized all of my documents and photos and managed to clear up 6 gigs of new harddrive space. As Eva best described it, it was like taking a big poo. My computer feels purged and clean.
Claritin, Allegra, Benedryl, Hookworm
Now this is one
EXTREME cure for hay fever. Please pass the Benedryl instead...
Immunofluorescence Microsopy...
...is a fancy way to say "making my cells glow in the dark." This is what I have to do for the bulk of my current project. I take some cells, make them express my protein (which glows green), label different cellular structures/organelles (which glow red), and try to see where the two colors overlap. This way, I can try and figure out which particular structure/organelle my protein localizes in, which can in turn help me to figure out what its potential role or function might be. So far, I've found nothing too terribly convincing. My protein appears to be EVERYWHERE in the cell (the whole cell just glows neon green), so I'm trying to label it with the green-fluorescent-protein tag (ie GFP tag) in a different way to see if I can try to make my experiments work. I just wanted to share these photos with you cuz I thought that they looked way cool, despite my experiments not working too well. Ali, I know that you are sick and tired of seeing images like this, but you know what? I don't care. It's pretty new and slick to me and I'm guessing that most of you will not have had a chance to see stuff like this.
In this first picture, the cells are stained red for the Golgi apparatus. I don't know how much high school bio you remember, but just in case, the Golgi is where newly-synthesized proteins go to be processed and packaged for export. The four cells which are glowing green are expressing my protein but as you can see, it doesn't really co-localize with any of the red that's also stained in those particular cells.
Here, the cells were stained red for ERGIC proteins, which are present in vesicles transporting proteins between the Endoplasmic Reticulum (where new proteins are synthesized) to the Golgi. In the green cells, you can see where there is a tiiiiny bit of overlap between the red and the green (in these cells, the red staining looks kind of orangish rather than red) which could mean that my protein may localize in these transport vesicles. Wheeee! An "almost" result!
This final pic I just included because it looks really nifty. The red staining corresponds to microtubules, which are present throughout the entire cell and help give it its shape. They make up what is essentially the skeleton of the cell.
On a side note, without warning, my computer has died again and refuses to start up. I am too lazy and too tired of this constant tug-of-war with my piece o' junk HP to try and fix it now. The other blog entries that I had planned require photos which are on my defective computer's hard drive so instead, I took photos off of my lab computer. Your consolation prize? This bio-post.
April Showers Bring May Hay Fever
I've been suffereing from my worst bout with hay fever EVER. I was brought up in the desert, where flowers only really bloom for about a week or two, so my body's immune system was totally unprepared for the long-lasting pollen-y goodness of English plants. I haven't had a good night's sleep in over a week because I have to get up twice an hour all night just to blow my nose. I've been taking all kinds of allergy-preventing medications and I can't tell if they're working, because I'm not about to stop taking them to see if my symptoms get worse or not. I have never wanted so badly for it to rain really really hard so that all of those seeds and pollen grains get washed down the drain and into the sea, rather than into my eyes and up my nose.
I'll make a real update when I've had some sleep. Precious sleeeeeeeeep.
Last Year
Over the last year, I spent approximately:
114 days sleeping
100 days working
15 days and 3 hours watching TV
10 days and 3 hours preparing food
9 days walking/biking to work
8 days and 20 hours eating
2 days and 12 hours showering
2 days and 12 hours brushing teeth, washing face, etc.
8 hours trimming my toenails.
That equals 262 days and 10 hours doing stuff I have to on a regular basis. Which leaves 102 days and 14 hours to do fun, leisure stuff like going out, travelling, hanging out, shopping, working out, etc etc. Too bad I probably waste most of those 102+ days mindlessly surfing the web, updating my blog, and doing silly calculations like this in the first place (I suppose I'm not much different from Calvin).
Is There a Doctor in the House?
Looking at the big picture, I could say that my lab work is interesting and I care a great deal about my results and the data that I produce. However, like any other job, the day to day details can be tedious and may get a little boring. Every now and then, though, something happens to help break up the monotony of a typical workday, and today, that little something was a nice panicky medical mini-crisis.
My lab bench-mate (let's call him Joe. To my best knowledge, none of you know him well, if at all, so I figured it's safe to write about this incident; I'm just sharing a tidbit of my crazy day with all of you) scared the living daylights out of me this morning. I was just fixing some cells and was pretty focused on grasping the slippery little cover slips that they had been growing on so I wasn't really paying attention to anything that anyone else was doing. That's when I heard this huge THUMP and I looked up to find Joe lying on the floor of the adjacent bay in the lab. At first, it looked like he had fallen off the footstool that was next to him and I my first thought was that oh, poor guy, just tripped and fell. How embarassing. Then I noticed that he was completely unconscious. His arms were pinned at awkward angles under his body and to make matters worse, he was bleeding pretty badly from a head wound. I kinda freaked out at this point. I somehow had the sense to check that he was breathing, called for another coworker to call an ambulence (because I realized at this point that I had no idea what the UK equivalent to 911 was), and tried talking to Joe to see if I could get him to come to. He was out cold for the better part of a minute and when he opened his eyes, he was totally spaced out and couldn't hear me or respond to me for another 30 seconds or so. I was SOOO afraid that he had been knocked unconscious from his fall (he's a pretty tall guy, probaby 6'4" or 5") and that he was seriously hurt or something. You know when your brain works like 10,000mph and time slows waaaaaay down when something like this is happening? Well, my mind was going crazy and thinking of all of the worst possible outcomes and whether I should try to stop the bleeding or should I leave him alone because me moving him might make his injuries worse or I don't know! I was so relieved when he came around and could hear me talking to him. At some point other people finally came around to help me. The paramedics arrived really quickly and whisked Joe away to the hospital across the street. By this time, he was pretty lucid and was asking to me tell his girlfriend where he was going to be and to please freeze his protein samples so that he can load his gel tomorrow. Hopefully, he'll be alright. He was able to walk to the ambulence, so he's probably going to be OK. But dear God, he gave me (and the rest of the lab, since it had just started out as another typical Thursday for them, too) quite a fright.
I would make a crappy paramedic. I'm too prone to panicking.
