...for this week has been hell, and the entire tank of urchins I blogged about earlier spawned.
Yeah.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
So I had a fun day in lab.
And by fun, I mean horrifying. And kinda hilarious.
My advisor took off recently to do important professorial things, and so through a series of events, I wound up being the only person in lab today, which made me feel very important indeed. It's the first time I've been put in charge of a whole entire laboratory, even for a day.
We've got two cultures that I'm growing that are rather sensitive; the algae and the baby urchins. The baby urchins need constant temperature, filtered seawater and algae, all of which need to be kept free from contamination. The algal cultures are just as sensitive.
So I come in this morning (after a simply hellish time parking my bike) and open up the lab where three of the algal cultures are and it's sweltering--about 75+ degrees. This may not seem so hot to most people but the lab typically runs about 10 degrees cooler. To my relief, the algal cultures are doing fine, but the bubbler (that aerates them so the pH doesn't go screwy) has managed to unplug itself during the weekend.
I fix this. Then I go into the other room, dump out the acid rinse from the culture plates (note, culture plates are impossible to pour neatly), and then make my way to the tank room. At this rate, I'm expecting that something else has gone terribly wrong--a seawater hose has disconnected and the room is flooding, there has been a mass urchin escape and they're all in the drainpipe, a tank has exploded and both of the above have happened, the bucket with the larval culture has fallen over, the air hose into the larval culture had disintegrated, the temperature has gone flooey and all the inhabitants are dead....
You can imagine my relief when I open the door and everything is normal; the temperature is what it should be, the bucket is upright, there are no visible escapees and no floods of water. I breathe a sigh of relief and saunter over to check the larval culture.
And there is a starfish.
In the larval culture.
A fat, filthy, actively excreting starfish. In my larval culture. My nice, clean larval culture, with the seawater that needs to be filtered through a 20 micron filter and the air that needs to go through other filters and the algae that need to be grown so they're pure cultures.
I stared at it in mute fury for a few minutes. The starfish crapped more.
Then I started laughing. It was that or break something and all the breakable things were expensive.
In the end I fished out the starfish and filtered the culture (which seems to be dead as a result) and spawned urchins (the female kept flipping over and the male exuded simply VAST quantities of sperm, and filtered water and went home with the sincere hope that the experience wouldn't be repeated on the morrow.
And then I played video games.
And by fun, I mean horrifying. And kinda hilarious.
My advisor took off recently to do important professorial things, and so through a series of events, I wound up being the only person in lab today, which made me feel very important indeed. It's the first time I've been put in charge of a whole entire laboratory, even for a day.
We've got two cultures that I'm growing that are rather sensitive; the algae and the baby urchins. The baby urchins need constant temperature, filtered seawater and algae, all of which need to be kept free from contamination. The algal cultures are just as sensitive.
So I come in this morning (after a simply hellish time parking my bike) and open up the lab where three of the algal cultures are and it's sweltering--about 75+ degrees. This may not seem so hot to most people but the lab typically runs about 10 degrees cooler. To my relief, the algal cultures are doing fine, but the bubbler (that aerates them so the pH doesn't go screwy) has managed to unplug itself during the weekend.
I fix this. Then I go into the other room, dump out the acid rinse from the culture plates (note, culture plates are impossible to pour neatly), and then make my way to the tank room. At this rate, I'm expecting that something else has gone terribly wrong--a seawater hose has disconnected and the room is flooding, there has been a mass urchin escape and they're all in the drainpipe, a tank has exploded and both of the above have happened, the bucket with the larval culture has fallen over, the air hose into the larval culture had disintegrated, the temperature has gone flooey and all the inhabitants are dead....
You can imagine my relief when I open the door and everything is normal; the temperature is what it should be, the bucket is upright, there are no visible escapees and no floods of water. I breathe a sigh of relief and saunter over to check the larval culture.
And there is a starfish.
In the larval culture.
A fat, filthy, actively excreting starfish. In my larval culture. My nice, clean larval culture, with the seawater that needs to be filtered through a 20 micron filter and the air that needs to go through other filters and the algae that need to be grown so they're pure cultures.
I stared at it in mute fury for a few minutes. The starfish crapped more.
Then I started laughing. It was that or break something and all the breakable things were expensive.
In the end I fished out the starfish and filtered the culture (which seems to be dead as a result) and spawned urchins (the female kept flipping over and the male exuded simply VAST quantities of sperm, and filtered water and went home with the sincere hope that the experience wouldn't be repeated on the morrow.
And then I played video games.
Friday, July 6, 2012
Keep a blog, they said...
...it'll be good for you, they said. And then Google keeps highlighting the writing. Anyone knows how to keep random sections of my prose from turning white, I will be so so happy if you'd tell me.
Okay, angstpost coming up.
I'm getting very vexed with the fetishes in the writing profession. They're presented to every young writer, and usually follow these lines:
No adverbs (excuse me, I like me some adverbs. Shakespeare used adverbs. As long as they're not everywhere and copulating in the margins, you're good.), no italics (see previous), only use 'said' as an attribution (booooring), no semicolons (you can pry my semicolons out of my cold, dead hands, and even then I might come back as a zombie and bite you) and no cliches/figures of speech.
Yes, sparse prose is pretty. You know what else is pretty? Shakespeare. Les Miserables. The Aubrey/Maturin books. Les Miserables has so many adverbs in it you could probably still wind up with a 500 page book if you took everything but the adverbs out. How about The Three Musketeers? Exclamation points. Adverbs. Figures of speech. The Scarlet Pimpernel? Eh... I may be hurting my argument there. Lord of the Rings. Think about it, people. Just because it's the 'in' thing doesn't mean that anything that doesn't follow the rules is bad. The Canterbury Tales. Seriously, I mean Chaucer. Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Pride and Prejudice, for chrissake! Jane Austen does not give a delicate lady's shit for your extermination of adverbs, sir!
Basically, I'm getting disillusioned. I don't want to write the Next Great American Novel. I'm a scientist. I already have a career and a field with specific rules and vicious editors and puking sea urchins. Really, I don't want to be a master of the art of writing. I just want to write things that people can read on the bus or the train or listen to in traffic, and wonder about what's going to happen next and fret about the characters. I just want to make people's days a little brighter. I want to make stories. Not art. And I don't want to have to do it by a whole batch of arbitrary rules that really are taking the aspect of someone's Hemingway fetish gone way out of control.
Good writing is not something you do by formula! (Oh, look an exclamation point. You may all proceed to faint now, at my use of that most hideous form of punctuation). If you write like shit, you'll still write like shit even if you excise all these things. If your characters are shallow or your plot absurd or you genrally idiotic, the lack of adverbs will not save you. These rules lead to a woodenness of expression, a general sameness of the written word. You're excising a part of speech, a punctuation, a way to add emphasis to your words, a variety to attribution. You are, to make a culinary comparison, making beef stroganoff without the vinegar or pepper. Sure, they're not strictly necessary, but the dish is going to be damn bland with none of it.
But, you protest, you needen't excise everything! If you do it tastefully, sparsely...
Then why say never? That's inaccurate. Also, my argument still stands. A tasteful sampling of those most forbidden, dreaded parts of speech, of language, would do most delightful things to our wealth of literature. We needn't all write like Hemingway.
Thus saying, I have most likely ruined all my chances for respect from my writing teachers forever. But I have been told I need more emotion in my writing.
We'll see how that balances out.
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