#it turns out I'm still fucked up about my thesis advisor dying

[magneticwave]

LAB GIRL by hope jahren

I am (ha Ha surprising) currently deeply unmotivated to do lab work because dumb shit keeps happening like the idiot in the lab next door turns off the cooling system to a piece of equipment in the middle of my experiment and it's making me think of a scientist's memoir I recently read and 70% hated, LAB GIRL, which I only recommend for #treefacts and the opening stuff about the isolating experience of growing up in Minnesota. In LAB GIRL, a memoir about Science, the author describes a test she uses on prospective grad students where she has them complete a task and then throws away the results of this task and tells the student that they had made a mistake. If the student does anything other than immediately try a new approach to accomplish this task (including taking a break to collect themselves), they have failed. I was thinking about this memoir while eating a donut this afternoon, approximately ten minutes after I discovered my overheated samples floating in a water bath, determined that they were ruined, and screamed like a fucking pterodactyl in the soundproofed cold room as an instant cage of fury descended over me. The donut was a "don't quit grad school because one (1) post-doc ruined one (1) experiment" bribe to myself. If someone told me that I was being kicked out of my program for taking fifteen minutes to eat a donut, I would kill them. I know (I KNOW) that hating capitalism is a meme now that all the cool kids do, but it sucks in ways that move insidiously beyond the work force as we think of it and I can feel them constantly breathing on my neck, even as people I know who are not in grad school tell me that I'm really lucky to still be in school and not doing a "real job." Plenty of people who control my professional future think it's totally normal and in fact appropriate to demand 80 hours of work a week from their students, because their students are supposed to love this work so much that it's not work any more, it's a Passion. But I don't think that anything you need to do for 80 hours a week because otherwise you will be without healthcare or money for rent or a good reference letter can be a Passion. I think it burns the love out of you. After that, all you can do is write memoirs where you try to recapture that first love and then try (maybe successfully) to convince yourself that you still feel it and therefore all those hours were worth it, the ones you spent crying in the bathroom because you couldn't go home or else your boss would write mean things on your yearly progress report about how bad your work ethic is. The real love is gone. It was killed a little bit the first time a sleazy professor hit on you during a meeting and then a little bit more when he was assigned as the chair of your committee. You could have rescued it with donuts and friends and funny movies and weekends away but you didn't have the time for those things because you had to be in the lab. You always have to be in the lab. You don't deserve this cushy job serving the god of Science if you aren't willing to sacrifice absolutely everything to it, like that stupid Robin Williams movie about the anthropomorphic slime. Everything about being in grad school and academic science is designed to make you grateful and willing to be trampled in the pursuit of whatever fucking thing you want to understand. ANYWAY, don't read LAB GIRL. Buy yourself a fancy donut and take a fucking breather.

#ADVICE TO SELF #it turns out I'm still fucked up about my thesis advisor dying #which is #you know #..........a shock