my first blogpost

my first blogpost, written on Aug. 3rd, 2004 on livejournal, was quite funny. it actually talked about science too. it's quite an interesting thing for myself to read now. lol.

here i'm starting a new journal, my first online one. used to be very excited everytime i started a new diary when i was younger, but as i grew older i don't even keep a diary anymore. busy with life. that sounds really pathetic.

working in the lab isn't exactly very fun. esp when you don't even know where the project is going, and keep screwing up things. life is reduced to the monotonous sound of a PCR machine running. tissue culture is a little more fun, at least with more things to do. but i only do clean-ups. clean the pump with water, then chlorox, then water again, washing the flask that you suck all your waste (poor)cells/medium into, dash in vircon, swirl, attach it back to the pump, test pump. wipe down the hood with 70% ethanol, UV for a while, switch off.

so half of the time i'm slacking in front of the common computers, like now, and the other half i'm busy mixing reagents for PCR or cleaning up tissue culture room. and after lunch i'm feeling sleepy now. my mentor's assistant hasn't alerted me for anything. she's supposed to extract RNA from 48 eppendorff tubes containing transfected cells that we prepared last friday. huge task ahead. but she hasn't called me. so.

and this is life in a lab? i'm starting to wonder if this is what i really want. maybe life as a researcher is really so much better than that of an attachment student. hopefully.

and everytime i watched my mentor's assistant/my mentor herself suck up liver cancer cells in that pinkish medium from the flasks and praising the cells on their healthy growth, i wonder why humans are doing this. and when at last i raised it up to both of them on separate occasions, i got differet answers.

qn: wow man, why do humans grow cells in medium??

mentor: yeah, what next?
asst: so that we can do experiments on them.

sigh.

that was when i was totally whiny. haha. i guess i don't whine so much any more on a blog, which is a good thing, of course. ;)