My brain might explode.

One of my officemates is sick. Like there's an open bottle of Robitussin sitting on his desk. If you're that sick, GO HOME! I do not want you here. Nor do any of the other dozen or so people who work in our lab. The Queen (aka VW, our advisor) will be the first person to tell you to get the hell out of here (in much more polite, motherly words and tone of course). I don't want whatever you've got, nor do I have time to get whatever you've got. LEAVE.

I went to a graduate student speed dating tonight. I wasn't really expecting to legitimately meet anybody interesting, but I was absolutely expecting a good story or two. I was sorely disappointed. There were a couple of undergrads who had the balls to show up. If you're 22, and nowhere near done with your bachelors, and you don't have a particularly good reason for that, I'm not interested. Call me a snob, but I'm not. Especially when I see that your pants are belted around your @$$ and I can see 6" of your underwear. The only other guy of note was from the same department as one of my former roommates. He was very nice, but had I met him on the street, I would have SWORN he was gay. That's totally fine if you're gay, but as a heterosexual woman, if I'm wondering whether or not you might be gay, I don't want to date you either. Sorry.

The talk I'm giving to my entire department is just over a week away now. I'm starting to be rather stressed about it. Hopefully that won't be a lasting feeling of stress and just a passing, come-and-go feeling of stress. This will be the first talk I've given in graduate school on my research (other than group meetings, which are a totally different ballgame). It's good and bad that it's to a VERY broad chemistry audience. So one major challenge is making what I do comprehensible to people who have no idea what I do without dumbing it down (too much). So as I dig through my data to put this presentation together, I'm discovering that my results are even more interesting that I initially realized (yay!), but I'm also discovering a lot more work to be done (what else is new?) and some questions/results that we can't fully explain. On one hand, it's not really a problem because there's always more to be done. Good research leads to more research. And my biggest irksome question doesn't detract from the big picture of what I'm trying to do (thankfully). If it's an issue next week, it'll be because there are people in the department that are hugely skeptical of how valid gas phase protein measurements are. That at least is an argument I encounter regularly (after all, life happens in solution). What scares me more is the more nit-picky (although possibly valid) argument I KNOW I'm going to face at the national conference at the end of May. I know I have some time before the end of May, but I'm pretty sure this particular question isn't going to be resolved by then. I could be wrong. If I get a poster for that conference, odds are I'll go unnoticed. But because I work on something that nobody else in the world works on, and because people have been waiting for results to follow up my group's initial results in this area, odds are also quite good that my abstract will be selected for a talk. I know I should be excited about that prospect - after all, it's good if people are excited about what I work on, and a talk is a lot more prominent and puts me on people's radar for when I start looking for post-docs/jobs. It's just a heck of a lot more stressful. End rambling.

I'll leave you with this. I'm paranoid about a lot of random things. One of them is locking myself out of my office/lab when I'm here alone late at night. Let's hope that paranoia keeps me from actually doing it. :P