Plated

What a fantastic idea!

A dreadful evening

It'd been so cold last week that I didn't park my car in its usual faraway spot, but instead, as close to the lab as possible. So yesterday, when it was bright and sunny, I parked it a mile away and had a most enjoyable little walk to the lab. But I totally forgot about the walk back by the time evening came around. So at around 5:15 or so, I slowly rose from my desk and plodded along to the parking spot opposite my lab only to remember, to my utter dismay, that the car was elsewhere.
Then I half-ran half-trotted the mile back, got into my car, realized it was stuck in a frozen snow bank and couldn't pull out, got back out, pulled an ice scraper from the boot and viciously struck the frozen ice all around the tires to get them to loosen up a bit so the tires could come out of them, then managed to reverse the car out of the snow bank and race to the daycare to pick up the kids before closing time, stressed out, disheveled and hungry after all that unexpected exercise.

Then, after coming home, I ruined my record of patience and good cheer with the kids by sniping, yelling and finally screaming at them. It started with Durga tossing her cup of buttered corn at Ani, scattering glass and corn all over the kitchen; then Ani accidentally spilling his whole cup of milk on the couch; then Durga, inspired by my earlier broom-sweeping of the glass and corn, picking up the broom to try to sweep the floor and then the utensils off the kitchen counter; then me ruining dinner by... I don't even know how. The tomato-paneer dish I made was the bitterest thing I've ever tasted. In the meantime, Durga hungry and crying for food; Ani on the potty, having diarrhea (what?! how?!); Durga pulling out vaseline from one of the shelves and anointing her face, hair and the floor with it; me yelling at both of them and the two kids crying because I yelled at them. Finally, got food ready, tried to cram some food into Durga, who magically lost interest in food and wanted to play instead with Ani, who instead of eating, got up to play with Durga and tripped over something on the floor and hurt his head his head against the couch. This is when I screamed.

And then... silence. Blessed silence for a few minutes, while I replayed  in my head what I had just screamed, Ani and Durga quiet, but eyes filling with tears, the calm before the storm of their crying would begin again.

 I should have eaten something before I started making dinner for the kids. If I'd been less hungry and less tired, I would have noticed the signs of the impending crisis much earlier and could have altered the outcome.

In the end, I calmed down. And magically, everything else calmed down too. The kids cried a bit, but it was nothing I couldn't handle. Then I took them on my lab and apologized profusely and kissed and cuddled them both. Then, exhausted, we all fell asleep by 9 in the night.

Reminder to myself: if I lose control, my world loses control.
Now to pick up the pieces and start again.

A purpose in life

In undergrad, my purpose in life was to compete against a set of friends and get better marks than them. This was no secret- I think this group and I became such great friends because each of us was trying to beat the other. Joys of attending a great college in India- life is very simple: marks are everything.

In grad school, my purpose initially was quite lofty: save the world from HIV. Then 3 years into my PhD project (yes, it took me that long for this realization): forget the world, just get some results... any results. But at least this project is marvelous. Couple more years: fine, this project is a piece of shit, give me a to-do list to graduate and I'll get that done. Final year: Oh God, may I never think about HIV ever again. My purpose became, get the hell out and never look back.

Let's fast-forward the postdoc years and now it's time to go back. What to do in India? During my off-moments, which I define as those when I feel I have accomplished nothing and I'm a terrible scientist with idiotic publications, I think I will shun research entirely. I will do something radically different, like start an orphanage or go about the country planting trees. Then I actually get around to doing a bit of research; I might analyze a placental RNAseq dataset, or stare at some DNA methylation data and then get highly excited. And think, hey, this isn't so bad after all.
So now, I've come to some sort of balance with my on- and off-selves. I will do research on stuff I like doing research on: no wet lab nonsense for me (even the thought of cell cultures and Western blots raises goosebumps and a need to vomit), but more of this sort of high throughput data analysis.

But everything needs meaning. No point in me staring at some numbers if it isn't going to be worth it- worth my time, worth some money and importantly, have a worthy answer to the question: how is this going to change anybody's life? It doesn't have to be a big change, but there has to be an impact.

Now I have a splendid research idea, dealing with obesity and my current favorite cell organelle, mitochondria (perhaps it's my favorite because I don't know much about it and have never worked on it, but that's a question to ponder another time). It is fairly novel, there's not too many labs in the world that will have the infrastructure to answer such questions (but my current lab is one of them, hurray), but does it have any point?

From a clinical angle, probably not. If I get any answers from my splendidly exciting question, nobody's life will be saved. But from a research angle? That's what a ton of background reading will tell me... some time, when I actually get around to it.

So this is my current purpose: figure out if question is worth asking and if yes, design a study; if not, modify.

Running in the snow

I thought that running in the snow was just inbred in the American psyche or something, but apparently all normal people wonder at these snow-runners just like I do!

Hilarious and spot on!

Introspection and some navel-gazing

We've lived in Pittsburgh for 10 years now. For both Ram and me, products of an itinerant childhood, this is the longest we have ever stayed in any city. Six months ago, if you'd asked either of us, we would have happily said we would probably stay in Pittsburgh and live in our current house forever.

How quickly the mind changes!

Now we are just as excited about leaving behind our lives here and starting afresh, returning full circle to the city we were born in.

I think the biggest benefit of such a move is that one is forced to introspect about what one really wants to do. An opportunity like this can't be squandered, as Shantideva has said in his Bodhisattvacaryavatara:

("Time and opportunity are hard to find; if I lose them now, where will I find them again?"
My translation. It captures the general superficial message, but falls completely short of capturing any of the depth or insight. Still, it serves its purpose for now)

So some of the many questions or issues that I've been pondering are:
a) How should we think about this move?
Is it a rejection of our American life or an acceptance of an Indian life or neither? Or perhaps should we think about it completely differently: as setting up a project in a different site. What if, every 5 or so years, we envision an exciting project, breathe life into it, set it up and then move on to something else in a different place?
b) After moving back, I will be interacting with my close and extended family on a frequent, perhaps even day-to-day, basis. There will be daily phone calls, famlily-related events to attend, festivals, religious events, weddings, deaths, illnesses, all the things that are considered "good to participate in", but are the same things I'm fairly insulated from right now, sitting half way across the world. How can I prepare for this?
c) What are some ways by which I can juggle family and work while getting time for myself and to spend with my husband?
d) What are some ways by which Ram, the kids and I can stay healthy?
e) How do I stop being overly sensitive about the many issues that I am sensitive about (such as child-rearing) and handle issues gracefully?

Preschool Valentine's Day celebrations!

Ani has a Valentine's Day party at school today. We got the notification for it a couple of weeks ago and ever since, he's been excited.

I really enjoy these kiddie-parties. These are great opportunities to be creative, health-concious and thrifty, all at the same time. Ani and I spend a lot of time bouncing ideas off each other regarding what he should take as edible treats and what he should take to give away as gifts. And we both love the planning, the shopping and the making aspects of all these parties. We have multiple events like this every year: V'day to begin with, then his birthday, then Halloween and then Christmas and New Year.

This year for V day, this is what we did:

Strawberry hearts

 We had strawberry hearts and raspberries with vanilla yogurt for the in-school treat.

Then, for a gift to take back home, we bought these Go-go Applesauce squeezies.

And for each squeezie, we made a little card.
For boys, we made the T-phone (from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and for the girls, pink hearts.

Making the cards

Squeezies with their little cards

Inside the T-phone card, it says  "Have a (T)phone-tastic Valentine's!"
And on the pink hearts, as you can see, it says "Squeeze me, Valentine!"

Nice, eh? I will update this post later with the link that gave me the ideas in their entirety for the Gogo squeezie and the pink hearts. But the T-phone idea was all Ani's :)

Durgoose, since neither she nor her classmates are old enough to care too much about gifts yet, she got just the strawberries (chopped into small pieces) with the yogurt.

Hopefully the kids enjoy themselves. I can just imagine Ani's excitement this evening when he comes  back home with the gifts that the other kids brought for him!

How not to start a talk... or maybe: how to grab everyone's attention right from the beginning, but annoy your main funder while you're at it.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for this opportunity to present my work to you.

Let me begin by saying something a little bit ominous. But don't worry, I'll follow it up right away with something much more reassuring.

This is the sort of study that makes anyone who does not actively work on it cross-eyed with boredom, it will make them roll their eyes at the total waste of NIH money, it will even go to the extent of making them swear upon their mothers' (or grandmothers', if the mothers are alive) graves that they will never, ever work on a project remotely like it.
But on the other hand, if you happen to work on something similar, you might find it a bit exciting.

Here's my promise to you today: that I will try my very best, my utmost to make the next 30 minutes mildly interesting, and who knows, may be even exciting, to the 99.9% of you who don't work on this stuff, who will never care about this stuff and who don't see even the remotest point in it.

Let me tell you what I'll be talking about. I'll begin with the our main tissue of interest (hurray for this tissue! Who doesn't love it?). After some background on how it regulates its function, I'll go forth to the basic premise of this study. Why we did what we did and why we thought it would be a good idea.

This is a difficult study- you have no idea how much we struggled to get the samples we needed and the fact that we have had so much difficulty publishing this stuff should tell you just how much we struggled to get even the samples we did. Reviewers, darn them, just don't like unmatched samples from random patients.

This is also a really expensive study. So, I hope you will understand, at the end of my talk, why we spent so many hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it. And why I spent more than 2 years trying to make sense of the ginormous terabytes of data it yielded. But I hope to convince you, by the end of my talk, that it really does make sense to do it this way, that there are serious biological phenomena that can be understood from the analyses that we have done.

Hmm... so, right, aims and objectives of this study.... well, let me be frank here. We didn't really have much of an aim to start out with, or any hypotheses. It's like a fishing project really. We hoped, when we did this, to get something interesting that would help us diagnose... anything, really. But I do have one section of my analysis that is hypothesis-driven. So that's something.

I won't bore you with the multitudinous reams of analyses that I've done on this data. It would go against my initial credo not to let you get cross-eyed with boredom. So I'll just share some small snippets of relatively interesting findings.

I will conclude this talk by telling you a bit about our future directions. Some of you might consider this mostly hand-waving, driven less by evidence than by fervent desires and fervid dreams. But I can assure that we do have some preliminary data, in the pipeline, that supports our initial findings.

So, let's begin!

Why women read romance novels

Yes, of course because they want an escape from their real lives. But why do they want this escape?

a) In romance novels, the heroine is always appreciated by the hero, by the middle or end of the book if not right in the beginning, with the promise that he will do so for the rest of their lives. No matter how much or how little she actually does, he always thinks she does a huge lot and is always impressed.
b) The heroine has help- she is not juggling the work of teacher, nanny, cook, laundrywoman and housekeeper in addition to her day job. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all afford that kind of help?
c) Heroine (or hero)'s hard work always pays.
d) Good sex. How nice to be able to imagine a world where there is always a turn-on and always an orgasm!
e) Refer to (b) again. And again. And again.
f) Oh, and heroine (almost always) has great clothes.

Plan to Become Fitter

a) Park car a mile away from lab and walk between car and lab. Target speed: 1 mile in 13 minutes.
b) No elevators; only stairs
c) Cut down on desserts.
d) Play TT everyday with husband.

Frustrated

I like writing. I like science. And I like scientific writing.
Why, then, is it so hard for me to type up the results of the projects I've been cranking away at and make a decent paper out of them?
I have a story, I have the results, all I need to do is get them on paper in a semi-interesting way.
But no, my words are wooden, the story is all in my head and whatever I write makes no sense to anybody else reading it.

And I only have about 2 months to go to write up my 3 papers and submit them! And this paper is the easier of the lot! And I haven't even begun working on writing up the other two!Yaaarrrggh!