I shouldn't do this

It's past 10 PM and guess where I am at? I am still working in the lab, running simultaneous experiments on the stop-flow and on the spectrophotometer. I guess this is what happens when you grossly underestimate how much time you need to do your experiments. So after about 13 and a half hours I just want to go home and sleep. But I pushed myself to do this, and being the scientist I am, I hate wasting good enzyme. So I am still shooting it (or using little bits of it at a time while the machine mixes a bit of enzyme with a bit of substrate). Then because I am at a very high concentration of substrate, I need to do hella washing of the syringes with anaerobic water. And then finally load the oxygen scrubber. So hopefully I am out of here before midnight.

I pulled a few crazy-ish days last summer, but at least I planned for it. I came in at 6 AM and expected to leave at 8 PM, and appropriately brought breakfast, lunch, and dinner with me. Today I only brought lunch, a plum, and a tupperware of cereal for emergencies. Well looks like I'll need to load up on the emergency food again.

Even though basically no one is here, the whole "being at lab instead of at home" doesn't give me too much comfort. I miss things like my laptop and having knitting. And even the noise/life from my roommates. Talking about roommates, I need to find one in Seattle. One of my labmates came by and talked to me about what's going on (I don't see him much). I am putting off thinking about grad school just like I put off thinking about college. I want to enjoy my last summer of "freedom" for as long as I can.

It's funny. This stuff is so monotonous in practice and somewhat the reason why I am ditching biochemistry for pharmacology (because this was the most interesting stuff I thought I found in biochemistry). Yet the results are so cool. The more I work on this stuff the more I get this "nostalgia" for it. Yes I could have been complacent and done this forever, but I need a change. That was why promoting myself during grad interviews was so hard - because this stuff is quite different. Now I love the stop-flow machine because it just seems so cool, so I would love to use it in some way again in my career. But there is more to life than work, and what I love most of all is having more knowledge, more tools. This is partly why I love languages and playing instruments. I definitely would have tried to learn how to play more instruments if it wasn't so expensive to do so... I would also pick up more sports training if it was cheaper... But that's how life goes. There are only so many hours in a day.

Well, I'm about to finish up here in the lab. As soon as I get home it's brushing teeth and then SLEEP!