Sun is shining

Hello downtime. Automation in the lab has it's perks, like short turn around time and plenty-o-breaks! As annoying as it is to run quality control, I'm not going to complain about a 20 min break while assays are being run. I'm going to blog about it :)

Life has been busy (which is nothing new) but instead of the raging river my workload once was it's more of a steady stream now. I don't even need to use a planner anymore - it's gotten that good. For the past 3ish years my life was plotted points on a calendar. Days lived out before I got to live them. It was a sad state of affairs. It took much of the impulsiveness out of daily life and when I would try to take spontaneity back it was often destructive to my obligations. Bastard.

However much I hate sounding like a "planner", I don't think I have a choice in the matter. There is so much stuff I want to do this year and still more that I'm expected to do. I don't think I could manage everything without much paid deliberation. I picked up my cap and gown yesterday (Oh yeah, it's real!) and time suddenly sped up. By the later part of the summer I should be running free across the country if not the globe. It fills me with exuberance to know I'll be with my nearest and dearest, enjoying life without the weight of pending chores.

Graduation to me is analogous to birth. I've been stewing for a while in this academic womb and when I'm finally free of it's chamber, I will be my own individual. Finally, there will be time to think about myself; cater to my needs. Since I was a wee thing I've been faithfully conditioned to be subservient to everyone else. Maybe it's a part of eastern culture or maybe it's just pure BULLSHIT. Getting a degree is my last "duty" to my family. It's been the umbilical cord that's chained me to the floor my whole life. With my parents, the emphasis on education is not an Asian stereotype, but a radical militant belief.

This kind of upbringing makes me so unbearably ambivalent at times, I'm not sure wtf I should do about it. Is there anything that can be done to remedy this? If there is, give it to me doctor, stick it in my vein and pump it to my heart STAT. Life sucks, yeah - whatever. No one cares. Things are about to change anyways so I'm not sure why I'm being such a bitch. As soon as my wings dry, I'm booking. Gotta live life, break rules, and maybe even feel things. I guess I'll just sit in the sun until take off.

It's a good day

I'm on break and watching the helicopter landing pad through the floor to ceiling windows in the cafeteria. The days have been peaceful as of lately. Can almost sense this blanket of calm, making me more complaisant than I could have ever imagined.

... I just heard a lady at the next table say "no one cares about New Zealand", I need not hear more. She was referencing places to drop/test bombs. A little perplexed I am at the backwards way of people. Then I wonder, are they backwards or am I just progressive? Use to consider humanity's inherent goodness but my postion is being challenaged. The harder I look the more I see the shit of human souls and this makes me reject my faith in Buddhist thought: to be human is to be high up in the reincarnation pecking order.

Dispite the ugly face my human siblings sometimes wear, I still find beauty their distorted ways.

In a bookworm's cocoon

A woman on the bus walks on with a smutty novel under arm, depicting a shirtless man with a dame clutching at his leg. I notice it's a well worn book, many women have enjoyed it I'm sure. There was a library stamp on the top, so many women or just one really enthusiastic reader must have gotten off on that piece of work. It made me want to shine a black light over it - how much girl cum does a dirty library book contain? Enough to power a Betty Crocker crock pot I'm sure. Hungry for supper anyone?

Is a graphic sex novel a woman's equivalent to penthouse or playboy? Both are tools of satisfaction that trees where felled for. One just comes in pink and the other in blue. I smirk a little at this comparison, and find it black and white true. That a woman's brain takes at least 100 more pages to get off than a man's - who is satisfied with (and all over) a few glossy photos.

Reading a book takes time, since there is no point in furiously flipping through pages. It's also a very private encounter, one in which no one outside of you and your book knows exactly what's going on. Unlike a magazine, it's not on full frontal display and is completely acceptable in public. Not only that, it's very involving. The full picture is more of a puzzle, that takes it tantalizingly slow to finally come together.

Women's brains are needy due partially to it's invested involvement with emotions. Females are so fucking greedy for it; wanting the whole cake and wanting to eat it draped in metaphorical (but often times not) silk and jewels. In addition to physically having, most women expect emotional commitment. Blinded are they by this sickness they will supersede anyone viewed as a third party. So I guess you could use this breathy explanation as reasons why you had to burn that bridge, smash that windshield, or on any other occasion acted like a lunatic.

Romance novels are what I call a cheap and easy read. The plot is fairly simple and all the stories have been homogenized. Although intellectually void, it has it's niche in that part of the my female brain that is equivalent to the clitoris. Herein lies the distinction of our mentality as well as our human commonalities. Next time you call him a dog, there's a good chance you're a bitch.

Oi is Om

I haven't seen my body in some time. It's been a minute since I've really had any one-on-one time with it. Sure, I see it. I notice it in mirrors as I am running from one obligation to the next. While getting ready for the day, I see glimpse of skin that appear when my clothes fall away. I register my image yet I neglect to give it any attention. I have not seen my body, not for all that it truly is. Over the duration of this hiatus I feel like I've become a stranger to my physical self.

In the middle of uttanasana (one of my most favorite poses) I suddenly became aware of my legs. The skin was dry, creating this reptilian pattern up to my thighs. They had become hairy since the last time I shaved them, which had to have been some time in early February. These knees of mine, did they use to be so ashy? The dawn of all these new realizations began to spread over the rest of my body.

How is my back? I haven't seen that in a while either.

Are my arms lean and tight or have they inched into flabby?

Christ, don't tell me my ass has turned to collagen!

It's a shame I've neglected the tangible part of my person for as long as I have. Pay respects where respect is due; this body has seen me through as many trials as triumphs. Who would I be without my dear body? Surely I am not just a mind, don't my neurons hold my memories? My thought patterns happen physically, so the two must be intertwined. Shame on me, for being so mean all this time.

Innocent when you dream

From the perspective of natural selection it’s a reasonable expectation for us all to either die or adapt, as a collective. Pan out for the bigger picture and you see that personal suffering means nothing on the grand scale. The current of changing times sweeps us in which ever direction and our demise (or survival depending on a few things) will serve to support something bigger than us, bigger than all 6.8 billion of us (1). Suffering, then, is a perpetual circumstance that is inescapable to all living beings.

Life is married to suffering; it is the yin to being mortal. What came first - the egg or suffering? It begins in our mothers, who are the most vulnerable for the 9 months between conception and birth. Ask any woman who’s passed a person like a stool, it fucking hurts. The whole ordeal is only described as magical by the masochist or the anestatized. From there on, it’s a downhill slope - a constant struggle to find material to sustain our bodies by resisting homeostasis.*

For what? I must ask. Why do we do it? Do we really believe we are the chosen creatures on Earth, whose survival will somehow benefit our planet on a massive scale? Quite the contrary, but I guess that’s not yet been proven. Although it has been proven all the ways we’ve taken advantage of it in the course of selfish aims. I maintain that we can’t be more or less than equal to our animal peers. The qualities that make us unique don’t make us more privileged. Who the fuck is judging us? God? Puh!

I suppose the conflict I have with this topic has to do with the transference of pain and how much attention do we pay to it. Is personal suffering something that should be highlighted and actively resisted or should we accept it to a degree? Since our pilgrimage from pain ultimately amplifies afflictions, it is a selfish act to resist.

Many of the reagents used in the biological laboratory are extracted from animals(2). Anti-sera is collected from a large variety of animals and used widely in a number of laboratories. Producing anti-sera involves injecting substances into an animal before bleeding them out to collect only what you wanted to form. Since we know now that there are a multitude of factors to consider, there are animals specific to aims. We use rats, rabbits, mice, horses, pigs, cows, chickens, cats, dogs, monkeys, guinea pigs, fish, frogs, birds, etc. And that’s only a short list exclusive to biomedical research.

Our need for anti-sera can’t be replaced, it practically flows in the blood bank, thus our need for animals to suffer on our behalf won’t be replaced. To take the "moral" stance on this argument would mean no more surgeries. No more RH factor delivered to expecting mothers, meaning more dead babies. No more transfusions. You can’t check for a tumor without anti-sera to tag the malignant cells with. Without the rising cost of lives, many of the people in your life (if not you too) would simply not be there.

What are we to do? Are they not just like us too? Don’t dolphins fuck for fun just like us (3)? Don’t elephants average one per birth and have burial practices just like us? Monkeys even look like us and have thumbs like us. Birds can mimic us and speak like us. Dogs know shame, cats have autonomy. Pigs can even play the piano. Who are we to say what’s better; are two legs better than four or can I have two legs with wings?

I’m not making an argument for either side, because I’m still undecided. I’ve analyzed the situations from both perspectives. I was born into this world in a limited hospital in Southern China’s countryside. In these areas, most medical practices are contained to homeopathic remedies. Upon arrival into the states, I underwent heart surgery. Even as a three year old, I used at least 3.5 bags of blood to maintain my blood pressure during the operation. The first pump that set the standard for coronary operations was first tested on a number of dogs with no names, only numbers.

I think for the rest of my life, golden retrievers will always remind me about my functional heart. How I feel about this is a mixture of reverence and sadness. I’m thankful that I have a life to experience, without being a sickly child confined by her own body. If my heart became my cage, I think I’d lose healthy mental faculty and in lieu of natural selection, would quickly be weeded out. Can you blame a mother for desperately wanting to protect her children from circumstance? Is this not a quality ingrained in all animals across the board?

In the laboratory my interaction with people are limited to a name, DOB, and a barcode. The malfunction in their body starts a cascade and I see the end product. What I see is sometimes so objective, it takes you out of the realm of feelings. When you work in a hospital, the individual’s story is paled in comparison to the patient population. Your pity must only be momentary, you can’t save everyone and if you try it will take its toll. But if you get to know even one person’s story, their life, you want to save them. You want to be able to deliver them from their condition, but that in itself would mean fueling the other side of the equation.

It’s a daunting task to remedy this conflict. I wonder myself if I could and the answer looks unpromising. I will continue to work on the side of suffering in an effort to relieve suffering. It’s not because I think we are better than animals and so we can do this to them. Maybe I’m starting to accept this arrangement that suffering can never dissipate. Like energy it’s not created or destroyed, but flows around our world along the same waves as chi. Maybe there is no good fight to be fought, but an understanding to grasp. I guess when your expiration date draws near it’s your decision to make. A sole decision whose effects are expounded by events only the living will endure.

*Contrary to what you heard, true homeostasis would kill our bodies – why do you think we have ATPases? It’s not to keep the balance but to resist the balance. True balance rights itself and is incompatible with life. Osmosis is natural balance and that is exactly what we are resisting! Active transport, yo.