Short Skirt, Long Jacket

I am seriously dragging ass today even though I slept something like 10 hours last night. I could be getting sick, or I could just have the sleeping sickness that hits me at random and leaves me needing 14 hours or more of sleep a day. The drag-assed-ness is not really helping work today. First, I believed someone else in the lab when they said they'd checked the cell expression (meaning the amount of luminous protein the cell is making) and it was a little low but fine. It was not "a little low," it was nonexistent, and I spent two hours dilligently looking for images that just weren't going to show up.

So I switched to a different probe (same shiny proteins, different places in the cell) and mixed up some new drugs because I can't do the same experiments with this probe, and now here I sit, sifting through bacterially infected pink fluid to find a single cell that will do what I want it to do. Oh, the glamorous life of research.

The good thing about being this sleepy is that because my brain is dull, it's letting slip through all sorts of sensory information that usually gets stuffed way, way back on the priority list. For example, today I learned that the hallway with the ice-cruncher-thing smells like puffed rice, the kind of rice that ends up in a tea they sell at Osiyo. The entire floor smells a little bit like a locker room, from all the animal tissue and dampness-tracked-in that ends up here, and a little bit like a butcher's, for obvious reasons. Muscle tissue has a smell all its own; it doesn't smell like dead meat, but warm and not entirely unpleasant. There's an incubator full of muscle tissue where my cells are kept, and I enjoy the unique way it smells when I open it.

The bad thing about being this sleepy is that my brain is dull. I burned my hand today making lunch, and it's blistered up quite nicely. I then capped off my day by sticking my fingers directly into the viral-infected cell culture. If I happen to be glowing blue and yellow by the end of today, I will have to recant everything I've ever said about the implausibility of science creating superheros. I hope I don't have to. Glowing is a pretty stupid superpower to have.