twelve days and a small fraction of more to come

a couple days ago, my dad noted that he is currently the same age as my grandfather was when they first moved to this country.

life passes you by. just like how my summer vacation is already a month over.
so maybe that's not a valid comparison.

im halfway done with college? getting closer.

im turning 20 in a week, which means i will no longer be a teenager. now i think im starting to see it.

i remember when i was still nine years old, i dreamed of the day when i would finally be thirteen so that i no longer had to accompany my parents whenever they ran errands. i dont noe if i ever looked forward to getting a license all that much; it was more of my parents pushing. turning 18 so that i can vote? seemed cool at first but to this day i'm still not registered. so what makes me think 20 or 21 has anything better to offer?

foolish inconsistencies

i tossed my postdoc's cells on friday....before incubating his own samples. you can add another point under jeremy's name for stupid mistakes in the lab. as if i didn't have enough already. just like the time i thought polymerase enzymes could survive at room temperature, or the time i put PCR tubes in a room temperature thermo-cycler even though i had been working on ice for the last hour.

i've always felt like my accomplishments on paper never seem to correlate with the amount of common sense i possess in real life. then again, it's not like my sense of achievement is even something to drool over. i guess that shows just how much common sense i must possess. and i guess i never understood why i can be so absent-minded, or do such stupid things without thinking beforehand.

with that in mind, i look at myself in the mirror every morning and wonder how i accomplished what ive achieved the last two years. and quite frankly, i still haven't come to a substantial answer. im not trying to compliment myself. i guess i continually impress myself with the dichotomy of foolishness and success that characterizes my lifestyle all too well.

can you believe im aiming for an MD degree from a prestigious university? just the fact that im still in the running for it must show that the Lord has some mercy on my own sanity.

today, i had the same old cliche question thrown at me again, resulting in an all-too-familiar self-propogating bout of self-introspection, only to result at the same frustrating answer. if only i accepted the fact that i cant do everything in life.

life comes in discrete packages of humor and irony

i was in the men's restroom in LSA a couple days ago, going about my business. and then professor schlissel walks in.

i thought back to the beginning of spring '08: when i sat in the far back rows of pimentel on the first day of bio 1a, i looked past the sea of students sitting in front of me, and fixed my gaze towards the front of the room and beheld none other than the immunologist himself. little did i know that one day i would be standing next to him by the urinal. it's just weird peeing next to your professor.

fine...so i was actually washing my hands when he came in. but it still made a great story.

it kind of reminds me that time i was passing out gospel tracts on campus, and i suddenly saw my ochem professor approach. the mere thought of being able to preach the gospel to my professor took me by surprise. my face suddenly lit up and i uttered an excited "hey!" upon which his face broke out in surprise and he looked at me awkwardly, only to become more cautious of his own safety as he strode on past me. only after he passed me did i realize i was only a single student in a class of eight hundred. and that he had never seen my face nor exchanged a word with me. i guess im still not a true berkeley student.

today i dropped off my samples at the DNA sequencing lab. as i approached the facility, i saw formidable gray machines encompassing the majority of the room, with their loud fans and motors running tirelessly to generate needless amounts of noise. this is where pretty high tech stuff happens. i walk in and i find no one else in the room except a 10 year old boy. yes, he was the one manning the facility. i gave my samples to him and he told me "he'd take care of it."

yeah, i laughed after i walked out of the room.

it just felt unnerving handing off my precious samples to a 10 year old. did that really just happen? did i see it right? is uc berkeley's primary dna sequencing facility run by a 10 year old kid? i guess so.

then again, he was taller than me, and i probably looked just as young as him, so i guess he was just as surprised to see that i myself was a researcher. and yes, im positive that he was actually that much younger than me.