College

The exam is done and dusted and I really don't give a shit about when the result is out. As long into the future as possible, with a bit of luck.

I'd have liked a bit of a break this week, but last Friday I emailed my project supervisor to ask him if he wanted me to come in on Monday and pick up my work from where I left it before Christmas. Personally, I'd sooner have stuck pins in my eyes than go back into it, such was my frame of mind at that point, but I felt that I should at least pretend to give a shit. So I got in touch, asking him if I should come in this week. Secretly I was hoping that he - like most of the other supervisors - was taking a break for the next two weeks. "Why yes", he said, "Come in on Monday, but I'll be teaching for most of that time, so I won't really be around to help." Bollox, I thought.

Yesterday wasn't too bad, though I was stuck in there until 5:30, as per bloody usual.

Today is looking rather different. Have you ever worked with animal tissue, dear reader? No? You should be profoundly grateful...

Basically, a big part of my project involves working with parts of dead animals. It's not particularly nice, but the work we're doing could result in the development of drugs to slow down the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's disease, so I suppose it's for the common good. Well, for the common good of the human population. Less good for the playfully cute mice that end up donating their brains and internal organs to us.

This morning, another one shuffled off this mortal coil and we...erm...honoured her by taking out her uterus and suspending it in a solution, where each end of it was attached to terminals designed to measure muscle contraction. The idea is that you inject novel drugs into the solution, and from the response of the tissue, you get an idea of whether or not the drug will have a noteworthy effect if used as a psychiatric drug later. Unfortunately, the reliability of the tissue as this kind of indicator relies on its uniformity of behaviour, i.e. it should stay still in the absence of external stimulii and contract in presence of drugs with an established mechanism of action.

Right now, it's not staying still on its own at all. The ghost of its pissed off host must still live on in its uterus, because it's spontaneously contracting of its own accord, which shits up any chance I have of using it. Which means that I won't have obtained anything in the line of useful results today, and let me tell you, it was not an easy exit from my bed this morning, dear reader.

(Later)

I'm at home. The treacherous uterus yielded nothing. I decided to call it a day. I'll be back in there on Thursday afternoon to try again. The one catch is that I'll be teamed up with two med students who've never used an organ bath before, and it'll be my job to inculcate into them the joys of using it.

But overall, it's OK. I'm making reasonable progress. Not as fast as some, but that's because I'm very exacting (bordering on obsessive) when it comes to lab work, making sure everything is done correctly and precisely. Project work is a good way for the lazy to pick up marks, as it involves doing things more than thinking or learning about them. Most of the time you're just walking around a lab making up solutions and using pipettes to deliver volumes of them, without having to think too much about it. I'm liking this project, hell I'm in the middle of it, doing it, and I still think it sounds impressive.

Basically, it's about this neurotransmitter called Angiotensin IV. In the last ten years, there has been a lot of work done in certain areas of neuroscience, memory and diseases like depression and Alzheimer's disease, and it has been discovered that if you raise levels of this neurotransmitter in the brain, you get improvements in memory and learning. This is of interest in the area of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers, where deeply embedded memories remain untouched until the latter phases of the disease, but acquisitional memory (the mechanisms involved in making new memories) suffers earlier on. Raising levels of Angiotensin IV in the brain seem to be the obvious way to combat this.

Except you can't raise them directly. Giving someone a tablet with Angiotensin IV in it accomplishes nothing because its chemical properties make it orally inactive, i.e. it won't be absorbed through the wall of the gut into the bloodstream. Injecting it directly doesn't really work either, as it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier that well, if at all. The only solution is to modify the molecule slightly, making it more likely to cross into the brain, but still act on the same targets in the brain in the same way. So I've been handed two different variants of Angiotensin IV, and my job is to run a battery of tests on them, assessing their suitability for the aforementioned scenario, and finally test it on laboratory mice, and see if they display any improvements in memory or cognition. Compared to some of the projects my classmates are working on, it's fairly rigorous stuff, but I don't mind. I like getting my teeth into it, and because it's a joint effort with other students on the course, if the research shows promise, we can publish, and our names will be under that of our supervisor. At the moment, the two variants I'm testing don't look particularly stellar, but as we're all working under the same umbrella, so to speak, so my chances of having my name on something worthwhile aren't much affected by that. There's also the bonus that this project work is heavily weighted in the award of my degree (close to 40% of my overall mark, if I'm not mistaken).

I like that I feel good about it, because there've been times - even before I started this degree course - where I wondered if I was doing the right thing. I'm still not fully reconciled to the idea of having to work 9 to 5 like everyone else, but I had to be pragmatic in the face of my flights of fancy, and as much as I'd like living a more artistically-minded existence, I value financial security just as much. I've always managed to do consistently well in science subjects, so this course seemed like a safe bet. I can say now, though, that I've no regrets. If you have to get out of bed in the morning and work for a living, then you may as well work for yourself, and get paid well for it. With this I have a chance of managing both, and actually liking the job into the bargain. Not bad, all in all.

It feels weird now that I'm nearing the finishing line. No doubt the next four months will be rather shit, but barring some major disaster, I should graduate. I won't cover myself in glory: Old habits die hard, and I still have the odious habit of mastering crucial concepts on the syllabus of a course for the first time mere hours before an exam. This, along with the odd stressful external circumstance, has kept me from breaking any records. There'll be no first class honours for me, not even in my wildest dreams, but with a bit of luck, I should get honours of some sort, and then get on with the business of pulling in the dough after that.

Onward ho...

Hooray!

On Monday January 21st of 2008, June Brooks gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whose name it has decided will be George. 9lbs-odd. You seem to have a knack for producing big bruisers, Brooksy.

A son for Dan and a brother for Luke, Jordan and Jasmin. An opportunity for a piss-up if ever there was one.

Psychopharmacology exam at 2pm!

Our Father,
Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name,
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On Earth, as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day, our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil,

Amen.

Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Now, and at the hour of our death,

Amen.

Glory be to the father,
And to the son,
And to the holy spirit,
As it was,
Now,
And ever shall be.
A world without end,

Amen.

Drat and bother!

With an exam on Tuesday coming, I'm anticipating a lovely weekend ahead of me. Being my final year, one would expect all cavalier tendencies to go flying out the window, to be replaced by a new, previously unheard-of diligence, wouldn't one?

Well, one would, if one was talking about anyone other than me. The screams of despair remain the same. Although I must say that sitting down for a coffee with a few classmates the other day, and finding that they had done nothing either, and cared even less, was comforting. Why floundering isn't so bad when you're not the only one doing it, I'm not so sure, but hey.

In other more important news, Tom's bar, the one I frequented only recently, has closed down. It appears that this particular opportunity is lost to you, Mz. 'Flee, but do please dry your eyes. I'm sure another kamikaze businessman will come out of the woodwork to attempt another similar venture soon. It seems to happen a lot around here.

I'm also starting the organisation of a trip I hope to go on this year: The Great British Bear Bash of 2008 in Manchester, at the start of May. Ah yes, if I exercised this much forward planning with regards to my degree, I'd probably be looking at a first class honours by now.

And with that, back to the study of the psychopharmacology of cannabis I go. From a purely theoretical standpoint, of course.

A Sex Entry

... for those of you with a fragile disposition.

Schwarz, a bar in Brighton I went to a while back that opened my eyes somewhat, came a cropper when Legends hotel was refurbished. The basement was converted into a disco that turned out to be more successful than its dark, sleazy predecessor. It turns out that people prefer to dance to tunes on a trendily designed floor rather than have filthy sweaty sex with random strangers. Who knew?

It wasn't long before the gap in the market was spotted, of course, and a new bar called Tom's sprung up, with the same theme in mind. I was put off going for quite a while. Due to the current legal requirements for running a place like this, private membership is necessary, and at the start they were charging quite a bit for it. However, they recently stopped charging for it altogether, and in recognition of that section of their customer base, the New Year Financially Fucked, entry was free last night and tonight.

I went last night. It was more or less the same thing as Schwarz. You have to watch your step on your way to the bar, otherwise you might trip over the guy on his knees servicing another guy, and in the darkroom, conversation as a prelude to sex is almost discouraged. One of the barmen was wearing a snug-fitting vest and had the body - especially the biceps - to pull it off. I wanted to pull it off. His vest, I mean.

After moving around a bit, getting to know different men (fnar fnar), I hooked up with a rather nice chap, and we headed back to mine. He was a bit nervous about holding hands in public, saying it wasn't worth the hassle, but I told him I knew Kung Fu, and if anyone gave us any shit, I'd collect one of their eyes. Mercifully, my misplaced faith in myself (I failed my most recent Kung Fu exam) wasn't put to the test.

It was about 4am when we got home, and I was exhausted after the long day (the earlier turbulence-ridden return flight I endured that day was not good for my nerves either) so we collapsed. We woke surprisingly early, but rather than get up and be productive, we spent most of the day in bed, getting it on.

The only problem is, now I sit here wide awake with my body clock gone to shit. What's a boy to do?

Go to the Bulldog, maybe?