today and relativity

So I know I'm a bit behind, but I just realized the importance of relativity today, at least as far as how it affects my own life. During the first weeks of work, I felt a bit young and useless because everyone else was so experienced and all I did was read as much as I could to catch up. Reading being a very inactive activity, I didn't feel like I was doing much. I still haven't started my exciting experiments yet (my cells were dying...more on cell death later...) but I've been taking care of my cells and other things, so I've been doing a lot more, but it didn't feel like much of a difference until a new high school student started working at the lab. Watching her read and do all those things I had to do in the beginning made me very much aware that I've at least gotten past that stage, and that for once I'm more familiar with the lab than someone else there.

Then, the postdoctoral fellow who I work with wanted me to help her transfer some mice to other cages. My main project deals with cell cultures, not mice, but I've been taking care of her mice while the person who usually does that is on vacation. In the beginning, I have to admit, I was wary, as I was scared by the mouse in Clav and I'd never seen so many mice in one room before. Plus the other person who was training me to take care of the mice (not the same as the postdoc) had been working with them for years so it was nothing to her. Needless to say, in comparison, I again felt a bit inexperienced handling them (though they brought back bittersweet memories of my pet mice). And, when the postdoc trained me in other procedures, she's so expert that I was bewildered at first. But today I was really surprised to find that she is extremely nervous around mice and left all the transferring up to me. We had to weigh them, and one of them jumped out of the very high container onto the floor (mice are amazing; that container's height was three times the mouse's size). The prospect of this happening has been a fear of mine since I started, but being with a person more scared of them than me made me much less so, and though it took about ten minutes, I caught it and without any anxiety. This role reversal made me feel much more useful, even though it's not really a big part of my work there.

Just when I was feeling responsible and old, everyone in the lab started talking about our beach outing tomorrow. We're going to Santa Cruz to celebrate our boss's birthday. People were talking about how they didn't want to be out in the sun, running around all day and someone mentioned bringing aspirin. This discussion all came after I was thinking about how excited I was that Richard, Aud and I have finalized our road trip to LA and how we'll be meeting up with everyone at the beach, and how I love being in the sun all day, and how much fun our previous energy-draining beach outings have been. Back to feeling young, this time in a good, unjaded way.

After work, I went to the grocery store to buy ingredients for the food I wanted to bring to the beach tomorrow. We don't do much grocery shopping during the school year since we have the dining hall, so I experienced that on-your-own feeling that grocery shopping gives you (the one that's replaced by the I-hate-this feeling after you've done it enough times). Then I went home, remembered that I can't cook (it took the actual failed attempt to remind me), and I realized that there are still things that are independent of age, and that are just me.