I'd gotten the same 6 hours as usual--woke up at the usual ridiculous hour-- but some astral demon had invaded in my stomach and was cranking up some sub-woofer terrorist action down there. I drove out to Mt. University, looking down at opportune times and trying to reason with my gastro-intestinal system. "What the hell is wrong with you?" I'd ask, "I never really feed your punk ass in the mornings." After the usual triple shot of Nescafe blackberry mocha, though, it settled down.

So there I was, after some of the usual errands, sitting alone in the lab meeting room with noone else in sight. It was 10 minutes before the right time; understandable, since I'm usually early. 10 more minutes pass by, 10 more still while I zoom in onto the ground below and imagine taking shots. Finally it was 40 minutes past. I wondered if Dr. Zivago was ok or I'd missed an email (and I found out later lab meetings weren't held on finals week). I went down to the lab again. The heady scent of rat glazed the air.

On a whim I went back up to my half office on some floor of the building. I heard a ringing, opened the door and there was L. She'd spent the night curled up in the scratched leather recliner there. There was something unmistakably moving about her condition and how tired she seemed. I asked if she needed anything. She smiled in her usual way and shook away a no.

I spent the next hour and a half watching a videotape of rats individually swimming in a giant cylinder and grading their performance. I figured since I wasn't able to test our animals this past friday, I might as well have finished what the undergrads started.

So, why throw a rat into a cylinder of water? Basically, if you put a rat in an environment where they have to swim and you keep them there for 15 minutes, the amount of time they spend floating over 7 1/2 minutes indicates their relative level of major depression.

This whole process makes fly sex look like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. To grade each rat, I stare at them for 15 minutes--15 very, very long minutes-- and click on a stop watch whenever they seem to be floating. And I don't know how, but the results are not at all good. The guys who should be floating are speeding off like motorboats with tails, while the non-drug ratsies look like speed junkies coming off a high with cannabis and mescalin (i.e. slow and fucked up).

But there's a bright side. Since Dr. Ziv isn't here this week and L sleeps up in the office on finals week, I just have to stop by on Thursday and drop off a paper on this lecture. I got page one done and nothing else this week..but it is progress. **[section deleted for personal and ethical reasons]**.

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In other news, Gran cut me a phat check. I needed it because, somehow, all the money had been cleaned out of my checking account and my last two checks had bounced. Don't know what the hell happened, but I'll figure it out.

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Finally, one new photograph. I'm not going to bother adding "photograph" in the subject line anymore, since it's becoming kinda moot...

Into the Light

Comment: has an elvish or fae quality to it.

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