Due to the ASS FREEZING COLD of living right next to a lake during winter, I decided to curl up in bed and go to bed early-ish. Woke up once or twice in the night, but that's par for the course now and again. I finally, semi-gracefully, got out of bed near 9, did my hygiene rituals, and dressed. This was the first day and some dead wraith from high school was nibbling my brain lobes. Consequently I decided on my beige khaki slacks (mostly since I wear the same pants for a week at a time), a beige shirt, and the brown master carpenter's vest that Sasha's boyfriend gave to me as a gift back during my visit. I absolutely adore that vest. It makes me look like I should be teaching high school English.

I looked so damned outdated in terms of style that it had to be posh-esque.

I scrolled the main drag looking for places open and willing to swallow my money. The usuals would all wait until 11am. Even Qd*ba grill was a 10:30 job. But I had my hopes set on the meditteranean place just down the way. They'd been open early before. Surely they wanted the early crowd money.

And success! I was sitting with a gorgeous plate of hummus and chicken in no time. The arabic tea was magnificent as usual. I love that place more than any other restaurant in town; only Ian's comes close. It's more an arabic mediterranean place, so the blend of music is much more to my liking.

After food I headed to the psych. building and marvelled at the sight: wall to wall undergrads: sitting, standing, all milling around. I noticed one from our variance analysis stats class. Fairly cute young irish thing. Wasn't sure if she was trying to get my attention or had a turning-head-to-left tick. Awfully calm tick, musta been. Eventually I slunk in, and in quick order most of the people from the stats class last semester. The prof had just gotten her Ph.D. last year apparently and this was her first time teachin' the course. The T.A. was a 3rd year, guy I'd seen now and again.

The atmosphere was very collegial and friendly. We spent 25 minutes going through each person and ticking off our name, research, and if what scientific variables we were working with. Now most people kinda amble around what they say. Not me. I have it down to a quick sentence:

"I study immunological facets that contribute to the onset and perpetuation of mood and anxiety disorders."

Amanda, the prof., smiled, nodded and said, "Great! Now could you repeat that again?" Most of the class laughed in a good-natured way. Guess my style is notorious. I dutifully explained what the hell my blurb meant. Oddly she seemed interested and asked me for some experiment design examples. I just ended up saying I look at how the immune system seems to react different to different stress contexts (i.e. anxiety, hostility, etc.). I got the nod, the "very interesting", and it moved on through the rest.

As usual we have some non-psych people, such as a few industrial ergonomics folk, an industrial engineering major, and a few others. We've even got another middle-aged to older student among us, which is cool! She's portugese, kinda like one of my long ago exes.

The syllabus seems more straight-forward and kind. Two tests, as of now non-cumulative. An on-going stats project. Four homework assignments. Nothing insurmountable. The book also seems alot more clear than the one from last semester.

So feeling chipper, I stuck around, asked all sorts of precocious questions because I'm thorough/anal, then shot out to get a drink of some kind.

Now, with the windchill as it was in Insanity, even walking 4 blocks to the coffee place near my lab was painful. My ears and face were completely numb by the time I got there. I saw the same kindly 30 or 40 something woman there. She chuckled when I went for the hot chai, since I'd been the oddball and gotten iced a few times before.

This is turning into a travelogue and I'm probably boring the hell out of you, so let's fast-forward to the primate class.

First of all, there're 350 people in this class. The sheer SIZE of it boggles my brain. The biggest class I ever had in college mighta had, say, 40-45 people. I mean this made public classrooms in Los Angeles look intimate. So when Dr. C mounted the stage, I was curious what the experience would be like. He was his usual jovial and joking self, using a playful style of lecturing that really resonated with all of us. The class seemed relatively straight-forward in terms of memorization and having 3 tests. I'm just auditing it, though, so I can pick and choose. I wouldn't miss it for the world, though.

Few minutes after that class I talked with Dr. C, learning that he had the rest of the afternoon free. I couldn't walk back with him, though, because I wanted to stop by student health. Y'see, over the last 4-5 days, I've developed the most incredibly dry skin on the tops of my hands. Running hot water on them hurts like a thousand stinging needles. So naturally, I wanted to figure out whether I just needed lotion or if a flesh-eating bacteria was slowly figuring out I was the new Club Med.

Thankfully they had an appointment time in just 30 minutes. Unthankfully I waited for 20 minutes after being put into a room and having my usuals taken. The nurse herself agreed that I had some very mild eczema. Just general red inflammation, bone dry skin, but no itching or lesions (bleh). As I was walking to go out, though, the nurse wanted me to come back in and take my blood pressure. She thought it seemed a little high (140/100), and my other reading was a little off too (144/90). She decided that I should come in for a full screening to see if anything in particular might be wrong. I'd actually wanted to get a panel done. Y'know: triglycerides, cholesterol, etc. I asked if she could do cortisol, but apparently that was an advanced test and she wanted to cover the basics.

So after going through more of the trappings of student health, having the wrong labels put on my stuff, etcetera, I braved the cold to get back to the lab.

Dr. C and I sat down and made a few modifications to the experiments we'd discussed yesterday. As it stands, I get to answer the same questions that I was interested in, but kinda one at a time now in more of a piece-meal fashion. Piece-meal didn't sound good to me, so Dr. C smiled and said it was more "systematic". It's fun when someone has your sense of humor. I think this is an improvement over my other design in a few ways:

(WARNING: If animal research bothers you a great deal, do not read the following. I offer this warning as a courteousy.)

1) If the pilot and the three main experiments generally conform to what I expect, I could be looking at 4 different publications. With the huge ass experiment, it would have been in 1 big publication.

It might be I'll still have to combine some things into this or that article, but still: at least one more publication than I woulda gotten otherwise...if all this works out.

2) I don't have to kill myself doing a huge experiment. As it was, I'd have had to do 3 non-infectious drug groups of 12 monkeys each: a control group, a sub-sickness dose of a ground up, dead bacteria, and a mild sickness dose of that same dead bacteria stuff. For a given monkey, I would have:

*Injected it's drug dose

*Waited an hour or so

*Had the monkey experience one of three different stress contexts, either an anxiety, hostility, or depressive one. Recorded behavior for 15 minutes.

*Done a blood draw immediately afterwards to look at the immunological "snapshot" after that particular stress.

*Take the blood, get the plasma, freeze the blood and plasma. Clean the room and cage. Re-house the animal.

*Wait 4-7 days for that animal to become "normal" again.

*Do the same thing on two other testing days, except presenting the monkey with one of the two other stress contexts on a given day.

What the hell does all this mean in terms of man/person/descended from space microbes hours?

Well, 3 hours per monkey for one testing day...and 3 testing days, so about 9 hours per monkey.

Now take 9 hours, multiple it by 36 animals. Yeah. The experiment would have taken a solid 3 months to do. This is assuming if I went with my "testing two monkeys on a given day for 5 out of 7 days a week".

Sound like a sure-fire case for madness? Yeah. Even with helpers I'd have gone bonkers, and Dr. C could guess this. I'm dedicated, after all, but all that smushed with taking classes? Naw.

So what we agreed to is alot more realistic. I'm happy, he's happy. He even offered to write up the first two experiments for the procedure outline we need to present to the animal research committee. These guys make sure we aren't doing anything unnecessary to the animals. I kinda feel a little weird having him do the write-up, but I guess maybe he was feeling gung-ho about it? I'm trying not to think it reflects on me personally. After all, I'd written up the entire thing for the old experiment before.

I guess I have trouble reading people's inner intentions. I guess I also have trouble thinking that people just sometimes do things because, well, people just do things sometimes.

So I took a more than extended break from reading about primate taxonomy. I'll either read more about that and evolution, or go back to the stats book.

One of those two.

A friend of mine is also in bad straits right now. Some bad shit went down and is still falling down, stuff like that. I'd loaned her some cash for food because, fuck, we need to eat. Hard decision, but I trust her.

That situation is kinda bothering me since I don't want her to needlessly suffer.

Other than that, though, life is good.

Hope you're well.

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