Reminders of home, like lab

Being abroad lends itself to appreciating certain things I would not be able to stand back in the States, just because they remind me of home. I first noticed this when I began to enjoy spending time with someone who I found incredibly annoying. I couldn't figure it out until I realized that the odd, very indirect connection that this person has to my life back home was subconsciously comforting.

(Advisory: the rest of this post has almost nothing to do with being abroad.)

I noticed the second one a couple days ago when I finally started counting the spots from my last timecourse in lab. (I just have to finish before I go back home, it really makes no difference when I do it.) But I put it off because counting spots sucks. I look at my images, try to figure out whether a cell is a single budding cell or two separate ones, can't reach any definitive conclusion, then freak out because I feel like my counts are arbitrary and I can't do science. It's a reminder of how dumb I felt the whole time I tried to get the ropes of being in a lab, how I messed up every time I felt comfortable enough to work without the tech holding my hand, how the size of the lab and the shared space made it awkward to figure out silly things like which chemicals and which dirty glassware bins were ours, how I didn't know how much I should be helping with making media/cleaning/other maintenance since I wasn't work-study and the other undergrads were, how I couldn't synthesize and correlate the scientific concepts in my head to what was going on in front of me, how I got overwhelmed by the idea of creating original experiments to answer an original question, how it got awkward since I was always too dazed and tired to talk to people and make friends (although I blame the mono for that one), how bored I was sitting in front of the microscope and taking images. In a one sentence summary: how it started to convince me I'm not cut out for grad school or lab work and made me feel like shit.

DAMN, IT FELT GOOD TO WRITE THAT ALL OUT.

Well, my point was that for a minute, it was kind of comforting to count spots, but now I've taken off the rose colored lab goggles and it sucks again. On the upside, I'm glad I have this time to reflect on my plans for the future, to review yeast genetics/genetic techniques, and to catch up on all those journals.