Surplus.

I've been in a time lag all week, catching the seconds as they drip from the clock in order to make sure I have everything accomplished. Today, I finally caught up. I found myself with an unexpected two-and-a-half hour surplus, which I exhausted blissfully by consuming an entire novel, and I'm happy to report that things are at equilibrium again.

I read a shared blog today by an anorexic support group, and I looked down at my own arms and thighs, feeling kind of disgusted. The girls' photographs showed bundles of acute angles gilded with perfect sheaths of flesh, and I was almost jealous. I mean, I try and eat under a thousand calories per day for controlled weight loss purposes, but these girls are going on seventy-five to a hundred. I know enough to calculate all the ways that isn't healthy, but still...

In the lab today, I made a 4% agarose gel to definitively genotype my samples and ran it all on my own. It's kind of tricky; you have to supersaturate the buffer with the agarose while keeping all of it in the flask (it bubbles over extremely easily), but it went as well as can be expected. I'm getting tons better with a pipette, too; my hands don't tremble as much, and I can load my gel beautifully every time. My favorite part of running gels is loading the samples; I love watching the tiny drops of golden loading dye transform into royal blue solution as I add the PCR product, pipetting up and down to ensure homogeny before sucking up all five and a half microliters and transferring them into the tiny gel slits.

In academic news: I haven't gotten my calculus test back, but I think I might very well have aced it. I mean, after a math test, you kind of know, which is nice. My second chem test went equally well, but I may have missed a couple points on the theoretical explanation behind Schrodinger's wave equation...we'll see. (Quantum physics...it gets me every time. I like intuitive science, with changes I can measure and observe, so with quantum, I have to reduce it to memorization, or I get caught up in why it shouldn't work.) I had a Book of Mormon test today, too, which was more difficult than expected. It asked for many precise references, and there were a lot I didn't know/was unsure of...augh. I seriously ran to the bathroom and cried after that one, especially because it's worth one third of our entire course grade. I'm praying to see a percentage prefixed by 9; otherwise, I don't know what I'll do. I mean, I'm sure med schools aren't going to care if I fail Book of Mormon, but I don't need my GPA to drop because of it. I wish I didn't have to take religion classes, but it kind of comes with the territory.