Speech.

Cat got my tongue?
Kind of. It's called aphthous stomatitis, and you probably know it by its common name: canker sore.
After finishing off my Sunday night with two Otter Pops, I woke up this morning with a tiny canker sore right on the very tip of my tongue. It's amazing what one tiny sore can do to your desire (and ability) to speak. This morning I had to explain the experiment Dana and I performed on Thursday to David, and I tried to do it using as few words as possible so I didn't have to speak much...I'm sure it didn't contribute to my image the way I might have hoped. I'm trying to be smarter around here, but the fact remains that I'm unfamiliar with the equipment, the area, the protocols, and the subject matter; I work with an MD/PhD, a PhD, and a master's degree student; and we're at Harvard. I'm a 19-year-old Utah girl with no experience in tissue culture and not even an undergraduate degree. The "fish out of water" thing isn't new for me (England, the Philippines, Jerusalem, figure skating lessons, Arabic classes...), but it's hard all the same.

I give everything a valiant try, but that's all I can do, which is frustrating. I finish the tasks given to me efficiently and (hopefully) correctly and always leave my area clean and organized, but that's really all I feel I can do to help my case. I can't join in discussions about secondary antibodies, ubiquitous protein expression, or frozen sectioning, and I feel like I can't share anything from my little collection of knowledge, either, because it doesn't overlap with anything here. I like my work here. It's just that it's completely new to me, so I feel like I don't bring anything to the table. Bring me on in your effort to stain proteoglycans in the intracellular matrix of a knee joint or TMJ, and I'll have some ideas. Ask me to read a blood sample for parasitic diseases or prepare a restriction enzyme digest, and I can help you out. But ask me to culture bone marrow stem cells or perform immunohistochemistry and I'll putter around nervously with the protocol in front of my face, grabbing at tubes and putting them back, looking around for the right centrifuge, shaking as I use the pipettes, etc. It's frustrating. But I'll learn, I guess. That's comforting.

P.S. Ravioli? Holy cannoli! I had the most delicious cannolo (yes, that is the correct singular form) in the world (pictured above) at the iconic Mike's Pastry in Boston after going hiking and seeing a movie with some kids from the ward (yes, this does mean I'm finally making friends!). It was a combination TO DIE FOR; sweet ricotta cheese and homemade pastry, chocolate dipped and chocolate chipped. And I didn't think I even liked cannoli.
P.P.S. Will Smith's little boy in the new Karate Kid movie is the most adorable little boy on the face of this planet.
P.P.P.S. I'm currently obsessed with the "Married Life" score from Up and the main title theme from Finding Nemo. My life is more comfortable and far happier because of this obsession.