Ridiculous Words

I’m not going to lie... I have very little to write about this week.  And that’s making it a great deal more fun to read through my old blog posts than to write this one.  I think I’ve spent the past two hours procrastinating rather than writing this post... so you’ll have to bear with me through the boring bits, since it was a strugglefest to write them.  No, strugglefest is not an actual word.  Yes, it’s something I use on a regular basis.  No, this is not at all relevant; I just felt the need to address it.  Yes, I’m still procrastinating, even as I started to write the post.  I’m going to move on from the legitimacy of the word strugglefest now, and get to some more relevant words.

A request from last week’s post was that I keep up with the crazy GRE-level vocabulary words that I included last week.  And since the list of words I’m supposed to know is now over 250 words long, I’ve got plenty to choose from.  As a result, this week’s post is going to consist of one ridiculous word per day.  I’ll give you the word and its definition, and then explain what happened that made the word fit the day.  Yay words!

Monday

erudite – having or showing great knowledge

Monday mornings in lab are almost always spent in group meeting.  The way group meeting works in our lab is that one person presents anything they’ve been working on since the last time they gave group meeting, and the rest of the lab asks them questions or offers suggestions about other experiments they could do.  I can’t say that I contribute much to these meetings, mostly because I don’t have the level of expertise that the other members of my lab do.  (To be fair, they’re all multiple years into grad school and/or already have a Ph.D., so I’m a little bit out of my league).  But the ease with which everyone is able to ask intelligent questions, or offer actual useful suggestions astounds me every Monday (and then again every other Friday, when we have Journal Club meetings and present papers). 

Basically, people in my lab are ridiculously impressive, and if I can attain their level of knowledge at some point in my life, I’ll be very happy/proud of my accomplishments.

Tuesday

toothsome – (of food) temptingly tasty

On Tuesday, one of my friends came back from spending the weekend at home.  He’d spent the last month observing Ramadan, meaning that he wasn’t eating between sunrise and sunset.  To celebrate his return to being able to eat at normal hours, we decided to go out for food.  We ended up going to Dorado Tacos, a taco restaurant in Coolidge Corner (part of the outskirts of Boston).  I had two fish tacos and un elote, or corn on the cob with seasonings, crema (sort of like sour cream) and cheese.  It was totally delicious, and very filling.  I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who has some time to kill in Boston.  I’ve been there twice now, and both times the tacos were wonderful.

Wednesday

timorous – showing or suffering from fear, nervousness, or lack of confidence

Late last week, my PI (principle investigator- the professor who’s in charge of my lab) decided that everyone working on the project that my grad student and I are involved in should have a meeting so that we can all be brought up to date on what’s going on.  This was a totally reasonable suggestion, but I was kind of dreading it because it meant that I had to talk about my work in a knowledgeable way, in front of people who are (as previously stated) really good at what they do.  In a word, I was very timorous going into (and during) the meeting.  I managed to acquit myself in a not-horrible manner though... afterwards, my grad student told me that I had done well, even if I was rather obviously nervous.  Hopefully after doing this a few thousand more times, it will become second nature and I will be less nervous.

Thursday

soporific – causing sleep or lethargy

On Thursday, I got to do a really exciting experiment, where the italics are meant to stand in for sarcasm.  Basically, I needed to figure out how long the plasmid we’re working with needed to be incubated before it was fully formed.  In order to do that, I got to take a small sample out of the solution every 30 minutes for four and a half hours, and then run them in a gel to see where the bands for every half hour fell.  And then, once we figured out that only an hour was needed to fully incubate the plasmid, I got to do 10 minute time points between half an hour and an hour.  The whole process was rather soporific, since the 30 minute intervals weren’t long enough to really do anything else, so I basically went into lab for two minutes to grab a small sample and put the larger sample back in the incubator, and then sat on my computer studying vocabulary for 28 minutes until it was time to do it again.  So much fun.  It was good that we figured out how long the plasmid needs to be incubated though, so there was a silver lining to my boredom.

Friday

ebullient – cheerful and full of energy

tremulous – shaking or quivering slightly, timid, nervous

Friday gets two words, because it was a rather full day.  The first word, ebullient, is applicable for a number of reasons.  First, my grad student found out that he got a fellowship for next year, which is a really big deal... it’s more or less a scholarship that’s awarded based on the work you’re doing in your research, but there’s only 65 of them awarded per year for the specific fellowship he was awarded, so it’s really exciting.  I didn’t really get how big a deal it was until our PI came into the office to congratulate him (she never actually comes into our office or lab... there’s always something big happening when we see her there) and then I googled it and realized that it was a big deal.  So everyone was pretty happy about that.

Additionally, all of my experiments that I was running on Friday worked the way they were supposed to, which was exciting since it meant that we could start actual work on the project on Monday.  And since the school year is almost here (when did THAT happen??) it’s nice to know that we’re more or less on track for where we want to be.

Friday was also tremulous (the quivering was only in a metaphorical sense... I’m more referring to the timid/nervous aspect here).  At the end of the day on Friday, my grad student had to go to a meeting so I was left for about an hour and a half with nothing to do (since all I had left for the day was planning the next week’s activities, which took about 5 minutes... but then I needed to discuss them with him to make sure I wasn’t forgetting something major).  As a result, I spent the hour and a half alternately freaking out about grad school and studying vocabulary.  It was mostly freaking out about grad school if I’m being honest... the fact that it’s almost the beginning of the school year, and I’m going to have to apply to grad schools in just a few months kind of hit me all of a sudden.  On the bright side, I had a good talk with my lab for about 20 minutes about what they had done to get into grad school, and where it was reasonable to apply, and how important the GRE was, and things like that.  Since it was Friday afternoon, no one really wanted to work, and they were all willing to answer my questions, which was nice.  So my tremulousness abated a little bit.

Saturday

ennui – a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement

Don’t worry, I brought this one on myself.  Saturday morning was spent doing some completely necessary grocery shopping.  And Saturday afternoon/evening was spent studying for the beast that is the GRE.  My friends and I sat down in a cubical in the Student Center for eight hours, doing practice tests and reviewing things we need to know for the exam.  At the end of eight hours, you’d think we’d be done studying.  But instead, we went home, grabbed some food, and continued studying, although perhaps not as diligently as we had been when we were in the Student Center (at least on my part).  Studying was pretty much suspended when I had a laughing fit... you know those moments when literally everything seems funny? That was a good hour or so on Saturday night.  My friends were mildly concerned for my wellbeing, since I nearly toppled over from laughter a couple of times.  I’m going to go ahead and say that I should maybe limit myself to studying for slightly less extended periods of time in the future, if only so that everyone can retain their sanity.

Sunday

noisome – having an extremely offensive smell; unpleasant, disagreeable

felicitous – well suited to the circumstances; pleasing and fortunate

Sunday was another two-word day, as it was again spent in activities with very different levels of enjoyment.  As you may have noticed, the two words have pretty opposite definitions... I did a lot of things on Sunday.  The first word, noisome, relates to the dreaded House Cleaning.  This time, rather than cleaning the first floor again, I got to clean the bathroom.  Yay.......  It wasn’t actually all that bad though.  I was expecting a lot worse to be honest, but most of it was just not thinking about what I was doing, and letting the disinfectant do its work.  Fairly painless, as far as jobs go.  Noisome still fits though, since the idea of cleaning the bathroom was certainly disagreeable. :P

The second word, felicitous, relates to the hour I spent skyping with my friends from home.  It was a little ridiculous, as my microphone decided not to communicate with the Google+ hangout we were trying to have.  Our solution was that I would call one of my friends, she would put me on speakerphone, and I would talk through that.  It worked, but I’ll need to figure out what’s wrong with my microphone at some point.  It’s not broken, since it registers sound (I just tested it with both Skype and my internal sound register thing) so it’s the way that it’s communicating with Google that’s an issue. 

Regardless, it was wonderful to talk to my friends, no matter how difficult it was to talk to them.  They’re doing ridiculously cool things with their lives, and I don’t see them nearly enough.  Hopefully that will change at some point in the future... I miss those crazy people. 

And now it’s 11:59, so I’m going to sign off... yay for new words! Next week will include the GRE, so that should be fun...

Until then!

Alycia