Lagging

I don't feel much incentive to post lately. I've been caught up doing lab work and dealing with unusual personal turmoil. Besides, this blog hasn't been shaping the way I wanted it to. And for my work, phytochromes have momentarily slipped into the background while one research mentor is away and the other hasn't had time to set up our LED arrays for a trial run of the experiment. I keep seeing and thinking about phytochromes everywhere anyway. The plants in our first row of greenhouse mesocosms are tall and pale and developmentally trailing behind the rest due to lower light exposure (or is it over-watering?). My houseplants are pale and starved because I keep closing the shades to decrease energy consumption (and Apollo-dog "pruning" off their new leaves doesn't help either). Everywhere outside I see plants reaching for sun. I still don't have a map of how they do it.

Instead I spend my time pretending I understand what I'm doing as I learn to extract RNA from plants I heat shocked. Why is it so difficult for me to apply classroom concepts I learned in college to practical experience? I feel like I have a wall in my brain. I am constantly aware of how little I know and how badly I piece together the little I do. It doesn't help that I am so burdened lately that I have resorted to writing bad poetry while I wait for the samples on the centrifuge to spin down. I am turning into someone I do not recognize.

Image middle right: Arthurium nemesis (the redoubtable Apollo), photographed by Arabidopsisgirl