Control Illusions

Comfort comes in many forms.  It can be a blanket.  It can be a memory.  It can be a routine.  Comfort can be the illusion of control.  Nothing scares most people more than this realization.  Even as I type this I always feel that I have some type of control but I don't.  No one does.  On my way home today, which is a straight 2.5 miles to my house, I could be hit or hit someone.  I could not wake up tomorrow.  I could also wake up for the next 50 years.  I don't know.  I am not in control.  There are little actions I can take that have an overall effect but it is not precise.

Example?  I could switch to low fat milk/cheese as my physician suggested, which I probably won't because I like food, to add 3 years to my 50 years of waking up.  It would have the effect of helping my heart stay strong longer but it doesn't mean that those 3 years extra could not exist because of something else.

If you have children, you don't truly know what they will be.  Who they will be.  How they will love.

Courtesy of  I Fucking Love Science.

Control.  Quite an illusion.  I know this, probably intuitively since childhood but I forget sometimes, I really do.  On a daily basis I make plans.  I look towards the future and plan.  Lately though I've been questioning all of these things.  I think my job makes me think about these things more often than I used to, seems to cause a few existential crises a month.  You know all this working with individual amino acids and their tiny components (protons, electrons, neutrons, bonds between these) makes you wonder about the silly things that we plan for in our lives.

I think I'm just going to concentrate on enjoying the little things that make me happy and not worry too much about being productive all of the time (not applicable to work) or going places.  While I'm planning on going places or doing activities or having stuff, my essence is disappearing into the abyss of entropy that is our universe, so let me just say I love all you atoms and your bonds that make us, us, you, and I!  Tell your special accumulation of calcium just how much their aggregation in this here and now means to you because at the end of the day we just got lucky.

Have a great week!

Poster Perfect

Famous B coming to you live from LBB!

Yes I am famous now!  I was famous for about 15 seconds - at most - this past week!    The taping of the Juanes concert I attended at ACL Moody Theater was aired!  A seriously edited video but it was fun watching extremely closely to see if I was in the crowd :)  I mean extremely closely because it was seconds and then I was gone!

An old poster of mine :)

Sorry I've been absent but it has been so busy.  On the weekends I haven't done much of anything either, I blame it on the weather.  September was still really warm, not 38C/100F but still high, definitely in need of AC.  October has been kinder, we actually had rain on Sunday - lots of rain.  However, work has just been super busy.  We had a mini-conference at work and I had to present a poster, which of course was nerveracking.  Once you get going it's OK but the first person to come up to the poster always makes my stomach churn.  The poster presented will also be presented at the Biophysical Society Annual Conference in February and I'm pretty excited/nervous about that.  It's in San Francisco this year so lots to look forward to in the coming year.  Otherwise, work is good.  I am happy to report that I have achieved the crystallization of a few mutants and have managed to express a difficult construct (mutated protein).  

 In what spare time I have had I have also experimented with Pinterest projects :)  Some fails, some wins but fun.  I have knit most of the yarn I had so that's good, now I can finally buy some more!  Woohoo. Exciting.

Well hope everyone has had a good fall so far :)