Where's my reset button?

I've been home for over a week now, and it's a little weird.

A lot of it has less to do with being back and more with getting ready to leave. The last week largely consisted of sending out more job applications and looking for a place to safely pass out in for a week after driving the 28 hours to Seattle. Some might see it as apartment searching, but after the amount of walking, driving, and flying I've done in the past few weeks, as long as the mice don't mind another snuggle-buddy I'll be happy where ever.

Our goal is to get everything squared away by the beginning of March. Between the planning and the worrying and the arguing and the nerve-racking, I'm about one more bout of food poisoning away from ecstasy. At least I think we've got our new apartment nailed down. We sent them money and called dibs. DIBS I SAY.

There's other things that are weird about being back. Even though Taiwan has a lot in common with the States, I've had to readjust to the things I was used to a month ago. Some things, like the floor toilets and the possibility of becoming road pizza whenever I was near a street, have been left behind fairly easily. The floor toilets provided a Great Fun in trying to not fall into them. Other things have taken longer. For instance, now that I'm diligently job searching, I pretty much need a crowbar every time I want some separation from my chair. Being in my apartment for long stretches of the day is very different from my time in Taiwan and being almost constantly on the move. While it was exhausting to travel and do so much, it was by no means boring.  Even when I am successful in rending my behind away from in front of my computer, River Falls provides only so much diversity in locale. It's a far cry from the kaleidoscope of Taiwan's scooter-filled metropolises, murmuring seashores, and wide variety of architecture and local business. 

It sounds strange to me, as I'm more of the "hide in my cave while everyone else has enjoyable interactions" type, but I also miss having a lot of people around. Part of me misses all the people-watching, but I wasn't exclusively a wallflower over there. It's a good thing too. Almost everyone in Taiwan - and there were a lot of them - was nothing but kind and willing to put up with me masticating the Chinese language into a pulp. Even though it was difficult to get our points across, I really enjoyed being around so many people that were as nerdy as I am. I've worked in a lab with other people before, but not with as many people or with as large a set-up as in Taiwan. Adding to the awesome, most of the people we were working with were brilliant. It was a little intimidating at first, as I am neither tri-lingual, bi-lingual, and I don't even have a master's degree, but everyone there was just too generous for my embarrassment to last for long. 

Now, I'm back to my friends who have no qualms with telling me, "I love you, but you need to actually open your mouth when you talk or quit attempting speech with a mouth full of peanut butter" and other sweet nothings regarding how much of a socially-stunted over-achieving dork I am.

Not having a state-wide snow emergency was pretty nice as well. The heaven's picked the exact worst time to dump it's contents on me. I'm having enough trouble accomplishing everything I need to and squeezing in last minute visits with friends before we go due to my job/apartment/figuring out how to move/packing up things. The last thing I need is being blinded by plumes of snow on a frozen highway.

Until the Midwest road system becomes largely dependent on tunnels, I'll have to make do. There's a small mountain of things on my to-do list, including:

• Find a Job.
• Figure out how to ship things to our apartment.
• Finish my research with Dr. Huang.
• Meet with some bio/chem/tech clubs and a few teachers on campus to give presentations of my experiences
• Prepare said presentations
• Prepare a poster for NCUR that combines my last year of work, including the trip to Taiwan.
• Meet up with friends one last time before going out to Seattle (and convince them to come visit)
• Help out in the play my fiancé is currently struggling to keep afloat.

Fun side note: I can make soy milk now, thanks to the tutelage of Dr. Huang's wife.

Also, I totally typed in "globspot" instead of blogspot and think the former is Much better.

Taiwan Day 4ish

This is my busy face.

 It is unfortunately apparent how behind I am on posting and how poorly the posts that I do have convey what I've want them to. I've been really busy lately. Hopefully, I can stay up late tonight and get some things finally filed away in my mental "done" pile. I've got Regina Spektor crooning in one ear and Dr. Huang's snores in the other, so let's start with actually explaining the events behind some of the photos I posted in the last post.

New Year's Eve was one big ball of crazy. It was also exciting, hectic, and on a few occasions nearly perilous. I guess that's how you know we're doing things right. The day started off harmless enough with some more work with embryos. For those who understand nerd, the following is what we were up to, as I now realize how extremely vague I was (You may thank my fiancée for this - and most of my other positive character traits). For those who don't, suffice it to say that we're finally doing some science and skip ahead to the stars.

Our work at Academia Sinica was basically the same thing that our lab normally does in River Falls, except better. Normally, we use in vitro fertilization to obtain roughly a few hundred zebrafish embryos for pharmaceutical testing and other experiments. I was pleased to find that the fish at Academia Sinica breed infinitely better than those at UWRF. We managed to get something in excess of 2000 embryos to work with, which was very encouraging until I found out everything Dr. Huang had in mind for those embryos. The first experiment was pretty tame in that it involved comparing the effects of known drugs for heart failure against a compound from La Crosse we've been looking at since the summer. I've done dozens of similar trials. The other two experiments were a little more daunting. Both were time trials, which is basically Dr. Huang-lish for "people get to draw straws for who stays up all night to change the embryo chemical treatments at 6 hour intervals. The main purpose of this sleep deprivation is to ascertain the "window" of a drug's function on heart failure. As we also had to harvest the embryos, we get to look at variation in gene expression as well (in experiments we'll be doing tomorrow). I'm not sure why, but Dr. Huang offered to do most of the time trials. This freed the girls and I up for the New Year's Eve. While he's a bit of a workaholic, it's nice to know that underneath he's got a heart of gold. 

***********STARS********STARS*********STARS (Someone needs to show me how to do cuts)

After the work with embryos was finished, the pictures from the last post are pretty indicative of what we did. Dr. Huang's old lab assistant ChinWei loaned Dr. Huang some of his nicer clothes for our fancy New Year's Eve dinner, even though that's not really common in Taiwan. In Japan it is, but I think ChinWei was pretty confused by it all. He played along with our sillyness very well regardless. We had Peking duck for dinner, which was delicious even with the breeze that blew through the restaurant. Afterwards, we went to ChinWei's house for the very energetic party his family was hosting. I had a really good time trying to comprehend the three different languages spoken with various degrees of intoxication, though this may have been slightly due to my own sampling of some very fine wine and sake. It had a great way of making the actual content of a conversation secondary to the intent behind it. Luckily everyone was there to have a good time, so the verbal chaos at least appeared to be friendly. Honestly, it was probably the theme for the night, as the Whole City was lit up with fireworks to celebrate the 100^th New Year of the Republic of China. Getting home from the festivities was no exception to the chaotic theme, as it looked like all of Taipei and then some came to watch the Taipei 101 worked in fire. With some help from ChinWei and the Taiwan public transportation system, Kenna, Kathryn, and I all made it home safe and sound. The only real mishap was that I almost paid the taxi three times the fare, so considering everything that could have gone wrong while we were being jostled by the gigantic crowd, I'm not complaining. As far as first real New Year's Eve celebrations go, Taiwan treated me pretty well.

Day 4 - Sciensauce

Good things to know about Taiwan's public transit system.

1. The buses don't stop unless you hail them.

2. The buses are privately owned, so they are all a little different.
3. As the buses are not government property, the drivers are just as reckless, if not more so, than the scooter drivers. If they were all amazing defensive drivers, the streets would be filled with carnage.
4. I'm borrowing this from a friend I met yesterday: when crossing the street, don't just look both ways. Look in every possible direction. In Taiwan, it is very possible to be hit by a car while on the side walk. It's like playing bloody knuckles with traffic lights.

Luckily, we all managed to avoid this fate and worse during the bus ride from Hell's amusement park the Downtown-most part of Taipei City after the train back from the hot springs. After being shaken like human martinis for 20 minutes, the bus poured us out into Academic Sinica research campus. Solid land never felt so...solid. After getting everything stowed away in the campus hotel that we were staying in, we toured Dr. Huang's old labs and had pizza with some of his old research assistants. While they understood English and I knew some Chinese, we ended up using Dr. Huang as a translator many times while talking about everything from babies to bioethanol. Even with the language barrier, I think it was good learning experience for everyone. In addition to a few new words, I learned that my pronunciation in both English and Chinese is roughly atrocious. Hopefully I'll improve or one of the other by the end of the trip.

Getting to take a look at the research facilities that Dr. Huang worked in was great. It was my kind of place, with science tucked in every nook and cranny and big, expensive machines waiting to be put to work. For the first time in a while, taking the GRE's started to look very appealing (GRE = big nasty test to get into graduate school). While it's been in the back of my mind for year or so now, I'm thinking that if for some reason I decide against going into naturopathic research, the reason will most likely be grad school. I'd probably try and do something with developmental or evolutionary biology. Ever since I took a zoology course two years ago, I've been really fascinated by the correlations between the different phyla and their indications. We covered everything from Eukaryotes to mammalia and I loved every minute of it. Unfortunately, I tend to dedicate the majority of my resources to my goals, so I've not really had the chance to explore my interests outside of medicine and healing. Even though I can be scatterbrained and have multiple interests\projects going in completely different fields, when it has come to getting into naturopathy school I have let very little be a hindrance. I may joke about grad school now, but that's all it is.

Naturopathic school doesn't have any kind of admission exam, as they emphasize instead on applicant history. I really like this about ND schools, although I must admit it took me a while to come around to not being completely skeptical about it. While frustrating and stressful and a royal pain at times, standardized tests are my friends. I was one of the lucky jerks that cruised exams like most kids eat Halloween candy. As a result, I had a really easy time seeing why organizations and the like to use them so frequently. In hindsight, the tests weren't a really good indication of anything other than my innate ability to fill in a bubble-sheet correctly. I still see how they can be useful in determining how capable someone is, but there's a lot they don't factor in. Unless you're being hired to take tests, performance can really only be measured so much by something like a GRE or the MCAT.

We also finally set up embryos yesterday before lunch. It's good to be officially out of trip's first few days that were set aside for tourism and getting over jet lag. I'm sure some people were getting sick of me only talking about the food and the sights. Granted, others might be less happy about it. Research is kind of an acquired taste. 

For the experiments, I was pleased to see that Kathryn was not useless in the lab. Having not seen her in the lab prior, I was a little concerned as I knew that a lot of the protocols we would be doing on the trip would be brand new to her. Many of the people I've taught the protocol to in the past have at first lacked confidence or just generally sucked. I know that I was that way at first. In truth, she's not as experienced as Kenna or myself, but she's a quick learner. It's really a relief. Hopefully her affinity for learning lab technique continues, otherwise this could become a rough couple of weeks for her.

After the embryos, we pretended to be vodka and gin on the buses again (I'm seriously considering borrowing a helmet from someone while I ride around) to go shopping and see one of the Massive public gardens in Taipei City. It was very pretty although since it's the winter a lot of things were out of bloom. It's also kind of chilly, which confuses every bone in my born-and-raised midwestern body. A week ago, the temperature outside was -5 degrees and I was fine, now it's 50 and I get goosebumps unless I'm wearing pants and a jacket.

After the garden, we had to skip the shopping we had planned on and instead went to see the Cheng Kai-Shek Memorial before it closed. On the way, we picked up some hot milk-tea for the girls and what I think was lemon-flavored battery acid for Dr. Huang and me. It was delicious, but my stomach could probably be effectively hooked up to jumper cables and used to start a car. I've also yet to take a tally of my remaining teeth. Another down side was that if we hadn't gotten our drinks, we would probably have been sick with the cold but also arrived at the memorial in time to see it. We arrived just in time to see them shut the memorial doors. From what I could tell, it was a lot like an Asian Lincoln memorial. Luckily, there are other things to see at the memorial, so it wasn't a complete waste. In fact, some of memorial's neighboring buildings simply defy explanation in size and detail. I'd venture to say that pictures might have trouble expression how beautiful and grand those buildings were as well. I guess I'll just have to take people with me the next time I go out there.