let everything happen

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.

-rilke

---

the email in my inbox asked: 

was it okay? good? not what you expected?



my response:

All of the above. I feel like I'm taking my first deep breath in about 72 hours. Yikes, the real world is hard! But exciting. 

My mentor-figure in the lab is a Chinese woman who is just returning to work after maternity leave. In my little computer-cubicle area are the two of us and a woman from India who is about 6 months into her post-doc. In my line of vision from my desk is an Australian man; tomorrow I'm meeting the guy who's going to teach me things about patch clamping - he's an Israeli scientist. This morning my mentor (her name is Mufeng) started talking to Andres about visas and the length of various flights, and I'm not sure where he's from, exactly, but he sounds European, like maybe German or French is his first language. 

I feel like I'm on the set of a movie or something; everything and everyone so extravagantly interesting. There's a room in the lab that's the "cold room," always at 4 degrees C. A dark room; a room used solely to transfect bacteria with DNA; a room with the equipment for patch-clamping. And the various patch-clamp "rigs" are inside of Faraday cages, and when I first saw them I imagined myself tucked inside like a hermit crab. 

So far I have learned a bit about transfecting DNA in HEK cells, fire-polishing micropipettes, and the beginning steps of DNA cloning. By next week I will be starting to practice patch clamping. Yesterday Mufeng said, "Maybe in 3 weeks you will be self-sufficient," and Kenton (the big boss of my lab) grinned a bit and said "That's ambitious," but she didn't sound like she was joking. 

AHHH. It is very much to take in; and also there is Bethesda itself, the three lanes of traffic headed each direction around NIH campus, the mad crush of people at rush hour, the shock of being two days removed from a place where I knew even the cracks in the roads.

But mostly I am happy, glad to be here, excited to keep learning. I'll be happy to sleep tonight, though.