Being an Adult

Ah 久しぶりです。This past month has been somewhat mental. Between all the work (oh so much work) and the other writing I’ve been doing I’ve had very little time to blog. Nothing serious mind just some short fiction but I did manage to get my first story published (a whole $5 is mine to do with as I wish.)

Now to the meat of this post. As I said lots and lots of work so no real adventures, and to be honest not much sleep either. Still when you aren’t sleeping it does give you plenty of time to think and I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

The thing is it was my Birthday recently; I’m nearly a quarter of a century old now. I’ve never liked the run up to my birthday and I think these days I just assume the worst and get into a bad frame of mind. Quite a few mishaps have occurred between my last post and now and I put it down to bad birthday luck.

But that's crap. 90% was my own carelessness and the other ten, well it just couldn’t be helped I think. The thing it got me thinking about is what really makes you “an adult”? When do you cross that line? I always thought it was something to do with making it out on your own, being accepted by others and respected and so on, and yet sometimes I still feel like a kid.

The thing is due to my own carelessness I’ve lost or damaged some things at work recently. Now these things happen I know but I truly am week to things, facts figures, faces, quotes, no problem. Things, forget about it (and I do). Either way that's not the problem. It was how I handled it.

Now obviously I was upset and what made it worse was a dressing down from the administrative staff. I’m sure I’d of had it worse if I was Japanese but they were still pretty stern. Suddenly I felt about ten again. The trust was gone, I’d let them down and I felt incapable.

I’ve got a real thing about letting others down, it really triggers my mood and I need to get a handle on it. Thinking on it though it is childish. Sure you can let people down but I think the ‘grown up’ thing to do is accept it, apologize sincerely and then get on with it.

Most people are pretty tied up in their own lives you see. These little mishaps impact them so little in the long run. I do want to keep a low profile though and I’ve not helped that this month, sticking out is not a good thing around here. Maybe I’m just trying too hard these days, definitely I’m working too hard. I can’t please everyone and I should just accept that.

Do we ever really grow up though and in the end what does that mean? I haven’t the foggiest. Independence? Nah everyone needs help sometimes? Not screwing up? Haha with my scatterbrain that’ll never happen. Screwing up and setting it right? Yeah that’s probably more like it. Maybe being n adult isn’t about controlling your life but taking ownership of it.

 

So where do I go from here. Well just keep doing what I’m doing I think. I guess I’m still busy and I’m still a scatterbrain so I’m sure accidents will happen again. The key is to accept it, be mindful of ones self and hope for the best ey?　There are still plenty of things I can do and am capable of. Maybe I should write them down one day. When the brown stuff hits the fan I've always been someone that gets stuff done at least. Anyway I’ll be back with something more interesting next time I’m sure.

Ja mata neee.

Whats going on?

So ohisashiburi desu ne? About time for an update from myself. I'm sure many of you (Ha I wish that many people cared about my life) have seen/heard/read about this.

And most likely this as well.

I won't do the catastrophe the diservice of trying to sum it up here. It's a major disaster, truly awful and I'm not a good enough writer to do it justice. Many talented journalists around the world have done that already. What I will say is that Spring-8 th synchrotron at which I'll be working is over 400 miles away from Fukushima. It's also on very high ground, at the foot of a mountain in fact, and has it's own power supply so it shouldn't be hit by the electricity cuts. Here's a nice picture of the synchrotron (look it up :P) ring in the day time.

So what that means is I'm still going to Japan at the end of the month. How do I feel about, well friggin terrified to be perfectly honest. I'm miles from home in a completely different culture in a country thats going through hell. Am I excited though? Hell yizzle. I've been wanting to go here for years and I don't think anything could stop me right now. A good friend once told me that fear and excitement are more or less the same emotions in terms of the neural pathways they employ. I'm definitely feeling that right now.

On a side note I've been doing a lot of work this week in preparation. So as some of you know I'm off to Japan for work. I'm doing a pHD right now in molecular biophysics. That essentially means I'm using x-rays as a means of producing structures of biological molecules. This is something thats quite common practice however I'm trying to take it a few steps further.

Normally this kinda thing is done using crystalline samples of protein, exploiting a property of x-rays known as braggs diffraction that amplifies the intensity of x-rays diffracted by regular crystalline latices, you still with me? Well basically there is a problem with this process and that is most proteins don't form regular crystals, particularly a very important class, membrane proteins. These line the periphery of the cells of our body. These babies are important drug targets and are involved in a lot diseases so it'd be nice to know what they look like.

Back to me :). This week has been totemo itsogashi. I've been tinkering with a machine called a Digital Ion Trap. This thing is used to store proteins that have been artificially charged and vaporized to a gaseous state. It's main application is actually in determining masses of proteins, usually to figure out what is in a complex mixture. We (myself and my supervisors/collaboraters) hope that we can use this thing to capture proteins in the gas phase in a small area so we can bombard them with high power x-ray lasers and ultimately produce an image of them. Sugoi desu ne?

< The DIT

Well anyway I've been fiddling about with this thing all week trying to get as many ions into it as possible. We had some success earlier in the week, but the past couple of days haven't been great, currently I can't seem to get some of my proteins into the trap to begin with. Not the confidence boost I was expecting before leaving :(. I'm just trying not to let it get to me , there are a few more things I wanna try and I do love tinkering anyway so fingers crossed.

Now good news. I can see now  yay. Or at least as well as I ever could. My eye has stabilized now so it shouldn't deteriorate any further, awesome news right. It's only  been 10 days so hopefully things will only get better. Can't wait to play some frizzers :D.