Psychopathic effect

(title is a horrible pun on "cytopathic effect" - basically the sick cells you see when you infect a tissue culture with virus.)

I'm listening to Jonathan Coulton and it's making me feel a lot better. He achieves that incongruity of "sad songs about happy things and happy songs about sad things" that a friend once attributed to the Barenaked Ladies.

Cause it’s gonna be the future soon
And I won’t always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
It’s gonna be the future soon
I’ve never seen it quite so clear
And when my heart is breaking I can close my eyes and it’s already here

I have a chronic nail-biting/picking problem and it's been a constant source of shame ever since my best friend said "Oh my God, your fingers are disgusting." Today I managed to chew off 7 nails due to a combination of lab meeting in the morning plus being cornered by our most annoying postdoc in the afternoon. He's the type of person who not only talks too much, but can't explain things straight and can't listen to anyone more junior than him.

I think with my hands and my eyes; I stutter when I speak and struggle to retain what other people say (really, I'm trying). I FARKING HATE meetings.

Qiu, one of the other grad students in our lab, was talking to me just before we left work (at 6pm). She's been at our uni for two years longer, but transferred to our lab after I did. She's partly funded from a different prof's project and she got scolded for spending too much time on the other thing...and for not making any progress despite the fact that she had to wait for him to get back from vacation to order some special cells.

In a way it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who feels like they're floundering a bit...as she said, "I just wanted to know how [our advisor] talks to you guys."

Oh hey, another Coulton song, this one about a giant squid (he writes a LOT about unrequited love for a guy with a family...)

So I can’t do that thing anymore
I can’t be the thing I was before
Maybe I am better off alone
Because I crush everything
And I crush everything
And I crush everything

And everything I want I take
And everything I love I break
And every night I lie awake