Happy 4th, happy post-presentation!

Happy Birthday United States, God bless our country and this one too!


A memorable 4th it was, as I delivered my speech in Japanese with partial success, knees knocking ferociously with increasing frequency and amplitude as I reached the description of the two laboratories I work in (a stretch with particularly long words like "kenkyushtayroo"). I had the entire thing memorized, but managed to royally freak out beforehand anyway. Just before going to give my talk, Dr. Yanagawa gave me a stack of about 20 papers to look over, and as I flipped through them, all with his name on them and published mostly in the last year, I realized that this professor who I had been confused about what his position was here was actually a reknown mastermind of knockout mice. It didn't help that he was sitting in the front row. I stumbled at the part about actin (sorry) and had to refer to my notes to prevent butchering the language and probably causing an earthquake at the same time. Thankfully the first slide I did in English was the slide of actin dynamics and I could calm down and deliver the easiest presentation of my life when compared to the agony of the introduction, hehe. It was worth it though -- they really appreciated the effort and they SAID it was understandable, hence a good thing for the two people who do not speak English. Whew.

Each person in the lab then gave a 5-15 minute presentation about their research projects (cool syt stuff going on here! And tubulin dynamics in the presynaptic terminal! Wow!), and 3 hours later we finished and went out to dinner at a very nice restaurant where you sit on the floor with no shoes on, and no cheating holes under the table for legs! It was really fun talking to everybody, Dr. Yanagawa is as nice as Dr. Kuromi is, who is probably as nice as they come. I really like this lab, and homesickness has ebbed to a just a dull roar. It's a great opportunity to be here and I will learn a million new things with all of this interesting work going on. In memorizing my speech I got a better idea of the Japanese sentence structures and can pick up some words now and then in conversation that give me a clue what people are talking about. It's a small step, but it helps.

My stomach must have finally desensitized, as I ate squid and raw tuna with no problem and even thought the tuna was good. Well, I did have beer with it, hehe. There was one item, however, that I had no clue what it was. It was a brownish stack of meaty looking stuff on a stick, and I just put a piece in my mouth without hesitation (surrounded by profs who have been very kind to me and are buying my dinner, I'm going to eat it!)... and I immediately knew it was liver. That was a torturous moment that will live in infamy. It's not just a texture thing for me with liver, it is the awful taste coupled with the knowledge that it is a liver that caused my two previous accidental experiences to end over a nice toilet. The mouthful was too big to swallow immediately, so I chewed it, wiped the tears away before they were noticed, and went to a happy place as I fought to keep my stomach under control. Finally it was over and washed down with beer and meso soup and a few more tears. Ugh. Even thinking about it starts stomach contrations again. I have to watch out for that, it was nearly a disaster. I didn't expect chicken liver on a stick.

I found a cool bug in my bathroom last night and brought it into the lab today for Tamura-san to identify. Turns out it's just a cockroach, and not well-respected here. Ah well, he can't help it that he's a cockroach so I stuck him in with the beetles. I think he has retractable antennae.

One thing that had me fit to be tied during the research presentations is that whenever someone asks a question and gets an answer that clarifies things for everyone, everyone goes "Oooooooooooooh" and "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah-haaaaaaaaaaaaah" in unison for quite a while... and it reminded me of the yup-yup aliens on Sesame Street. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to pipe up with a "yup-yup-yup-yup-a-HA-a-HA" (don't worry I didn't), but thinking about it had me dying and trying to hide it as there really was no reason to be laughing. Hehe.

Must get to sleep at a reasonable time tonight, tomorrow will be drug day extraordinaire.

Kanpai!
Janel