Boo hoo

We had medchem lab this afternoon. I wasn't so much lab-queen today.

Our compound was chlorpromazine. A peculiar acidic drug that won't dissolve in base but does so extremely well in acid. Yeah I don't get it either.

So luck has it that while William and I are both performing UV spectrophotometry, he was given the acidic solvent, leaving me with beaker after beaker of precipitate as I stubbornly persisted in diluting the standard to satisfactory solubility. On top of that I had no literature values to serve as guides, because seeing as chlorpromazine dissolves so much more easily in acid, no previous studies had bothered using base.

It was a four-hour lab and William left after 45 minutes. Another hour later I managed to produce an acceptable but nevertheless funny-looking absorbance graph and was allowed to go home. Better than nothing, I suppose. If it really did go on for the full four hours I'd still be in there, probably bald from pulling out my hair.

I went home at the same time the school kids did. While sitting on the train watching them do all the horribly stupid things I once did a million years ago got me thinking about how different it is to be in uni. Mostly, to have that freedom associated with being a uni student.

Count the number of lectures you skipped this semester. Lost count? I know I did. I'm not good with flexibility. Completely rubbish at utilising my time. I like to be told what to do. If nobody tells me what to do I try to tell myself what to do and pretend that it's somebody else. I bludge like the next bludger and face the consequences during STUVAC, when I'd force myself to draw up elaborate timetables dictating what I need to have done by when. Then I survive. And I cry. And my skin succumbs to stress spots. Then I swear on a number of people's graves that I'd never let this happen again. They all should have dropped dead by now.

There were a few horrifying experiences I'd rather never be subjected to again. On the night before one of our second-year exams we sat around Derek's dining table with a bowl of chips and poured over our notes late into the night. Funnily enough I don't recall what subject it was, but I do remember the horrible panic associated with understanding less than 10% of the content. They were talking and I was trying to listen but it was like listening to the Spanish news.

Only days after that I was in Jenny's room with Mylinh at 8:00 pm, the night before microbio. After ten minutes Mylinh exclaimed "Annie, you don't know anything!". And that was true at the time. During the next five hours my brain gobbled up a whole semester's worth of lectures. It must have ate too fast because the next morning it had constipation and nothing came out.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is ... send me back to high school.