Spice of Life

Spice. Spannung. Panache.

I'm no Kobe, but I know a triple-double-entendre when I see one. This particula' trifecta describes last weekend to a T.

It kicked off early with a Thursday-night outing to a Mexican restaurant with the colleagues. I flexed my taste-buds, ordering a Chimichanga - extra Scharf (spicy) and followed Erwin's example by washing it down with a Panache (beer with lemonade, also known as Radler and Alsterwasser in the non-Saarland parts of Germany...we're so French). Chilling outside of work with the colleagues is great. Getting to know their personal lives gave me a hint at what mine could be like in a couple years if I continue with this research stuff.

Ah, the research stuff. On Friday, I struggled to diagnose my sick circuit. The dual analog inputs were causing problems; apparently they were interfering with one another, and I had to call German tech-support to decipher why the Spannung (voltage) was abnormally high. It apparently had something to do with "cross-talk" or "ghosting", but since technical German is pretty much lost on me and it isn't anywhere near Halloween, I left it to Monday.

Consequently, the Spannung (also: tension) remained elevated. I went jogging to combat the two Goodbye-Cakes at work ;.( no more Jan) and strayed off the beaten path in search of the setting sun. A poetic run resembled an extended metaphor after I got lost in the woods. When I finally reached civilization, I thought to myself, "Oh, Scheidt!". I was in the neighboring town, facing a green sign that read "St. Ingbert 5 km". My foot was killing me. Without money for a bus, I hobbled to the next green sign: "St. Ingbert 4,7 km". Ouch. And the next green sign: "St. Ingbert 4,7 km". Huh?! When I finally got to the WG, my foot tut Weh from gehing, so much so that I was afraid my Saturday on the Salsa Ship was in jeopardy.

Das Salsa-Schiff (Fanfare Please)

I had been looking forward to the Salsa Ship all month. Every Wednesday I attended Salsa-Tanzschule (dance lessons) to prepare myself for a glorious evening on the Saar. To remedy my ailing foot, I visited an Apotheke (pharmacy) for pain-killers and improvised with some tape and a couple extra socks. It was gonna take more than some aches and pains to stop this Queen from spreading his spice on the dance flo'.

In spite of the weekend's tribulations, the evening was a great success. Imagine a floating Diskothek with higher mean age and mean dancing ability. It was by far the most funked-up ship that ever sailed the Saar. I accomplished my objective of showing those Germans the true meaning of "panache" and got flagged down by an Italian man who told me to dance more "macho".

Dance Partnerin - wawaweewa

Italian Man

Home-Dawg Klaus with Band

No, I may not have seen the sunset, but above the Saar the stars were aligned.

Mark@Work

Today I assigned Jan the important task of photodocumenting my day for y'all. Here's what the ol' boy came up with:

Compiling Taguchi Test Results

Lacing Cells with Nanoparticles

Programming!

Yep, it sure is a long day...

...but you get through it somehow.

Holy Schnitzel!

Last weekend was my cousin's B-day party. She turned 20, and invited lots of her friends to celebrate. I played some guitar. There were 4 kilos of schnitzel.

Heaven on Earth?

Plan B

And now an update on the Praktikum I've been up to at the Fraunhofer Institute:

After 8 weeks on the job, I'm entering the homestretch of the internship firing on all Bunsen burners. The first month was mostly an Ausbildung where I learned and gained experience with aseptic technique and the culturing, counting, and torturing of cells. I also learned the basics of a completely different style of computer programming (LabView) and assembled a nice little program that reads in data from pressure sensors. There had been plenty of odd jobs to do, like building capillaries, assembling an adaptor/interface for a machine (soldered for the first time), and correcting my colleagues' grammar. And train my Praktikant.

I was happy to absorb all of the information and experience during June, but after running tests for a whole month, I realized that not only were the cytotoxicity assays losing their edge, but my results indicated that the water was more toxic than the notorious silver particles swimming in it. OsNOsis it what it should be called.

In light of the circumstances, I negotiated with my supervisor and replaced the rest of the scheduled cytotoxicity tests with an experiment to optimize an assay. I designed an experiment modeled after the Taguchi Method and hope to find more reproducible and robust parameters for a test which measures membrane damage. As far as I can tell, no one has ever tried to optimize a cytotoxicity test using this method before...time will tell if that makes my idea groundbreaking or incredibly far-fetched and stupid.

We'll hope for the former, since in one month I'll be officially presenting my body of work in front of the Department of Biohybrid Systems. Seminars are held in our department every Tuesday in which someone presents his or her research and findings, or discusses a topic on the cutting edge of biotechnology. I'm looking forward to it, but I'll be hard-pressed to condense everything I learned and worked on this summer into a single presentation. It should go well, but just in case, Plan B is a well-rehearsed, half-minute hip-hop dance routine that'll show those jokers the meaning of cytotoxic.

Scenic World, Fictional World

Years later, when facing the screen brightly illuminated with memories of the past, I'll remember the day I discovered the world is a vibrant work of fiction.

Although the sensation did not truly occur in the span of 24 hours, it will be conceived in such a way, as memories often are, so the soothing stretch of rail winding through the dark and familiar tunnels in a cloud-crested forest will reside next to the neuron occupied by refreshing waters inviting tired-legged teammates to a post-game bath.


This process will inevitably distill my recollection, but it need not be so, for reality was perfect as it was. I might not have realized this truth hadn't a pinnacle of fiction been lying in my lap, but the novel held the key to what had previously been an indecipherable manuscript. Upon my fifth visit to the Bodensee, I could therefore live in the nostalgia of the present, as if I was reading a really good book. It's hard to comprehend in this world that a little angel could pause mid-sentence to pick up a four-leaf-clover and hand it to you with nonchalance, or that a family could walk a path past dusk toward woods alight with the shimmer of a trillion glow-worms. But I now believe that utopias aren't the inventions of authors, but rather their inspirations.


Applying this lesson to places other than the Bodensee has yielded encouraging results. A little reflection can uncover the extraordinary embedded in every day. It might take some internal rewording to see things in this light, but it is not to be confused with passive acceptance or with gasping at the slightest provocation. I believe instead this summer is and has been genuinely amazing, and with this realization I plan on living like the "good ol' days" are here and now.