One of the few ways I know how to lift myself out of depression is to go to lab.

Of course, this strategy is somewhat less effective if you're working and working and never seeing any results...but even the act of working towards a result can help me sometimes.

I was feeling overwhelmed about various personal things in my life, many of them related to anxieties about moving and starting a new phase in my life. Right now I'm kind of still working in my undergrad lab in a very low-expectation, lackadaisical kind of way, and I very nearly didn't go in at all because I was feeling kind of shitty.

I finally got up the energy to go in at around 3 pm to check up on some stuff, and I realized a ligation had worked when I screened it by PCR. It was one of those surprise ligations where only one colony on the plate grows, but that one transformant is the right transformat. It was enough to lift me out of my funk.

So...after dinner I came back and started working on this more. Re-doing the ligation that didn't work, and transforming the miniprep of the ligation that did work into an expression strain. I'm going to be here until 10 pm. It's totally illogical for me to be working like this. I should be coming in at 9 like a normal person. And for that matter, even if I do get a soluble expression of this protein, I'm leaving town in less than two weeks. There's not enough time for me to play with this.

But I can't help myself. I have to do that transformation. I have to see.

It's an addiction.