We got our laser (one of the lasers…) replaced in the Bruker timsTOF fleX MALDI 2 (I looked up the official weird capitalization just for you) on Friday. The laser, which costs something like as much as a nice car, looks like a gray metal box with a bunch of random cable connectors plus a flat metal plate that I guess must get Real Hot because a heat pipe and fan thingie gets bolted to it. Which is what real lasers normally look like. But back in the day we had this DNA sequencer that used an argon ion laser to excite the fluorescent dyes used in the sequencing chemistry, and that laser, holy crap, that laser was a shiny black metal cylinder with a bigger cylinder on one end and a gigantic power cable, and it looked exactly like a movie prop laser. Like it seriously looked exactly like a prop from Star Wars or Trek or whatever. The most laser prop looking real laser ever.
I’ve been looking through my old photographic slides, so far those from the late 90s, and it fun to look through them. There are a few of my mom in there from when she was roughly the age I am now. It’s funny, the way I would take photos thinking of what was interesting at the time. I visited the old house to do some work up on the roof and have photos of the roof, because how often do you climb on the roof? That’s an interesting subject for photos! I didn’t take any of mom, because mom’s just around all the time, right? Twenty-five years later…I wish I’d taken a couple of mom while I was there, you know?
I picked up a new prescription at a new pharmacy and ended up having the experience of hearing the patient, who is in fact me, referred to as “he” in the third person repeatedly. Presumably the Michael dude who it’s for couldn’t come in, and whoever I am, his wife or girlfriend maybe1, am picking it up. Whenever this kind of thing happens I think, do I want to explain this? No. No, I do not want to explain.
Honestly I have these thoughts wondering if they know and are jerking me around in some sort of deniable way. Like, they might get into trouble with the management if they actually said a slur or something but if you just act confused what can anyone say? But I spent years being just obviously a person with a beard wearing dresses, and no one hassled me about it, no one pretended to be confused or made anything difficult. So having had that experience, I think people really don’t notice, are actually unaware. I never expected that to actually happen!
Obviously I’m wearing a respirator, but today with two days of fuzz growth all around the edges because tomorrow is electrolysis day. I might have imagined a numbing cream specifically described in the prescription as for electrolysis might hint at the use but who knows, could be for all sorts of things I guess.
“Passing” is the weirdest thing.
To be fair, that dude probably would have liked a girl like me. ↩︎
“Feasibility Study of Mining Coal in an Oxygen Free Atmosphere; A Demonstration of a New Mining Technique to Prevent the Formation of Mine Acid in an Active Deep Mine: Phase I”
The miner in the proposed process must work in an atmosphere that will
have less than 0.1% oxygen and will be at 100% relative humidity. The
life support system thus must not only supply breathing oxygen but
must remove carbon dioxide all without contributing significantly to
the oxygen content in the mine.
The idea was to avoid acid mine drainage by excluding the oxygen that oxidizes the pyrites to produce the sulfates by simple mining in inert gas with the miners wearing life support suits. This has real “guys will write a long proposal for coal mining in inert atmospheres before going to therapy” energy. 1970 was a weird time in environmentalism!
I was trying on some clothes in a shop today and overheard presumably mom-and-little-daughter talking in an adjacent fitting room and mom was explaining something about wearing shorts under a dress to avoid display of underwear in case of gust of wind or sudden urge to do a cartwheel. It was adorable and also on the one hand mom explaining practical stuff to a little kid so they don’t have to just trial and error it out by themselves is great and seems like something that must happen, but also, obviously, my mom never explained any such things to me! Indeed, not explaining such things seemed like sort of the goal of parenting!
This came to me in a dream. It was a very lesbian dream. I was on my back in bed, a woman was on top straddling me, and … we had all our clothes on and we were telling each other jokes about Tom Scott and, apparently, C. (I know the real transbian stereotype is rust, but I’m old and we lived dangerously back in the day.)
