Have You Ever Done Six Hours Of Research, Digging Through At Least Twenty Papers In Order To Get Yourself

*waters plants, chugs three cups of oversweetened black tea, pulls up six half-read, poorly annotated papers, knits three rows of a frog stuffie, re-reads prompt and guidelines, tries to command f keywords in the paper, finds nothing, re-reads the abstract, realizes all the papers are useless, goes onto googles scholar and searches for the same keyword, finds new papers, reads abstract and intro, finds something super interesting, reads discussion and realizes the methods for this study were slightly different than what you were expecting, has an existential crisis, wonders why tf they're doing genomics when they're interested in hydrocarbons, sheds one tear, shrugs, types furiously and writes it up anyway with a quick sentence explaining that it's slightly different but still relevant, cries, does citations and slams computer shut, stares at the clock which has somehow gone from 11AM to 6PM in the blink of an eye, and proceeds to not sleep for another ten hours*

"yEaH, i'M a ScIenTiSt."

reading thomas nagel be like

"sir WHAT are your verbs and why.

why are you like this?"

so. geoengineering. seems pretty fricking cool, right?

and like, in concept, yeah. no, Fe fertilization ain't gonna solve global warming, and it will probably have some wonky ass impacts on nearby marine life, and i wouldn’t recommend doing it, but it’s theoretically very cool! and it's so much more elegant that other CO2 reduction schemes.

buuuuut.

then, you get to other types of geoengineering. and it's like—

toss a bomb into the ocean!!!

froth the ocean.

shoot aerosols into the atmosphere.

put hydrofluorocarbons into the atmosphere.

yeet dry ice into the atmosphere to precipitate snow

like. sir. no?????

sounds heard while reading hnmr spec charts:

“it’s so sad, it has no friends!”

“that’s not possible, you can’t have that many friends!”

“that hydrogen is getting peer pressured.”

geoengineering be like:

no one:

absolutely no one:

some random scientist named dr evil: y'know what sounds like a really good idea? froth the fucking ocean, make meringue earth using CO2.

part of the scientific community: huh... y'know, what if we just... tossed a bomb? but like, into the ocean. in the middle of a hurricane. cuz. that works. 100%

another equally ridiculous part of the scientific community that is like 100% white military men: ...okay, but what if we put frickin hydrofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. yes, it will cause warming. we know. we just wanna. play god.

bernadette banner just referred to someone as her "resident chemist" and i am quite sure that this is the profession i aspire to.

papers are hard.

seriously, it's not even a content issue anymore (i mean, we have those in spades, but that's not the point right now—)

how acknowlegements???? like??? titles??? full names??? what if they're a child, because you're also a child trying to publish something? what do you do then? if someone has a doctorate but did less do you put them first or last in that acknowledgement category??? what???

was anyone going to tell me that hans christian andersen is queer, or was i supposed to just figure that out myself???

lysenko is the mansplain manipulate manwhore of genetics and agrobiology.

no, my mind cannot be changed.

delighted to be back in my happy place of bacteria, and not in the utterly horrifyingly confusing world of genomics.

...that said, i seem to have cornered myself into a deadline again, so here goes at least another three cups of tea.