every day I'm learning

[sciatrix]

....today, the learning experience is that coordinating the shipping of twenty-odd singing mice from New York to Texas is a mind-bogglingly complex endeavor, and I am just barely coming out on top of the bureaucracy. But! But! There will be mice I can use for this experiment, ideally by my committee meeting and at least so that I can do a kickass talk for Evolution this year. I'm applying for the SSE Grad Council this year, although the deadline is today--gotta make sure I set some time aside today to do that in amid the flurry of emails.

Also, I'm very carefully dipping my toes into The Body Keeps the Score and gritting my teeth the entire way--more because conceptualizing my life as traumatic in any way feels bad and wrong and self-indulgent and terrifying than because I think that the book itself is problematic. (I'm listening to the text-to-speak function on my phone, which is comforting and a little less scary than reading it for reasons I have no idea how to articulate.)

I'm low on Diamine Meadow right now (review) in my TWSBI stub pen, and I'm really sad about it. I think I need to commit and buy myself a proper bottle of it--this is just the tail end of the 2mL sample I got for my birthday last year.

Comments

[notasupervillain]

Now I'm imagining twenty mice in top hats with canes with crooked ends, singing and dancing together.

Please tell me this image is accurate.

[sciatrix]

Alas, it is not: they sing with their heads pointed up to the sky like coyotes, or sitting up on their haunches, and they don't move while singing. So very little in the way of dancing, and they're not super up on talking to strangers either.

Fortunately reality is still pretty cute. (That's a colleague's youtube channel, which has several videos, including one incredibly ridiculous one in which he used a goddamn fog machine to "simulate cloud forests," except he knows full well that the clouds in said cloud forests don't normally swirl as close to the ground as the mice sit.

I tend to refer to that video as MouseZilla.

[notasupervillain]

I'm glad that reality is doing it's best!

I hope you don't have to hurt them in the experiments, that would be hard on you.

[sciatrix]

These are not survival experiments, since I'm taking tissues, but there isn't much that should distress or stress them more than handling: one restraint and injection, and then a few hours of listening to playouts and responding as they like, and then isofluorane anesthesia they won't wake up from.

The thing is, they hate handling. So as far as they're concerned, that's generally the most stressful thing that's happening to them.

[notasupervillain]

What are you testing, if you don't mind telling me?

[havocthecat]

Ooh, Diamine Meadow seems to be just the shade of light green I'm looking for!

Good luck on the mice.

[sciatrix]

I love it SO MUCH. And it's not expensive, either, especially if you order in a bulk way from a company that's UK-based so as not to lose too much in shipping.

Thank you!

[kore]

........singing mice?

conceptualizing my life as traumatic in any way feels bad and wrong and self-indulgent and terrifying than because I think that the book itself is problematic

Yeah, I hear you there. It takes me ages to read books like that.

[sciatrix]

I work on them! They're the best study organism anywhere except when they're driving me up the wall because we know so little about them. Little brown mice--actually, "brown mouse" is the other common name, which is ridiculous because they sing and in a register humans can hear, at that! They're insectivorous and they live in Central America and I love them.

I keep sidling up to the concept and then sidling uncomfortably away. Augh.

[kore]

They sound adorable!

....yeah, I had one of those episodes where reading about the possible effects of trauma was kinda triggering. FUN.

[jesse_the_k]

*offers paw to hold while reading van der Kolk*

/disappears down a rabbit hole of ink reviews.

[sciatrix]

That blog is very very dangerous, isn't it?

[felinejumper]

MICE TRANSFERS. THE WORST. The worst. So much paperwork and obscure forms and institutional specificity and emailing vet staff to be like "please....?" and meanwhile time is passing and they're aging, damnit. UGH. Good luck, they'll get to you eventually and you can make lots of jokes about flying first class. Or driving, I suppose.

[sciatrix]

OH MY GOD I KNOW. And bossman was like "the mice will be probably between weanlings and 10weeks?" and I went "hm I don't believe you" and then YEP speaking to the lab manager at the other lab she was like "oh, I was figuring I'd send animals about 1 year or under..." and I'm very :| at my boss and glad I asked, because a third collaborator is theoretically taking the brains and he's a notorious asshole and is the person going "ALL OF THE ANIMALS SHOULD BE BETWEEN 8 AND 12 WEEKS." Which. Their litter sizes are 2.5 on average, motherfucker, and they don't breed real great; you're going to get what I can put together and like it.

Grumble, grumble.

[kaberett]

TBKtS: I have opinions on bits of the book that, in fact, ~problematic~, but honestly they're more to do with BvdK's lack of self-awareness than anything else.

Audio books: maybe more of a There Is Another Person Here And You're Not Alone support-in-self-regulating than you'd get by Reading Words On A Page? hindbrains are a thing, and also stupid.

also, good luck to getting over here, where I am still periodically incandescently furious about my trauma sources but at least am not still clinging to "but if I don't admit they were that bad then, magically, they will have Not Been That Bad and in consequence I Can Fix All This because It's A Moral Failing On My Part so I Just Have To Be Better"...

[sciatrix]

Yeah, I keep ricocheting between This Is Not Trauma This Is Just Background Radiation and, er, being seized by the desire to list all of the things that I've put up with in the last ten years and ask for validation that yes, That Really Counts.

Ugh this is very hard. Bah. BAH.

[kaberett]

<3

It counts because of the effect on you, and also, I'm really very confident that Whatever It Was would meet any reasonable bar for A Trauma.

[sebenikela]

SAME HAT

when I read van der Kolk it was totally just RESEARCH for a CHARACTER i was writing fic about and definitely not about ME, okay, I am obviously perfectly fine it's just that sometimes this is hilariously #relatable for reasons that can't possibly have to do with actual TRAUMA, okay, that would be silly...

etc.

...good luck?

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I relate to the text-to-speak bit. It's a lot easier to detach to things being read in an automated voice than a human voice with inflections that indicate an understanding of the content's meaning.

[sciatrix]

Oh, I wonder if that might be part of it? I find the TTS waaaay more soothing than actual audiobooks, weirdly enough.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I know for me personally, audiobooks can be super iffy if I just don't like the reader's voice/characterization of dialogue or the extra noises their mouths make (wet noises or breathing).

[wellthisisnice]

Ok, this finally made me lookup ebook apps that do the text-to-speech thing, so thank you for that. Now i should uuh, copy some of the textbooks and papers i need to read into my phone...

(Unfortunately, my copy of The Body Keeps the Score is not among my ebooks, so i'm gonna have to read it myself if i wanna move on from chapter 4 someday.)