sciatrix

today's job: sliding through I think almost two year's worth of group Twitter DMs to create an annotated bibliography of books, pop science articles, and peer reviewed journal articles on same-sex sexual behavior in animals that one of my collaborators (or me) have brought enthusiastically and waved at the others at some point. Then figuring out which ones we definitely absolutely yes do need to cite and point people at, in case we've missed anything, and coming up with good sentences to make sure readers can find, say, Malin Ah-King's work or Joan Roughgarden's or more of Marlene Zuk's or anything else.

It's going to be a fun afternoon once I sit down and eat something. I'm excited.

(Then I have to do some data entry and some grading and probably some formulating explicit hypotheses for the second two aims of my dissertation, but shhh. I'm being excited about this instead of rolling my eyes at my boss, who thinks I will magically work out how to graduate by December; I think this time next year is much more likely, but committee meetings wait for no one.)

Also on my docket: sitting down and figuring out what the relationship between cortisol and leptin really is, because there's something really fascinating and antagonistic there but I need to understand more about cort's role in energy balance and leptin's reactions to chronic and acute stressors first. I can probably justify spending the time on that under "lobbying to test my mice's plasma cort levels when I test the leptin" and picking other hormones to look at, but I need to think about what the kind of social stress the animals are under right now looks like in terms of the experiment. They've all definitely had one acute stressor in the form of being handled and injected before I ran the experiment, and I should think about that in context, too...