Yesterday, after four hours of sleep and getting the most painful cramps of my life and having to TA a class all by myself because my co-TA had a stomachache (oh boo hoo), I had to come back to the apartment and study for my synth lab practicum and written final, as well as finish two lab reports for this same class.
I basically have a love-hate relationship with synth lab. I actually really like it when I'm in there doing the experiment and I love the hands-on part of lab. But then, when it comes to writing the lab reports and I've been busy or procrastinated, I despise the whole writing-them-at-1 o'clock-in-the-morning part of synth lab.
So I came back to my apartment. It was a beautiful day, extremely warm and sunny, and there was a carnival going on in the quad, with cotton candy and obstacle courses and goldfish and everything. I resisted the temptation and went up the stairs, feeling extremely sad that I was going to miss everything, but as soon as I walked in, one of my roommates yelled "LET'S GO WIN OURSELVES A GOLDFISH AT THE CARNIVAL!"
So much for self-restraint.
So we went downstairs and I raced my roommates on the inflatable obstacle course, stumbling through it and falling all over ourselves, and we won ourselves a goldfish, got FREE STUFF (every college student's dream) and ate cotton candy. At this point of my day, I was having about as much fun as these guys!
After lengthy discussions about what to name our TWO fish (which finally ended in us choosing the names Sir Waffles Spankalot and Lady Pancakes Spankalot), we got to work. This was the easy part. I was basically describing the procedure and my results and was listening to GloZell in the background for entertainment. Work was getting done pretty easy (mainly because I was basically copying stuff from my lab notebook) and I was accomplishing things like a boss.
But then, synth lab threw me a curveball. I was supposed to be doing a cost-
yield analysis for which compound would have been better to use. And this is where I was completely lost. Our product yield was completely messed up, we had no clue how to calculate and shit was not cool.
I could relate to this guy right about then:
I figured the rest of the lab report would be easy. But obviously that wasn't the case (this is Tech we're talking about). They decided to throw a zinger at us at the very END of the lab report by giving us two bullshit post-lab questions that made absolutely no goddamn sense. And I KNOW they didn't make any goddamn sense because Yahoo! Answers, my Holy Grail for finding answers to chemistry questions I don't know the answers to, only had one answer to the question and it was "I'm in CHEM 2380 right now too, and I'm still working on it." This entire time, I'd been sitting there working and trying to stay awake, so much so that I basically looked like this poor baby. That was it. I reached the end of my tether.
This fact, combined with the fact that I had a written part as well as a lab practical and I was scared shitless about it, and also because I was starving and had gotten no sleep in the last two days, resulted in a minor meltdown in which I just grabbed a pillow and screamed into it as loudly as I could. When taking a break, I saw this guy and decided that it would do us both some good to sit down and have a little bonding time and let out our problems.
After a while, I was able to calm down and get back to work. And even though it took forever, we finally did all the practice questions, finished all the calculations and wrote both our lab reports with as much grace and dexterity as this panda.
And now, I'm finished with synthesis lab for the rest of the semester (and for the rest of my LIFE) and am finally going to do this:
Good night :)
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