Protistos

20^th July 2012

I was lying on the floor with my legs stretched upward trying to relax them completely without letting my knees bend when I realized what I was doing. I was doing nothing, and I was doing nothing for a long time. I didn’t know how long I’d been doing nothing on the floor rolling on my back. I think I was thinking, but I don’t remember what I was thinking. Why would a 34 year old woman be lying on her bedroom floor on a Friday afternoon with her legs up in the air, apparently thinking, did she not have somewhere to be or something to do?

I could say that my life was tough, really hard and that not many people could do what I do. I am a PhD student in the field of zoology. People always light up when I say zoology. Some naïve enquirers presume that I am practicing to be a zookeeper, some kind of specialist vet or something (I thought so too before I was educated on a higher platform), but I study something that we were taught at school to be, ‘The simplest forms of life’, Protists. Protists are single-celled eukaryotic organisms, yes, like amoebae. Saying that they are ‘simple’ is not realistic and this common belief has only been borne out of text books patronizing the layman too much. ‘Simple’ was supposed to mean, in my unqualified opinion, just that it was a lone cell and nothing else, a simple form of life. The person who came up with ‘Protists are the simplest form of life’ must have been in a bad marriage or relationship or something because to think that living by yourself would be simpler, they were no poet. ‘A single cell that can survive on its own’, you have to admire that.

You might think that being a training scientist is tough, yeah, I have to work on something that I don’t know that much about and probably never will know that much in the end. “Scientists, when answering questions in science, always end up discovering more questions, more than they can ever answer.” Well, I don’t find that to be an inspiring thought, however I feel a tad sadistic that my research could be the next student’s PhD question, their battle for the doctorate. I won’t get any Nobel Laureates doing what I’m doing, unless I work out a way to save the planet using protists, but it could happen, I suppose, to someone else. Protists have been here far longer than we have and, I don’t want to get into arguments with any creationists, but we evolved from a single cell, so studying protists do hold the key to the past.

The truth is, people do do what I do. People all over the world are doing PhDs in science and have been doing so for quite a few decades now and probably with much less fuss.

Lying on the floor on a Friday afternoon is not really making a fuss, but the thing is, I feel ill. Not ill enough to be laying in bed sleeping, surely not, but just enough to keep me from going out of my room or doing any work. An observation of mine is that PhD students feel ill a lot of the time, “I have a sore throat, I thought I had one the other day but I really do have one now.” Or another very common comment I hear around college and the departments is, “Don’t come near me! I’m really not feeling very well, I know I shouldn’t really be working but… Everyone’s got it anyway, I think there’s something going around.” 

There is a perpetual soup of viral incubuses that inhabit universities. Of course everyone blames the undergraduates, those idiot trendy youth who wear innapropriate fashion clothing and are paying for an education that they might never even professionally use. Yes they get drunk and kiss and make love to one another more frequently than the rest of us but they are responsible for this viral onslaught. Their fabulous voyeuristic life-style, burning those candles in every way they can makes everyone sick. OK, so we can’t put all the onus for everyone being sick with more frequency all down to the undergraduates. Postgraduates, yes, they too are students, and could be regarded as just a more experienced undergraduate, but with foresight – I suppose we should be more weary of them! These postgraduates, like many undergraduates, come from foreign lands, but a lot of graduates then go on field work to far off even more exotic lands only penetrable with a special certificate by that country’s government, or perhaps a bribe, and then coming back home with a bunch of data and a persistent cough that just won’t go away. Perhaps these postgraduates ARE more dangerous than the undergraduate annual plague bearers of freshers’ flu.

There are conference delegates who visit the out-of-term vacated universities but do not stay long enough to really infect a place for that long, but perhaps enough to cross-contaminate far off campus and far off campus with something that might become the next season’s freshers’ flu.

I have a sore throat, well, really I just have inflamed tonsils and a bit of a cough. I feel tired and I don’t care much about anything. I’m trying not to think about my PhD. Doing a PhD is easy, not doing a PhD is harder.