One of the lessons you learn as a Research Assistant is this: you do quite a bit of random stuff to get through slow days. Ideally, you wouldn't want to, because you don't know where this is going, and time is of essence. But when you're a graduate student, it allows you to mingle. So it works. I'm interning as an RA at a university in Muscat, Oman, for four months. Sprawling campus, quiet 30-minute drive to campus, and lovely Islamic architecture. Most importantly, something to keep an otherwise useless post-graduate waiting on graduate applications busy, in a generally quiet town.
So this morning, like a few other mornings, I dive into non-project-related work. Skills are skills after all. I'm supposed to sift through bags of silt from a lake bed in Australia, looking for eggs. Tiny, microscopic eggs. Translation: hours spent squinting into a version of Leeuwenhoek's greatest gift to biology. I plug in the lights and set up the toolbox: miniature airtight jars, tweezers, probes, droppers, petri dishes and glass beakers, and squeeze bottles filled with water and ethanol to euthanize the little critters.
You learn quickly that the key to getting through the tons of monotonous days and tasks is an iPod. I don't know how scientists got through without them earlier, because in those days instruments were large enough, and rooms small, to leave no space for a bulky record player. Sometimes you want to hear the quiet humdrum of the machines in the room, but it's earphones all the way.
I prepare my samples for viewing, sit on my backrest-lacking throne and start sifting.
I see a little asteroid explosion on my dish. The pale yellow background of the light underneath glistens through the large and small chunks of brown, dark brown silt. I'm looking for something that looks almost exactly like the debris its buried within. I need to break these mounds with the probe to find the eggs. Tap, tap, tap. Trouble is, when you break one chunk, it sets tinier chunks flying in every direction. I start a one point, and move the plate clockwise to cover the entire area without oversight. With every little task, you establish a regimen. Neither lab class nor field trip. This is the excruciating path of research. So I probe, lift, twirl. And then again.
There, in the midst of that chaos, I find my treasure.
Even if you've been doing this a small while, you'll know a living thing when you see one. So I find that smooth-edged, shapely, mustard-brown egg, almost glowing red sandwiched between the dirt chunks above and the light below. The circling stops, the area around in cleared, the dropper dives in and sucks the little critter in it's temporary haven right out. I put a strike on the sheet with the details of the sample. The circling starts again. And I continue to break mounds of dirt for that fiftieth chunk that will yield that golden egg.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
When one song flows into the next, I don't realize. But I'm constantly humming. I've unknowingly memorized these songs. Until the next set of 100 that I take the week to memorize.
The tapping stops. I think there's a fatality. I gingerly tap again, and the dirt disperses. False alarm. Sometimes, I'll admit, I am more afraid of ruining the shape of the beautiful critters I'm fishing out and into the ethanol that puts them into a permanent sleep, than I am of killing them.
I found another. Three actually. And after seeing no results for ages, I actually yelp. Out loud. On such occasions you're glad that there's no one there but you, and those that are, have earphones. I repeat my fishing routine. Stop, clear, suck, spit, return. I smile as I watch the alcohol from the dropper tip starting little eddies in the water. See the several teeny possibilities of getting lost in the mundane everyday tasks?
The dish takes too long to rotate. It's taken me four hours to sift through 6 grams of soil. 42 grams to go.
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