Writing a blog feels like pouring from my mental cup— once it’s full and overflowing. That is if my mental cup is not full, it is more difficult to write. I try to collect experiences, memories, senses to build a ‘body’ out of all these.
And once my mental cup is overflowing, it needs to pour in an eye pleasing way. This imagination made me think of the song: River flows in you. If you have never listened to it, you should listen to it now. The melody brings me to the rivers that actually flow in me. Inside my blood vessels.
I imagine a red blood cell, tasked with carrying oxygen to bodily tissues. As the RBC navigates the narrow capillaries, it delivers oxygen to help tissues survive via oxidative phosphorylation. Think of this as —not oxygen burning the food you have digested to make ATP for you— but rather "Oxygen" giving a welcoming hug to 'energy deprived' electrons in the electron transport chain. Guess what this kindness creates—water.
Our blood is 55% plasma. As a thick and responsible river, it continues to flow in you. RBC returns back to heart, to be deployed for recharging in the lungs. As we fill in and inflate our lungs, oxygen gets attracted to the heme on the hemoglobin, in RBCs — which also makes them red. Now recharged and ready for a new adventure, RBC continues to flow with a new pitch in the melody.
Once I had imagined to study the lymphatic vasculature and the smooth muscle cells around them. Similar to pulsatile movements in striated muscles, lymphatic vessels also pulse and return bodily fluids back to circulation. The idea of discovering unknown physiology and cellular relationships using scRNA sequencing data really attracted me to learn genomic data science skills that I was hoping to master. I had to swing towards more of the biostatistics rather than the bioinformatics, and I can only think there must have been a reason for it.
My learning journey for omics analysis had a “first” this week. I found myself singing:
“For the first time in forever,
I got a hard time installing packages
For the first time in forever,
Need to make R speak to fortran and java,
Going back and forth <R and CodePilot>
I am somewhere in betweeeeen.
MetaboanalystR, I will figure you out, one day!”
My son had his 4 years' shots, he has been walking in what he calls “slow motion” :) I taught him a song to feel competent to wear his pants and socks himself:
I am very smart
I can do everything
I can use my brain
I can do everything
Once he accomplishes the task, he turns around and says, “Mommy, I used my brain”. I wonder why I did not teach a similar song to my girls. My middle daughter was struggling with rounding numbers. We opened chat gpt, asked it to help her learn the method. As patient of a teacher it is, disappointing to see that it was making mistakes in basic algebra. Maybe we should consider deepseek like many others these days.
I had my guilty pleasure of reading before I went to bed, instead of creating more figures. One thing I noticed in the “Keeper of Happy Endings” was that, all it takes for a woman to fall in love with a man is to see his “kindness”. To see that he would care for her. The romance is pictured in such an aesthetically pleasing way, you can feel the kindness in between the words and the lines. More than the romance, the deep personalities and back and forth of the story to fill in more gaps as it evolves are the hooks.
I am now going to go back to my IHC, singing my son’s song in my head.
Are there any songs that you find satisfies your cerebellum with aesthetic pleasure, keep rocking your head to the tune? What are some thoughts they bring?
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