audaciousamadeus

[audaciousamadeus]

2024 Season Finale

Now, my holidays had officially started, and something possessed me to go to Notting Hill for the first time. Very mindful, very demure. I walked there for a bit more than an hour, went to a Japanese Café and got some last-minute Christmas decorations for my bedroom before I decided to come back. Seeing that Hyde Park was very close by, I decided to walk through the entirety of the park until I was close to the Victoria station. Getting there, I saw that waiting for a bus and getting on it would take almost the same time as walking home, so I decided to be unhinged and walk all the way down to Camberwell. My total walking time that day was around four hours. In the cold. Without drinking water. So unfortunately, this gave me a sinus infection for Christmas, but oh well. 

The experience was still so nice that I planned to do that for the rest of the holidays and explored a few places that I wanted to visit before but never had the time or energy, like the Queen's Wood café and the surrounding woods in north London, and walked all the way up to a bakery in Islington, to a Biang Biang noodles restaurant in Aldgate East, all the way from Camberwell to London Bridge and then to Vauxhall through Southbank, and places surrounding Crystal Palace park.

Soon enough my flatmate left on the 24th to be with his family and they would pick me up on the 25th so that I could spend Christmas with them. Fondness aside, I had an anthropological hype to attend this British Christmas and see how they celebrated it in their natural habitat. I made some of my vegetarian bacalhau a natas, as well as some palha italiana for dessert. Usually, I look forward every year to eat bacalhau a natas, and honestly I think it should remain a once a year thing. This thing is like a heart attack in terms of fat. By the time I tried it this time my body was fiercely rejecting it. It knows that a second dosage within one month would cause critical damage.

The way they celebrate it is very organised and spaced out, nothing like the chaotic Christmas dinner on the 24th that Latino families do. I arrived there around noon. We had some civilised snacks, a civilised little entrée, the main meal, and pudding, all decently spaced out. A Latino Christmas dinner would've been all of these in one meal and 10x family drama and loudness. We even had a cheese board by the end of the day, to my flatmate's dismay, as he just asked if he could have some cheese, and his mom went all out. I sent a few wishes of a Merry Christmas to close ones, including the Freaky Welsh Nerd to check if he was alright and if he survived the wedding in Cardiff and his family afterwards. Surprisingly, the banker guy from Salsa Temple sent me good Christmas wishes from Colombia, as well as someone from the course I did in the Swiss Alps during the Summer. 

Putting my phone down, I joined the family to watch the new Wallace and Gromit and a bit of Mastermind. Had some political discussions and it was very interesting to see how little difference I could see between British and Brazilian families on this aspect. My flatmate's mom had some very interesting conspiracy theory about the carbonated water industry. All in all, very entertaining. Glad I was adopted for today. I took many pictures of my flatmate's baby pictures (and a painting of his face, even!!!) to send to my Witchy Friend and the Ginger Goddess. I bid my farewell early the following day to go feed my cells and thanked them very much for having me before my flatmate and his dad dropped me off back home. He told me later that his mom said I was "beautiful”, and I'm still shocked about that. It possibly healed 1/4 of my school trauma.

My flatmate was still going to be at his parents for a few days, so I just enjoyed my alone time with the (extremely needy) cat. When I wasn't walking 500 miles or walking 500 more, I watched a lot of Christmas films and series. The stupidest, most brain-numbing films I could watch to properly relax my brain for January (yes, many of those Netflix ones but also some classics like The Grinch and Love Actually). I watched some anime after a long time, in this case Dan Da Dan, and an animation recommended by Freaky Welsh Nerd called Scavenger's Reign. 

Speaking about him we agreed to meet platonically in a bakery close to where I live to have some coffee. It was pretty nice, having some nerdy talk and psychological talk, and after a bit we walked in the park and headed to my place for a bit so that he could watch Dan Da Dan. Sitting in separate couches, mind you. It all felt very relaxed, normal and friendly and after a bit I felt like being alone and cleaning up the place for the New Years, so we parted ways.

I feel like my mom must've done some serious black magic after I spoke to her about my love life in 2024. She told me she was "praying for me" and asked for names but I refused to give her any. 

Someone from the Swiss course messaged me and asked if I remembered him, before asking when I would go to Switzerland again, because he could show me the greatest places around. I didn't want to seem self-centred but this did feel a bit too obvious of a demonstration of interest, so I straight up asked if he was shooting his shot. His response was to be bit embarrassed, but I said that I admired that but wasn't interested. Some random friend of friends who live in Berlin also added me on Instagram and started liking all my stories. "Just normal Brazilian behaviour" I thought, as a Brazilian who just likes stories when I'm simply happy for people or find something cool. Soon enough he started messaging me though and said that he saw a cute girl on my friend's stories last year and found out that the cute girl was me. Jesus Christ. I didn't have much of the energy to be friendly here and just said I wasn't interested. I think he unfollowed me after this.

As the Murder Mystery party drew near, the Bosnian Bride made a WhatsApp Group for the event and there he was - the Dancing Blog Guy. I didn't know who else was going before and now they only inform me that he is going three days before the event, huh. Sneaky, sneaky.

Well...maybe he didn't know I was going either and will now bail. 

Most likely.

....Well...I did think that until he added the number of a friend to also join. Interesting.

I felt some adrenaline at the thought of seeing him again but tried to reassure myself that everything would be fine as long as I acted normally. Yes. The show must go on and it's gonna be very fun, and maybe he'll even bring the dog! This truly does feel like 2024 season finale though, I must say.

The Bosnian Bride sent us our character sheets for the event and I was a galactic biologist, who should go dressed up in a lab coat and gloves, and was "scatterbrained but passionate". These people are just bullying me at this point I swear. I borrowed a lab coat from the lab, got some protection goggles, a couple of gloves, and my purple wig from the institute’s Christmas party to complete my galactic look. 

Qué será, será.

I was the first one to arrive, so the Bosnian Bride asked if I could help with some of the food. As I was cutting cheese a few minutes later, the Dancing Blog Guy and his friend arrived. Great. I could keep my back turned to them to avoid this whole thing for a bit further....until the dog came over. Feeling very blessed that the dog is here though. After I finished cutting the cheese I got a drink and sat a bit with them before the other guests arrived. Awkward. But not for long as the other guests started arriving. 

I soon shifted my attention to incoming guests, some which are from our regular Pizza Tuesday’s group, some which I met in the wedding. There was this Romanian girl from the wedding that I thought I had huge affinity with, so seeing her again was really nice. Same as this one autistic girl whose fixation is Neuroscience, although I feel overwhelmed in our conversations and feel myself shifting to mentor mode. She also brought her parents and partner, surprisingly, and her parents actually knew about my existence and prepared vodka screwdrivers for me. We had many interesting characters for the Murder Mystery. The character murdered was a black hole researcher, and in the game, we had a time traveller, a policeman, a lawyer, an archaeologist, the pilot, a chef, a financier, the CEO of a company, a hacker/software engineer, some sudoku lady (what do you mean "that's not a job"?) and me, a galactic biologist. The hosts were representing the engineer and the AI of the ship, with great cheap green wigs. 

A few people accused me of being the murderer as I was the only other researcher around. How unimaginative and illogical. At some point a pizza fell on my lab coat and the Dancing Blog Guy's bestie said "Look, she has blood on her coat and didn't even bother cleaning it up!!". Har har har. Going around finding clues was fun, but it was a minimal part of the evening. I was mostly catching up with people and getting drunker and drunker, which I think was also the experience of everyone else involved except for the host. I did think certain people like the sudoku lady were trying to look mysterious and managed to do so in style, until I realised, she was just sleepy. On the corner of my eye, I could often see the Dancing Blog Guy facing me while he was in different conversations.

Soon enough we were around the same corner, and he asked me softly "So, how has it been going?". I mentioned a few career highlights of the year but didn't have too much time to go in-depth, and he said "For me it's being going terribly at work" with a nervous laughter. He has a tendency for self-deprecating humour, but it did seem quite real and that's a pity. I wanted to ask further but topics shifted, and I was too inebriated to properly recall things in detail. I did speak of things like briefly dating the Freaky Welsh Nerd and asked the Dancing Blog Guy why he really ended things, to which he replied "You had no red flags. The heart wants what the heart wants and that wasn't it." and I know exactly how that is, so I didn't push further, and for a very brief moment that felt like closure. "You're welcome to my place any time" he said. If this was months ago, I would've said yes for this to be a casual thing and briefly considered reaching out to propose it at some point, but now I think this is just not good for my mental health so I would take nothing less than someone madly in love with me. I am perfectly fine being alone, so anything less wouldn't be worth it and would just bring me sadness.

We parted briefly and he immediately went to the Romanian girl and started hitting on her and asking her to move in with him as his flatmate was moving out. He also tried convincing her to give a chance to his best friend, and at some point, she just left. I tried focusing on talking to other people while that happened but soon enough, we were back in conversation. 

Weirdly enough, talking to him reminded me of what real chemistry feels like. Everyone else within my focus disappeared except for him and our conversation was so fluid, I felt so calm and peaceful, but ecstatic. I don't remember ever feeling this with anyone. It's odd that even with the heartbreak and with all those months that we didn't speak it felt like we had been friends since forever. The only downside is realising afterwards that people were indeed around and noticing how disgusting I've been behaving. At some point I sent a video message to my best friend in Brazil and watching it now and seeing the whole thing sober I'm almost embarrassed of ever coming to Pizza Tuesdays again. I feel like hitting my head on the mattress repeatedly but a part of me is fond of the video, so I won't delete it just yet. 

Unfortunately, all of this happens with a man who does not want to pursue me romantically, and has questionable emotional maturity, possibly with problems stemming from lack of self-esteem in some areas. Not that any of these make me any less fond of him and even stripping away the romantic nature of my feelings, any less of a friend who would be there for him, but some things are a bit of painful reminder as to why we shouldn't be. Things that can be worked on with good communication and willingness of both parts, yes, but that would be a bit of a challenge.

I mean, he did even flirt with another woman right in front of me. Back in the middle of the year Ginger Naruto showed his indignation to me because the Dancing Blog Guy had also hit on other people during the wedding and that I should be with someone who makes me "FEEL LIKE I'M THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WOOORLD, like Rihanna said". Ginger Naruto's words. Not mine. That was a bit of white knighting but I am glad that I have friends that watch out for my best interests. And I agree, I think that's what everyone deserves.

I considered going home but the Bosnian Bride said I could sleep over at her place in the living room, so I accepted it. At some point everyone left, even the Dancing Blog Guy's bestie, except for me, the Dancing Blog Guy, and the guy whose character was the chef. We were all going to sleep in the living room, so I lied down on the couch. The Bosnian Bride was setting up an inflatable mattress for the Dancing Blog Guy to sleep on, and while she did such, he kneeled next to the couch, with his torso on my body and cheek on my cheek, yapping random stuff that I cannot remember now, but found it funny back then. 

"Ok, time for you to go to sleep now", the Bosnian Bride said as she physically removed him from me down to the floor.

As she went to sleep at 3am, me, the Dancing Blog Guy, and the Chef gathered in the living room in the dark to talk. That damn guy kept filling up my mug with wine, as we spoke. The poor Chef asked about our history, and I think he would soon deeply regret making that question. Me and the Dancing Blog Guy spoke about everything. I told him about how I was feeling sad on top of the Swiss alps and even told my boss about it, and how I made a playlist about the whole thing, but that I had gotten over this around mid-October (well, until now). He could only reply with a feeble "I'm sorry". I did not want to make a case for anything that would make him guilty and only wanted to express myself. My feelings are my own after all, but for whatever part of me that felt injustice I will take that. We spoke briefly about the experiences I had with dancing at places other than the one he suggested, and how I was avoiding that one until my feelings stopped. "Nooo, Amadeus, you should've spoken to me!". "...No, I most definitely shouldn't have..." I replied, after a period of silence and I think some emotion must've escaped in my voice. My lovely mediator, the Chef, was always in my favour and said "Yeah, you know, it would've been tough for her". He added at some point "I think you dodged a bullet". Hilarious. I spoke about (self-perceived) funny things like my type, or what my mom thought about it, and had some self-pity about me being a "loser" who was not that attracted to people easily, so I gave chances to very few people. How I'm meant for heartbreak blablabla woe is me. I hope that sounded a bit humorous, it wasn't supposed to be this heavy.

On random occasions the Dancing Blog Guy said things that spoke high praise about my intellect, calling me a "genius" to the Chef, and vouching for my singing abilities. Despite being a bit touched, I do feel that maybe he idealises me a bit, and that maybe, just maybe, this would increase feelings of unworthiness and low self-esteem on him. I hope I was mistaken, but just in case I told him "I think you are very intelligent. I loved our conversations. You reflected on your own bias and treated my arguments fairly and seriously and we could improve together." He seemed a bit shocked. It was something I wrote on the first entry of this blog and wanted to tell him since August, so saying this to him felt immensely cathartic.

Around 6am we were finally going to sleep. The Chef retreated to his pile of yoga mats somewhere behind the couch, while the Dancing Blog Guy went to his inflatable mattress next to me. Somehow, before sleeping, he reached out for my hand until we were holding hands in the spaces between our beds. This remained like this for a while until I started to let go out of discomfort, and slowly he followed. It felt beautiful but tragic. This was possibly the most romantic experience of my entire life.

Did we both lie? 

About our feelings, that is. 

I don't want to think about it much because hope is painful.

He was probably just touch starved and thought he could get something casual out of this. 

Yeah.

I could see that soon he was asleep, but he was really crooked. His head fell off his pillow and the legs were falling off the mattress, so I briefly got up and fixed this. He gave me a brief acknowledgement before going back to sleep. I soon followed.

I woke up on the next morning around 9am. Looking around, I considered pulling a little Cinderella act and getting the fuck out to go back home and get ready to watch Nosferatu with my flatmate and friends early in the afternoon. I strongly feared the hangover that would probably soon hit me. Before going to the door to put on my shoes, I said good morning and "I love you"s to the dog, who then wanted to go out with me. Damn. When getting close to the door my brain stopped working and I dropped many things from my trench coat. Fuck my life, -300 points of stealth here. The Bosnian Bride came out and said she could take the dog for a walk downstairs, but soon enough the Dancing Blog Guy came out of the living room and said he was leaving too. We both were walking to the station together having a friendly conversation when he realised, he forgot his suitcase back in the flat, but insisted that he would be fine without it. 

Once we had to part ways he leaned in for a friendly hug and I wish I could go for it, but I just couldn't do it. Something in me felt too vulnerable, too scared of being hurt. I could see his smile fall a bit and that saddened me. After he said some really cheeky goodbye, I went to my bus stop while he went to the station. I allowed myself to feel the waves of joy remaining from the previous hours, before I'd have to push some feelings down a bit in the following days. 

I don't think he'll reach out to me again. But I can do so occasionally when something reminds me strongly of him, I just need to release the expectation of a proper reply or any acknowledgement. In the end I think what 2024 really taught me was to cherish love for what it was and to release any expectations or need for it to be returned. That being said, I will, of course, focus it on those who do so.

I still hope we get to have a better conversation about the trips and experiences we had in 2024 though.

Focusing on the positives: I feel that now we had some level of closure and that I would look forward to seeing him if we were to meet in future events, and I feel confident in going to that dancing place he suggested now. As a matter of fact, I plan on going this Friday and am looking forward to it!

Happy New Year!

An Amadeus who was actually not hungover after that (but did nap during the film)

[audaciousamadeus]

Too Many Christmas Parties

The time is here, the time is now, for the most awaited event of the year: The institute winter party! Every year it has a special theme. Last year it was films, and my lab dressed up as Jurassic Park (I was Jeff Goldblum), but this year the theme was London tube/train stations. It was revealed to me spiritually (cough cough I just liked the vibes and wanted an excuse to dress up as a crystal queen cough cough) that I should be Crystal Palace. I got a fancy glittery dress, a purple wig, a crystal crown with actual lights on it, dinosaur hairclips to symbolise the dinosaur statues in the park, and I borrowed a red coat from my Witchy Friend, to symbolise the flames that burned down the palace. Slay.

And slay I did indeed. I ended up getting the prize for the best costume! Already drunk at that point, I shared my Champagne prize with the buddies surrounding me like a good communist. I kept the Toblerone that was part of my prize for later at least. Frankly, my competition didn't put a lot of effort so this almost didn't feel like a win, but I'll take it. I do regret the cleavage that my dress had however, as I could definitely feel the looks, and at some point a question about the size of my breasts (from a person who is close enough and is funny, so it's fine but still). The party had the same food as last year with the addition of pizza from Papa Johns', a pub quiz, and lots of karaoke. I sang some ABBA with a cool Swiss ADHD girl from a neighbouring lab, A Whole New World from Aladdin with the Anxious Greek Fairy, In The End by Linkin Park with a bunch of random people, and Mr Brightside by The Killers with Golden Retriever Boy.

More and more people left until there were around ten of us left, a bit of dancing happened until we decided to go to the nearby pub. I was sitting in front of Golden Retriver Boy and we were talking until the point I stumbled upon the topic of ending things with the Freaky Welsh Nerd. Golden Retriver Boy immediately perked up and said twice "So, what went wrong??" with some intense gaze that he does sometimes. I mentioned the split earlier in the week during lunch and he asked the same, but I didn't go into too much detail. I think he could tell, as he can read people well, and kept his thirst for gossip for this moment. Before continuing, he was feeling cold so I offered my red coat, which he took. He looked like I dragged a homeless hobbit out of the streets during winter and did the charity of giving him something warm. It was a vibe, so I told him to pose so I could send the pictures to my Witchy Friend. I proceeded to open up to Hobo Baggins here about aspects of the Freaky Welsh Nerd's psyche and how certain kinks and desires had a deep relationship with his attachment style and how that made him suffer, in addition to how our dynamic was. "Sorry, that is probably a bit too much for coworkers" I said, to which he replied "Nononono, it's fine!". He gave me back my coat and revealed that he actually had an extra coat in his backpack, so I wouldn't die of hypothermia. It didn't take long until we all left and I had some pathetic hiccups that woke up my flatmate before I went to sleep.

The next day I had the first hangover of my life and I don't know how people can live like that. I will never do the mistake of not hydrating when drinking again. I removed my make-up, brushed my teeth and got into proper pyjamas but forgot about drinking some water, like an idiot. I didn't remember taking the pictures of Golden Retriver Boy posing in the red coat, so going through my camera roll I died in laughter when I saw them. With each laugh my head exploded, but I just couldn't stop, they were so cursed!

I tried my best to recover because in the late afternoon my Witchy Friend and the Ginger Goddess would come over for our own little Christmas dinner, provided by my flatmate (although he bought mostly tiny dishes which were not vegan-friendly so I had to make some stuff for my Witchy Friend). I made some cocktail vegan sausages wrapped around fried aubergine with a tamarind sauce, as well as vegan rabanadas for dessert. My flatmate bought lots of cute mini-food, including an adorable mini fish and chips in a mini newspaper wrapping. I wish I could keep up with the party more but I was destroyed and feeling sleepy by 8pm, so I went back to my room as usual to sleep while they stayed in the living room until way later. It was a cute and cozy Christmas party in the end, and compatible with my recovery mood.

On Monday we had my lab's own Christmas party at the Bioinformatic Goddess' fancy penthouse. I made my favourite Christmas food, bacalhau a natas but used lionsmane mushrooms as the substitute for codfish to make it vegetarian, made pão de queijo with a guava-chilli dip, and used the rest of the vegan rabanadas to make bread pudding. The afternoon and evening involved chatting and good food (people had many of my pães de queijo and two to three servings of my vegetarian bacalhau, a few people told me that by the third time they just felt silly but I think that this is what Christmas is all about) to the sound of Japanese City Pop, followed by a very wholesome Secret Santa in which I got a translating monosome in which every aminoacid represented a letter that formed a very special and personal word. The few that remained after secret santa played two rounds of werewolf, in a very dramatic fashion.

At some point we were chatting in small circles and Golden Retriver Boy said that me and my flatmate's interactions were sheer sexual tension. I rebutted that there was absolutely nothing and that it felt like empty threats and friendly bickering, as we both appreciate a certain degree of casual lunacy. He insisted that if this was a romcom this would be a scene in it, of me fervently trying to escape the truth of my undying love. With a heavy and bitter sigh I reminded him that this would've been awfully convenient and would solve a few of my problems and that shut him up. My flatmate openly admited that he felt like the older brother that he never was before, as he grew up an only child, and I absolutely agree that the dynamic feels like what I imagine siblings to be like. It's lovely. And annoying. But in a lovely way.

The rest of the week I felt very productive, downloading and processing public datasets, doing experiments that I planned to do since the conference in Denmark, and making some more neurons out of my stem cells so that I would come in only once a week to feed them while they matured to the point that I could use them. Since I'm the only one staying here, I agreed to also feed Golden Retriever Boy's and his research assistant's neurons. I also decided that for New Years I would take up on the offer of the Bosnian Bride to take part in a Murder Mystery game that she would host. Exciting!

I managed to do everything I wanted by that Friday and registered to go dancing at the Salsa Temple by myself for the plot as a start of the holidays. That evening was....interesting. I arrived a bit early so it seemed quite empty, but soon enough the place was full and I had to dodge suspiscious old men left and right for most of the night. This stopped a bit once a German man who worked at the place noticed by discomfort and agreed to dance with me. Our communication shifted between Spanish and German, and soon enough he got a bit too much into teaching me how to dance, escalating to the point that he seemed to get annoyed when I was not understanding some of his instructions. By the end of this he did acknowledge though that I had already improved a bit and this made me happy enough to consider having a break and getting a drink.

When I was finishing my cider some random banker invited me to dance and he seemed respectful enough that I agreed. He was decent but soon enough it seemed like he was just coming on to me and when we stopped dancing he offered to buy me drinks. I replied "I'm not interested romantically, but we can still chat if you'd like", to which he replied "No worries, I wanted to talk to you about neuroscience anyway". He then proceeded to tell me how after a trip to India with his mom and his brother, his mom died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. "Sorry you came to a Salsa evening and I'm making you talk about neuroscience". He was interested in the sort of treatments we were working on, and I briefly told him about things people in the building were working on, such as antisense oligo therapies for ALS-FTD, but unfortunately I had to tell him that none of that would be compatible with how fast the progression of a prion disease is. He lost his mother within two weeks of the start of the symptoms, and his brother who is a neurologist felt absolutely powerless in the field that he devoted his life to. He seemed unsatisfied at how we would define "sporadic" and wanted to identify more factors that could contribute to that so we spoke a bit about that. He then went to the classic topic of AI and consciousness, followed by the even more classic discussion about consciousness itself. At the very end he chuckled and said "Well, how about your dating life?". I gave him a brief overview of 2024 before taking my leave. But not before he got my number, since I sensed that he would not make any moves on me (at least not in a rude manner).

May the holiday season commence!

Seasonal greetings,

Amadeus

[audaciousamadeus]

New 365 Party Girl Who Dis

Turns out that the girl from Geneva who also got fucked over by EasyJet really, REALLY wanted to go clubbing.

Some time in late September I opened my instagram to an unnexpected message from her. An invitation to go to her place with some of her friends and to then go clubbing in Shoreditch.

Simultaneously, Anxious Greek Fairy, who is another PhD student in the same floor as me but in a different lab, invited me to her birthday party. Although we are always there in the lab late at night and on weekends, me and her have very different lifestyles. She does like to allow any thought to go through her head and therefore if she's not in the lab she is out partying. That being said, for her birthday I promised that I would go to wherever she wanted me to go, no exceptions.

As it turns out, her celebration would be on the same day as the invitation fron the Genevan girl's thing, but the venue wasn't chosen yet.

Three things made me torn:

I must always follow through with my promises and therefore had to go to the birthday no matter where it would be.

I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and go out dancing with that stranger and her friends to shake up my life for a bit for the plot (and because I felt a bit guilty for saying no to her twice before).

I'm not used to this and felt tired just thinking about the prospects.

One day before, Anxious Greek Fairy made up her mind and revealed that she also wanted to go to a club in Shoreditch. I checked the distance between this club and the Genevan girl's place and decided I could definitely make both happen but I would prioritise the birthday celebration.

But at what cost?

I had gotten back from Denmark on Thursday evening. It had been 4 days of intense networking and travelling around has absolutely killed me this year in general, but I got rest (as in, gently avoiding people like the plague) on Friday and hoped for the best.

I went to the lab on Saturday until around 6pm and the birthday girl was there. Of course she was. We have similar workaholic routines so she's always there in the weird times that I'm in. Always venting about science, experiments, people or things and occasionally having some coffee. You know, in this harsh academic environment you need to stick together (and she's just a very lovely person). She was more stressed than usual because of logistics of her plans (happens often but not to this level), and told me to join them in her place in Streatham before going to Shoreditch at 11pm.

I had to analyse data for a meeting with collaborators on Monday and to write an email ASAP about the exciting collaboration I got at the conference in Denmark, so I knew I most likely wouldn't have time to join her in Streatham and would see her at the club.

And before that I would go to the Genevan girl's place. Everything about this plan made me anxious. I only went clubbing once and it was in Frankfurt, on the New Year's Eve from 2020. Probably what caused the pandemic, as it was too much of a shift in the force.

I put on a very Berliner outfit and some acceptable make-up and left the flat to get to Shoreditch at 10pm. On the way there, birthday girl called me and said that this had been a misunderstanding, that people would arrive at her place around 10pm and she would only be in Shoreditch at 1.30am. Lord almighty, this somehow made my plan be way more feasible. She apologised but I reassured her that it was truly alright and that I had an idea of how to spend my time until then, explaning the whole plan. That managed to reassure her thankfully.

The Genevan girl and her friends were actually very pleasant. So was her flat, but this was her goodbye to it as she would soon be moving to Stratford. She put on some music, and we all spoke about Murakami novels, and some dubious fantasy novel that I've also read after the vegan witch told me she hated it (I call it "The Fairy Fucker Book"). I somehow overheard one Spanish girl whisper to someone else "I'm straight but Amadeus is so hot, Jesus Christ" and almost choked on my cheap Rosé wine. Really unbelievable stuff. After a while we headed to this club called Old Street Records and they decided to get an Uber to go there, although the journey wouldn't take long. They decided to put on music in the car, after asking for permission, and just straight up doing karaoke on the way there. At first I felt very sorry for the Uber driver and thought about how he should get a humongous tip, but the Genevan girl did one hell of a cover of Super Bass. Bro should feel grateful for the free concert.

I could feel that this club was more mainstream and that I was not as drunk as the rest of them, but still tried to have some fun dancing. I tried to stick to the group, and at times that I was alone I just had to avoid eye contact from a few sleasy guys and to elegantly slide away from them if needed. Around 1.30am I could not find the group anymore and had to go, so I texted my goodbye and danced my way through the crowd until I reached the exit and walked 5 minutes until the birthday club, Basing House.

This place was definitely more alternative, playing DnB just like the birthday girl likes, and there were people from a wider age range. They were also definitely using drugs, but everyone was more respectful. I had to wait 30 more minutes for the Anxious Greek Fairy to arrive, so I had a few shots and had a great time dancing. Briefly I considered not dancing away from certain people, sticking around for maximum 1 minute with each person before switching around or dancing by myself while I waited. It helped that people were respectful and decent I have to say, that made the 30 minutes pass by very quickly. When the birthday girl arrived with her crew, they were all beyond wasted. Despite that, she remained fully functional, as expected. We danced some more, I said hi to previous friends of hers that I met before in a jazz event that she invited me to. They were all from outside of academia but close to her friend circle from Sheffield, where she used to live. We took an angelic chaotic picture before continuing to dance.

Clearly though, I was far more sober than the rest of them and by now was feeling quite tired so I said goodbye like a modern day Cinderella for the second time tonight, just in time to catch my magic pumpkin ride home (*cough cough* a shitty TfL bus *cough cough*). I got home at 4am fully sober, removed my make-up, had a shower, brushed my teeth, and had a lovely night of sleep. I had a surprisingly enjoyable time but this definitely cannot happen often. Apparently the Genevan girl's friends also liked me as they all tried to add me on social media, another shocking event to be honest, but a pleasant surprise.

Well, maybe I wasn't as sober as I remembered, since apparently I made an emotionally charged playlist on the bus on the way home. I chose to keep it though, for therapeutic purposes. I decided to see it as one more productive thing done this weekend.

Bisoux,

A (carefully) Audacious party girl

[audaciousamadeus]

Brain Conference Shenanigans

Fine. Let's recapitulate and give more context to the previous post.

If you could tell, I managed to apply to the Danish conference. Not only that, but I got selected to present a poster. Yeepideedoo, how good is that? If only this was not communicated two weeks before the first day of the conference.

Alas, under a bit of stress, I managed to pay the (very expensive) registration fee, get some last minute flight tickets to Denmark, and a place to stay. Under normal circumstances I would choose the hotel of the venue but I thought I already spent too much money this year out of my funding for conferences and training purposes so I decided to stay in an Airbnb. To be more specific, I got a treehouse Airbnb because it seemed to be close enough at the time.

After doing more analysis and working on a poster based on the narrative of my main project, I had a meeting with my boss to discuss how I should finalise it and we both came to the conclusion that it would be ideal to present my side project instead. This gave me however three days to work on a brand new poster, for which most figures were not made by me but my Mr Genius. My boss spoke to him and he was surprisingly positive about it and encouraged me to do it. So like a good miracle worker I made that poster happen in 3 days, starting it from scratch, and managed to print it on the final day before travelling to Denmark. I sent the poster to a printing company 1 minute after the time specified by them for same-day printing, but I called them to beg a bit and they were fine with it. Phew.

The final hours before my flights included Ginger Naruto's final goodbye in the pub right by the lab and a mere one and a half hours of sleep before heading off to Gatwick on a night bus. The cherry on top was receiving messages and videos from Ginger Naruto, Golden Retriever Boy and his research assistant, as well as the bride from Bosnia losing it on the dance floor of a dance club in southwest London. And receiving those when I was having my little pity party sitting in the cold, with my eyes burning in East Croydon while waiting for the train that would take me to the airport. I really should've gone with them instead of having some internal crisis until I only had little more than one hour of sleep left.

At last, I had landed in Copenhagen. The city that had become my favourite since 2021, when I had first visited it. My check in was only at 3pm, so I carried my poster roll on my shoulders to a café accross the city and posted that lame and brief post, while I waited for my phone to be fully charged I was reading a paper that my boss had sent me. The walk following this felt like being reminded that an old friend had remained the same after years of not talking. The vibes were at times killed by my poster falling of my shoulders or it being mistaken for a weapon by the Danish police. But, given the circumstances, it all felt glorious. I'm happy with my choice to spend one day before and one after the conference in Copenhagen.

My hostel was surprisingly fancy, and my bed was private and cozy. I stayed in it for the rest of the day and decided I would have an early night the recover from my sleep deprivation. Before going to sleep I received a message in response to some pictures I uploaded on social media indicating that I was in Copenhagen. The messages were from a Latvian guy I met during the wedding in Brazil. I completely forgot that he lived in Copenhagen! We scheduled to meet in a coffee on the following morning before I took the train to Rungstedskyst.

As for his origin story: I was a bridesmaid for a couple of friends I knew from university in May this year, in Rio. The groom is also in academia and he is now a post-doc in Norway. He briefly worked with this Latvian guy for a bit and invited him to the wedding. I took two friends of mine from London with me to the trip (to be more precise, the vegan witch who is actually from Freiburg, and her ginger princess flatmate who is from around Birmingham), and bargained with the bride in order to take them to the wedding. Since he was a bit out of place due to the majority of the people in the wedding being Brazilian, he quickly joined our little group of foreigners. We were the only ones treating him normally, since the other Brazilians were fauning over this guy just for being outside of the country and having blue eyes despite being just your average nice nerdy guy with no major redeeming features (I say this in the nicest way possible). My first ex boyfriend, who I was with for seven years and was my accompanying Groomsman, casually invited all of us to his place the next day, and all of my dear gringos said yes. My ex's sister had somehow come at the same time from Berlin and trafficked Berliner Luft, so that's what we had while we all introduced Bridgerton to this poor Latvian lad. He started off by saying "I have no clue what Bridgerton is" and by the end he was completely hooked. I have to say, watching scenes of some fingering happening in a Victorian carriage on a big screen with my ex's family, my friends from London and a random Latvian man I met during the wedding was not what I imagined I'd be doing in Rio but the whole thing was hillarious.

After one of the best nights of sleep in my life (and in a hostel nonetheless!) , I checked out. I was almost late after speaking to an antivaxxer in the lobby (I think it's a duty of us, publically funded researchers, to make scientific knowledge transparent to the public, although sometimes it's exhausting), but made it to the café. After a chill and friendly catch up with the Latvian guy I took my train to the conference venue at last, in Rungstedskyst.

I arrived a bit too early for the conference but not early enough to check-in in my Airbnb. I thought that it would be nearby but I guess that the adrenaline resulting from the need to find accomodation fast made me oblivious to the fact that this was in another town, one hour away by bus. Silly me.

I decided to leave my things at the conference venue, put my poster in its designated place and have a nostalgic stroll by the beach. Soon enough it was time for the conference to start and I saw Miho and Sunshine Athlete as well as my old boss from Frankfurt.

My ex-boss from Frankfurt is quite an intimidating woman and huge in our field (this conference was made as a celebration for her being awarded the Brain Prize this time after all), but I feel that talking to her now feels far more fluid, she feels more human and approachable. Not entirely sure if she changed, or I changed, or both. It felt heartwarming that she still seemed to consider me one of her own, and put the three of us to mediate questions for the different sessions of the conference. In this case, I would mediate the entirety of the first day. My current boss' flight was late so here would only get here later in the afternoon. I must say, this still remains the best conference I have ever been in, in terms of talks, venues, food (despite the fact they were lowkey starving me, Miho and Sunshine Athlete for being vegetarians/vegan) and networking. The talks kept me genuinely absorbed and I had many good notes about ideas and techniques that I could apply to my work. A real treat!

But just how I remembered, talks ended around 7pm, dinner went until 8pm, and networking would continue until late hours with plenty of alcohol. Which would've been perfectly fine, if my treehouse Airbnb wasn't an hour away and had awful connections. I decided to head to it around 9.30pm and decided to walk there to familiarise myself with the path.

Well, well, well, this idiot here got lost because Google maps told her to walk through a forest in the dark of the Danish countryside. Thankfully, she was not enough of an idiot to actually do it.

So yeah, halfway there I decided to get a bus, but it took 20 minutes to arrive. My feet had blisters at this point, it was super late, I sent many apologies and updates to my Airbnb host and hoped she wouldn't be terribly inconvenienced. I'm too much of an anxious goody-two-shoes for this crazy lifestyle I swear. Getting there my host was super friendly and my treehouse was adorable and cozy, although there was no heating or wi-fi. I was thinking of how I could possibly deal with this situation for the next three days though. It's fine, faith in the universe something-something, things will fall into place blablabla.

Maybe, just maybe, it was good that they accepted me so late, just so that I would have to stay at this idyllic treehouse Airbnb in a small town in the Danish countryside. Maybe, this has forced me to broaden my horizons and this made it all worth it. Unfortunately, I must disagree with this assumption and would do unspeakable things to be in that luxurious conference hotel right now. Thankfully, the Sam to my Frodo (might be interchangeable roles here), Miho, offered me to stay in her bed for two out of the four days. The bed sharing thing is a silly tradition that we have by sheer inevitability. It somehow always happens.

Back in 2021 I actually shared a room (and a bed) with Miho and everyday at 7am she would leave the bed to join the lab of a cold-shock researcher to go jump in the ocean like a freak. They found out that it is protective against neurodegeneration so that became their thing. Whatever. All the evidence points out that this is my freaky year, so I decided to join them this time. I made it to my knees before feeling excrutiating pain in my feet and quitting like a little bitch. Still, I hope that this was sufficient to give me any extra crumbs of RBM3 in my bloodstream.

As unlikely as it was, due to time of exposure and the fact that this does not seem to happen to everyone, I still felt more fresh and ready for one more day of talks, rushed note-taking, and incessant networking. My boss has this insane talent of creating collaborations out of thin air. He would appear during coffee breaks with different PIs to ask if I had time to do certain experiments to collaborate with them before disappearing into thin air, as if he was the twink version of the Dungeon Master from the 1983 Dungeons and Dragons animation.

The cherry on top was that I forgot that I needed to prepare slides for a flashtalk to advertise my poster. Fuckfuckfuckfuck. It should be just one, very well done and easy to follow, slide that I should present for 90 seconds. I spent the morning session of the second day working on it sneakily and making the script for my flash-talk. This was surprisingly stressful for the weight of this conference and because I was the only representation that my lab had here. There was also an element of wanting to prove myself to my ex-boss that put my stress levels through the roof.

During the first coffee break of this day, while having some non-caffeinated tea to avoid having a full-on anxiety attack, I found the PI that I had first applied for a PhD with. His lab is in Basel and they do amazing work on how certain RNA regulation affects neuronal network formation and even impacts social disorders for example. I had reached out for him when I was going to leave Frankfurt, and decided to try my luck again when the whole Berlin thing happened, so I explained the story back in the day. For my surprise, he remembered me and the things that happened, and asked how I personally dealt with that before asking me what my current project is. I spoke to him a bit about my main project, but since I was here to present and discuss my side-project, I spoke about it at length. The special part about it, is that it's based on seeing the opposite of what one expects in a specific event, but for one protein which is quite relevant in general neuronal function. To my huge surprise, he started talking about how his team has observed a similar thing in another protein of their interest, and they were puzzled as to why that was. He said he was not going to talk about this during his talk, but now he decided to include it. Feeling super excited, arranged for him and for my boss to have a meeting with me so we could discuss possible implications and see how to proceed.

We actually met by accident at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and discussed it then and there.

We spoke about collaborating by using our script to identify more of that phenomena in some of their mouse datasets with a specific mutation that impacts social behaviour and I was beyond excited! Also I'm proud to say that my flashtalk actually made my boss very pleased, and that my poster presentation attracted so many people that I could barely have a break for all of the duration of the session. All in all, this has been a great success and I'm overjoyed!

I was just concerned that my boss would think that I was chilling too much by constantly sitting with my previous colleagues during the main meals. Oops.

Some faces became familiar though, and a few I even looked forward to seeing. This was especially when it came to a certain group from New York. Their PI was one of those that are not only creative and intelligente but a really cool and decent person, full of tattoos and a big fan of classic rock. I think his lab definitely reflected that, and we got along really well. There were six of them and they were all amazing. We played pool together and spoke a lot after dinners, and at some point they said I should really come to New York for a few months. Frankly, that would also be beyond dreamy, but as of now I don't have a reason to do so, so let's wait to see what the future holds.

Someone told me that I could borrow a bike from the conference hotel, so I decided to try to do it to get to my Airbnb. So I did.

Drunk. In the dark. In a country I never cycled in.

Things were going smoothly until Google maps did this cute thing of telling me to go through a shady path again. For the sake of being clear: this path led me to a small island in the middle of a lake that only had a church on it, and it led to a dark forest. I decided that maybe I would try this route, and went forth to my fate.

"I'm the one who's from Rio, I'm the danger", I thought, stupidly.

It was a full moon, and the church bell rang at midnight, exactly the time that I was cycling past the church. I could only smell weed around me and seeing the straight path to the dark forest grow shorter and shorter as I neared the pitch black entrance of it. Some deep, deep fear struck me at last and I rushed to go back to the main road and take the longer path back to my Airbnb. This has been the most real Spooktober experience I ever had. Getting back to my treehouse really late, I never felt more alive from the adrenaline and unfortunately took a long time to calm myself to sleep.

For the final Gala dinner, we had a three course meal and prizes for best talks and posters. In the final networking session my ex-boss bought cocktails for me and my previous colleagues while we discussed topics such as sexism in academia, suspiscious podcasters, ambition and so on. More and more, I sense that she feels far more human since the last time I saw her and feel genuinely happy for the lab. I think there are many things that I would like to discuss with her that I feel would only be possible when I feel less intimidated by her. Maybe one day...

I decided to spend some time with the cold-shock lab and play pool with them and they asked "Yo, do you wanna do some RBM3?". As a translation: they were inviting me to go dive with them in the ocean in the middle of the night, in a very touchy way as well. I politely declined. At this point, without enough sleep, everything was too much for me and I crashed at Miho's room. This was not initially the plan, as I needed to check out from my treehouse, so I had to cycle there the next morning, also finally seeing how the forest looks like when I can actually see it, and to cycle back with my stuff to give my rented bike back.

My flight back was only in the evening, so I took the day to meet up with my previous summer student, who now lives in Copenhagen. We spoke about PhD applications and life. I gave her some advice after she was a bit heartbroken about her application situation, and she revealed to me certain romance conspiracy theories she had about me and certain colleagues. Her fanfiction-reader brain is fascinating. She said she wanted to get rid of some novels and asked if I did not want to take one. I insisted on paying for it and she happily took me to her dreamy historical dorm in the center of Copenhagen. She even had a sword!!!!!! And a decently sized studio!!!!! Life is so unfair.

I took my book and went to an Icelandic café that my student recommended me to go. At first I was slightly nervous about my boss possibly being upset that I was interacting a lot with previous colleagues instead of properly networking as much as I could, but couldn't check emails or messages since my phone's free data in the EU ran out, so I focused only on reading my little brainless tiktok romance novel while having some chai latte in this super charming Icelandic café for a few hours. They also had a dog. An old, blind and deaf girl, but a good girl nonetheless.

As I made my way to the airport I could finally check my messages and to my surprise my boss sent me a huge email about how happy he was with how things happened in the conference, and with many ideas of what to do next. Feeling the spirit of Hygge spread through my body, I bought a scented candle, a Moomin rotating candle holder (aren't they stealing Finland's culture?), and a black licorice pipe. You know, just the essentials to survive the rest of the year.

Successful but tired greetings,

Some lady with a certain amount of Audacity but not enough to cycle through a dark forest in a foreign country

[audaciousamadeus]

Exasperated but Elated Interlude

"She learns!" she said, and then two weeks later she's in Copenhagen with only one and a half hours of sleep, after a full week of doing analysis and making a poster to present at her old boss' conference.

This year is being ridiculous.

Maybe she does not learn at all but she is content, safe, and in Copenhagen.

Hygge greetings from a café in Nørrebro,

Amadeus

[audaciousamadeus]

Back to the routine

Sadly, coming back to London also meant coming back to my responsabilities. More specifically, coming back to my Upgrade report. After 9 months since the start of the PhD up to 16 months, you have to write and present a mini-thesis with all the progress you had so far and to discuss it with two lab leaders from the same department. If they approve of the current direction of your project, you are upgraded from MPhil to a proper PhD. To be fair I think this is a feature within British universities and that it makes it harder for a student to fail or to have a PhD that lasts like 8 years in which they are exploited by the PI to complete an insanely ambitious project and get scooped three times in the process (I'm looking at you, Germany).

I tried to work on it as fast as I could, but since the end of August I've been feeling this bizarre drowsiness. Even during my trip. It didn't matter how much I slept, my eyelids started getting heavy and dropping around 11am and this has never happened to me before. Thankfully I wasn't pregnant. For a few days before taking a test I even mentally prepared myself for a conversation with that guy (the me from before this Summer would have never thought this would happen in her little uneventful life), as I thought it would be only fair as the child would be half his and he would most likely agree to not keep them, and to make him aware that he was fertile if that was indeed the case (which, again, thankfully it wasn't as that would be the cherry on top of this situation). A blood test only pointed out to slightly lower ferritin levels than the average, but that has always been my baseline. The most shocking thing was that even my B12 was fine. I was doing regular exercise and hydrating as well.

So shockingly the problem was most likely stress. I guess that all those months working from 8am to 7pm and on weekends were finally taking their toll. Half of the trip last month was also just intense science, and even when it wasn't I would still read a few papers and worked on an abstract for two conferences.

So yeah. Maybe that was it. But who knows really.

Because of that, even though I had a week left to finish my report, I decided to not do anything related to academia during the weekend. My witchy friend asked if she could join for doing nothing on Saturday and I agreed that this was a good a idea. I made us some amazing peanut udon noodles with kimchi, gochujang brown sugar glazed tofu, cucumber strips marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil, and fried broccoli (can you tell that I am writing while hungry?).

I live right next to London's cutest Weatherspoons with a beergarden, so my witchy friend asked if me and my flatmate/landlord would like to go outside and have some cider in the garden, considering that it was literally the last day of Summer. We agreed of course. It was a great atmosphere and my flatmate was telling us about one time that he met a psychic (who was actually just a drug addict, classic South London NPC) at the Weatherspoons, until we started talking about our private lives and I had a meltdown that surprised not only my friends but myself as well. I'm not sure what exactly triggered this, but soon enough I was being bitter about unrequited love.

And even more bitter about thinking something was unrequited for years until the person confessed to me years later, long after I stopped having feelings for them. Even someone who I liked who is gay wrote a huge text to me saying that one of their biggest regrets was not spending as much time with me and that I was the most important person in his life. This has happened three times so far, so it seems to be a pattern. I should feel validated by these, I really should. Maybe the bitterness comes from a sense of injustice, not towards them but towards life or the universe. It feels like, maybe I could sense the potential of our bonds but years before these people could be mature enough to match my imagination. Like I have spent years hurting for nothing, that I am unlovable and that it is all unfair, although I know rationally that this is how life is and that I am not special in this regard. Even writing this down makes my eyes burn with tears. My own reaction revealed to me that this hurt me far more than I knew it did and it scared me, but it is better to acknowledge it than to sweep it under the rug.

It could've come up in a better way though.

I apologised to my friends and we went up to blow out a candle that my flatmate forgot to put out. My witchy friend revealed that she brought a bottle of Port, so of course we finished that bottle before heading back down to the Weatherspoons. We got a new round of ciders and the witchy friend's flatmate joined us.

We went back up after a while and I baked some vegan chai buns. I never baked chai buns. I didn't have a recipe. They turned out marvellous. Dangerously spicy though since I accidentally spilled a handful of ginger powder in the filling. As usual when I'm drunk and these two come over, I have no more impulse control and go to sleep around 11pm while they stay until 2am talking to my flatmate in the living room. Although I wanted a quiet day, I felt like this made me extremely happy. I could really feel the seasonal change as I woke up on the next day to a more cloudy and cold weather, got a leftover chai bun and warmed it up in the oven, made some matcha latte, and did nothing all day. I prayed that this weekend would exorcise the burnout away.

On Monday I didn't feel so sleepy anymore so I counted this as a huge success. Suck on that, stress! I made more progress during those three days before my deadline than I had for the past two weeks. At some point I had to improve specific plots I had for the datasets related to my main project, so I decided to reanalise everything altogether. As it turns out, naive old me wasn't as well-versed in the art of data analysis as current me is. The results I had pre-optimisation were not as bad as I thought they were! Those optimisations took so much time out of my life and self-esteem points...But oh well. Happens! Also results on a collaboration I have investigating how cold-shock affects neurons were super interesting. I felt the spark come back to me and genuinely felt eager to analyse that data! This was amplified 10x when I hit the submit button for my Upgrade, feeling life return to my body.

On non-scientific news I went to a Tango class. My boss recommended the place to me when we were having breakfast in the Swiss Alps. I intended to go alone, but another PhD student from my lab, cute Indonesian girl, decided to come along. She's polyamorous and had a relationship with a married non-binary person and a guy from my neighbourhood who identified himself as monogamous. On that week she broke up with one of them, and gotten broken up with by the other. It was the week of her birthday. She contacted me asking if I had any weekend plans because now she "had a lot of time". So I invited her for Tango during the week.

When it comes to singing, the majority of my enjoyment comes from the technical aspect of it, hitting the right notes in the right intonation, although there is the element of emotion in it. With dancing, although I would like to feel competent and praised for being good at the technique, what I sought was to feel more in the moment and connected with my body. To get out of my head and feel fluid. This has always been complicated for me especially due to a mix of being naturally unaware of sensations and feeling ashamed of my body, but I knew it was possible. Just for the sake of it I decided to lead. It was very interesting how much my levels of enjoyment varied according to the person. And how much a slight turn could induce someone's body to go to a different position. The teachers, who were Argentinian, congratulated me a few times. Maybe there is a special thing in Latina body proportions that tips my balance in a special way and makes me actually decent for this after all. Still, the dance felt far too sober and controlled. Maybe I truly am meant for "happier" dance styles. Still, I will give this a few more chances. The cute Indonesian girl also really liked it thankfully. We catched up a bit before going our own ways.

After the Upgrade was done I dedicated myself to the Away Day of my institute. Each lab had to make a skit, and Golden Retriever Boy, a post-doc, decided that we would make a parody of a David Attenborough documentary about the life of a scientist, and finish it off with an interpretative dance of a theory from the lab about how certain proteins interact with specific RNAs, shifting interactions and localisation of certain molecules in the cell. Trying, not my best but my bare minimum, to support the vision, I found a David Attenborough AI online for free and sent it to our lab manager, Ginger Naruto, to make a script. I had a few hours to become decent at using iMovie to edit videos and the end result made me prouder than my Upgrade report.

Ginger Naruto is leaving us soon for greener, shinier, more open-architecture pastures, so we went out for drinks and our place of choice was doing Oktoberfest. I saw this as a sign from the universe to impulsively buy a cheap Dirndl on Amazon, which arrived on the same day. Cheers to culturally approriating the Bavarians.

On Friday we had the Away Day. Our skit was one of the best, but our interpretative dance was a dumpster fire, as Golden Retriever Boy didn't want to practice beforehand. One of the labs did a pub quiz on the topics they study, another one did an Office parody, which was absolutely brilliant. By the end of the day we had a cocktail workshop with tapas. Except that even before making cocktails we were given shots. My body, although not hungover (still didn't have one), felt like it needed to be cleansed so I didn't take too long to leave, after making a beautiful Cosmopolitan.

Going back to the lab to split my cells, I had a very lovely walk to the Farringdon station, appreciating the sun setting and the Autumnal vibes. Splitting cells at 9pm would not be everyone's choice of a Friday night, but it felt comfortable somehow when listening to my Autumn playlist.

On the (sixth and) seventh day, she rested.

Lo and behold, she learns!

Recharged greetings using 80% more of my brain,

Sleepy Amadeus

[audaciousamadeus]

Whiplash

I breathed in the familiar air of the busy Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. Walking out of the station, I saw a group of crackheads jumping up and down and hugging each other. Cute. Lovely to be back.

When I was on the train I had the impulsive thought of having coffee with one of my friends from the circle of people associated with my first flatshare in Frankfurt. Back in October 2019 when I moved in, during the final months of pre-pandemic times, my flatmates (AKA: The vegan witchy muse that now also lives in London and the most elegant and cultured monster fucker novel fan) would invite their friend group to come to the flat and hang out often. That's how I got my first friends in my new life. Those months were incredibly blissful and I hold a place dear in my heart for all of these people even if I don't speak much to them anymore. I remember my first impression of this particular friend, Emo Cowboy, during one of the many celebrations organised in the flat, in which he was still pre-transition and I thought he looked too intimidating and cool. A few hours and drinks later however I realised I couldn't be more wrong as we bonded over growing up with Jewish culture, anime, and similar sides of the internet. I missed him, our conversations and coffee hangouts.

Thankfully, he agreed to meet for a brief coffee before going to work. We didn't have much time, but it was still refreshing. Afterwards, I headed to my stubborn Belgian friend's place, which would be my home for the next 3 days while he was away in Belgium visiting his family. Stepping in, I noticed how the flat still had an aura of barely lived in. Almost a soulless Airbnb, as he had only recently moved in and this was his first time out of a flatshare since finishing his PhD and starting a job in industry (hence having enough money to have a flat for himself). But looking closer, one could see the cute memorabilia and signs of my friend's cheeky personality, starting to take root in the flat.

My goal for today was to rest. To eat something fresh and healthy but yummy, to have a nap and read a bit. Oh. Right. And to work on an application for a conference in Denmark, which was my priority conference for this year.

Most people in my lab work on the mechanisms of RNA regulation sometimes applied to dementia, and I am the only person in the lab who researches RNA translation, or protein synthesis, in neurons. The name of the conference was literally The Brain Conference: Neuronal Protein Synthesis Mechanisms in Health and Disease, and it was gonna happen in October. My boss told me back in December of 2023 that I would have to be at this conference, so I couldn't fuck this up. The organiser is my previous boss from Frankfurt, who won the Brain Prize this year. I attended this (actually as my first-ever conference) back in 2021 and as a matter of fact that is where I met my current boss. So this event holds a lot of significance for me.

But...to complete my application, I needed to present a poster and have an abstract for it. I was, however, struggling to come up with an abstract given the fiasco that currently was my data. What would I even present? And the deadline was for the next day, so I needed to come up with something fast. Considering that I had abstracts from previous posters, I decided to Slack my boss about the situation and ask him whether he would still want me to go or not and to make this a problem for next-day me. With that, I took my nap and woke up in search of food. My friend had only left behind some sausages, sauces and a carton of Starbucks Cappuccino in his fridge, and although I am grateful for him telling me that I could use whatever he had, this just wouldn't do, so I went to the Rewe nearby. The neighbourhood is very close to the one that I spent my pandemic days in, Westend. On the way back, I admired my old guiding light for whenever I had no directions and a dead phone, the Europaturm. It was close to my old flat so I could never get lost.

None of my close friends from the Max Planck were in town, unfortunately. My lab partner in crime and pipette thief, Miho, was in another city, cheeky Belgian was visiting his family, Cephalopod celebrity and their girlfriend were in Greece, Sunshine Athlete was also away somewhere and the rest of my previous labmates were nowhere to be found. The curse of Summer in Europe.

Regardless, on the next day, I arranged to pick up my bass with Cephalopod celebrity's flatmate, who was in town, and had lunch with someone from the cheeky Belgian's old lab. We did get along very well before and have good conversations about politics, but this guy can be a bit too much (as in, a relentless human shitposting machine), so I could only handle him in small doses. He was more tolerable this time, which indicates that he was a bit depressed. Thoughts and prayers, buddy, hang in there, you're almost finishing your PhD. We met in Riedberg, where the institute is, at the very end of Frankfurt.

This place gives me some very strange feelings. Some paranoia about seeing people I know due to the high percentage of researchers here. A feeling I cannot label that is similar to nostalgia as I remember the amount of time spent here in the lab, on the campus, and the first time that I arrived here (two days after arriving in Frankfurt) and signed my contract only to realise that this was real and not a scam. Not only that, but that this was the most fancy research building I had ever seen. And that, with my contract, I would be able to afford my living here and suffice for a visa application. It gives me some pride, remembering how much I grew scientifically and personally during that time and some embarrassment thinking about how little I knew back then and the many mistakes that I did.

It feels oddly small now, but it was my everything. Maybe that's exactly why I had to leave.

After lunch, I decided to not overextend my stay in Riedberg and went back to the city centre, where I walked a bit around my old neighbourhood to give my brain some more oxygen. I needed to be REALLY creative for the abstract as today was the deadline.

Westend is quite a boring neighbourhood. Most of the people living there are either old money, bankers or diplomats who worked in the nearby embassies. I managed to live there during the entirety of the pandemic in a flat that used to be the family home of a Bulgarian family. The son was around my age and was the only one still inhabiting it, although he was usually in his girlfriend's place. Moving out of my first flatshare, where I made all of those lovely friends, and moving into this more distant flat right at the start of the pandemic in February 2020 felt like a bit of a harsh transition, and I remember crying on the first night, but I grew to appreciate that place. The one thing that kept me sane during those days was the Grüneburgpark, so I decided to have a walk in it before going back to the flat.

I kept few friendships from my Masters' Programme, but thankfully the strongest one still lived in Frankfurt and agreed to come over tonight for dinner. I decided to make homemade pizza from scratch and get a bottle of wine. She said she would bring watermelon as a dessert. While the dough was rising I tried to work on the abstract. I sincerely thought about giving up, although my boss was hopeful, but then I saw that the deadline had been extended by 2 weeks. I saw this as a sign from the universe and decided to then only think about work again when I got back in London, but was filled with determination to do all sorts of experiments to get interesting data when I was back. So I Slacked my boss saying that I would go on and still intended to join the conference, despite being terrified of embarrassing him by representing him with mediocre data in front of my old boss.

But something would work out. It had to (I'm really not a person of faith, but I tried my best).

My mind could now finally enter vacation mode, so I put on some music and started preparing the sauce and the ingredients for the pizza. I got special heirloom tomatoes, fried some aubergines in olive oil, a bit of honey and garlic, chopped some basil, and cut mozzarella.

By the time the first pizza was in the oven, my guest had arrived. Perfect timing. My guest, known as "the Russian girl" by many friends, came straight from the lab, tired and with lots of things to do for a publication, but chose to come regardless. People in the Masters course have revealed to me that they didn't know how it was possible that we got along so well. "You are just so nice and she is such a bitch" they said, verbatim.

The Russian girl was indeed quite a character. Certainly her sharp and icy cold blue eyes and directness could be quite intimidating. She projected an aura of ruthless confidence that some could say was borderline masculine, and certainly cannot conceal the distaste in her face for certain people. But somehow amidst similar taste in media and cynical sense of humour we got along just fine. It was also surprising to me in the very beginning and it did make me wonder if she was attracted to me. Just as I was beginning to also feel something I reminded myself that this thought pattern was very self-centered and unlikely to be true. After finding out that she had a husband back in Russia would soon move in with her, I cut off that idea for good as well as my tiny crush before it could become a fully fledged obsession that would devastate me.

Little did I know however that I was wrong about her feelings. At some point in 2022 we both discussed our feelings and she, quite directly, offered me a place in her open marriage in case I wasn't in a relationship (which, at the time, I was). It has always been a shock when discovering that people were attracted to me. I know very few instances, and it's even more shocking and almost unheard of when it's something reciprocal, but I'm slowly dealing with it better and trying to repeat in my head that it's shouldn't be that absurd.

This dinner was the first time we met when I was not in a relationship, so needless to say there was a small component of tension to it although very minor.

Sometimes I do forget that I am bisexual, and moments like these make me remember that it is indeed valid for me to identify as such. I do not know exactly how to describe our conversations but I do see a bit of a Erik Lensherr and Charles Xavier dynamic before the bitterness that defines most of their interactions in X-men. It feels playful, witty, and connected. She is also an amazing storyteller and really thoughful when it comes to the people that she holds dear. Especially considering the recent heartbreak in August I almost wished I could revive my infatuation towards her and to give this a chance. But there was something, something in the physical distance, something about her mentioning that her husband was not doing mentally well right now, something in me about how I feel about being with someone who was married, and...something about my still existent feelings about someone else that did not allow for anything to happen during that night.

Following wonderful conversation and food we parted our ways with a hug. After stepping out of the door she came back in because she forgot her bag. "Maybe it was just an excuse to get another hug", she said, hugging me once more. I felt paralysed and could not do anything more than to hug her back before we parted ways.

Oh, how I hate my brain. My awfully stupid monogamous brain. Quite an asset for long-term relationships as I am loyal to a fault, but absolutely useless being too invested and devoted to someone that does not even care about me as I should be cared for.

He texted me again as soon as I was in Swiss soil. Sent random reels while ignoring whatever I sent back. I don't want to assume the worse, but it feels like he just wants a back-up plan and felt like there were threats in Germany, and that as soon as I was back he would stop again. I had such wonderful feelings and memories from the time that we met in person and that gave me hope of continuing any sort of interaction in the future, but the current behaviour caused a contrast in my mind that tainted those memories and feelings with resentment, disappointment and hurt. Which truly a pity because I treasured them. I genuinely appreciated him, romantically or not. This was supposed to have ended a long time ago, and many times it almost did, thinking about how I deserve so much more than breadcrumbs. So much more than possibly being a back-up option. But there was always something reigniting it everytime it dimmed. Be that words of friends, memories, or a song or text, small occurences in the worst possible timing.

Again, I am not a person of faith.

I'm not spiritual or into mysticism.

But, hear me out, I believe that this is definite proof of the existence of Satan.

The next day was my final day in Frankfurt, and the day to celebrate mine and God's (this is a nickname that friends already used before me for this amazing woman) birthday with a picnic. The celebration would be with the circle of people associated with my first flatshare in Frankfurt (AKA: the witches). After a morning walk a Grüneburgpark I prepared some pesto focaccia (with the remaining dough from last light), and some vegetarian sausage rolls with sweet Bavarian mustard. If the cheeky Belgian knew what I was up to he would kick me out of his flat. Back in 2020 we used to have one night of the week in which me, him and other friends from the Max Planck watched a film or just chatted over a national dish of whoever was hosting. When it was my turn I made some vegan Brazilian stroganoff and he was enthusiastically eating a second plate of it when he found out that it was vegan. "HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?". Always a drama queen. I had to take the remaining vegetarian sausages with me back to London to leave behind no evidence of my crimes.

The picnic was wonderful. I love all of these people so much. It's not as if I'm unaware of it when I'm away but whenever I see them again I get reminded of how grateful I should be for having met such amazing people in my life. They baked me and God some birthday cake, each of us brought multiple dishes so it was quite a feast. Emo Cowboy put on some anime songs, and I received some presents, including a tarot deck and some earings. Emo Cowboy and Jesus also gave me a tarot reading, which at this point is standard whenever I visit them, and the cards told me that "my work-life balance was whack" (no shit), I was "exiting a cycle of trauma" (Berlin?), that I should be confident in my knowledge because now I was ready to achieve great things (I hope that's enough for my boss), my heartbreak would be over soon (???), and to be wary of manipulators (!?!?!?). Well, all the fun things.

I spoke more to the rest of the group but for such a short time it was ridiculous. I wish I could spend so much more time with them but I needed to pick up my bass, and it was my final chance to do so. I said my goodbyes and gave them hugs as I headed to the northern part of Frankfurt. Once I picked up my bass and went back to the flat I felt like I had nothing left in me, and that if I exerted myself any longer I would get sick, so I decided to rest for my train at 5am the next day. I would first take a train to Brussels and from there I would take the Eurostar to London, a total of around 6 hours of travelling. During those hours I thought about where my home was, as many people asked me where did I feel at home. This used to be Frankfurt to me, and during the year that I lived in Berlin I visited many times and always got the feeling of belonging. A feeling that I did not have with Rio since I visited again for the first time in 2021. But this time, I did not feel like Frankfurt was my home anymore. But I also don't think London fits that either.

"Home is where the heart is, and the heart is nowhere." I answered chuckling to whoever asked me during this trip. Many things about Frankfurt however brought me back a sense of who I was during the time I lived there. But that person is not me anymore, and this caused a feeling of disconnection. Spaces really bring you back to a certain mental and emotional state and I think that when that clashes so much with your current state it feels too foreign to be associated with your sense of self. It's like being faced with an old you who at some point you don't recognise anymore.

I believed I was in a transitionary period in which London did not yet feel like home, but as the train doors opened and the chill Autumn breeze from King's Cross St. Pancras hit my face, I could feel that I was wrong.

Glad to be back and writing this emotionally heavy post from the future,

Amadeus

[audaciousamadeus]

Rainha dos Baixinhos

The one thing I will not miss about Switzerland is being without mobile internet by refusing to pay 10 pounds to giffgaff every 30 minutes.

I did already miss many things, especially my peace of spirit from being alone in Basel. Thankfully, I had a 5-hour train ride to prepare myself mentally to interact with my pregnant friend, her boyfriend and his two kids in Munich.

When she came to visit London I couldn't properly connect to her even when we had intriguing discussions and watched the Phantom of the Opera because of busy lab days and having to prepare to go to Bosnia the day after she left. Talking to her now felt far more refreshing. Crazy how our emotional context influences our perceptions of people.

Her and her boyfriend were far more right-wing leaning than most of my friends, so I could have discussions I usually don't. We kept things light and fun enough while still keeping it relatively deep, which was a delight. I definitely see how her political opinions have been shaped by him though, and that was slightly concerning. They presented the kids to me, one which seemed to be around six years old, extremely energetic with a main character energy, and the other one was around four, very shy but with an intense gaze as if he knew all of your deepest thoughts.

They both spoke only German. They were both obsessed with Pokémon.

I revealed to them that I knew a lot about Pokémon and showed them my Game Boy emulator app on my phone, with many Pokémon games in German that I used to learn the language and fanmade hack roms from the community (I had a phase of trying them out to find the best hack rom and Pokémon Prism has a special place in my heart). I gave them my phone and allowed them to play a bit of Pokémon Emerald (or Smaragd). I was so intrigued by the information that the older kid paid attention to, like pointing out the weight of a Swablu and then going through every Pokédex entry comparing size and weights of Pokémon. He asked me about many battle dynamics and items, about every possible type combination and what was and wasn't super effective.

It might be an age thing, but I feel like in this trip the topic of motherhood and children came up far too often. I used to be horrified of the concept and was vehemently opposed to it (even had nightmares about it), but I suppose that by having more independence and stability the thought got far less scary. Some would say that my "biological clock is ticking", to my displeasure. I even dreamed about it recently and did not wake up in panic, which is shocking. Sometimes I fantasise about having children with whoever I fall in love with in the future (usually during the treacherous times of ovulation). After seeing so many mothers within academia recently it also seems to be doable as long as one has a supportive partner and institute. I was never the one to find children and babies cute, but I find their thought pattern so fascinating and hate how adults underestimate their intelligence. I try to take children's thoughts seriously and to stimulate them to follow their passions. The only problem then is, that they demand a lot of your time and energy and I barely have energy for myself.

I couldn't quite articulate the reasons why I wanted space in German so the kids were just following me day and night. At some point I wanted to read papers and they were just putting their hands on top of my screen and saying "CAN YOU READ NOWWWW???". Ugh. If I ever raise up a child I might give them serious attachment issues with the amount of space that I need, so I guess it's better that this doesn't happen.

I wasn't particularly interested in the city so I prioritised resting and seeing old friends more than seeing landmarks, but I did walk to Nymphenburg palace before going for dinner with my host and a Mexican friend who was also from our Master's programme in Frankfurt.

We started catching up on life. I explained what happened in Berlin and how life is in London and the Mexican friend spoke about her job outside of academia. She's a medical doctor (surgeon, to be exact) so she did not plan to stay in academia to begin with, but before while her diploma is not yet valid in Germany, she has been working in a company that administers clinical trials. It's funny how contrasting her warm demeanor and her practical mind and dry humour are. Big fan. We are quite alike but I feel that she believes far too much in objectivity. I started hearing from her side of the story how my host met her boyfriend/baby daddy. Her point of view was far more disapproving than I anticipated, but I suppose that that's her way to protect her friends from getting hurt.

"God, when you got together with him I wondered where did I go wrong. After everything I taught you! That you should go for a man who is attractive and has money, but he is actually NEITHER of those!"

The boyfriend in question was a previous flatmate of her ex-boyfriend, had two children quite young, did not have a higher education and was a gardener. He was, however, extremely intelligent in a way that he only cared about his interests even in detriment of reality, and had enough money to have a decent house in Munich and to be there for my friend. The problematic aspect of this is that I feel that my friend saw his potential and got interested in the aspect of making him reach it by making him be more organised and connected with the real world. She fell for potential. Very common mistake. Although in the surface they seemed to have a dynamic that could be lasting, it is actually based on her "fixing him". This comes from a place of arrogance, almost. You don't get to determine that someone gets fixed. Ideally love should come from a place of awareness of their flaws and your own. You can never fix anyone, although you can be there to support them if they wish to do so, and communicate if you think that something is not right for you.

These are of course, mantras that I also repeat to myself. Don't fall for potential. It does not matter what they could've been.

My Mexican friend has recently gone through a nightmare break-up story in which she had been friends with this guy who was her flatmate back in Frankfurt. He claimed to be a bachelor student in his 20s, German but with Russian relatives. They were together for more than a year before she found out that he was not a student, he was in his 30s, was actually Russian, and was cheating on her with half of the Latino community in Frankfurt and the country of Spain. This experience is still fresh on her mind and I think this influenced the tone of the conversation about my other friend and her boyfriend. She went on to talk about how the bare minimum would be for him to ask for my friend's hand in marriage and for her to get a pre-nup. That's the moment that I felt that my pregnant friend started being uncomfortable if not offended. She's the type of person who despite being an academic and looking tomboy-ish is all about empathy, traditional values and ideals of romance, so this has a strong clash with my Mexican friend's practicality and cold-heartedness. People like me and the Mexican girl would see the act of signing a pre-nuptial agreement as prudent and not a threat to the feeling of love, whereas my pregnant friend would see it as incompatible with her idea of true love. If it's truly something that would completely ruin things for her I think that should be respected and tried to leave it at that. My impression is that perhaps my pregnant friend and her boyfriend can talk about this dynamic and revert it, and that overall they seem to like each other enough and to compliment each other. So I feel that there is hope and I wish all the happiness to the couple and the baby that will come to this world in one month.

I think the Mexican friend noticed the discomfort and we changed the topic to her destroying some careless coworkers with sassy emails and vast knowledge of the company regulations. Talking to both of them again face to face really fills me with fondness. It's funny now how the pregnant friend used to be a crazy party girl with infinite flings and is now a saint, while me and the Mexican girl were always the hardworking, devoted types with very boring love lives and now we looked each other in the eyes and swore to become "baddies" (easier said than done, as I am a fool). She was also ruthless about my choices in men but I am immune to that, finding it entertaining at best.

The next day I finally explored a bit of the city center, and frankly found the city to be a bit devoid of a soul. I wanted to go to the Deutsches Museum, but on the way I got intrigued by the Jewish Museum. Reading about the individual lives of Jews in Munich before the Second World War brought me to tears. I knew many of those last names from classmates all the way in Brazil. The timeline of Jewish presence and rights in Bavaria made me think about trauma. How it operates similarly either as a collective phenomenon or one on the individual level. The segregation observed in the Jewish community comes from fear of the local communities who rejected them. But this reinforced the distrust of the local communities towards the Jewish population. This has been intensified after World War 2, and continued to grow post creation of the Israeli state. In the end, the trauma keeps you alive, but it makes you less atuned to the feelings and goals of others. Social processing seems to have a cognitive cost far too high when in a state of anxiety and fear. In that sense trauma seems more likely to guarantee your survival on something that is short term (needed, as you need to survive in emergencial threats after all), but it is self-sabotaging as you live the rest of your life in hurt and distrust, and in a perpetual fight-mode. As this happens in people it can also happen in collectives.

I stopped by the café of the museum to have a cappuccino and to use my computer there for a bit, as it was very hot outside. At some point I ate some Käsespätzle with fried onions and had a dark beer to feel like I truly came to Munich. I then headed back to my pregnant friend's place to watch Barbie and pack to leave early on the next day.

"What time do you leave?" The older kid said.

"My train is at 7am, so I need to leave at 6am" I replied.

"That's fine, I will wake up at 5am to show you my items on Pokémon Go!"

Hillarious, a bit cute as they really liked me, but overwhelming. In the end he didn't wake up. I thanked all the possible deities and I ran for the door and headed to the Hauptbahnhof to go to my final destination: Frankfurt am Main AKA Crackfurt.

Servus,

Auntie Amadeus.

[audaciousamadeus]

Where Science and Art Meet for Drinks at the Rhein

When I mentioned to friends that one of my stops was Basel, I received a few puzzled responses. Why stop in such a small city that I had been in before?

Well, 

I needed a link between my next two destinations, and I don't have infinite time and money. 

Originally, this had been the city that I wanted to do my PhD in the most (I am still interested in the research of that specific lab), but life got in the way. I had been there before when my mother came to visit me and needed to go to Zurich for career reasons, back in the end of September 2022. This, however, only happened because we had time for a 4-hour layover, and I received a notification from Google saying that the institute I had previously been interested in was having an open-door day. 

Importantly, I heard from previous colleagues that during the summer the Baselers float down the Rhein with a special bag called a Wickelfish, which can carry their belongings as they do so. Now that it was summer I could finally do the same and have more time to explore the city.

Also, I have already been to Zurich twice and for some reason that city gives me the heebie jeebies.

On the 31st, I arrived a bit too early for lunch and definitely too early for my 3pm check-in, so I immediately headed to H&M to buy the cheapest swimsuit I could get for the Exotic Rhein Mermaid™ plan before going to get lunch. Considering that Google Maps told me that to every place I need to walk 17 to 30 minutes, I just walked everywhere to feel the spirit of the city and get exercise (it's all about the efficiency, baby).

A few weeks before starting the trip I asked a few previous colleagues and friends to see if they were available to meet. One of them now lived in Basel. We didn't really talk these days, but I asked him for cafés/restaurant recommendations (for me to explore alone) and if he would like to catch up over coffee. Considering that now I feel more confident in my knowledge I wanted to talk to him about science and philosophy without feeling intimidated and cutting our conversations awkwardly. Also, he knew some people from my nice collaboration lab back in Berlin so I guess we could talk about that experience and this more personal side of academia. He gave me some vague and non-personal recommendations and ignored the message about catching up.

I thought of possible reasons why he wouldn't want to see me.

I believe this is somehow about him not seeing me as worthy of his time. This could be for a few reasons. Maybe now that I am in a lab that is more focused on RNA again instead of having a more direct connection to Neuroscience, he did not think it was likely that we would be peers. Perhaps he heard about what happened in Berlin through different sources that were not charitable towards me and therefore he thinks less of me now. These suggestions are of course tinged with my own insecurities so I should take these with a grain of salt. But he is quite a narcissistic and practical man, so I can somehow see him thinking something along these lines. A friend joked that he must've left the country. An idea that is quite funny to me.

Perhaps I traumatised him back in Frankfurt...

Naaaahhhhhh. Unlikely.

In either case, he shall regret it greatly when I'm a big shot and I deny collaboration requests, that'll show him, mwahaha! Jokes aside, my reaction was to feel minor disappointment and mostly neutral about it. Which is not a particularly good thing. Emotions motivate us to take certain actions, and the lack of anger makes me less likely to treat the person as coldly even if it might be in my advantage. I tend to prioritise understanding the full context behind someone's actions to make the best assessment and moral judgement before deciding how to react in the fairest way possible. It's an obsession with precision more than with being kind, you see. That unfortunately usually ends up in me being far more likely to be stepped on than others. On the good side, it also gives me enough mental flexibility to meet very interesting people and learn from more perspectives. But I'm not sure it's truly worth it.

On the other hand, I feel that in life, and especially in academia, you face a lot of rejections and toxic competition, and that made my bitterness levels go up through the years. It can be very easy to be lost in it, like when you go to the beach, leave your belongings in the sand and swim in the ocean, only to realise after a while that you have drifted far from your original position. Or in this case, you blink, and you realise one day that you are the toxic PI that people are cancelling on Twitter. I don't think one has to necessarily avoid it entirely, but to be aware of it when making decisions. One must be extremely wary of that and know how to channel those feelings on the right things and the right people in a justified way. Ugh, why must balance and personal development be so hard?

Moving on, I went to a place he suggested for lunch as I was craving Pad Thai, and it was almost as good as my comfort Pad Thai in Frankfurt. Well done, Basel, starting well.

I decided to go to the Pharmacology Museum. Inside, I had my first encounter with a Baseler. Had a surprisingly friendly chat in German before realising this guy was barefoot. Interesting people. Afterward, I went to a café that looked tiny from the outside but had a huge balcony facing the Rhein. "Things are getting better and better", I thought as I headed to my Airbnb.

The flat was a gorgeous penthouse. A gorgeous penthouse that I had to drag my suitcase up three flights of stairs at 34°C to get to. By the time I reached it, I was parched and was hallucinating about drinking half a pool of clean and cold water. I dropped my things in my very spacious room with large windows and desperately went to the kitchen. There, I found a man who seemed to sense my desperation and offered me water and ice as if I were a snake that had escaped from an Australian fire. He said he was staying in the room right next to mine. Turns out that he was a post-doc in Basel and that he was also working in molecular biology. A nice coincidence. He was also Brazilian and my bachelor’s thesis supervisor was a part of his thesis committee. Now that was insane! I revealed to him my Exotic Rhein Mermaid™ plan and he offered me his Wickelfish to do so. I was over the moon and looking forward to use it in the following day.

I went to my room and rested a bit before going to a brewery recommended by a Swiss PhD student who works on the same floor as me back in London. I saw that this brewery had two types of beer that I really like and ordered both of them for myself. 

"You can get just a small glass to try if you'd like." said the waiter.

"Did I fucking stutter?" I considered saying before replying "Thank you, I'll still have both."

I only had the Pad Thai, a ball of black sesame ice cream and a cappuccino earlier that day, so I got tipsy far too fast. I decided to talk to a close Brazilian friend, who was giving me suggestions that were far too dangerous for the state that I was in. I decided to switch off my internet, put on my earphones to listen to nice music and explore the riverbank on the north side of the city. I didn't expect that it would feel so...alive. It felt like a miniature Copacabana with crowded bars, people doing sports, and even groups dancing to Forró, which was absolutely unexpected. After a wonderful one-hour walk, I decided to head back to the Airbnb. I decided to try to find my way back without Google Maps and somehow, I managed. On the way back, wandering through charming streets with idiosyncratic details on every corner, the unusual mix of a big pharma tradition and a love for the arts, niche shops and numerous tiny galleries, I wondered if it was possible to fall in love with a city.

The next morning, I was set on my quest to get some good coffee in a traditional bakery and head to float down the Rhein next to the Tinguely Museum. Everything was going according to plan, and I needed to be reassured that my Wickelfish was adequately closed. It was early on a Sunday so there weren't many people around, only two women who seemed very experienced with the whole Wickelfish jazz. I asked for their help, and they decided to float down the river with me. One of them was an old rich Baseler architect who knew Oscar Niemeyer himself, and the other one was a younger Viennese woman who was her coworker and neighbour. Friendly like everyone else in this utopian town, they tried to indoctrinate me into learning some Baseler German, to no avail. They told me to go to the Vitra Museum of Design and then in the evening to a private closed off section of the Rhein that had a bar/restaurant, known as Le Rhin Bleu. We parted ways as they left the water, and I continued with the flow until the next bridge. I will be forever grateful for their help and suggestions. They made my plan work even better than expected and I felt the Rhein renew my will.

I did not realise that the Vitra Museum was in Germany until my bus crossed the border. The museum was fantastic, and I could even see great pieces of art in the exhibition, like the chair that was in my London flat's living room. Since my flatmate was obsessed with Vitra, I got him a little expensive souvenir and went back to Switzerland for one more museum: the Tinguely.

I felt like the main character when the rain started to pour as soon as I entered the Tinguely Museum. Even more so when the rain stopped as soon as I left it to go to Le Rhin Bleu. Not even the mega-rich people's judgement could ruin my time there as I had a Limoncello spritz and the best focaccia and gelato of my life. I left just in time to appreciate the setting sun touching the city for the last time while walking back to the Airbnb on a tiny route by the south of the river. I felt emotional thinking about the sheer happiness that this weekend brought me, said my goodbyes to the city and promised to return.

Getting back to the Airbnb I packed and rested. On the next day, I spoke briefly with the Brazilian guy who gave me the Wickelfish over breakfast. Mostly about science and surprisingly about the project I did during my MSc programme and if that would ever get published. He showed me pictures of his wife and children and his lab in Brazil. We exchanged our social media handles to keep in touch and I rushed to get ready and leave at last to be reunited with my one true love: 

Deutsche Bahn.

With unusually deliriously happy salutations,

Frau Amadeus

[audaciousamadeus]

Alpine science monastery

I wasn't the only one suffering through the waiting time mentioned in the bottom of my previous post. A native Genevese who lives in London also suffered with the consequences of EasyJet's greed. After parting our ways early in the morning, we found each other again sitting next to each other in our very late plane.

She had far more energy than me and was surprisingly social. To avoid having small talk, I started talking about personal issues and drama (good to do it to strangers, as there is nothing at stake and can be occasionally insightful). She said that when arriving in Geneva, her and her friends were gonna go clubbing and she invited me to come along. My sister in Christ, after so many hours waiting how is it possible that you have so much energy? Even when I have energy, I don't have energy for clubbing. At this point I was merely an empty shell of a person, so I politely declined. We did agree to see each other at some point in London though, maybe for a salsa class.

There must be truly no rest for the wicked and I must be Elphaba. Arriving in my hostel in Geneva I was met with an insanely hot room and I had to share the room with two strangers. I went to bed cuddling my backpack for protection and couldn't sleep due to the heat, so I doomscrolled until exhaustion. Maybe I managed to catch 2 hours of sleep before my train to Visp at 6am. Getting out of my bunk bed was slightly worrying as I was dizzy from consecutive days of sleep deprivation. The way to Visp and then to Saas-fee was so scenic it felt like everything was a postcard on a green screen at times. I stayed in a tiny flat that I shared with two other workshop attendees and had a beautiful view to the alps. Apparently, they shot the video for Last Christmas here, wowie. Good thing that I arrived early so that I could claim my solo room and have good nights of sleep.

After greeting the other attendees and lecturers, including my boss and some colleagues from the Slovenian part of the lab, we had an ice breaker session (most people were from Swiss universities, as the workshop has been subsidised by the Swiss government) and then the lectures and other activities started. I stood victorious against my exhaustion and watched even the chalk talks without falling asleep.

The workshop was divided into sessions for different aspects of RNA biology: processing, compartmentalisation, translation, development, localisation and modifications. For each session some of us were assigned to present and criticise papers that were previously chosen by the lecturers of each session. This made me expect that the course would happen in a more information-based approach. However, I soon realised the course would be more dynamic than expected and most of the learning would come from having to come up with projects and criticising the papers we had to discuss throughout the course. The course was like a huge journal-club and parts of it were actually dedicated to how we should approach ideas, both in creating them and discarding them. In the end creating a sense for these and for critically assessing the research of your peers (and your own) are just as important as having vast knowledge about biology. I have a feeling that all of us in the course had this shared conclusion.

One of the lecturers was a big shot from the field of the biogenesis, function, and degradation of eukaryotic RNAs. Throughout other lectures the others were basically sucking up to him. Big cringe. Hierarchies in academia are so annoying, as if it wasn't enough to deal with just the science you also have to deal with the social component of interactions between people who were most likely misfits in high school and didn't go through therapy later in life.

Interestingly enough the big shot remembered my name and continued to refer to it and to make me answer questions. People asked me if we knew each other from before (we did not). I had a feeling that it was because I was one of the few people that did not treat him as if he was a God. I can only hope it was also because I said very intelligent things but I don't want to be delusional.

I had to prepare my presentation with a PhD student from ETH Zürich. Upon further discussion about our backgrounds before actively working on the presentation, he told me that he was from the exact lab that was my second choice for my PhD back in the end of 2021. In a parallel universe we would be labmates! The PI of the lab he is in was kind and passionate, but seemed like he demanded a lot of independence from his team. Additionally, his intensity could potentially make me uncomfortable in expressing myself when it comes to science. When speaking to my current boss from London I felt comfortable discussing science, was offered a more concrete project, and was assured I would receive more support. Somehow, I intuitively knew this would be the perfect choice and that it would be the ideal place for me to grow even before we finished talking for the first time, which surprised even myself. Considering that I had just been through a traumatic academic experience and my confidence and sense of stability were shaken, these factors were my absolute priority to rebuild myself. Even with the crazy leap of faith that it was to apply for a PhD programme in London and to discard offers in Germany and Switzerland.

When we started discussing the paper itself, I could clearly see how much of a good match he was for his lab. He was extremely critical and vocal about it. Something about him screamed that he was very independent, passionate and intense about science, in a borderline unhinged way. It reminded me a bit of a Russian friend back from my Master's programme in Frankfurt. They are both born and raised Muscovites and both studied at the Moscow State University. I wonder if that's a pattern and if so, if that's a selected personality trait for that specific university or a specific social class in Moscow. Regardless, it's a trait I admire and aspire to develop. Feels like my most instictive mode of interacting with information is to just simply absorb it (and I am very good at it) passively instead of critically. I was reminded of that when hearing his extensive criticism. Always good to have a reminder to improve and we had a productive discussion.

On Wednesday we had a free afternoon in which we could've chosen to rest or to go on hikes. I would rest, but thinking that the opportunity to be in the alps wouldn't present itself again so soon, I decided to join a small group of crazy people that wanted to do the craziest hike around but to go even higher up than its official ending point. What could go wrong with such a great decision? Needless to say, around 30 minutes in my pressure was dropping and I realised the error of my ways. Luckily, I wasn't the only unfit quitter in the group! One of the lecturers, a woman from the University of Vienna whose expertise was in the ribosome heterogeity in bacteria, was also feeling unwell. We both told the group to continue going and found a resting spot 10 minutes later.

"Well, we're already here in Saas-fee, we should still see the top of the mountain..." She trailed off, with an unspoken suggestion that wasn't that hard to infer.

"Should we take the cable car?" - I suggested.

"Oh yes, absolutely. You know, I'm glad you're here."

"Me too."

We went our gleeful way up living our best life. On the way the topics ranged from the discussions within the field of ribosome heterogeneity, methods, academia and how it changed within her life time to more personal topics like her family, upbringing, motherhood in academia and other experiences. Getting to the top we knew we had an unspoken agreement to get a beer to continue living our good life and to patiently wait for the fit freaks to arrive at the top so that we could belittle them and say how slow they were. This happened when we were already at our second pint. She reminded me a lot of a PhD student from the lab that I was in when studying in Frankfurt. More and more I feel like I can have a glimpse of what kind of students many senior researchers were.

I briefly wondered who did I see myself reflected on.

The whole week included very productive coffee breaks, as I discussed things to do in my project with my PI. He was under great stress having to finish the application for an ERC grant and still had time to brainstorm for ideas with me and that fills me with gratitude. It also included however feeling some melancholy at times when I wasn't thinking about science. It should be illegal to be sad in the Alps. "Brat summer", I chanted beneath my breath, in hopes that it would fix me.

By the end of the week we worked on a group project in which we basically had to come up with a grant application, down to designing work packages and assigning students and post docs to parts of the project. We then had to present it - kinda felt like a Saas-fee's got talent. I thought this would be way more stressful at first, but even though in the final day we worked together until almost 11pm I had so much fun! Shout out to the people involved. These will be my peers in the future and I cannot wait to see what they will become and when will life make our paths cross again.

Going our separate ways at last, I headed to an Airbnb in the small village of Zeneggen. I spent the afternoon without one single useful thought, and decided to watch youtube videos that were not related to RNA biology until the time I went to sleep. It was marvellous. Finally some crumbs of rest.

Peaceful salutations,

Ms. Audacious

[audaciousamadeus]

Self-pity, the post

Ladies and gents, what a week.

It's been 6 months. 6 months since I found out the method I was using to answer the first question of my PhD project wasn't well-established and the person I got it from in the lab was also trying it out. 6 months of troubleshooting. After promising results indicating that I managed to fix the protocol, I processed a huge amount of samples, not only for my project but for many collaborators. 

Now the data was finally here (as of the previous week), and I had my lab meeting presentation the week after the arrival of the new and shiny data. The presentation was one day after my 30th birthday. Exciting and frightening times. 

On the week I got my data, I also got a proposal from a colleague to catsit and housesit while her and her boyfriend were away on a festival for 4 days. "You should see it as a little getaway" she said. Thinking about how much work I needed to get done and how little that would happen if I stayed home and got distracted by my flatmate, I accepted the offer. Went to her place on Tuesday for dinner, picking up the keys and meeting the lovely cat who looked like the pathetic pleading emoji. Their garden looked perfect for my data analysis getaway, and I was looking forward for the weekend.

Very little analysis was done that weekend (pre-processing takes time) and instead I bought some cheap vintage clothes from a store that was closing in Camden, went to a local bakery in Nunhead and walked in the Nunhead cemitery with my newly bought tradwife cosplay of a dress. Maybe some people must've thought I was an apparition. When waiting for my data to get ready and choosing which experiments I should prioritise for my presentation I sang to the cat, who loved it. This weekend I was completely obsessed with Real and Rain, both songs by Unprocessed, and by Alibi from Sevdaliza, Pabllo Vittar and Yseult so that's the repertoire that the cat got to listen to.

On Sunday I also walked to the lab to feed some cells and got my ass literally kicked by a homeless man in Peckham. This was probably an omen, if not a visual metaphor of this week kicking my ass. Also, I couldn't find my bike lock keys. Just grand really.

While looking at the initial quality control of my data I was faced with a very depressive image. The degree in which the problem in the protocol was indeed solved varied to insane degrees depending on the sample. And the useful percentage of the data was usually too low. Considering that I was going to watch a film the next day with an amazing bioinformatician from my lab, I decided to ask in person whether she could meet me to discuss my data for the lab meeting.

Usually, I would say no to social outings so close to my presentation, but I really look up to her and feel like we have a bond. Due to a part of the lab having a different location we barely interact. A few more people that I had similar feelings towards were going to join as well. I felt like I couldn't decline the opportunity to meet them and that I would deal with my presentation stress and tiredness later. 

We watched the best worst film: Troll 2. The one in which there is no Troll 1, no trolls (there are goblins though), and one of the actors was some guy that was an outpatient from the University of Utah psych ward. It was gloriously trashy. The Bioinformatics Goddess told me to come over to their part of the lab so we could discuss things the next day.

Getting to the fancy part of our lab the next day, I first saw Mr Genius, who was also there in the Troll 2 watch party. Something about him tells me that he can handle my sense of humour and that we're quite similar, but I'm always reminded that this is not fully the case. The mismatch isn't big, but it always gives me a weird sense of unease and anxiety amidst the joy I get when talking to him. Him being intellectually intimidating doesn't particularly help, but still, I quite like our interactions. After some light banter about the film, I told him that soon I was going to talk to the Bioinformatic Goddess about my data and he decided to join.

Going through my slides and data their silence intensified until both cut that with indignation at our boss. They were both furious at our boss for the lack of adequate supervision that I have received so far, and the amount of hard work that I put for almost no reward. It takes me a lot of mental effort to show them my work and have discussions, as I feel slightly inhibited towards them due to me seeing both as inspirational people, but I think I managed to calm myself down a bit and to have a proper discussion with them. My fears were confirmed. the way that the data looked, I would only be able to detect biological phenomena that were quite pronounced. And perhaps this could be the case with one of the collaborator's projects, but it was most definitely not mine. It felt reassuring to see that they both felt that I was competent actually and that they both had my back. "You are truly excellent, and this is a waste of hard work and intelligence, I'm sorry but this just makes me so angry", Mr Genius said. It feels a bit delirious to write this down, even. We spoke a bit about what analysis I could do with what I currently have in order present something on Thursday, and they were both very helpful.

After work I went home to make sure I had some analysis pipelines running for the pre-processing of a few datasets before heading off to Pizza Tuesday (with the people from the Bosnian wedding). I took an apple strudel that I baked that morning as a little birthday thing. We spoke briefly about the dancing blog guy, and they told me something vague about reasons for him ditching me. I couldn't really put their bits of information together, but something about him "not being that social" and them thinking that I "deserved better" (as if anyone deserves anything. As if there should be the need to diminish the person who is not your friend, the person said friend is attracted to and decided to like based on their own assessment, just because this friend got hurt) and that in reality he most likely just couldn't "handle it". Whatever "it" means. The prospect of commitment? My feelings? His feelings? I decided to not ask any further, but somehow hearing that from them intensified my heartache. I almost preferred to think of my previous hypothesis that he just didn't care about me and thought I was physically unattractive. Hope I don't care about people ever again, 4/10 experience.

I wanted to spend the night working on my presentation and analysing data, but the wise Bosnian Pizza Tuesday host told me it would be better to sleep and to work on it in the morning. Feeling emotionally exhausted, I don't think there was anything else that I realistically could do.

At last, it was my birthday, and I decided to go early to the bouldering gym as a treat. That felt great and I even found my bike lock keys there! I felt like the universe was finally smiling at me. My Persian ex sent me happy birthday wishes, we spoke a bit about my lab struggles, and he said "Good luck with all of that. Never forget: you came a long way and you have done great things. You are also gonna be even better and go higher!". I cried a bit in the middle of the gym and was very thankful that it was empty. His support has always been invaluable, and I will forever be grateful and resent the fact that I am not attracted to him. Went back home and got some presents from my flatmate's parents (for tolerating their deranged ape son. Just kidding). Went to work and found some more goodies on my desk from colleagues.

People kept asking me for celebrations and what I would like to do on my birthday. I decided to go out for drinks in a cute pub close to the lab as a celebration after my presentation. I felt like I didn't have energy to organise anything else and that I would need the drinks. I'm definitely not on the path to become a raging alcoholic. 

Also, early March I had bought one ticket to watch the Spirited Away theatre play on my birthday, with the original Japanese cast. I feel a bit guilty that I did not invite anyone to come with me, but I truly wanted to have this experience alone and treat myself. Back then however I did not know I was going to have a presentation the next day. And truly, it was magical! And it was all in Japanese! When it was over I returned home and spent most of the night finishing my presentation.

I concluded that I shouldn't lose all my sleep over this and that if there was any interesting bit of data to show, there was not enough time to properly prepare slides in a way that I could communicate something meaningful to the lab. It would just be a show-off of how much I had done and that only thing that would accomplish is for me to feel like I am not useless. I refuse to do such meaningless self-soothing behaviour ever again. It was painful, but I decided to make a presentation based on how the method that I was using was indeed not usable, what are the exact issues, ideas of how to proceed, some optimisations on other methods. The main focus was to inform other lab members and my boss if they wanted to either use the method or suggest it to collaborators, and to gather feedback and ideas of what I could possibly do. Personally, the whole thing was painful to me and gave me a feeling of failure and not being smart enough to know when to quit optimising and switch to something else. But I received reassurance from peers that things are ok and that's how a PhD goes.

I am still, however, feeling that sort of numb sadness. Indeed, good that I had drinks afterwards. Good job, past me.

For the celebratory drinks there were some people from my lab, my flatmate, two London besties, and a guy adjacent to my Brazilian friend group who moved to London before I hanged out with these people. We talk quite often on Telegram but I think that my texting style became too European to keep up with Brazilian texting (but it's still too Brazilian and intense for the European standards). I got lovely cards, a few gifts and an AMAZING vegan (so that my Witchy Muse could eat) chocolate and raspberry cake from Konditorei, organised by my tasteful and thoughtful flatmate. 

Celebrations didn't stop there. Two people joined me for climbing on the next day, and on Saturday my flatmate gave me the surprise present of watching episode 6 of Star Wars in the cinema, a perfect ending for our Star Wars craze we had for the past weeks watching every main film in the franchise. I'm incredibly thankful for all the lovely people that consider themselves my friends. Highschool me would never once have thought that one day people would care as much. Considering that she never had that, I didn't have a lot of practice with saying no and finding a balance. It's especially hard considering that it's not easy for me to immediately access my emotional feedback on things, so if something is too much it usually hits me consciously way later than for most people. It was getting obvious though (at least for me) that my interactions were getting stunted and unnatural the entire week. That was not very 365 party girl of me. 

I'm just...

Tired. 

Exhausted really. 

I want nothing more than to stay in bed, watching nonsense on YouTube, or some series, or to casually read a fiction book, and to sleep for 9 hours every night for 1 month. Surrounded by pillows, preferably with cuddles every so often. And that would be the only contact with people that I would want in that ideal one month.

But that fantasy is far from happening in the foreseeable future. You see, I started writing this from a Starbucks at the London Gatwick airport with a large cappuccino. I had a flight to Geneva at 7:45am and woke up at 3:30am to come to the airport and be on time. With a pack of discounted babybels in my pocket so that they wouldn't go bad in the fridge.

Said flight was overbooked. I will now fly at 4:55pm. It was 8:36am as I started writing this. I stayed in that Starbucks for almost 6 hours writing this and reading a paper to make slides for a summer course in the Swiss Alps. The flight was also 2 hours late and now my earphone batteries ran out. I'm finishing writing this on the plane to Geneva. Woe is me.

When Mannequin Pussy said, "Everyone says to me 'Missy, you're so strong' but what if I don't wanna beeeeeeeeee" I really felt that.

This is just the beginning of frenetic two weeks. And It's me and my pocketful of babybels against the world.

Exhausted salutations,

Drained Amadeus

PS: The timeline is probably very confusing so I'll simplify it here:

Week of the 12th of August: At some point in the middle of the week, my data arrived

15th to 18th of August: Catsitting in Nunhead

21st of August: My birthday

22nd of August: Lab meeting presentation

[audaciousamadeus]

So it begins

Many times in my life I tried to keep a diary. It's such a fad when you're a child, it's just what people do (usually, what girls do). It was an attempt to recognise my own emotions as a young adult of 23 years of age. Now, nearing my 30s, it is a gift to my future self.

Possibly, this is the right reasoning to make the habit stick and to shut down the overthinking that usually stops me from posting things. Let's try to be positive this time. And on Tumblr because that's how we roll.

This didn't come out of nowhere, of course.

One month ago I was at a traditional Bosnian wedding. After the bride and the groom had their first dance, the best man dragged me to the dance floor. Throughout my life, I've been known to not be the dancing or partying type. There's an aspect to identity which is reinforced by the context, be that people or places, in which we are immersed in. I've found that one of the wonders of changing surroundings and peers so often is that one can more easily let go of such constraints. At that moment, the once so self-conscious me was nowhere to be found. No one pointed out her absence. Not the audience nor the dancing partner, for no one there knew her. Amen.

The dancing continued for hours and I felt myself improve. Could it be due to alcohol? Most likely, yes. It did seem extremely logical to my inebriated mind, however, that I and the best man had compatible ways of responding to each other's feedback in ways that helped us improve, and that this would translate well in a relationship. Absolutely moronic and just enough to generate interest.

Coming back, we decided to meet and he showed me his private blog. Smooth. He cooked for me, we drank, we danced, we sang, we connected. Coming from a different field and social bubble, his views challenged me but in a non-aggravating, refreshing way.

The lack of empathy that tinged his comments at times scared me, as did the gap between our financial situations. I hate imbalances, they pave the way for unhealthy dynamics. These stopped me from going all in but seemed resolvable with good communication and organisation. With continued communication over the next days, came the sinking realisation that:

Either he was used to putting in less effort into relationships than me, or

He had lost interest within 1 or 2 weeks but continued talking to me

And with either case, I have decided, after almost 30 years on this Earth one of my requirements is for someone to actually love me back. Earlier this year I decided I needed to be attracted to someone to start a relationship. We're really going places in 2024.

He revealed that he truly wasn't interested in a romantic relationship, which wasn't much of a surprise. Still, it made me feel a hollow type of pain which was unnexpectedly overshadowed by a sense of inner warmth and peace throughout that weekend. On the afternoon of that Sunday however, I realised that I saw the moments in which we danced and sang together with immense fondness and would miss them dearly. Two activities that I have not been comfortable doing around anyone else.

Something in me told me that our interactions would survive and there was hope for us to do that again, platonically. Therefore... I asked him if we ever could repeat that in a non-romantic way. Maybe he interpreted that as me having a hidden agenda to seduce him but I cannot be damned and don't think this is a good time to explain why I also wouldn't pursue that further. That would seem very salty and this is far from what I feel. I suppose people are not used to direct expressions of "pure" intentions.

His reply gave me hope that we could enjoy each other as friends in the future and I'm glad I asked. I also need to take my time to recover until that can happen.

In the meanwhile a friend has given his opinion on the whole ordeal and has said that the guy was most likely intimidated by me intellectually (*laughing track in the back*), and that I sabotage intimacy with nervousness by acting cynically - making the other person feel insecure. Shots fucking fired!

Things learned:

Dancing is actually nice.

Blogging seems to have its benefits.

Seeing potential is not enough, the other person needs to see it too.

I will only pursue someone who I am attracted to and that is head over heels, insanely in love with me, is caring, passionate about their interests, open-minded, witty and is into mutual support and growth. Is that too much to ask for? Apparenly, yes.

I thought I was being annoyingly vulnerable and found out I have to be yet more vulnerable. This is horrible news!

My blogging endeavours are, therefore, an STD from a situationship. Alas, that situationship is no more but the damage is done.

Contagious, nasty stuff that stays after the heartbreak.

I want to use this to process my feelings and thoughts and to entertain and shape my future self. I want to remind her what it's like to be a bit of a fool and to remember the mundane but magical moments of my present.

Days of morning exercise before work. Indulging in treats from the local café. Laidback interactions with colleagues. Intellectual stimulation from podcasts, audiobooks, scientific papers and discussions. Watching the night fall on the London skyline in my flat while debating whimsical and grotesque would-you-rathers with my lovely and deranged flatmate, sitting next to a needy Bengal cat. We're watching some Western with Javier Bardem. God, I hate cowboys.

I'll cherish these moments forever.

XOXO,

Ms (not-so-audacious) Amadeus