tonic state of threatened homeostasis

In other words, stress.

My frustration is steadily increasing, but I'm not ready to give up on grad school or a career in science yet either. I chose my path and I'm going to stick it out.

Messed up the cells again (though this time it wasn't entirely my fault, for once). New ones are growing. Reverse transcriptions yesterday, hybridizations this afternoon, then finish off the arrays tomorrow and scan. And hope beyond all hope that I at least one of my four arrays comes out some semblance of good.

(If you didn't get that last part this is what matters:)
My optimism says all of this is great. The stress-spawned evil little monster of reality is telling me the arrays will be unintelligible ugly yellow smears and the contamination problem is going to come back. Ah, graduate school.