I dropped a jar of gold powder.

Okay it wasn't gold powder that's in the jar (people here call it a flask). It was some sort of expensive sugar with a fancy name - D-Mannosamine, but it didn't look much different from normal table sugar, both with crystalline structure and silvery reflection. What's different was that it was stored in an elegant cylindrical glass container with a size no larger than my thumb. I was told that it's worth 250 USD per gram, and so I guess it was important. I like the feeling of being assigned to an important job, and playing with some expensive sugar sounded important, so I was quite excited. I was also extra careful though because I really didn't want to mess it up. But when I tried to be careful my hands started to shake uncontrollably. I managed to keep myself calm and retain some control over my hands, but it was merely enough to keep things in my hands without any external influence. Nevertheless, it seemed promising in the beginning. I was familiar with all the procedures and I successfully carried them out. The plot twisted when I took it off from the vacuum and loaded it into a round bottom flask ready for chemical reaction. You know, most chemistry labs are filled with equipment and glassware ( and people ), and just when I was about to turn around to get back to my area, a new intern girl ran into me for some god-knows-why-but-probably-not-important reasons and swiped the flask out of my hand. The flask accelerated toward the ground inexorably, hit the target, and shattered so loudly that turned the entire lab into silence. Normally I don't stutter, but I blushed so hard and was basically petrified staring at the mess I'd just created. After a few minutes of awkward silence, my lab mentor told me to clean it up , and so I did. I hope it's all good now.

OMG I can't believe I just tossed away 50 dollars like that it felt like doing charity except that I wasn't helping anyone. Nononononnono.

1st organic reaction

It’s my first time to complete an organic reaction and obtain a satisfactory product, after two days of trials and errors. I never knew that it takes to many steps, each requiring stringent execution, to replace a simple amino group with a protecting group on glucose. The word ‘glucose’ has also been given a new definition. It is no longer only synonymous to sugar and sweets or energy-generating material. To be more precise, it’s more like a blank sheet of paper on which different colors can be added to give it different kind of meaning. What I did today was just making it hydrophobic for the benefit of my future experiment, yet it has already brought me so much excitement. I can wait to move on to the next step.

Procrastination

I've been having a hard time telling myself to carry out things listed on my schedule. And yes, I made the schedule. Yet I need a motive that's strong enough for all the time to push me forward, and I've realized that if I allow some time to digest an intense sensation, the feeling will abate and in the end I will just accept it. And that was the typical history of my motivation; it forms, and it gradually dies out. I guess it would have to be intense enough to go over certain threshold in order to be sustained. I also read from somewhere that we could spend only 20% of our time with best attention/focus to complete 80% of our daily work. Same logic applies, we could also spend 80% of our time not focused to complete only 20% of our daily work. I haven't checked the statistics of it, but it does leave a strong impression.