I love my collaborators.

As you all know, I mostly hate my lab.

But I sometimes forget how much I love my collaborators.

My collaborators are smart. They are open-minded. They respect me and treat me as a colleague. They share ideas and reagents freely.

So, pretty much everything I'd want my labmates and advisor to be, but they can't seem to manage it.

In all fairness, it probably helps that I don't see my collaborators in person very often. I love how over email even the most surly, socially inept people can manage to be politically correct, even downright polite.

I love how you can have these amazingly focused scientific discussions over email on any random day, and each one can contain as many as three huge epiphanies.

I love that.

Today was a good email day. Something about the holidays and everyone wanting to catch up on their email before they go out of town always works out well for me.

I also love that I've been getting enough sleep this week, which is helping tremendously, and my friends all seem to be having crises, which amuses me. Sometimes it's just really nice to know I'm not the only one who has bad job days, or gets annoyed about stupid little things not so much because of the things themselves but because they happen repeatedly and we have no say in changing them.

But today, my biggest battle is with computers, and I am okay with that. Maybe because they aren't sarcastic, egotistical, competitive, and they don't constantly put me down. Yes, today I am fond of computers, even if they are sometimes slow and stubborn.