Ouch

Today I lacerated myself by simultaneously crushing the end of a borosilicate glass pipette and jamming it into my right thumb. This is the first time I've been cut this way, after a total of almost a full year in lab doing Chemistry. I've heard that it happens fairly commonly with NMR tubes, but damn I've never heard about the *back* of pipette tips.

Glass is a very temperamental beast: smooth, elegant, and lustrous--even sexy--when intact, but when broken... If you've seen / handled borosilicate before you'll know that it's a real b*tch when it shatters. The shards are uneven and slivers go everywhere. Think beer bottle, only 100 times worse.

So another battle scar to my collection! Let me break down the extent of the cut. The approximately inch-long slice is about 3 mm deep, enough to warrant stitches (except I'm too lazy, healthcare in America costs too damn much, and there'll be too much downtime). The pink patch (about 5mm X 15mm) is where the epidermis was entirely stripped off, creating a little flap-like pocket. Fortunately for me, there weren't any shards that decided to make this space their permanent new home. I'm not sure whether to be proud or ashamed to say I played doctor, nicking it off partially with a pair of soap-washed shears in the lab, only to completely remove it with a nail-clipper back at home. K's makeshift bandage was also great at stopping the bleeding, but eventually kept slipping off.

There is a strange way in which pain (and possibly blood) makes you feel a lot more alive than thinking about death. Recently, I've been reading and thinking about Mortality Salience, a concept in existential psychology. The simplest idea is that all of psychology--identity, personality, happiness--blossoms out of the human fear of death. In the immortal words of one of its foremost proponents, Irvin Yalom, "Although the physicality of death destroys man, the idea of death saves him." There have been a number of experiments where dental pain (or thoughts of it) has been used as a control condition, versus the mortality salience manipulation: making the participant think in detail about death. Other manipulations, like making the participant consider his "creatureliness" are also successful in evoke mortality salience (MS) effects like a participant's increased affirmation of societal standards.

The curious thing is that I, and I suppose many other people must too, associate death with pain. Yet pain, or the thought of it, does not evoke any MS effects. Could it be then that pain--physical or otherwise, as romanticized by the poets and boybands alike--is one of the things that let's us know we are alive? Perhaps pain is essential for our understanding of happiness, the sensation of relief, the distinctiveness of pleasure. Perhaps now and then, a little self-sought discomfort might clear one's mind, as effectively as exercise?

In any case, a word of advice if you're self-inflicting: submerging your hands in bucket of ice works perfectly well; really, there's no need for broken glass.