I fucking hate cancer, and not because it kills people.

That part about it killing people sucks really bad. But right now I mostly hate it because it's complicated. Biology is complicated and hard. I wanted to be a biologist why, exactly?

I should be studying/cramming but I just ingested a chapter and lecture about senescence and crisis and telomeres that resembles my love life a little too well.

They're all double-entendres (I hope I spelled that right. I'm too lazy to look it up.)

Senescence being the non-replicative state entered into by cells that have had their replicative potential fulfilled. Replicative potential. Just another dirty word/phrase for: My uterus is drying up and my ovaries are giving out.

Crisis. The state in which cells who have karyotypic instability enter into apoptosis and DIE. Like my love life. It is officially in Crisis. It is dead, has died and has undergone apoptosis. I guess my emotions would represent the chromosomes and there is definitely some genomic/karyotypic instability there. I would mention something about the breakage-fusion-bridge cycle but you can infer your own clever metaphors from that one. It's simply too easy.

Cancer cells escape crisis by expressing telomerase, an enzyme that lengthens telomeres and fools the generational clock of the cell. That's what I need right now. Something to fool my generational clock and coax my uterus into thinking that it has many many more years and thus cancelling the incessant ticking.

My mom came right out and mentioned it yesterday; it was Mother's Day so I couldn't become tyrannical about it. I made up some excuse about how I was working on it, but then I started to sound like a floozy so I had to back-pedal about that because goodness knows I'm anything but right now. And then the conversation ends with my clever but inane diatribe about the necessity of another partner in this process of fulfillment of one's replicative potential. I think that may have been the only chat my mother and I have ever had about activity-level of my love life. And it was creepy.

Just when I thought it could not get anymore awkward I find that my mother has recruited my aunt and uncle, her siblings, to her cause. Brilliant. I spared them the replicative potential chat. I just shrugged.

Now all I have to concentrate on is making sure my cancer biology exam does not end up as a treatise about why I'm unhappy about my own personal crisis and senescence. Hopefully I'll be successful. If not maybe the professor will take pity on the tear-stained sheets.

But I'll probably just drop back and do what I've always done when I don't know the answer. I'll just draw pictures.

Remember: Cancer, not our friend.