Hairless guinea pigs and three-legged dogs

So my new favorite thing are hairless guinea pigs.

If you haven’t seen them, they can look like miniature hippos from a Ghibli movie. But I’d imagine they smell a bit better than real hippos.

I have discovered this amazing hairless guinea pig called Ludwik. He comes up in gowns and crowns and necklaces when you search hairless guinea pigs online and he’s the best thing that happened to me today. Here’s a picture of Ludwik (credit to his hooman Agata Nowacka).

Ludwik the hairless guinea pig

Something about his little face remind me of my grandpa. Let’s be honest, it’s probably the chin. And maybe the white hair with varying length near his pink nose. Something about these features really gross you out in humans (I love my grandpa and hope he will never ever read this) but they just seem so forgivable and even adorable with animals. He has also got such a serious but confident look in him. Hate to admit but I think the camera loves him way more than me. I have the most awkward habit of talking while my boyfriend takes pictures of me. I’d be lucky to get 1 okay picture out of 30 of me doing faces, rolling eyes and talking with my month looking funny. Always wonder where is the version of me I see in the mirror when I looked better?

But I have a point with Ludwik.

I feel like a hairless guinea pig these days. One major, and I mean MAJOR reason is that two years of PhD life is making me lose my hair, right in the middle of where I usually split it. If I’m talking to a friend about this, they would always say, no, you are crazy, you look fine! But I know I’m somebody who used to get my hair thinned in barber shop because there’s just too much. My mum, blunt even to Chinese standard, (I’m Chinese – my years in the UK make me feel like I need to clarify that), gasped when I was video calling her about this, while she was actually mid sentence of ‘you are overthinking‘. Yeah. So on that front, I think I am a bit going to a hairless guinea pig direction.

But another reason is that as somebody who always wants to be healthy (and not get called out by my Chinese friends, who are just normal Chinese standard blunt), but is always too lazy to get to 400 steps on Sundays, I see my belly in his chin.

But I guess we always have somewhere we want to change about ourselves. BUT NOT LUDWIK. HE OWNS IT.

One day I’d like to bury a necklace in my neck and feel like a King (or Queen).

There is way more I want to change than my appearance. Most recently, I did a preliminary data analysis for the first study of mine, and it looked, well, just bad. People talk about how null results are still results. But there is publishable null, and there are ones that just are ‘meh‘. But you do wonder to what extent you can take that, if 2 years of your life has been spending on that. And I was silly enough to be building my expectation along the way. I tried to give myself time until I confirm this ‘bad’ data – took me two weeks of wasting time to look at it again. I think that’s how my procrastination usually comes up. Avoiding incoming blows. Now that I think about it, my martial arts Sensei would very much support my procrastination then. I confirmed it this week. Surprise! Sh*t overnight doesn’t turn into gold!

I bet on this front, I’m not like Ludwik. I bet he doesn’t really mind if his new necklace is gonna hit the science world – and to be honest he is hitting Instagram pretty well.

Stuart (my boyfriend) said yesterday: “I bet a three-legged dog is just as happy as a four-legged dog.” I think doggo depression is a real thing, but I didn’t wanna bring it up because that cute white three-legged shih tzu near us might be fighting hard to be happy, you never know. But then, if they can try to be happy with three legs, it is not the end of the world to have three-legged arguments in my thesis.

When I have an okay/good emotional moment in my life, I can see that we can all feel hairless sometimes, but it is all about how you pose like you are proud of it. And just maybe, one day you will actually have faked enough that you believe it actually doesn’t matter, and you might even be happy about it. But it is easy to talk while you are having a good day, bad days hit you in a different way. But I’m feeling covered today, wish you do too. Because wherever your bad days hit, you know which picture you can look at.