contrast

There are so many things in my life right now that make me exceptionally happy I am alive. Today while at the grocery store I ran into a couple, one a post-doc, the other a lab tech, I know from my graduate school career, which threw just how much better my life is now into sharp relief. I walked away from our brief conversation about PI's and other academic people with the strong reaffirmation that, for me at least, all the misery is just not worth it. Terrors for PIs, failed experiments, long hours, lack of job satisfaction, never seeing any good come out of excruciating painstaking work...not worth it. I'll take high quality of life over a few more letters after my name any day.

It's been about a year since I bottomed out. Three since I moved to Texas. Grad school got me to Austin, and thus is the reason for so many of the wonderful things I appreciate so much. I wonder though if I shouldn't have realized earlier just how miserable I truly was. Then again, hindsight is always clearer.

reclaiming my life

Dusk is gathering, as are what look like rain clouds. It's humid enough at the moment, but still I'm sitting outside on campus for use of the free internet. Might as well use it while I still can. I'm back on campus for the first time in a week to clean out my desk. It's an odd feeling, but freeing. I never have to walk in that lab with the bad fluorescent lighting and horrible boss ever again. There may be a visit or two over the summer when I know my ex-PI is out of town, but there is nothing requiring me to go back.

I have decided I am reclaiming my life. Doing the things I want to do and really live. Two weekends ago I went camping at Enchanted Rock. Every time I spend time in the great outdoors I'm reminded that living in the city is not for me. Saturday morning I was up early with a couple of other people from the group while most everyone else slept in. We went for a hike around part of loop; the Hill Country almost looks like the Appalachians in the early sunlight with fog in the low areas.

My graduation weekend was technically this past weekend. I didn't walk, it seemed, not pointless, but certainly not appealing. So I hung out with the Huns and the boys from the Mariners RFC, who were on tour from Bermuda. The annual Huns boat party on Lake Travis was much more satisfying than sitting through a commencement ceremony. The pub crawl the night before was something of a psychology experiment, but one I enjoyed immensely. There really is nothing in the world quite like a group of ruggers. Particularly ruggers on tour.

Right now I'm in this spot in my life with all the loose ends tied up and nothing new quite in the works yet. Technically, I am totally free. I could pick up and go anywhere in the world, which may be the most intoxicating thought ever. Leaving Austin, or more specifically my support network here, makes the chances that I'll actually do it without a very good reason rather slim. Between the Gateway crew and my Valkyries Austin has become the best place I have ever lived, but maybe I will run away to that island in the tropics after all. I think I've been land locked for far too long.

my thesis is finished

My thesis is finished.

98 pages total, which includes a fair amount of graduate school-required formatting. The table of contents is pretty, though.

I took the day off yesterday, got a few things done, but mostly watched Battlestar Galactica. I'm hooked. (I blame you all, you know who you are, for this.)

Yeah, that's all I've got right now.

nerdgasm

Oh. My. God. If my iPod wasn't a generation early I would so buy this. I don't know how actually useful it would be for me as neuroanatomy is only a very minimal concern for what I do, but having an brain atlas on my iPod? What could possibly be more awesome?

As a side note, Tim totally ROCKS. For many reasons, not the least of which being that he's willing to spend an evening touring the high and low culture of Austin, TX with me, but at the moment because he bought me the new Anberlin album. So I can rock out while working on my "MASSIVE paper."

re:

"If there is anything I could tell prospective lawyers it would be, don't go right out of undergrad. Don't even take just one year off. Do something else for at least 3 or 4 years. If you still want to go back, then you probably want it bad enough not to resent it before you're through."

I'd say that applies in science as well. (Mrs. Juicebox is exceptionally good at articulating things that I also am dealing with or thinking. Particularly in response to certain Dooce posts.) If there is anything I regret it would be coming to graduate school straight out of undergrad. I wasn't ready. No one is at 21. So I find myself cutting my time at UT short and still wondering if that nagging little voice is right about mastering out of the program being failure. Not to mention the mass amount of uncertainty in a large swath of things going on or about to occur in my life. Truly, though, I can't complain; I wound up in Austin and this city has been good enough to provide me with amazing friends and a million opportunites I haven't even begun to explore. I just wish I could shake that negative little voice.

thesis count: 32 pages, 61 citations, experiments in progress

strung out

There is a new website for the research group my lab is a part of. It's simple and shiny and attractive. There is also a photo page with a bunch of students, many already graduated from my or other alcohol labs. Most of us look like we're feeling the strain of it all.

everything I know to do

Spent the weekend mostly trying to avoid completely freaking out about everything I need to do between now and May. It's like it all decided to drop out of the sky on me at once. Thursday night I left neuro class with the distinct feeling that I was in way over my head after a discussion about the physics of electrical current and resistance. Way over my head. So I started making solutions; I need to use my time and my resources more effectively. And make small goals for myself. If I look at the entire mountain I'll freeze in fear; focusing on the next rock makes it seem much more managable.

Friday as I was headed into the Gregory Gym to grab a smoothie between discussion sections I passed a sign advertising "swim like a fish." On an impulse I signed up for swimming lessons. I've been around the water most of my life and can get by just fine, but have never learned anything anywhere near resembling form. I figure I can learn to swim for fitness; having to focus on my breathing will be a big help for rugby and my aerobic abilities. Plus being in the water is just calming for me. So I had my first class today. There are about five other adults ranging in age from mid-college to mid-50s. Our instructor is probably twenty years old, started taking swimming lessons at the age of six, and has spent her entire life in the water on a regular basis. I feel like I'm missing out on something not having had that opportunity as a kid. The first class involved learning the basics of breathing and kicking. As I was focusing on not inhaling water it became pretty plain what the truly important things in life. I think I could really get into this.

thesis count: 29 pages, 54 citations

strategery

This morning was group lab meeting, a rare one in which we had an outside speaker instead of listening to someone from of the other WCAAR labs presenting their most recent data. (I'm scheduled to give mine a week and a half before the thesis is due.) I tried to pay attention, and can say I did actually get a little bit out of it. Serotonin receptors are cool. Pictures of fluorescent imaging are always nice and easy to understand.

Importantly, however, was where my mind wandered. To the thesis. I have 44 days to finish the first complete draft of the thing by my self-imposed strategic "six week early, allow for rewriting after perusal by official readers" deadline of March 23rd. This works out to about two pages per day, including weekends, or just over three if weekends are not included. I will be working weekends.

Okay. 44 days. I can do this. Really.

squeak

Okay, Grey's Anatomy. That moment, the one where George announces that thing, I jumped and I squeaked. I squeaked. And I continued to do so until after the commercial break. Pathetic, perhaps, but there was no helping it.

Even stranger, I was so absorbed in what I was working on with my thesis I missed the first few minutes of the show. I looked up from reading a review on miRNA biogenesis and function and correlating the citations and it was suddenly 8:04. Maybe I really can do this...

Spent today on class stuff, so the count hasn't really changed...

drive in between the rain drops

Email that just showed up in my inbox:

Wednesday, January 31
*New Seminar Listing*
Behavioral Neuroscience
Dr. Victoria N. Luine
Distinguished Professor, Hunter College of CUNY, City University of N.Y.
"Stress Effects on Cognitive Function: Accounting for Sex and Age."
3:00 p.m. - SEA 4.244

Enough to make any grad student wonder.

current thesis count: 15 pages, 38 sources cited

dodging a bullet

Yesterday afternoon/eveningish I spent some time working on my thesis. Or at least ostensibly working on the thesis. As part of my delaying I spent some time on the website of the NIAAA (the NIH branch that funds most of the research going on in my lab). Said website contains a lot of information aimed at a lot of different groups of individuals from middle schoolers right up through alcohol researchers. Whilst piddling around on the site I found the following:

"However, whether an individual will drink in response to stress appears to depend on many factors, including possible genetic determinants of drinking in response to stress, an individual's usual drinking behavior, one's expectations regarding the effect of alcohol on stress, the intensity and type of stressor, the individual's sense of control over the stressor, the range of one's responses to cope with the perceived stress, and the availability of social support to buffer the effects of stress."

(from here, because all good little graduate students cite their sources).

Basically that paragraph is a clear description of my life. Upon moving to Austin the amount of alcohol I consumed in a given period of time was indeed directly proportional to the quality of friends I had. The level of stress I'm under certainly hasn't decreased since those early days of graduate school. It has changed (and if anything increased to the "who would willingly do this to themselves?!" level). However, I do not spend weekday evenings at home depressed on my sofa watching movies like Nora while drinking copious amounts of wine like I might otherwise. Because I now have absolutely awesome friends and my my perceived stress has dropped considerably. You all (and you know who you are) are my buffer. Thank you.

ice day

This should be the requisite "OMG! It's snowing! We're in Austin and it's SNOWING!" post. I missed out on that yesterday. Not out on taking pictures of it, because yes I was outside when it started and I was most certainly grinning like an idiot. Because I'm in Austin. And it really was snowing. I haven't seen snow since February of 2004 when Stillwater (photo on the right) was covered with the white stuff and it was so cold the brick courtyard in front of the Edmond Lowe library was a sheet of ice for a week. No, I'm missing out because I left the adapter cord for my camera at work and therefore can't upload any of those photos of the ice I took until it is retrieved.

So I spent yesterday working on just about anything except my thesis. On a positive note, however, my kitchen is cleaner that it has been in quite a while. I also spent loads of time playing with the photographs already on my computer as well as on flickr. I finally uploaded my Thanksgiving pictures, including some adorable ones of my youngest cousins. I also came across these incredible images from Ophelia Chong. I wish I were half as creative. I never even contemplated collages of the sort despite the large amount of it I did in college. Not entirely a wasted day, but one I could have utilized better.

nothing

I'm battling a serious lack of inspiration to write. Or maybe not battling, since I've more or less given in to it. Heading into this semester I can feel the stress looming over me, which makes me want to burn up hours and hours with staying in bed, watching episodes of Firefly over and over, reading fluff fiction, and drinking hot chocolate with irish creme in it. Burn hours spending time with my friends instead of reading endless journal articles with neuro terminology I can't pronounce and that refuses to lodge in my brain.

Four months.

Okay, I'm going to make solutions now. At least that is something I can pretend is productive.

grey and cold and wet

It's a rainy, cold weekday afternoon in the Northern Shenandoah Valley and I'm attempting to focus on alcoholic mice and miRNA function with little success. Everything I write seems completely plagarized, but mostly because everyone says essentially the same thing over and over again in their brief overviews of alcoholism and its effects on society to start off their journal articles. Half of what I'm reading isn't sticking through the haze of sinus pressure. What I would really rather be doing is watching The Fellowship of the Ring on the very large TV at home whilst curled up on the sofa.

Hanging out with my brothers has proven interesting. They've both grown up a lot in the last year and remarkably making decisions that directly affect the rest of their lives. My mother is moving forward and upward in the wake of her separation from my father. It hasn't been easy on anyone, but in the long run it's a major positive for everyone involved. Not having him in the house has definitely made for a much more relaxed few days at home; no worrying about keeping things on an even keel, wondering how long it would before before something miniscule and inconsequential sets him off again. Christmas Day won't be nearly so peaceful.

materials and methods

In an effort to unsettle any future students who may stumble across this blog, this post from Concurring Opinions to the method I use when grading. The comments to it are highly indicative of what spending too much time with whining undergraduates will do to your perspective on life.

Fortunately a good long drive is good for perspective. Solitary time in the limbo that is travelling back from Saturday night insanity in a distant town is a major ingredient for sanity. I like road trips, even short ones. There is something soothing about the rural Texas country side flying by on a Sunday afternoon and sometimes all I really need is to get out of Austin for 24 hours.

I'm trying to spend my two day week getting things together to head home. I have big plans to get a start on my thesis. Next semester is beginning to bear down on me and this is one way to minimize the trouble to be found in having more things to do than I have energy to devote to them. Else, I may find myself using the above method for grading papers.

excuses.

My life has gone from breakneck speed into an uncontrolled Mach 3. Or something like that. So photos of my Thanksgiving weekend help bring me back to earth. Because there is life outside of this mess, I just need to remember that.

Monday I spent nearly a full twelve hours on my feet doing an experiment, arriving home just before my small group showed up at eight. More of those are planned just to accomplish everything I need to accomplish. Keeping busy is good for me, but I'm already starting to feel stretched thin and the worst of next semester hasn't even gotten close to beginning. There are a lot of things I want to accomplish between now and next week when I leave for the holiday that just aren't going to get done because I'm running out of time. And today is a waste of time because my lab is going to Chuy's for lunch, which wipes out a good three hours in the middle of my day. None of the benchwork I have to do can be accomplished in the time slot before that, furthering the situation.

Socially my life is out of control. This weekend I have three different events involving three different groups of people, one of which is a graduation party in College Station that I don't have time for, but will feel immensely guilty if I miss out on. Plus I really want to be there. My weeknights are also ridiculously scheduled - and this is my life not on rugby. I have no idea what I am going to do in the spring and what I am going to cut out. Sleep, perhaps, on top of three-quarters of everything else.

I'm grateful to have such a full life and so many wonderful people filling it, not to mention the trouble I have always had saying "no" when asked to help. This is worlds better than where I was two years ago when new to Austin, spending most nights alone on my sofa with a movie and rare nights out doing things I despised with people, for the most part, I didn't like very much. So to those of you I won't see very often for the next six months I apologize. And please don't forget me.

applause

A friend of mine recently posted a blog entry could have been taken out of my journal. Except that it was succinct and well written. I wish I had half the courage she does in posting her weaknesses and insecurities and struggles for the world to see.

Is grad school over yet?

Friday's poster session went well, in the "I was back in a corner and spent nearly an hour talking only to our lab's undergrads" sense of going well. I guess I could say all that stress for nothing, but really I'm just glad it's over. So now I have about two weeks to get as much done with my microarrays as possible before heading home for Christmas, the very thought of which makes me happy my life is compartmentalized well. Yes, I'll be hard at work writing while home, but at least have a break from this environment. Back to work. The more I get done now, the less I have to do next semester.