An Open Letter

Dear Office Mate,

A few things:

1. If you are going to bring a guest to the lab with you for an entire week, and that person has no professional business in our lab, and during that week your guest will be occupying our *shared* office, it is generally courteous to inquire of the other person(s) with whom you share said office whether they mind. You know, out of respect for the fact that it is also *their* office and that accommodating another person in an already cramped space might be a teeny bit inconvenient for them, and might possibly disrupt the work that they are here to do. (For the record, when asked in the above manner whether it is OK with me for your guest to come to work with you, and spend some of that time in our shared office, the answer is yes, it's fine. However, I don't feel quite so charitable when I am informed, rather than asked, whether this will be OK.)
2. As per #1, your guest is a potential disruption and inconvenience in my working space. Which means that requesting demanding that I go to further inconvenience by disrupting my workspace is really over the top. No, I am not going to "tidy my desk" to accommodate your guest. I have two stacks of papers on it: one for papers I need to read, and one for papers that I have read but intend to revisit. Your guest will not be using my desk during his or her visit, so there is no reason that the relative tidiness of my desk should be an issue. Also, as for the "clothes" under my desk. I keep a gym bag under my desk. I have (washed, never unwashed) gym clothes in it. But there is no reason that you should know that there are clothes of any sort in it, unless you have taken the liberty of snooping. I am sure you're aware that this is completely unacceptable behavior.
3. Finally, I do science. For a living. Doing science is what puts a roof over my head. Ergo, I am a professional scientist. I have a desk. It looks the way it looks, with a couple of stacks of paper on top and a gym bag underneath. It is my desk. It belongs to me, a professional scientist. Ergo, this is what a professional scientist's desk looks like. So when you ask me to make my desk look "more professional" for when your guest (who I have not invited) comes to our shared office, I'm not really sure what you mean. I'm a professional scientist; this is what my professional scientist desk looks like.
4. Please go suck an egg.

Uncharitably yours,

AA

Story of My Life

Ha! So true! Thankfully, I have some good ones.



From here.

Also, I just noticed that this is my 300th post. w00t! And, I have 39 followers. (Who are you people???)

Avian Update

Albatross #1 is off my neck! And I didn't have to kill anyone to make that happen. Huzzah! Despite attempts to buzzkill in the comments, I am unafeared of the torture of reviewers. This is sort of a weird manuscript/submission circumstance which I think/hope will circumvent a lot of reviewer quibbling. Fingers crossed on that.

Now for Albatross #2, which I thought was ready to go, but now GrAdvisor says it's way too long and this will piss off the reviewers. Last draft was "too short". I am feeling like this is very subjective, which is the nature of the review and editing process, I am well aware. However, some objective criteria would be much more helpful and result in a more expedient submission of the fracking thing.

Albatross #1

If it is not submitted by the end of today I will very likely kill some innocent creature (not my fantastic minion though, because he is working his ass of on fixing the codecs on the final two videos). Just waiting on the last two pieces for uploading, then I get to click "SUBMIT"! The heady feeling that follows a manuscript zipping off into the ether is like crack, and it's been waaaaaaaay too long since I've had a fix. I am getting very, very twitchy over this one.

Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

...is what has been inflicted on my sense of self-worth and accomplishment recently.

No huge assaults on my sanity or integrity. No terrible failures. Just a sense of scrambling all day to keep on top of the things that need doing, and a sense at the end of the day that I've been spinning my wheels.

Then there's the lack of weekends. I spent last weekend gutting and reworking TWO manuscripts albatrosses from my dissertation, and sent them off to coauthors. It felt really good to do that, but now they're back with edits. One has a submission deadline, and the other has competition. Urgh.

I didn't want to take time away from post-doc lab to work on that, so I did it over the weekend. And I will do it again this weekend...in addition to covering some hugely time-intensive experiments for my fantastic undergrad minion who would ordinarily do all of this really hard work himself, but not this weekend because he will be interviewing for medical school admissions. So proud of him.

And all week I wrangle my schedule to try and solve this completely unfathomable problem with my BigFuckingDeal Experiment, and still provide adequate (I can't hope for good at the moment) guidance to my minion-in-training. I don't want her to flame out for lack of mentorship from me because she is already well on her way to being another second set of hands on my projects.

I am exhausted by all of this, but more than I should be. The weather has finally started to feel like fall (it occurred to me on my walk to work this morning that I could "get away" with wearing actual pants again, instead of shorts), and it is soooo nice. After an interminable summer of rushing from one climate controlled building to the next in order to avoid a heat index well into the 100s, this weather makes me want to play hooky, to run around like a fool in the courtyard outside our building, or to just sit on the deck with a nice Oktoberfest and watch the sun go down.

I haven't done any of those things because there is still too much work to do at work. Instead I come in early and leave well after dark, and feel sad and tired and a tiny bit desperate about that. Then I do it again the next day, and the sadness starts to feel cumulative, and I sit at my desk and try to work up the motivation to actually make a dent in this mountain of work that I need to finish, and instead of doing the work, I wallow. Sometimes I feel like crying, and there is no good reason why. Nothing terrible has happened. I have a little too much to do for my comfort at the moment, but this is nothing compared to the stress I was under in grad school and I was able to hold it down most of the time. Now I just feel kind of helpless and useless and like a bit of a burden to other people. I'm sure that will change some when I get this problem with my experiment sorted out, and when I get these albatrosses off of my neck, but in the meantime, it's hard to make progress on those things when I don't even feel all that functional.

My mom gets seasonal affective disorder. I have always noticed a change in my mood with a change in seasons, but never to this degree. Perhaps it's heritable.