My plans? Destroyed.

I am an idiot.

In order to be all proactive and shit, I decided to ask my boss which journal I should submit my paper to. She usually leaves that up to us, but I know I'm lucky that I'm even getting to write the damn thing in the first place so I'm not trying to push my luck here. Anyway, her response was that she would like to see my results section - right away - in order to make that decision.

Fuck.

So yeah, I'll be in the lab this weekend.

There's a really important lesson here. It's one that I thought I knew already. Way back in my undergrad years, the sage grad student in our lab told me that I should never let my boss know exactly what I was doing at any given time. I should instead give him old data (ie, a few days) instead of fresh, just finished yesterday results. That way, I would always appear productive and on top of things. I would be able to take off in the afternoon and drink beer - just like she did - even when the boss knew about it.

See, I've brushed up with up-to-date here. My boss knows that I don't have my results written and all of my figures done. She didn't sound too happy about it, either.

Ah, the imaginary connotation of email.

Writing a damn paper

Ugh. More complaining!

Ok, not really. This one really isn't that bad. I am just writing my first paper. It is, in theory, fucking awesome. The idea was mine, I designed and performed every damn experiment for the thing, and I am writing it. It's my first first-author paper. Woohoo!

In practice, though, it's semi-horrible. I work much better with a gun to my head. In fact, I've done my best work under atrocious conditions - and I have the gray hair to prove it! For this, though, there is no deadline except for "soon." That is just not working for me.

I can't tell you how many times I have toted my reference papers and photocopies of my results from the lab, to my home, and back to the lab again without even taking them out of the binders. They just look at me over the weekend, taunting me. I keep thinking, "I should be working on my paper." Torturing myself. Over and over. I always end up watching some stupid crap on TV and feeling guilty when I stroll in to the lab, late, as usual, on a Monday morning.

So I've made a deadline for myself. I have ten days to finish the first draft. With hope, this goal will make the transition from arbitrary deadline to a proverbial gun to the head and I will accomplish the task.

The outlook? Not so good. I foresee several all-nighters in the murky future, or endless streaming waves of guilt. Awesome.

Some new vocabulary

Today I was so tired in class that when I was taking notes, I wrote "geen" instead of "gene."

Disaster at a temporary pause

Right. I was postponing writing about the end of the semester until I received all of my grades, but that hasn't happened yet and I've already started a new semester. So here it goes.

Fall semester.

This was the single worst semester of school I have ever experienced - and that is saying a lot. I got kicked out of school three times my senior year in high school, so there was some pretty tough competition on that front. Seriously, I've tried to convey the horror here but I am incapable of finding the right words.

See, my education means a lot to me. I feel a little silly sometimes when I take bad teaching so personally, but then really everyone should. I'm only going to go through grad school once, so in my opinion it better fucking count. But the majority of professors in this school are horrible and are making class pointless.

Let's say someone gives you a lecture on how to make a batch of cookies. You follow along, understanding why things are added when. It all makes sense. Cooking is, in fact, just chemistry. But then you are tested on this lecture. It's a multiple choice exam, and the questions are asking how many millimeters across the dough mound should be and about the type of heat that is delivered by your oven. Are both of these points important? Sure they are. But do they truly further your understanding about how cookies are made? No.

This is what I am talking about. I am being taught stuff, but not learning anything. It's horrible.

Anyway, the first semester is over. Thank fuck for that. No more complaining about that shit. This semester, instead of taking seventeen credits, I will only be taking fourteen. Or twelve. I haven't really fully decided on this one class, so I'm going to wait and see how that goes. It sounds interesting, but it's on Wednesday evening and gets out after 5pm. This means less time out of the lab. Tricky.

Maybe it's that I'm fresh out of a break, but things are good right now. I'm writing my paper, finally - but that is another story.