Bad day.

This time of year is really hard for me. I lost someone a few years ago to suicide, and it happened to be around the same time as 9/11, so now with Katrina almost coinciding on the anniversary, I'm having flashbacks to national disasters and horrifying phone calls with bad news.

Last night I was sad because I felt like I was starting to forget him. We worked together, it's not like we dated or anything. So it was especially strange to have a very vivid dream last night, and there he was! It was very normal, I guess it was my imaginary version of what it would be like if he were still here. I still don't understand how our brains can store all this information and recreate it so perfectly, but my brain won't do it on demand, at least not if I'm awake. I always liked the way they had holographic recordings of people on Star Trek. I could use one of those.

Anyway this morning I was really depressed when I woke up. I guess you never really get over losing someone so young. He was the age I am now.

I forced myself to come to lab and start getting the administrative burden of my grant shifted onto the appropriate administrators. Of course I was chastised by people I have never met before, I'm sure I made a great impression with my obvious complete lack of clue.

I guess what annoyed me the most was that nobody seems to want to teach me the correct way to do this. Granted, I hopefully will never have to do this same kind of grant again at this same university, but I really don't like working in the pitch dark.

Then I decided to go ahead and start learning LaTeX, which doesn't seem that hard, but once again, there are no step-by-step instructions. This is what I hate about trying to learn programming. All I need is a list of reagents and a protocol. E.g., here are the parts you will need, here is how you make them, here is what you do with the parts to put them together, here is what it will look like when you're done.

Nobody seems to want to do that in the computer world. They hand you a gigantic dictionary and tell you to write. No grammar, no examples of books like the one you're supposed to produce. It's ridiculous.

Which would all have been okay, except that the coffee place was closed at 3 pm when I went down there- WTF??? I so don't deserve this today.

Anyway I think I am just feeling really isolated and needing feedback. I hate sending these job applications and not hearing anything for months. So I don't feel like doing more of them, the psychology of it says "what's the point"?
I need some kind of Pavlovian trigger. They should send you a cookie for every application you send in. You know, some tiny token of acknowledgment.