After the rain

Yesterday sucked. I came in and finished a western that didn't work very well. I am getting pretty fed up with stuff working just well enough to convince me that I should do it again. Rinse and repeat, the results never look any better on the 2nd or 3rd try, and it's all technical crap having nothing to do with whether my hypothesis is correct or not. I think I know what the problems might be, but as usual they are things I'm not sure I have any control over in this lab.

Ran around finishing up some stuff so I could go to a series of seminars where I knew I would run into some people I don't like very much.

Some of the seminars were good. A couple of them were terrible. But one was given by a guy who never misses the opportunity to trash my thesis advisor, nevermind acting as if my work never existed. I admit that at one point I was very upset with my thesis advisor, but I'm over it and now I'm back to getting really mad when other people say nasty things about him.

What really galls me about this guy is that he was on my thesis committee, and he used to be pretty nice to me, despite having a reputation for being a jerk. And despite my having done nothing to deserve it, the last couple of years he started treating me like dirt. So I've come around to the majority opinion.

For whatever reason, when I left, I was pretty depressed. In theory if this guy had written me a recommendation letter for jobs, that might have helped me. And I considered going to his lab at one point. Now we're essentially competitors, which was more than obvious since he presented only published data, some of it more than 5 years old. If nothing else, yesterday convinced me that I'm really glad I picked this lab instead of going to work for him!

And yet, despite his obviously being threatened by me, I still felt invisible yesterday. I deliberately snuck in the back door and sat in the back of the room for the seminars because I didn't feel like having people ask me how it's going, yada fucking yada. But it pissed me off that two women separately commented on whether I was there for this or that talk, like my attendance was being monitored and I should be concerned about getting credit! I still haven't gotten up the nerve to ask obnoxious questions in seminars just so people know I'm there. Perhaps that will come later in my career.

I went home and watched hockey and Medium . I really should have gone to the gym instead. I will have to go tonight.

Today I had an email from a school saying that one of my letters never arrived. I'm sure it just got lost somehow, the person who was supposed to have sent it has otherwise been very prompt. Something about the way the email was worded made me think they actually planned on reading the letter, having already read my other two letters. This might be a good sign, I don't know. I'm just hoping the third letter gets there right away and that they like what it says!

I set up some experiments this morning and sent out a few more job applications today. I'm not sure what I'll do for the rest of the day. Just trying to kick the hangover of gloom from yesterday. I wish it were easier for me to brush off worrying about the politics of work so I could actually get some done.