Grad school mode.

With as much benchwork as I've been doing lately, I've been in what I call my grad school mode.

Hey, it got me through, so it's not all bad.

Good things:

- get lots done
- get that nice virtuous feeling from getting lots done
- no guilt about reading blogs, skipping seminars, or dressing badly
- being too focused on the immediate goals to stress about the future... yet.

Bad things:

- eat badly/too much just to keep going

- wacky sleep schedule (work late - come in late loop)

- put off almost everything else, including most chores, exercising, and committing to plans with friends (because "I might have to work that day, I just don't know")

- put off making actual plans to take a long weekend break (see above re: "might have to work, don't know")

- eventually the future is here, with all of its associated stress (health insurance, taxes, will-these-other-experiments-actually-work-after-all-this-work, and will-the-paper-get-in-oh-please-oh-please-can-this-be-over-soon)

****

In other news, I started working on a presentation I'll be giving, eventually, on my latest work.

In some ways this is a small victory, and I am getting kind of excited. I realized I was getting nervous wayyyy in advance, so I might as well get started. And that little ounce of prevention seems to have worked to calm my nerves.

I ordered a book online about how to stop sabotaging yourself. I'm curious to see what it says I'm doing wrong. Probably things I already know I'm doing. I'm really curious to see if it can tell me how to stop doing them. The reviews of this book are pretty spectacular, "It changed my life!" and so on. I figured what the hell, might as well do the experiment.