It's always personal.

I'm thinking about firing my therapist.

Having said that, I want to talk about one of the things my therapist mentioned recently while talking about deciding when/how to give up on one's career.

She told me to watch You've Got Mail. Because it's about a woman bookstore-owner who loses her store thanks to competition from a giant, male-dominated superstore.

Now, I saw this movie years ago when it came out, and I was disgusted at the time that the main message seemed to be that for women, it's more important to have a charming, rich man love you than to have a fulfilling career.

But it's funny, I really didn't remember that it's not just a love story, it's about a woman who has to close up shop. I guess at the time I couldn't really relate to it. In fact, I've always wondered whether it wouldn't be better to inherit a family business than to have to go look for a job. If it's just going to be a job to pay the bills, does it really matter what it is? At least you'd get to be your own boss, without having to work your way up.

So this movie has been on tv again lately, which I guess is why my therapist thought to mention it. I watched part of it one day, and the rest today when it happened to be on again. It's funny to hear the modem sound when they log on, and see how big their laptops are. I mean, does anyone even use AOL anymore?

Some of the writing is superb. I think my favorite sentence in the whole movie is the line about how she sees a butterfly on the subway, and she thinks it must be going to Bloomingdale's to buy a hat, which will surely be a mistake, as almost all hats are.

But as far as advice goes, this movie is a terrible analogy, because while Meg Ryan's character says she's heartbroken, she doesn't really seem to be very upset.

Somehow, her character never cries in the movie, despite losing her shop. She fights a little, she mopes a little, and when she finally closes the shop there is one scene where she sees the ghost of her mother and says the shop will be something depressing in a week, like a Baby Gap. But it's flippant the way she says it, and apparently she doesn't have to walk by the shop every day or run into people who constantly ask her about it?

Instead, the next time we see her, she is at home with a cold. Sure, getting sick around the time of a major loss is just a way of your body expressing what your mind can't handle, but probably since it's supposed to be a romantic comedy, not once do they show her sobbing with grief.

Okay, she is a little wistful, and it's a little bittersweet, but she's almost relieved. She doesn't seem to need medication or therapy! Maybe because the whole thing seems to take place in the space of a few weeks?

And it certainly doesn't hurt that someone offers her a job she wants, and almost immediately. Someone who sees her talent, and like all things movie-esque, it's a job she doesn't even have to apply for. The movie ends before we find out how things turn out with that.

The motivations are a bit understated, and as a main character she's a little bit spacey. You kind of have to assume that she's a bit sheltered and overly optimistic, otherwise as a character she doesn't really make any sense. They try to develop this theme by this one particular line about how things in life remind her of things she's read in books, but shouldn't it be the other way around? But apparently, she was completely happy with her job and, we have to assume, always had been.

I think one of the things that I'll never really understand about psychology is how sometimes, the harder we work for something, the more we think we want it. And this is definitely the way science works. Sometimes it's that much sweeter when you make an experiment work perfectly after a hundred tries. And knowing that elbow grease can win the day can be infinitely comforting as you're slogging it out, sometimes only inching along, but we always say it's better if things are at least moving at all. There's something gratifying in that, having a sort of noble goal and making progress toward it.

But in the same sense, the more the bad parts of science make us miserable, the more we want to justify that misery by trying to make our own happy endings. We think that if we just persevere long enough, as with our experiments, we can win at the political game, too. But what if we can't? What if we're just making ourselves miserable for longer, and like Meg Ryan's character in this movie, we're ultimately doomed to lose?

Being aware of the possibility that we're locked in this game of misery-begets-more-misery doesn't really help you overcome it. Because it's not so clear-cut as it is in the shop-keeping world, or in the movies.

And that is where I think I am a little fed up with the idea of therapy. Yes, I have learned a few things, but I think as a guide to helping me figuring things out, it hasn't been any better (and less cost-effective) than anything else. And perhaps most importantly, it hasn't made me feel any better about what is happening to me. It hasn't given me the critical tools to improve my situation, as I had hoped I could do if I just knew how.

Anyway the title of this post comes from a line in the movie, where Joe Fox tries to apologize and say it's just business, it's not personal. And the main character responds by saying It's always personal, everything is personal, and what's so wrong with that anyway?

I think one of the weirdest things to me about asking for advice is that nobody knows whether to tell me to fight or to quit. I don't know if I'm giving something up just a moment (or a year) too soon, with the finish line just around the corner? Or if the bottom line is that I just can't win, so I'd be better off getting out as fast as I can?

And my therapist doesn't know, either. She's trying to give me advice on the personal, as if it can be separated from the rest. She's also trying to convince me not to worry about what I'm going to do to make money, which I find not very credible coming from someone who is clearly not hurting financially and apparently never has been.

When things are crappy, I just want to quit. When I'm making even a little progress, I wonder if maybe it will all turn out to be worth it. I think a lot about the tortoise and the hare, and wonder if I'm just being impatient or getting distracted when, if I just keep plodding along, eventually I will get there?

I just don't feel much closer to knowing than I did when I started therapy. And being in therapy has not made me feel better about that.

scientiae-carnival

Back to the Sixties.

Next time you're looking for inspiration, watch the Obamas' graduation day speeches. These two could have been very successful as televangelists for education if we hadn't given them their current jobs.

Michelle Obama spoke at University of California at Merced and you can read the text of her speech online.

I thought it was interesting to note, too, that Michelle's speech was mostly about other people. She mentioned a lot of names of students, those who apparently pushed hard for her to visit there. I thought that was interesting, especially given that our President uses his own experiences as examples, and he talks about his mother quite frequently in his speeches.

The text of the President's speech at Notre Dame is here and I watched it live on, of all places, Fox. I really enjoyed learning about how the civil rights negotiations almost broke down. I never learned the history of the 1960's in school.

Of course as soon as the speech ended, despite the standing ovation, Fox brought out our favorite chump, Michael Steele, who immediately started criticizing the President. If you don't know who Michael Steele is (and I was surprised to learn recently that some of my friends had never heard of him), go to Rachel Maddow's show online and type his name in the search box. I particularly like the way she highlights what a joke he is. So I turned the tv off when he started saying the same old things he always says.

Overall, I was hugely impressed with the Notre Dame speech, with only perhaps a very minor quibble over a point at the end- the last analogy to "fishermen." It's stupid that semantics matters, but I think it would have been better to say "they discovered that they all enjoyed fishing." Why re-emphasize that no women were included on the original civil rights commission? In the same speech where you want to make a claim for women's equal rights? Come on, who edited that?

(And I'm not even going to mention what some of my hippie-ish vegan, animal-rights activist friends say about fishing.)

In the end, we're not all fishermen. The point is supposed to be that we're all human beings.

Speaking of human beings, I guess I was thinking about these "little" slights we all take for granted, because like a lot of geeks I saw the new Star Trek movie.

I liked it well enough, but one thing stood out to me. By keeping basically the same characters as the original show, and the same miniskirts, the people who made this movie are helping (inadvertently or otherwise ) to perpetuate some of the same old stereotypes.

The original show had almost no women, and the new movie was the same in that regard.

Why? Just a total lack of originality? Because of Pepsi throwback, we have to be all nostalgic for the 1960s?

Perhaps the blackest humor of these filmmakers' choices is that the story is set a couple hundred years into the future, and yet childbirth still appears to be the same medical mystery (just like in the Star Wars movies). How depressing is that. Here's hoping that in the future, someone will at least have figured out some better solutions for PMS.

I always liked how the Star Trek franchise promoted technology, the spirit of exploration, and diversity: celebrating the differences and commonalities among races, and (at least among the imaginary space varieties) species.

I can only wonder how much watching these shows as a child must have influenced me to want a career as a scientist. They were some of the only shows I remember watching that promoted women in roles other than the traditional mom, girlfriend, daughter or housekeeper (unlike watching reruns of The Brady Bunch from the same era).

And although it was too late to help me choose a major, I rejoiced when they created a woman character who excelled at engineering.

Yet here we are, more than 40 years later (the original show first aired in 1966), and girls are only recently starting to be allowed to command space missions, both on tv and in real life. While some shows are attempting to put women in other interesting science-related careers, like CSI, what still gets the most attention? Their cleavage.

So I can't help feeling like the uproar over Obama's speech with regard to the abortion debate highlights how in the real-life year 2009, women are still pretty far from "equal".

Even our President doesn't have a solution to bridge that particular divide, but I like that he wants to try.

Not a response to anything, just a post.

Today was, despite all my venting yesterday, a pretty okay day.

My student is improving. That is fun for me and saves me work and time, so it feels like progress. It almost feels like I am getting twice as much done (although the reality is probably not... but I am about 25% less tired).

I am, despite myself, getting some ideas for Christmas presents for people. Some years I am very inspired about this. I don't know why. This might be one of those years. Maybe it's because today I both

a) did an experiment and
b) got data that advances my project.

That always makes me happy. In fact, I can't think of a single time when I got useful, progress-provoking data and thought "yeah, whatever."

Nope, that has never happened.

Not to jinx anything, but I have been on a bit of a data streak the last week or so. I am hoping it lasts. I am trying very hard to enjoy the science part of science for science's sake. And it is mostly working!

It helps that we haven't had so many meetings of the lab. Lately I hate meetings of the lab. Maybe because we have a lot of arrogant little fuckers in our lab right now. I'm waiting for them to realize that arrogance gets you nowhere. It could be a while.

Oh and to answer the person whose comment I deleted (again, this post is really not a response to comments), re: telling people not to join large labs with 20 postdocs. I TOTALLY see where you're coming from with this. I used to think this, too, actually. But it's not that simple. In some fields, there is nowhere else to go from which to get a job.

In fact, there are some fields where the ONLY way to get your papers published and get a job is to go through certain gates, and those gates happen to be guarded by two-headed dogs .... and they are labs with 20 postdocs (or more).

Meanwhile, my visit with my therapist this week was helpful, and progress was made, in the sense that I FINALLY got through to her -although apparently not to everyone who reads this blog- that

a) Most days, I just really really want to keep working on my project.

b) I can't take my project to a "smaller" place, because there are a limited number of places where I could actually do it.

c) Industry is non-appealing first and foremost because I would have to give up my project, and the trade-offs are not worth it to me (more money, but other than that I have a hard time seeing how it's going to be so much different). So that's what I mean when I say lame-ass. Sometimes.

And my therapist was like, OK, I think I finally get it. You don't want to give up your project!

Aha! Houston, we have signal.

In other good news, I am making some progress on networking, I think. In theory I am still kind of on the neverending hunt for a 'mentor', although I have to say at this point I think the likelihood of finding a soulmate type of mentor is about equal to finding a unicorn in the chemical hood, but I guess you never know.

(aside: I think the unicorn reference came from the pegasus skit in Robot Chicken this week. Anybody catch that?)

To answer JaneB's question (although this post is really not a response to comments), no, I am still not applying for jobs.

I am trying to rationalize this by knowing that there's no point in applying until my CV is competitive (I did that experiment already, see the earliest posts from the archive, obviously it does not work or I wouldn't be blogging what I'm blogging...).

And I rationalize waiting because continuing to cultivate my network in the meantime means that I will maximize my chances when/if I do apply.

And maybe the economy will be on the upswing. Or something.

Re: setting a deadline, that has already been set. Not by me. I have been working with a known expiration date for a while, which is, yes, adding to my stress and general state of mind (or lack thereof).

However, I don't see any viable alternatives at this point but to soldier on and try not to worry constantly about what happens when we get to the point of lemming-ness and have to say "What next?"

Today was, in fact, such a good day that I was seriously wondering if there's something to this Positive Affirmation stuff. The idea of changing your negative thought patterns, I can kind of understand it from a cognitive science perspective, that replacing pointless worrying with positive sentiments could be very uplifting.

So I have been practicing my positive affirmations. Want to hear them?

Of course you do. They're things like this:

I deserve to be heard.

I make important contributions to science, and I feel fulfilled.

I floss, and it makes me feel virtuous.

There are some more, but I can't remember them right now. I guess I better practice until they're ingrained in my ears, on my tongue, and the inside of my eyelids.... and to try to shut up the little font person who says yeah, but nobody cares.

Taking stock of the week and 2008.

So the end of the week turned out strangely productive. I actually did a lot but it didn't feel like much, because it wasn't what I was expecting to be doing.

I had to bonk myself on the head and give myself points for progress. Bonk!

I went to the gym a couple of times.

Bonk!

Thursday my student called in sick, and then randomly I got called to deal with an ongoing problem that has now finally been fixed (in large part, thanks to me!). I should get some credit for this, but I won't.

The actual fixing does matter though, because it means I can finally run some samples that were sitting around for weeks.

...And that experiment turned out like every other experiment I did this week- interpretable, just didn't work the way I had hoped.

I will score myself points for interpretable. Because that leads to, at the very least, not having to repeat the identical conditions. And therefore, actual progress.

I also ran gels, ordered things, and things I ordered came in so I can do more new experiments next week. Yay!

Submitted two things that were due, before the deadline. Check.

Collected more samples for more experiments. Check.

And various other minor progresses like that. Check.

Bonk!

Went out with friends last night. It was really nice, actually. This is one of those when-it-rains-it-pours weekends. After weeks of no plans whatsoever, last night we had two options for going out, same for tonight, and tomorrow night we have a friend visiting from out of town.

Some of these plans can be rescheduled for future evenings, but I do wish it were possible to reschedule things into the long, lonely past that was this year without many outings.

----

I was also taking stock of what I accomplished this year. Personally, I have made progress (although not in entirely bloggable ways). I've figured some things out that have long been plaguing me. I got some problems solved, I think, once and for all. Which is pretty cool considering some of them have been life-long problems!

And I give myself 2008 credit for starting therapy, even if its ultimate value remains to be seen (and I might not be able to do it long enough to find out, before my position and health insurance are terminated).

Scientifically, I did make some progress. Even if nobody knows about it Officially.

Career-wise, not so much progress, I don't think. It's hard to say for sure because in theory some of the things I've done were long-term investments, but, not much progress in any tangible ways.

But I'm very much dreading 2009. It might be fine. But I had such high hopes for this year, and most of them did not materialize, despite my trying.

I've been enjoying blogging, especially comments from students who say it's useful to read this blog, and other postdocs who say they have had similar experiences.

I'd also like to think that the blog helps educate some of the faculty out there who might not realize how bad it is for us now. I particularly liked a comment I got on one of the last 2 posts, where the person was saying they re-read some of the only science career books out there (A PhD is Not Enough, for example) and how incredibly out-of-date and out-of-touch these books are as 'resources.' And how there's not much else out there, besides blogs like this one.

----

So I am feeling okay the last couple of days. I did get caught up on sleep, and that did help.

The Sabotage book I mentioned is just one lightbulb moment after another. So I'm really glad I got that and I'm working on it.

I'm thinking about what I'll be getting people for Christmas/Non-religious End-of-Year gifts.

And I'm planning some fun trips.

----

In truth, I do okay with research as a lifestyle, because it takes very little to keep me going. But I have to have that feeling of being able to make progress, and have some things to look forward to.

I guess I crossed that line again, the one I'm always walking. I really do like benchwork, and I don't mind when things aren't working, so long as I have what I need to keep trying, and not too much pressure for time.

Right now I'm in a little bubble where I can say "fuck it" for a while and just work on the science. I'm telling myself not to worry about whether I get to figure it all out myself or not.

And amazingly, that is actually kind of working for now.

Whether I apply for jobs or not, I just don't want to waste my time.

I'd much rather be doing experiments than job applications, and I really don't want to do applications as an experiment again, unless I can drastically change the experimental conditions. Unfortunately, my past attempts have yielded only negative results, which were mostly uninterpretable.

Right now, I think the magic 8-ball is saying conditions are unfavorable, try again later.

We'll see if we get to later.

Meanwhile, I'm going to try to focus on now. One day, one week, maybe one month at a time. But not more than that. Because 2009 is coming, whether I want it or not.

You know you're doing pretty well when

All those people who ignored or snubbed you are suddenly asking what you're up to these days, what your plans are, and how things are going.

Those people in this case, are PIs who previously wouldn't give me the time of day. People whom I was content to think had forgotten who I was, or just didn't care.

I'm very amused because from these kinds of encounters, I get the impression that my scientific reputation is improving.

Sometimes I even get mentored on these little run-ins. Suddenly now everyone wants to give me advice.

I think it's funny because I think they are realizing that, rather than quitting like everyone seems to have expected me to, they might actually have to deal with having me as a colleague someday.

Maybe, just maybe, I might be worth the effort of mentoring.

So I'm laughing. Because although I will always need it, and I need it now, they were not there for me in the past when I really needed it.

----

Oh and to the people who think I always blame other people for all my problems? Maybe you're right. I'm with Sartre on the whole population issue: Hell is other people.

At the end of the day, I'm pretty sure I'd be perfectly happy if people would just leave me alone to do my job.

Most of my complaints with work and with my parents have to do with people who think they know what's good for me but who never stopped to even ask me what I want.

A lot of the crap I went through in grad school also falls into this category, where the 'adults' (PIs) were constantly trying to block me from finding my own way. Which in my opinion is a lot of what grad school should be for.

----

As a postdoc, when I ask for help, it's not because I'm lazy but because I know it would be faster to have someone teach me and/or I've exhausted all the other resources.

But what I've learned is that most faculty aren't really aware of how they got where they are. They've never been forced to articulate what matters in choosing what journal to publish in, how to write a cover letter, or how to write a good grant and make sure it gets funded. They just do it.

A lot of times they're not even sure what they did. Or they might even suspect it was partly political, but they don't want to admit they've had these advantages handed to them, and all they did to deserve it was to be appropriately agreeable.

You know, how to do these things (publish, get funded, get a job) is what we should have learned in grad school, but nobody taught us systematically. And I'll agree that it's hard to articulate and hard to teach. But not impossible. I've met some PIs who can teach it. And I think these things should be required of any PIs that universities hire.

And right now they're not.

In fact, I think I've learned a lot more about the job market, for example, from blogging and reading blogs than I ever have from real PIs in real life.

----

I had a funny/depressing conversation with a young faculty member the other day, who said that although he knows he had a great advisor in grad school and a stellar experience (which is fast becoming a stellar career), he doesn't remember being mentored. He's not sure what his mentor did that made everything always seem easy and turn out all right.

I know this guy's advisor and he was definitely a good mentor. But I think people who've always had good mentors take it for granted.

Even though they're surrounded by stories of how bad it can be, the natural reaction is to deny it, and to blame the victim. It's hard to believe it until you've experienced it yourself.

Worst case scenario, these people end up being terrible mentors themselves, just because they don't have a clue about what they should or shouldn't do.

And they might not even realize that being a good mentor is an active process.

To his credit, this guy is at least aware that he needs to figure out how to mentor his grad students, and fast. And I think he will, because he knows how important it is.

I personally have not had the stellar mentoring experience in science, but I know what it can be like because I've had other mentors in other areas of my life, and it's a wonderful thing. But in science, I've kind of given up on having that kind of relationship with anyone anytime soon, and I'm not sure if I ever will. My goal is to be the stellar mentor myself.

----

When finally given the chance, I found my own way and it mostly works for me when I have the courage to stick to it. Which isn't always easy. At all. And when I chicken out or feel pressured by 'advice' from people who 'know better', I have no one to blame but myself.

(See that, trolls? I blame myself. I don't blame anyone else!)

When I'm brave enough to do it, it works for me and I'm really glad I got the chance to find that out.