Depression & deja vu.

I was pretty depressed this morning. I don't really know why. Nothing in particular has happened in the last week or so to put me in a worse mood. I am waiting on a few things, and I hate waiting. But that's a ridiculous reason to be in a bad mood.

Right now I am debating what to do. I can sit here, in the comfort of my unusually quiet house, and do some actual work on my computer. Maybe it will make me feel better to get something done.

Or I can go to lab and do something, and go to a seminar that I'm pretty sure will piss me off. The thing in lab can wait until tomorrow. The seminar might be interesting, and I might get some points for face time if I run into the right people. But all of that is very unlikely to cheer me up. It is more likely to make me feel worse.

So that is my conflict today. Do what I am "supposed" to do, and act normal, or do what I am not "supposed" to do and actually get more work done, and maybe feel better (but also a little bit guilty)?

I have this conflict a lot. I should be over it by now. I realize that nobody cares one bit if I show up to lab on any given day, so long as I get my work done. And they don't even care about that. I am the only one who cares whether I get any work done.

For a while now, I've had the equivalent of experimental blue balls (crude, I know, but I can't think of a better metaphor right now). I can't get any momentum going. I get excited about a project, and then there are all these obstacles to actually getting the answer, and most of them are stupid little things.

It's like trying to walk across a floor covered with toys. You don't really want to step on the toys and break them, but it hurts your feet if you accidentally land on one, and you just want to reach down and sweep them all out of the way.

It's not exactly a minefield. But it's not a relaxing walk in the park, either.

In the past, when I got frustrated by waiting, I would start something new. There are other experiments I could do.

But everything I need to do is time-dependent, and not in a way I can completely control.

So I could start something now, because this week I have time to kill. But it always turns out that everything is ready at the same time, whether I plan it that way or not.

And when that happens, it's impossible to get everything to work correctly, because it turns into a game of juggling. I am okay at juggling. But lately I am miserable because I need a few of these things to be perfect.

I really hate needing for anything to be perfect. Nothing is ever perfect.

I always say this is why I got a PhD instead of an MD. In research, if things aren't perfect, at least nobody dies. And you can usually try again.

But I need these things to be pretty close to perfect. And I am running out of time.

So I'm trying to be more focused. And I hate it.

Meanwhile, I am having a bizarrely strong sense of deja vu the last couple of days. I find myself saying things I could swear I've already said, and seeing things that I think I've seen before.

I keep thinking about the scene where Neo sees a black cat in the Matrix, right before something really bad happens.

I do feel like I'm caught in a loop. My current situation is very similar to something that happened before. And while I'm determined not to make the same mistake again, I still feel like anything I do will not turn out how I want it to.

I'm pretty sure at this point that I want to break out of this loop. But I also know that I can't do it just yet. It's like I'm trying to jump out of a centrifuge. If I time it right, the force will throw me into the right trajectory. Meanwhile I am being crushed by the force that is pulling me around in circles, and down.

Anyway I feel a little better just writing this. It is silly how that works.

Not very.

Ran across the lab website of an old acquaintance today, someone I knew from school.

This was one of those people - you know the type - that everyone thought was a Genius (or at least, some did). The Very Knowledgeable Type.

Well I kind of had to laugh because this person is now a professor at an up-and-coming school. By that I mean, it's not an R1. It's maybe a 2nd or 3rd tier school, trying to put more money into research but not quite there yet. Maybe a great place to be, who am I to judge?

But I guess I'm a little surprised, and disappointed in a way. It's always that question- are we all fooling ourselves, thinking we're Good Enough, or even if we're not we can work hard until we get where we want to be?

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In other news, I was thinking again today about how I have this one paper that I never sent back. When I got the reviews back, I wasn't ready to deal with them right away.

I was thinking about how I've always been impatient, and how this is both good and bad for research. It makes me look for answers and work a lot, maybe more than others, but it also makes the waiting parts really hard.

I think it was when I was working in a lab during college that someone told me this phrase, "hurry up and wait" and I immediately seized on it as a way to describe my life, my research, the whole vibe.

I'm in a wait period right now, which I hate. More than anything else about this job, I hate the waiting.

There are a lot of opportunities to wait. When you put something in to incubate overnight. When you send off a paper, a grant, an application for a job. When your advisor never gets back to you. The usual stuff.

I always liked the part after you send off the paper, the grant, the application. Because if you did your job right, there's nothing more you can do. But wait. It's almost like a vacation. From guilt, anyway.

I don't like the part where I'm waiting for an experiment, for something to be ordered or arrive after ordering in the mail, for equipment to be fixed, for people to get back to me.

But when you get the reviews back, you have to make a choice. Argue (as I've mentioned before, something I view as work and not fun), or go elsewhere.

In this case, initially I wasn't ready to argue. I think telling my advisor that was a mistake. I think my advisor determined from that one statement that I'm not cut out for academia.

A few days later, I was ready to argue, and my advisor told me we should go elsewhere. I think this was also a mistake. But now it's too late. We never published the paper, and lately I'm feeling like we never will.

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Meanwhile, when I had samples ready a few months ago, the equipment I needed was broken. Now that the equipment is available (because the other people who normally use it are all applying for faculty positions, because their papers came out in Top Journals), I don't have any samples.

It never ends, does it?

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So anyway I was looking at this guy's profile, and I thought, How Boring. And I realized I was less confused by him having a job at Up and Coming University (rather than Big Famous University) than I was by him having a job at all.

Sometimes I wonder why we pay anyone to do this stuff. I'd like to think my stuff is more interesting, but of course even if it's wildly different from his, it's not more interesting in any way that's understandable or useful to the general public. Not really.

It's no wonder they don't want to pay me to do this stuff.

More useless PI advice.

Okay, let's recap how this year has gone so far.

Had paper draft since year before. Was already sick of looking at paper.

Was more than sick of being asked what was going on with paper.

Submitted paper with overly grandiose claims to a journal where it wouldn't get in, based on overly optimistic advice of well-meaning PI.

Predictably, paper did not get in.

Had plenty of stamina to revise and plenty of time to send it elsewhere at that point, but no. PI wanted to try an even more ambitious plan, including augmenting paper with numerous uninformative and risky experiments.

Had a bad feeling about this, but wanted so dearly to believe that PI, with much more experience and wisdom, knows more than little MsPhD.

Experiments were done. Not much new could be concluded from them.

Paper is now much longer, arguably not much better, time has run out, and PI is now talking about sending it 'elsewhere' (meaning, the same level of 'elsewhere' where it could have been published in its original form many months ago).

PI won't even take a strong stand on which elsewhere, although some possibilities suggested a month or two ago were shot down.

The same possibilities so recently shot down are now regarded as perfectly reasonable.

When you can't even agree to continue to disagree, and the random changes of opinion occur too late to be useful, one has to wonder why anyone ever thought the apprenticeship model had anything to offer.

I gave up on it long ago.

But, I AM desperate!

Several people have made comments on the CV posts to the effect of "Don't do this because it sounds too desperate."

This is something I fundamentally don't understand about human psychology. But it's true. It's true for dating, so why shouldn't it be true for jobs?

I understand that you don't want someone to settle for a job they didn't really want, just to get out of their current miserable situation, and then be a flight risk when they come to their senses. I get that.

But, um, I really hate being a postdoc??!! And I'm not really sure that's any secret for most people at the stage of applying for faculty positions.

But there are a few who don't seem to mind. I ran into a friend today whose advisor has convinced her to wait yet another year to apply for faculty positions.

She's just relieved not to be out on the street, living in a cardboard box. She talks about it like he's going to "let" her stay in his lab. Lucky her!

But I can't help feeling like these guys don't really have our happiness and satisfaction in mind when they say they can pay us a pittance if we would just be patient and wait. And wait. And wait.

Especially when one of the slowest parts of the reaction is the delay when they make us wait days, sometimes weeks or months, to even have a meeting where we get to beg them for any little crumb of feedback.

Does that seem fair to you?

To me, this is a lot like having children. Should my taxes or tuition go to support someone who has 6 children, no job, and doesn't understand or want to learn how to use birth control? I don't really think so.

Similarly, should I have to wait for my advisor to make the rounds just because he can't make time for all his obligations? Do the accumulated days of waiting actually tack on an extra year, or even two, for each postdoc who desperately wants to leave? And is that really balanced out by the quality of the feedback I eventually get?

I'm thinking it would depress me too much to add up how much time it has actually been, if I counted up a total. I once added up my bus rides from high school and it came to something like more than a solid month of my life.

And is it any wonder after all this waiting if I sound a little desperate? I just don't really think it's fair to say that a little ambition is a bad thing.