Something's Going to Steal Your Carbon

My meeting went really well. Like, now I am questioning my own sanity because of it well. Did I hallucinate all the shitty, unprofessional rage that I had detected in the last few weeks of gritted-teeth emails and second-hand accounts of how much shit was being talked about me?

Hmmm. No.

Ok, on one hand I am hugely relieved that things are back on track and the project has been salvaged and, apparently, no relationships have been destroyed and some little nuggets of praise and/or understanding were thrown my way ("oh, this IS complicated!" and "I had NO idea this was so complex, no wonder it has been progressing this way") that are kind of making it all better.

On the other hand I am frustrated at the extremely huge expenditure of energy this has demanded, from venting/bitching/kvetching about it to literally everyone I have ever met to the mountains of mental and material preparation I accumulated this weekend, to the psykologikul and biological stress response enactment. All for naught...or at least, all for naught much. haaaaaa.

In other news, JD and I ruined some poor woman's day yesterday at the deli counter of a grocery:

Deli guy (to me, because i am clearly next in line): Hi, what can I get you?
Me: Hi! We just need 2lbs. of this vegan chicken salad, plea--
Lady: EXCUSE ME. I was next. EXCUSE ME? I was waiting!
*a lady has magically appeared, behind us, while I began ordering*
JD: Fine, then. Go ahead.
Lady: Well it's just that I was next. I was waiting and it's MY turn and I
Me: FINE GO AHEAD, WE DIDN'T SEE YOU IT IS FINE JUST GO AHEAD.
Lady: I was waiting over on the other side of the deli counter and I asked them to get someone to help me, so it's MY TUR--
JD: YOU WIN. YOU WIN, WE GET IT, YOU WERE HERE FIRST AND IT IS YOUR TURN
Deli guy (to Lady, after shooting us apologetic look and rolling his eyes): Ok, sure, what can I get you, then?
Lady: Hmmmmmm. Hmmmm. I think I want a sample. Yes.
Me (agog): ---
JD (mouth hanging open in utter disbelief): ----!
Lady: What tofu do you have today?
*there are, literally, twenty dishes with tofu available at this deli*
Deli guy: Uhh, well, this (pointing) and this and this are made with tofu, and this, and this....lots of things, anything that says tofu on the sign will have it in there.
Me (not even bothering to hide my bitchface now, hissing): Is she serious?!?
JD (also hissing): She wants a SAMPLE?!
Lady: ooh, ooh. I want a sample of this BBQ tofu, please. Yes, I want a sample of that.
Deli guy: Here you go. *turns back to us and opens his mouth*
Lady: HMMMMMMMMM.
Me (opening and closing mouth): Harrumph
Lady: Can I also have a sample... (looks at me as though she's just realized I'm there) OH, you can go ahead, I don't even know what I want yet.
Me (dumbfounded): Oh, thanks a lot! If you're sure that's ok? OK, it is? Ok great.
Deli guy (to me again): So what can I get you?
Me: Just 2 lbs. of this
deli guy (smiling): oh yeah, right.
Me: thanks a lot! (to JD): WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!

I felt bad until Jd convinced me that if ever there's a time to put on a bitchface, it's when some crazy lady interrupts my extremely quick, half-syllable away from being completed order so that she can hee haw around asking for samples and not having any earthly idea of what she wants to order, only that she wants to be first. He also told me that after I turned my attention back to the deli guy, she smacked herself full in the forehead like a cartoon and said, "oh, I can't buy groceries today! What is wrong with me!" Which confirms my suspicions that she is a nutter. As did the deli guy's reactions to all of this. Oh and we then continued shopping and she was nowhere to be found in the store. I believe I reacted so bitchily that I scared a woman out of a grocery store.

I felt like my knee-jerking reaction might have been a touch oversensitive. A smidgen off-kilter. A tad overdone. I'll blame it on the stress of waiting for this meeting. but I'll still feel bad, because words can never fully describe the withering eyeball daggers I hurl at people when I get this way.

We Treat Mishaps Like Sinking Ships

1. I'm listening to Kid A for the first time in about three or four years. The other night JD and I heard Disarm (my favorite SP song ever) playing at a restaurant and came home and dug up Melancholie & the Infinite Sadness.

2. I've been getting into trouble with one project I'm working on. Like, major, bizarro-world trouble that only makes sense in the context of some other dimension where it is a reasonable thing to treat someone (me) like a baby who is too stupid to do the simplest possible thing involved in a project, and where it is also reasonable to send shitty emails to an entire work group lambasting my idiocy instead of asking me if indeed I have done some retarded thing that I stand accused of having done. Also, in this other dimesion, it's cool for several colleagues to talk shit about you in your absence in front of many other students, regardless of your not actually having fucked anything up the way they are assuming you have fucked it up. And, in this dimension there is no need to talk directly to me, instead communication should pass only through a well-meaning but Not Exactly Helpful person who has been working in a research capacity for, oh, exactly five weeks of his entire life now. It's also great to be in this magical dimension, because even if you are an established member of the fakultee you no longer feel the need to acknowledge or respond to anything that I say, my pleas for reason or a chance to defend myself, or attempts at appeasement. Oh! What fun to be unreasonable! What fun to toy with hapless little students and totally fuck their sense of competency.

All I can say, though, is at least this person/group is not my advice-er, and at least the worst that can happen from this disastrous series of miscommunications is that I get kicked off a project, not that I get kicked out of school or asked to leave, etc. It still makes my stomach flop over when I think about it-- I have no idea how this happened and I am acutely aware that before the dust settles, I will have to endure at least one terrible meeting in which several people will scream at me and I am already trying to imagine how I will want to react to that: so far, I am unsure whether I will scream back (probably justified, as the more I think about what has gone wrong the more I am totally confused as to what their problem is) or sob like a bitch.

Awesomely, this project concerns emoshun and how one goes about managing it. My life has recently become very "meta" all the time- I know the things one should do in order to be happy, healthy, etc. I know which means of managing emoshun lead to which unseemly outcomes. yada. Anyway, this has been stressing me out for a couple weeks as I sit here, breath baited, waiting for the other shoe to drop, cringing every time I check my email. I suppose I am lucky to have gotten this far without having any Real issues with people I work with, but this is just sad and a waste. And who knows? Maybe it will still work out. But that would require my being allowed to explain myself first-hand, which does not seem likely. I feel very frustrated and like I am getting totally. fucking. screwed here.

3. I am also finding it necessary to read books about how one should motivate oneself to write, or write a big D, or go about navigating the shark-infested waters of akademic life (even just as a student) and none of it is cheery stuff. However, one particular book is proving useful in urging me out of writer's block (or motivational block, whatever) and I am trying to establish some better work habits than I have ever seriously considered doing before. I get the feeling a lot of things people have been trying to tell me for years, that I have dismissed roundly as not being effective for me, are things that I either need to learn or I will fail at this stupid big D process. For example, people always say that you should "write everyday for two hours and don't let yourself be interrupted by anything no matter what and it has to be your sacred time to write"

which I immediately snortled at. Only two hours? But so much writing has to get done, when will that be accomplished? Turns out that attempting to write all day sometimes results in impressive amounts of it, but I can only write all day once every so often. And the rest of the time I am being useless and unproductive, worrying about how I'm not writing. So I'll try this 2 hour thing. I did it yesterday and felt better about life. I'm not counting this blogging shit toward my 2 hours, but I'm going to go start it after I post this big steamer of a life update.

4. My hubsie is in AZ at a conference, networking and making himself totally obviously invaluable to a whole corporation. I have talked to him once since he's been there (he is too busy socializing! and enjoying it! I wish I could do that) and he'd had something like a trillion job offers from various exotic locales and people more or less offering to put me in touch with people they know who might study what I study but at private corporations. people telling him how cheap houses are in pittsburgh. Etc. Good for him. When I fail spectacularly at this, we can get by on what he makes. It'll make his grandmother happy, at least.

5. So along with this new writing routine I'm trying to develop, I am finding that, when left to my own devices, I would go to the gym most afternoons, write in the morning before I do anything else, and never turn the tv on. This is considerably different from married life routine. Sometimes I wish we had two cars so I could go to the gym in the afternoon, when I either want to eat a chocolate bar or take a nap, but I can't get there if JD drives to work. Man, what a dilemma.

6. Also, everything I've been reading about the "process" of the big D has emphasized how selfish on emust be during this important time, eschewing friends and family and husbands and pets and children, to focus on this all-consuming task. Hmmmm. I am sick of thinking and hearing about the "process" and how hard it is. This whole stupid thing could not be more nebulous and fraught with unclarity, and it is my suspicion that it is kind of the point of the whole dumb thing to make you feel like shit. Perhaps this is all a test. It's definitely a big flaming hoop of stupid they want us to jump through.

Argh. Raedy? Jen? Is this your experience(s)? I am starting to hate everything. I don't want to be a bitter heartless person on the other side of this. Cog in the machine and whatnot.

S'pose I Never, Ever Met You

Weird, just when I went to click on a song called "fidelity" in my itunes library, the tivo'd episode of 30Rock I am watching had a character say "fidelity."

First. She updated! Hooray!

Check it out.

So, this week has kind of sucked a big fat one, hasn't it?

Today, I have six thousand things I need to do that I should've worked on yesterday too so that I could watch the super bowl uninterrupted, but instead I have done the following:

1. Woke up at 9, peed, laid back down and the cat came and sat on my chest so I had to go back to sleep.
2. Made espresso
3. Ate an english muffin
4. Dicked around on the internet trying to think of good presents to get JD for our big eight-year anniversary (YES, there's some editorial give or take in that number, shut up) we're patting ourselves on the back for Thursday (we do this instead of lame-ass valentine's day).
5. Had no good ideas for JD. Had one good idea but it was out of stock. Shoved hands in pockets and kicked at imaginary dirt.
6. Made more espresso.
7. Heated up leftover Thai food in oven while doing dishes
8. Ate food and drank more espresso.
9. Thought about how if I were a good wife I would go put money on the laundry card and wash the towels while husbie is at work.
10. Piled clothing in corner to give to goodwill.
11. Tried on pants. Got angry with pants.
12. Started making new comp cd. It's for JD but I'll happily mail you guys copies if you want them. It'll be a little more MTV-U (we get that college channel since we live on campus. It's actually kind of nice, but I miss BBC America) than the last one. But yeah.

If you want that cd, though, you are also getting a photocopy of My First Publication. No, you don't have to read it, you just need to admire how my name is, like, totally on it. If you do read it, please bear in mind that when there are paragraphs in which every single sentence starts with an adverb set off by a comma, that was not me writing. In fact, I protested mightily, but all my careful rewordings were always returned to me with the original stupidity replaced. I won't name names. Everything else, though, is mine.

I've also been having intrusive thoughts about these maple scones we get at this one grocery store. They are amazing. I ate them all yesterday and I am kicking myself today, even though it is not like I don't have many other cookie varieties to choose from.

Clearly, if anyone needs me today, I am highly available.

It May Break Your Heart To Break Her Bones

Well, I am feeling like a big big asshole right now and the only thing that cheers me up reliably is looking at my own wedding photos. Indulge me, people.

So I had a meeting this morning with my advice-er. Urgh, I have been having a difficult time finding my joie-de-research for awhile now and therefore I was heinously underprepared for any kind of discussion about large-looming shit like The study I will need to do to earn The degree that is really The whole point of this. I was also heartbreakingly underwhelming with most other things I have been doing, unsurprisingly, because as I mention on here almost every day, I am exceedingly lazy and impressing no one with such behaviors.

Anyway, so I thought I was kind of bluffing okay-ish but she abruptly turned on me and called me out, nicely, like with a joke or something, you know, something to make it clear that she knew I was not up to speed on The big idea here and that, really, if I'm not ready to rumble we can't exactly have The important conversations, now can we?

I may have pouted once she snapped at me, I'm not sure. I am sure that I felt very stupid, and small, and childish and embarrassed for myself, but thought I was concealing this masterfully. We carried on, until a few topics later she interrupted me to apologize for giving me shit about not having memorized six different literatures and said that she had been very rude and that it was uncalled for, and obviously (obvious to her from the other topics we hit on, not from my pouting per se) the only reason I have not immersed myself in these literatures is because I am so busy with ninety billion other things.

We had an awkward few moments where I felt grateful that she apologized, because I really had been stung by it, but wanting to make it clear to her that she shouldn't have to apologize because what she said had been true and I knew I was totally lacking in that area, and she felt like an asshole for having scolded me in the first place. I am not sure why, but her apology almost made me cry and then I felt really really mean, like I had guilted or bullied her into taking it back.

Obviously no one else (except possibly Raedy) will care or understand why this was such a huge ordeal for me. I walked back to my office mulling it over and then I sat at my desk and cried a little because I feel like such a jackass for somehow making her feel bad, when I was actually at fault and it's not like she wasn't well-founded in her assertion. How did I manage that? Urgh. I emailed her and tried to say I'm sorry I made her feel bad but now I'm just hoping this isn't a "thing."

Stupid stupid brain. Turn back on, you!

Culling Of The Fold

Shit, Fuck. Bad Wrong. B-Dong. Shit, Fuck, Fuck.

Today was a long day. A long, long day. Today, as you, my astute readers will note, is not even fucking over yet, and it is already mopping the floor with me.

Okay, so there was nothing really especially, acutely awful about today, I just now have this simmering (simpering? maybe that works better) apprehension rumbling in my tummy. My tumms. You catholics may recognize this feeling as what I imagine the "fear of god" to be like. Catholicism is just the only religion i can think of right now, on account of this day's extraordinary length, and the churning anxiety in my bowels. It is a global feeling of unease and very slight dismay.

Hrmmm.

I had my Totally Hard, Over My Head Class About Brayne Photography today. Sweet balls! Although I whinged mightily about it last kwarter, I think that this portion of the class will blow that out of the water. IT IS GOING TO BE BALLS-HARD. It is already balls-hard, and do you know what? That fucking sucks for me, because a perfect storm of Balls-hardness is brewing. Maybe THAT is what I am feeling in my tumms. A Perfect Storm of Balls-Hardness on the horizon.

Ok, you may be thinking, "but you always pull it out cha ass at crunch time and end up rocking everything you touch!"

No, not everything.

So that Brayne Class will be fucking challenging. Something about either being killed or made stronger inserted here. That's how it goes, right? Either would be fine with me.

Also, I know I already brought it up on here, but I have to give a lekshur soon. Waaaaahhh. I sat in the trenches with the students in that class today, between two people oblivious to the fact that I am in charge of their grade, one of whom text messaged the whole time, the other of whom was signed onto myspace (myspace name? "bee-ing mayde kleen" if you care to look her up. spell it right when you do that, though) and taking notes on the lecture in faux-cursive font. Ugh.

My advisor appears to think (rightly) that I am a lazy sack who has done nothing for two months while all her other students went out like good little akademiks on the job markit and have made her look really good and awesome and I have just annoyed her. There are a series of things concerning her that I am just dropping the ball on, right and left. Like, par example, my dissertayshun ideas/proposal.

I feel blecky. There is a bunch of other stuff that's hard and "challenging" and shit but I just got really sick of writing about how much I hate my life today. Fuck it. This malaise is the cost of taking a whole fucking month off to like my life for a little while. everyone can get up off my shit now. I'm awesome.

Thank you, this has been another installment of Twenty Bipolar Minutes in the Life of A Floundering Grad Student.


OH and I made, yesterday, what might literally be the Best comp cd I have ever made. Seriously. It is FUCKING awesome. Requests in the comments section, yo. It includes the title track. Oh yes, those of you who recognized that title (no one? one-half of one person?), I hunted down the crane wife B-side thusly named. Ohhhhhh it's awesome.