Was in a small car accident this morning. I'm fine. The car acquired a few scratches on the back bumper and the license plate got bent but suffers no other damage. My life is otherwise still operating on the default somewhere between tired and stressed.

There's a cold going around in lab lately -- the PI came down with it, the grad student next to me was out sick, and I have been paranoid about hand-washing and eating oranges (vitamin C) especially given that traveling and stress usually makes me more susceptible to viruses. This is not helped by the 20F temperature change in the area but -- well, there's nothing I can do about that. (Except complain about which clothes I should be packing away in the closet and which I should keep out.)

The PI that I interviewed with have not offered me a job interview, nor has she rejected my application. Instead she has said to keep in touch with her and to let her know when I'm done with all the interviews, which means that rather than crossing off one item on my to-do list that I can stop worrying about, I get to circle that item in red and draw "?????" next to it --- immensely frustrating, as you might imagine. Other than that I have nothing new to report. Still frustrated. Still stressed. I have in fact taken to describing my days to people on a scale of how tired I am because at the end of any given day I'm guaranteed to be some level of exhausted.

Possibly am drinking too much tea when left on my own. Going to limit self to no more than three-cup of caffeinated things on any given day.

Interview for a post-doctoral fellowship, I've concluded, is a lot like an oral exam where the only thing you know going in is what class it's for and what grade is considered passing.

The worse part of it is you step in knowing you have to take this same exam again and again and each time the focus will be different, the questions will be different and how the answers are scored will be different, and that according other post-docs the success rate right now for a passing grade is like ...33%.

The worst part of it is that, as an introvert, five hours of talking is way too much.

IDEK

This week I have hit the point where I re-wrote one sentence ten-times and then convinced myself I need to re-organize an entire section because it sounded incoherent, though at that point I actually had very little confidence in my ability to determine what is coherent.

Also the my mice gave me a litter of babies from a test cross that had weird phenotype, which was hair-pulling level of confusion since although it doesn't contradict any of my hypotheses, it doesn't exactly make sense, either. Actually I'm not sure how to interpret it and so spent some time staring blankly at the DNA sequence.

"This is what you have to look forward to," I told the other grad student, dully.

"I don't think I'm gonna look forward to it," he replied.

Skipped two days of drawing this week and ate a lot of ramen. Was making plans about eating healthier next week except I'm flying out Thursday night and Saturday morning and so that's at least two meals of powerbars on top of my utter inability to parse amount of groceries needed for the right amount of days any time the number of days change. Perhaps I will buy frozen meals. Or make a giant vat of soup that I can can freeze in aliquots and thaw out to pair with bread as needed.

Also today I accidentally hit a blackbelt in the face. She was thrilled about it.

On an unrelated note

I didn't have the time to type this up yesterday because this week's post required a bit more thought and will most likely be a bit longer as well.