Still tired, still hanging in there. The dojo instructor's tapped me as being ready to mentor someone (sort of one-on-one tutoring to get someone ready for the exams) so there's now a bit of internal flailing about that as well. I spend a truly disconcerting amount of time feeling under-prepared for everything these days. It's possible I just need to relax and go with it. Though that's kind of anathema to my nature.

PI still operating on the "I want everything done, yesterday" notion, while the collaborators and I side-eye him because we are not sure if he's aware that he's spent 3 hours talking about additional experiments to do in the 10 days left of May and  that, in research, things...usually don't work on the first try.

Other than that, still hanging in there. Parents are coming to visit today, which will be some combination of awesome and exhausting and right now means I need to clean up the worst of the mess before they get here. Also: CA voting -- who on EARTH in Gary Wesley?? I tried to google that name briefly but it turns out it's a fairly common name and I'm...just confused how there's no proper opposition to props this time around.

This week the second heat wave peaked and at one point I was told there were 9 places on fire in the north part of our county, but thankfully it was still pretty far north that we didn't have to deal with evacuation. Thursday ended up being so hot that I, being in a top floor apartment without AC, took to sleeping on the floor with both windows open because the bed (and my clothes, and my bag, and anything that is any good at all at retaining heat) was still radiating heat. The weather's going to be dropping around 30F within the next few days, which is the good news. The bad news is the cycle of temperature and being closeted indoors against the heat means that nearly half of our lab building (or so it sounds like) is sick. The tech in our lab came down the day after I returned to work.

Even worse news this week is that I got partially scooped. For those not in the academia, being "scooped" is sort of like the journalism version -- someone reported what you were about to report before you did. The paper came out in NEURON, which is reassuring in a way since it meant that we were not completely off of our heads when we aimed for NEURON as the place to publish my work. I couldn't help but think that if I had managed to convince my PI to submit my work back in January, as I'd originally proposed, my paper and that paper might've came out back-to-back and I'd be DONE by now ---but trying to win an argument against my PI is.... Well no one in lab has managed to date, including the golden boy a few years back, even though the PI admitted after HIS paper was scooped that the students was right. (Basically it's impossible to convince him he's wrong unless you can prove it, which in this case is too late for me.) Mostly it means that I can't publish my work as it is right now and has to add MORE stuff, which my PI wants done (yesterday but even he can acknowledge that's not going to happen) by the end of May. Though it took him an hour to cover all the things he wants done and we're half way through May already, so I'm not sure his plan is entirely plausible either.

In conclusion: it can get worse. PI's still pushing for more data, all the data, done yesterday to the point where this week I flat out told him that I'm ALREADY doing my best. Because I don't think I can spend any more hours on this without completely destroying my mental and physical health and no, just NO. It's not worth it.

Huh

Just ran into apartment manager-type person (who replaced our landlady) regarding the sink issue (the one I mentioned in April) as I was staggering back in with fresh laundry and groceries. She THINKS, after inspection, that she might be able to get someone here to fix it by next week, and that she can't find my phone number (it's the same number I've been using for the past few years) but I think the sink might finally get fixed. Which means one fewer item to quietly simmer in irritation in the back of my mind, which brings to the obvious-in-hindsight realization that all my stress this past year hasn't been --no that's inaccurate. It's more accurate to say that the majority of my stress is actually from things being out of my control. I mean the work load is intense, but if I take into account the hours I put into studying / working in lab / classes during the last year I had as an undergrad, my hours is only worse because it takes me 2hrs to commute each day and also I do martial arts 4hrs a week. I have experienced nothing this past year that's more harmful than anything I've survived before and I really do think a lot of stress is born out of frustration at being told all the things I can't do -- be given all the thousand and one wrong answers while told there's no one right answer. I'm told directly and indirectly that so much of what happens to me is out of my control -- and even that sentence -- "what happens to me" instead of "what I do next" is a reflex resulting from some kind of passive brain washing. It's a kind of learned helplessness.

Well screw that.

The economy is awful and there's no funding for basic research and I am female and Asian and not-straight and currently getting over a flu. I cannot change any of these things. Some of them, however, will pass on their own, and I am well-read, intelligent, and even more stubborn than I am smart. I am about to graduate from a top-tier program in one of the top countries for research and I will find a way to get what I want out of life, even if it's not via the most direct route.

There is, as "they" have said, no one right answer, after all.

Ugh

Came down with the flu on Thursday (to be accurate I started feeling off Wednesday evening but at first I thought it was just exhaustion or something and I could just sleep it off...but then it kept getting WORSE since Thursday morning) and had to sort of pause three different experiments so I can go home and be feverish and nauseated with saltines and Nyquil. Fever broke on Friday though and I graduated to jello, and then when that stayed down, soup. Had to drag my exhausted self to store for more saltine though and nearly had a melt-down out of exhaustion when I couldn't find them (seriously WHY do stores insist on switching things around?). Still a bit sniffly and slight coughing today despite of being dosed with the cough-suppressant version of Nyquil and Dayquil (am experience enough to know that when I get sick there's over 75% chance I'll end up hacking for months unless I do something early on about it) but otherwise functional, so am going to go and be an functional adult with chores and stuff (and move back to my normal diet! Exciting!) so I can go into lab tomorrow and start catching up on experiments, which will be stressful on so many levels that I'm actually trying not to think about it too much because, well, I've had enough nausea for this month, thanks.

Just checked the weather and realized that after bouncing from 90F to 60F the past week we're heading for 88F on Monday. And then it starts to drop again but I'm not sure how FAR it will drop so ...am just going to hold on to my thicker jackets for now and eat a lot of oranges.

Had to email my committee to push back my defense date today (not sure if it's approved yet or not) because despite of my best effort I haven't submitted my manuscript yet. I feel a little ashamed because there're a bunch of people cheering me on and telling me "you can do it!" and now I feel like I've let them down. I'm also upset because I hate it when I can't meet my own deadline, even when it's for reasons beyond my control because I usually have enough backup plans that even when things get a bit out of control it still gets done, and so the rare instances when it doesn't come through feels even worse.

On one hand, I really am not ready to face down my committee at the original deadline. On the other hand I just asked to drag this out for another two months (at least) and I feel a lot like I'm failing at life.