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As you can see, I can't even come up with an original-like title, but I am posting at least.

The last 6 months have been a whirlwind. I successfully defended my dissertation, revised it, submitted it, cleaned up my lab records & copied what I needed to, moved to Tennessee, started a new job & have been swimming in work ever since. There is so much to do and learn that I still feel stressed out, but the environment is a lot different, so it seems like its more energizing than depressing.

I have basically switched back to molecular and cellular work, though I doubt I will ever let go of my systems perspective on things. I'm still doing a little bit of anatomical work - and have gotten some preliminary photos to optimize my image analysis on - but mostly I transfect cells (make them manufacture protein by providing them with DNA), run Western blots (to look at relative amounts of protein), and do synaptosomal uptakes (use radioactively labeled choline to measure the amount of choline uptake into neurons).

Nashville is nice, now that the snow is gone (sorry, Northeasterners, I don't mean to gloat), though I haven't ventured out much. I have good friends as neighbors; we play cards once or twice a week & sometimes watch Star Trek. And of course, the holidays involved quite a bit of traveling and visiting with people. For Christmas I drove to Pittsburgh with my neighbors, which was an exciting ride with the Subaru, a.k.a Ol' Greenie (at least in my mind). Unfortunately, D's cars had both kind of quit on him, so I left the car with him, flew back on Jan 1, and bought a car the next day. I was not planning on buying something new, but am pretty happy overall, and I think I did okay on the negotiating. Hopefully next time I won't be as rushed, and can improve on the dealmaking :)

But, ick, car salesman are sleazy... I felt like taking a shower once i got home from that ordeal, and was pretty upset for awhile that I didn't walk out of there. I don't know whether it was the New England cheapness in me, or what, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was behaving irresponsibly by buying new. I even had to go talk to the neighbors and have them remind me that it has a warranty, and nothing is really going to break on it for awhile.

On the upside, it's pretty fun to drive, and now I am looking forward to road trips with a functioning CD player, air conditioning, and cruise control. I even have one of those push button key chain locking devices. I know, I'm behind the times by about 15 years, but it's still pretty cool to me. I'll be taking it on an inaugural trip to Pgh at the end of the month, and D & I might go to Memphis for a weekend sometime later in the spring (or fall, depending on the cash flow situation).

While I am in Pittsburgh though, we're going to get some tile for the upstairs bathroom, and may tile the floor in there too. D's had a contractor in for the past week or so, and the plumbing & electrical are pretty set, now we just need the fixtures, etc. D got a roommate too, so there's a little more cash coming in to help with repair costs. And hopefully winter will abate soon, so the heating costs will subside a bit too.

Otherwise, I work, come home & work some more, sleep, then go to work. I have to admit it was a little relaxing at first to have some time and space to myself, but now I feel more settled in, and miss his company. I'm looking forward to findng an appropriate apartment with him, and setting up a dual household again. My current place looks like a big dorm room, which I suppose is appropriate, but we'll need something bigger when he moves down here. In the meantime, I'm trying to make the best of it by getting as much done as possible at work, and getting a handle on the new literature, etc.

It's not exciting, but at least it's posted!

The upside

I felt bad about all the negativity from Friday's post, especially since it was very gray outside & that never does good things to my mindset/perspective on things. Even though I took the post down, I still felt I should balance it with some of the good things about science/academia that I can come up with (assuming, of course, that I feel like acknowleding them). So in my quest to be more positive, here goes:

1) I get to work on some very cool things, and in general I don't have anyone telling me what to do. Granted, this has also been the source of alot of bad feelings on my part about grad school, but overall, I don't have to do things that I think are unethical simply because it's good for business, or anything like that. I know many people would have objections to the animal research I do, but it is heavily regulated & most of the researchers I know are concerned with animal welfare first before other considerations. Maybe we've had to be forced into it, but at this point in time, most scientists really do care about the comfort and well-being of their subjects (and not just because it leads to better data). At the very least, most of them grapple with the ethical issues surrounding their research on a regular basis. We get pretty upset if our animals aren't doing well (at least I do).

2) Despite my complaining about lack of job opportunities, I've done pretty well for myself so far. While I look back at my decision making as being pretty uninformed (or focusing on the wrong things), I ended up at a well-respected college that didn't bankrupt me. I'm in a grad program that's in the top 10 for my field in the U.S., and I'm going on to a very well-respected lab (and deserving of that respect) for a post-doc. I can't admit it very often, but I am excited to go train with the new mentor. I hope that my work will improve a lot over the next few years.

3) Despite the general complaining of Ph.D.s on the internets re: lack of well-paying jobs, research science professor jobs are more plentiful than liberal arts ones, so I've got an advantage there. If I decide to go the professor route, it doesn't have to be at a big research-heavy university. Slower-paced lifestyle is possible, and the non-financial perks of working in academia are pretty good (relaxed hours, work-from-home options, tuition benefits, discounts in community, summers off (sometimes)). Plus, if you can get in in the first place, job security is pretty good, though acquiring tenure requires an awful lot of upfront investment (~10 years of solid 100+ hr weeks & just pushing to get as much cranked out as possible). And who knows? Maybe I can float back and forth between industry/academia a bit.

4) Opportunity to travel. And not just for conferences or vacations. It sometimes seems a onerous to have to pick up and move for this or that opportunity, and it stinks to leave behind friendships that have been a big part of the past 7 years, but I always did want to live in different places. I doubt I could have predicted Pittsburgh, or Nashville as places I would end up, but I am so glad I got to experience Pittsburgh (a really great little city) and I'm sure Nashville is going to turn out to be a positive experience too. I am a little disappointed to not be moving back to a major (i.e coastal) city, but I'm glad there are places I can live that I can actually live within my means on an academic salary. I'm also glad I discovered that there are places that are much cheaper than New England (it sounds weird to me now, but I honestly didn't grasp just how much more expensive Boston-New York-Washington (heck, even Plymouth & Providence) are than other parts of the country.)

And of course, I didn't really realize that mountains in PA are a totally different breed than the ones in Western MA. And the plant life! New England is pretty & picturesque; PA flora is just so virulently alive - you can literally see the vines & other plants swallow houses, lots, etc within a couple of seasons. This makes for more frustrating gardening, but it's really amazing & inspires awe in me. Next I will be in the foothills of Appalachia, and I'm sure there will be lots of new-to-me nature to take in.

Of course, I still hope to get back to something a little more urbane, and luckily the academic thing offers a lot on that front. I'm already taking a harder look at fellowship opportunities in Germany & France, D even said he might consider Sweden (apparently the availability of disgusting fish treats may outweigh the cold & dark thing), though I'd prefer someplace I haven't been before. That won't be cheap, but how many people get to live & work in foreign countries for a few years?

5) I get to talk with scientists. For many people, that would not be a great thing. And yes, some of them can be snooty and awful. But then there are the people who practically wet themselves because they are, "Just. So. Excited. About.Science". These are the ones who run to the white board. Their eyes light up when they talk about what other people in the field are doing (not just their own stuff). They are engaged and engaging intellectually, and many can appreciate the humor in their own quirks, and in the weird conversations that come up in the course of their job. We embrace and celebrate our dorkitude, and then go off to discuss the neuroscience of zombies* over beer. It's pretty fun (sometimes).

* um, yeah, I've honestly had this conversation. It veered into how you would have to engineer the zombie virus to selectively inactivate different parts of the brain & which regions would have to be left intact. No-one participating in that conversation actually engineers viruses, so it was purely theoretical, I swear.

So I feel better about things today (obviously), and I'm almost done with the 3rd revision of my talk. In less than 48 hours, I should be done with everything, and hopefully celebrating the good outcome :)

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to try grad school....

I actually sing this to myself when I'm getting out of the car some days. Partially cause I like Willie Nelson, and it's fun to sing country in an overly vibratto way. But also because it's so, so true.

I try to wrap it in wry humor (because it is supremely funny in an objective, universe-sized way) but at some point I had to come to terms with the fact that I was doing this to myself. Grad school is a deep, dark, lonely swamp of self-doubt and confusion, and having to fake it. But no-one made me go, and no-one really made me stay through to the end (-ish). So I had to accept that no matter how anxiety ridden I am, it is self-inflicted. Which makes you really think about why you're doing it.

I can't say I've figured that out. I think in the end, I am addicted to thinking about the brain. I get to a point where I don't want to know anymore (I think things are now just getting knocked out of there whenever I manage to remember anything new), but then I hear about something on the radio, or a new idea just pops into my mind, and I'm back reading papers and my mind is cranking again.

To me it's like Gorgonzola. I think that I don't like it, but I'm not sure, so I have to try it a little bit more. I'm intrigued by the experience.

The last six weeks were very trying intellectually, but especially emotionally. I still feel embarassed about my document - there are at least 3 very weak sections that were written too close to the end, and that I wasn't thinking clearly about when I wrote them - but am trying to just press on with my defense. I'll worry about the written part later, since I expect there will be revision.

Send all the good thoughts/prayers/wishes you can out toward Southwestern PA. I'll let everyone know how it goes.

Revision

I learned in grade school/high school that the way one wrote a paper was to: 1) make an outline; 2)write a first draft; 3)Revise/edit; and 4) write final draft.

Throughout college, I aspired to this, but never really made it to that ideal. Usually, it was more like:

1) Take notes on stuff you read.
2) Think about it alot.
3) Realize this paper is due in two weeks, start outline.
4) Continue making outlines for different sections during all spare moments in between classes, while eating, procrastinating from doing other assignments. Make sure to put all the outlines on different pieces of paper, so you can misplace some of them. Accumulate a pile of reference material and various pieces of handwritten ideas somewhere near the desk region of dorm room.

5) Realize paper is due in a week, write new outline electronically. Start panicking.

6) Write furiously, and edit individual sections as you go along. Sometimes, I did get a full draft written before revising, but not most of the time.

7) During revision, decide that you don't even like the direction that one argument is going, and end up printing 10x the number of pages in the final paper, because there were just that many versions.

Unless, of course it was finals week, and there was simply no time. I have written 10-15 page papers in only 1 or 2 days. Luckily, they were things I had read for & thought about quite a bit, but I shudder to think how rough they were writing-wise.

It is not much better now.

Grad school writing has been pretty awful for me, particularly because my final thesis projects have ended up being very different from the entire set I had envisioned when I was proposing my thesis topic. So while these projects were all part of that plan, the ones that were discarded along the way were ones that really addressed the main theme of my original topic. I am left with three studies that are difficult to synthesize into one larger body of work.

I think I have figured out how to argue what I'm arguing, although its not the flashiest idea ever, but writing about it has been difficult. I think the situation is made more difficult by the fact that I've written so many different variations on aspects of choline transporter, having to break up certain mental associations with what the evidence in the literature means & use some of the same sources as evidence for something else. I also keep re-discovering papers I've read in the past & having to sit and skim over them again.

My own worst tendency is that I go looking for some citation for a very specific statement I want to make (and one that I know is a valid statement/idea) and get lost in the papers that come up in a search. On the one hand, it keeps me reading broadly, but I feel like grad school has been a constant struggle between breadth and depth of knowledge. And, coming back to writing, I have really had a hard time restricting what I write to relevant facts, and not slipping into trivia mode.

So far, it seems that the thesis-writing is an entirely new thing, and my writing habits are very different than usual with this. I'm essentially almost finished with another manuscript for submission (that becomes a chapter of my thesis), I'm pulling together another one, and writing a biggish introduction. I have not started the monster discussion section yet. I'm still scared of it.

The introduction has changed a lot, and I've been editing segments as I go along. Right now I have the first 5 pages done through 2 drafts, another 5 page section going through its second edit now, a third section that needs some expansion but can probably be in good shape with one day's work, and probably another 5-8 pages to write to connect them all into a decent argument.

Of course there are figures to pull together too, but many of these are almost done (at least for the dissertation; for publication of my last study, I still need to collect a little more data next week, then spend some time analyzing, but that can be done at a lower priority than finishing the beast of a written document).

So, busy busy busy here on my end. Another 6 weeks.

Once a month seems to be the natural frequency

of my blogging.

Forgive the late post, I did have a couple of drafts started, but it's been a very hectic month. I had my last thesis committee meeting before my dissertation defense on Friday morning, and turned in a 41 page report the week before that. That was the short version, too. So, I've been busy.

But, the good news is that I've been approved to go ahead writing & organize a defense date. I had asked for 8 weeks to write, but my committee said I'd need more (which is fine with me, I didn't want to seem like I was asking for too much time, but truthfully, I'm sure I'll need it). The longer timeline also will make scheduling people easier, as it'll be after the start of the academic fall term, not right on the tail end of the summer break. I guess the only downside is that I'll miss having any time off before moving to TN, unless I ask for another 2-4 week reprieve on my start date at the new job.

After the whole meeting, I took the weekend for myself, and D & I prepped the walls & ceiling in the front two rooms for painting. We also managed a trip to Home Depot in which we pretty much purchased only the items we needed for this one job. Everything's pretty much sanded, and more than 1/2 of the trim has been taped, so we're in better shape than I thought we'd be & painting will probably happen soon.

Today I stayed home, but I finished my work goal, and did a little bit of organizational thought about what I need to accomplish in the next few weeks. Still, I'm already overcome by the feeling that I'm not working hard enough, that I'm behind on this deadline, so this is not going to be a fun three months. Oh well, at the end of it, I'll be a Dr.

Hot Salsa, Chocolate-Ginger Cookies, and French Bread

After a few weeks hiatus due to just-too-much-work, the Pittsburgh cookie railroad is back on track (ha! I managed to squeeze a pun-like thing in there). I promised to make cookies this week, but didn't feel quite up to the curry cardamom gems that I made last time. And then ate all of them, so I had nothing to deliver. I wanted something chocolate-y, but not chocolate chip. Something exotic.

I had purchased some candied ginger a few weeks ago, at my local Indian grocery. I had plenty of cocoa and chocolate squares, so I went to the trusty Internets and searched for something chocolate and ginger. And I found these:

Chocolate-Ginger Crinkle Cookies

I made up the dough, with minor changes. Just the usual, I didn't have quite enough chocolate, Drew wanted more brown sugar, etc. The dough was really liquidy, more like brownie dough, but I remembered that the regular chocolate crinkles are also like this, so I didn't try to fix it at all.

This morning, the dough was hard as a rock. More like fudge. So, I carved it up a teaspoonful at a time, and set to work baking. They came out awesome!!! I'll definitely be making these again.

Prior to the start of the cookies, I was struggling to come up with something for dinner. I made Indian earlier in the week, so that was out. We thought about grilling, but we need a new chimney coal starter thing, and our local True Value only had a gigantic, overpriced one. (We did pick up a bunch of new plants and some mushroom compost though, so I have a few veggies planted and happy in the back.)

We settled on chicken tacos, but I was out of most veggies that go into my usual salsa. I did have some canned tomatoes from two summers ago, but I was hesitant to use them. They're whole yellow grape and red cherry tomatoes, but I included 1/2 a habanero pepper in each jar, and from previous experience, this made everything I used them in unbearably hot, even when the habanero was not removed prior to cooking.

I ground them up anyway, and threw some fresh garden oregano, onion, and cilantro. It was still insanely hot, but seemed like it was still useable. The rest of the tacos is pretty standard - I use the packet method, and soft corn tortillas - but they were great! The salsa hotness mellowed after sitting for a while, and the taco seasoning stuff worked pretty well to tamp down more of the heat. So I know at least one more use for the remaining two jars sitting in my cupboard.

While the cookies were baking this morning, I got started on some more baguettes, but tried out King Arthur's bread flour and Fannie Farmer's recipe. It's always a challenge for me to not overknead the bread, especially since my trusty Kitchen-Aid mixer tends to make kneading unnecessary anyway. Dough is in first rising now, and my fingers are crossed that it will come out well :)

Good news, everyone!

Most of the last month has been all-about-work for me, either doing it (a lot of imaging on two projects), or stressing out about it (am I making the right decision? Is it going to be enjoyable, or am I going to regret taking an academic post-doc? Or this academic post-doc?) As you can see, my anxiety talent is in over-drive, as usual.

Thankfully, this was broken up by a great visit home for my nephew's birthday. We had lots of cake, a fun time at the birthday place (with slides & lots of inflatable obstacle courses, a museum (where I made full use of my student discount) with bugs & rocks & things & a primo parking spot in Cambridge, lots of games, rock-climbing, & a nice visit with my Dad. I didn't look at any work-related stuff at all, & I came back relaxed & refreshed.

This relaxation was only slightly interrupted at the end of my return trip, when I cam bounding out of the airport, only to realize, I couldn't find my car. I had been runninng late when I got to the airport Thursday morning, and many of the Extended parking spots near the terminal were full. I didn't want to park 1/2 mile away, so I drove to the far side of the entrance & found a good place. Ran into the terminal, and didn't write down the location. D'oh!

But, I did rehearse the location several times (14d, 14d, 14d...) to get it into my head. The only problem is that area 14d was to my right when I exited the airport, and I remembered turning to my right to approach the airport when I came in. I wandered around several regions of the parking lot, unable to get the spatial location, remembered information, and direction of parking spaces to come together the right way. Finally, I went to inspect area 14d, and immediately found my car. The only upside is that I thought quite a bit about the different kinds of memory that we have, and the fact that these types of memory may be encoded/retrieved by brain circuitry that is largely segregated (a topic that is relevant to my dissertation). So, I guess I did do a little bit of work, but not too much :)

At my first day back to work, I collected a ton of imaging data. I have 60 stacks to collect in total, and as of today, I've made it through 42 of them. With two more days to image, I think I should have this project pretty well wrapped up. I'm not entirely sure how to analyze this data, but I'll figure something out.

My other project (which was finished, until we decided to add more cases), has a couple of weeks of imaging left on it, and maybe another month of counting cells. Then, write everything up, have a committee meeting, schedule a due date/defense date, clean up all my notes (including copying them, and reorganizing by topic, not date), and move to Nashville. I'm trying to get down there by the beginning of October, and not relishing how crazy my last month or so in Pittsburgh is going to be.

The good news is that I was selected for a fellowship in Neurogenomics. I have to giggle just a lit bit whenever I say that, as it seems like something someone much smarter would have on their CV. But it's going on mine. It basically just covers my salary & gives me some travel money, and requires me to do a few extra meetings & seminars during the year. And, of course, looks good on paper. So, I'll take it, even if it provokes quite a bit of anxiety over whether I'm taking an opportunity from someone who is more deserving.