busily digging away
Over the long weekend a couple of weeks back, Jesse and I dug a really deep hole. Everyone else that went to the beach with us thought that we were nuts, but we showed them. By 9pm at night, we had reached water level from near the top of the beach. Drunken local kids had begun to crowd around the top of the hole. They were calling their friends on their mobiles, telling them to drop whatever they were doing so that they could come down to the beach and have a look at what we had done. It was awesome.
I'm glad that I didn't tell my PhD supervisor about the hole... he'd probably have worked himself into a frenzy thinking about all the useful things that I could have achieved in the hours that we spent digging it. I wouldn't take those hours back, though. My world had turned into a bit of a daze before the long weekend. Everything was foggied up with spectra and structural assignments, isotopic peak pattern experiments and unusual radical initiator species. During our last meeting before the long weekend, my supervisor said that my science was very good, but that I had to "sexy things up" for the article that I was writing. I knew that he was right. I'd been huddled up in a dark, obscure corner of the world that nobody cared about, happily fiddling around with puzzles in my head, drawing kooky diagrams and growing into a skinny, hunched, unshaven, shaggy haired crazy person.
After the long weekend, all the insane structures that I'd caged myself in has washed away, and things felt empty again. I wrote a new introduction to my article; my supervisor got all excited with it and sent me an email with lots of exclamation marks. He's buzzing even more than usual now, and stopped by my desk several times with nothing better to say than, "I have a good feeling about this".
Only a few more days until I fly off to a conference. I still haven't started on my presentation... my supervisor told me that I should be an inconsolable puddle of liquid. I'm also meant to have a poster of my work printed out and ready to go. Ly is going to make it look nice and well designed, so that when people look at it they will go, "wow, super hard-core awesome and professional". My parents think that it's cute that she is taking an interest in my work, because nobody else does.
I'm glad that I didn't tell my PhD supervisor about the hole... he'd probably have worked himself into a frenzy thinking about all the useful things that I could have achieved in the hours that we spent digging it. I wouldn't take those hours back, though. My world had turned into a bit of a daze before the long weekend. Everything was foggied up with spectra and structural assignments, isotopic peak pattern experiments and unusual radical initiator species. During our last meeting before the long weekend, my supervisor said that my science was very good, but that I had to "sexy things up" for the article that I was writing. I knew that he was right. I'd been huddled up in a dark, obscure corner of the world that nobody cared about, happily fiddling around with puzzles in my head, drawing kooky diagrams and growing into a skinny, hunched, unshaven, shaggy haired crazy person.
After the long weekend, all the insane structures that I'd caged myself in has washed away, and things felt empty again. I wrote a new introduction to my article; my supervisor got all excited with it and sent me an email with lots of exclamation marks. He's buzzing even more than usual now, and stopped by my desk several times with nothing better to say than, "I have a good feeling about this".
Only a few more days until I fly off to a conference. I still haven't started on my presentation... my supervisor told me that I should be an inconsolable puddle of liquid. I'm also meant to have a poster of my work printed out and ready to go. Ly is going to make it look nice and well designed, so that when people look at it they will go, "wow, super hard-core awesome and professional". My parents think that it's cute that she is taking an interest in my work, because nobody else does.
posted by Gene at 12:26 pm
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