Doo-doo doo dooo….doo-doo doo doo dooo… April 24, 2008

(That was supposed to be “The Final Countdown.”)

The last few weeks of the semester are always really, really hectic. Throw in a trip out of town (to Jazzfest, yay!), a few research projects all needing stuff done to them RIGHTNOW, and a still very much bruised and sore left leg, and you have yourself a damn good time on your hands. Really. If it weren’t for my darling, wonderful husband, we would probably have no food in the house whatsoever and the entire place would be filthy.

Earlier this week I found out that they’d extended the proposal deadline for a conference that I really needed to submit to (but didn’t because I didn’t have any data in before the original deadline). So, I worked like crazy to get something together with what little data I had (33 completed responses as of press time…not bad for a start). All the while I’ve been working with the data for this study, working up my paper for a final project due for class, tinkering with an instrument for another study I’m doing (theoretically, it’s great, but whoever developed it can’t write for sh*t, so I’m rewriting questions), and don’t even get me started on my stats homework. God. It’s not hard, it’s just a matter of sitting down, reading a few chapters, finding a few articles, and doing it. It’s just that I don’t really have the time to devote to sitting down and doing it, at least not now. I’m likely going to end up doing it in one frantic sitting on Monday or Tuesday night before it’s due on Wednesday. Then I’m done with that class!

I have a research proposal paper and presentation due next Wednesday (or Friday, really), and I feel like I’ve made decent progress on that so far. Maybe I can get some work done in the car (unlikely) or steal a few moments here and there while we’re in New Orleans (even more unlikely). In other words, next week is going to suck. The week after that, though, is golden. Nothing really going on, nothing due…freedom.

Then I get my comps questions. Lord help me.

Heck’s Angel April 21, 2008

Day one of Piaggio Commuting. So far, so good. (Crosses fingers, knocks on wood, strokes bunny foot…Wait, I’m not superstitious…hmm.) I left la casa at 9:40 sharp and pulled up to my building at 9:50. Pas mal! It’s usually about 20-25 minutes door to door, because I park further away and have to walk about 1/3 mile to get from the deck to my building. Only once during my ride did I feel like something “could” happen, but I took all the recommended steps to prevent a disaster, and they worked. I got a few stares pulling up to the bike parking area, but I nimbly cut off the engine, hopped to the ground, and mounted it up on the center stand (all this despite the fact I’m still sore as f*ck from the spill I took on Saturday). My earliest attempts at this routine had been seasoned with a generous pinch of FAIL, but it’s starting to become second nature. Even tiny folks like me can manipulate 247 lbs of Italian craftspersonship with the right technique!

My lunch today consisted of a fried green tomato sandwich, which was transcendent even when eaten in a drab, windowless office. I’ve been working on a conference proposal all morning in hopes of having at least one accepted presentation by the end of this year. My SurveyMonkey count is up to 39 attempted, and 21 completed responses. Not bad for the first week! I’ll just use my preliminary findings for my proposal and hope for a better sample before it comes time to present.

The breakage of the ass April 21, 2008

Well, on Saturday, I came close to breaking my ass. Picture the scene: I’m driving, Scott’s riding 2-up (our first mistake). We are going to the record store (Oz, for you Tuscaloosians) to support “Record Store Day.” I go to hang a left onto Stillman Blvd, but before we turned left, I told Scott I didn’t feel comfortable driving, so he said to pull off in the parking lot ahead after I turned. Well, we didn’t quite make it. I hung the left turn, but got wobbly, and when I tried to make it into the parking lot, we wiped out on some gravel, sand, and glass. The Piaggio landed on me and smashed up my left leg. I had tried to brace myself with my arms and got the skin torn off my right wrist.

I hate to admit it, but I started crying. I was upset because I was in a hell of a lot of pain, I was upset because my bike got tore up, and really upset that like 20 people saw us go down. A few people were kind enough to come over and check on us. It was embarrassing, but it’s nice to know people care. We assessed the damage, tried to start it back up (I had the presence of mind to hit the kill switch before I got up), and drove it back home, with me on the back snivelling because the wind on my open wounds was killer.

We went to the ER to get my foot checked out (because I couldn’t move my toes or flex my ankle), and there were no breaks. I have a large bruise on my left thigh, a really bruised up left knee, my left foot is bruised up and had the skin taken off of it, and my right wrist lost a good bit of skin, too. I’m sore, but some 800 mg ibuprofen and some Vicodin (at bedtime only) seems to help it out.

I took it out on some errands yesterday, and Scott and I went for two rides (one to Publix and one joyride around campus about 9 last night). I’ll be taking it in to work here in a little bit, and I’m hoping it all works out OK. It was a scary experience, but not as bad as it could have been. You live and you learn.

Pretty Fly for a middle-class, Caucasian female April 19, 2008

So I traded in my old Honda for a Piaggio Fly 150. I’d been considering this switch for a couple of years, but there was always a reason for me not to do it. Finally, all my stars aligned, and I bought one! Originally, I was aiming for a Vespa LX150, but the Piaggio is virtually the same bike for 2/3 the price of the Vespa. No brainer, really.

I feel good about the fact that I’m taking a more efficient and environmentally responsible mode of transport to the university. Unless the weather is really terrible (which is rare here), there’s no reason I can’t take the Piaggio in. It’s about 3 miles on mostly flat roads, and most of the routes involve small, lightly traveled streets.

And let’s face it: I’ll look pretty damn cool pulling up like a rockstar in front of my building.

Oh em geez! April 18, 2008

In a couple of hours, I’ll be the owner of a Piaggio Fly 150. We’re selling my car and this will be my primary mode of transport. Ican’t believe that after all these years of “thinking” about it that I’m actually doing it! I took (and passed) my motorcycle license test today, so that’s out of the way. I will have a few weeks to buy the tag (and it’s waaaaay cheaper than my car tag) and the insurance should be no problem at all.  At 60 mpg, I will probably be spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $20/ month on gas. Very exciting!

To be honest, I’m a little sad to be selling my car because it’s the first car I ever bought and it’s been through A LOT with me. I’ve had it almost 5 years (and it was 10 years old when I bought it), and it’s still a good car. Gas is going up really fast here (about 25 cents/gal over the past few days) and I know that at some point the car is going to need some more major maintenance, and I can’t justify spending a few hundred dollars on repairing a car that’s only worth about $3000. I’d rather try to sell it while it’s still in good shape. It just seems like the right time: it’s relatively fuel efficient, I’m sure people will be wanting to downgrade to something a little more reasonable, and it’s a great car for the money.

All y’all should pray that I don’t break my ass on the way home tonight. 

I have met the enemy, and I am it. April 17, 2008

The toughest part of grad school for me has been learning to overcome myself, particularly my procrastination. The thought of really doing something, getting it in writing, and taking the first steps in a project is pretty intimidating for me. I’m not sure why. If I ever want to succeed in life, I can’t be content with merely thinking of something: I really need to just hop off my duff and do it. (Easier said than done.)

Yesterday, I made strides towards my goal of not allowing myself to procrastinate by sitting down on the sofa in a coffee shop near campus and gathering more sources and forming a substantial outline for a paper. By doing that, I’ve done all of the real foundational work for the paper, and I can spend this weekend and next week writing it. By doing this, I’ll have plenty of time for writing and editing, which will mean a better product. This paper is due about 2 weeks from now. My usual course is to just ruminate and plan for a couple of weeks, but then spend a frantic and unpleasant weekend writing it, usually finishing the conclusion the day it’s due. I began to see that while I was still putting out good work, it wasn’t my best, and that I was shortchanging myself and my professors. They’d spent all these years becoming experts in their fields, and hours with me to help me along my similar journey, and I couldn’t even grant them their due respect in the form of a solid effort? It seemed wrong. I’m capable of so much more than “just good enough,” but until I do more than that, no one knows it but me (and I’m beginning to doubt that myself).

Hopefully, I’ll see the benefits of this approach and alter my work patterns. Considering I have two large things looming ahead of me (comps and the big D), this would be the perfect time for a little self-improvement.

Good things come in small packages April 14, 2008

Y’know, like me!

I kid, I kid.

But really, it’s the small things in life that keep you going. Sure, there’s the big picture, but from a motivational standpoint, the big picture itself isn’t a very good motivator. It doesn’t constantly prod you and reward you. That’s where the small things come in. You don’t work for those, but they’re what keep you going, or at least in my case.

So, the small things that have cranked my tractor this week:

• I finally have a few responses trickling in for my study. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t checking SurveyMonkey every couple of hours…err, every hour…to see if there are any new responses. On Friday, I got to make my pitch to two different sections of the same class, and I get to do it one more time tomorrow morning. If I can get around 100-150 responses by the end of the semester, I will be ecstatic!
• On Sunday morning, the spouse and I decided to make the outside of our house look decent. This entailed cutting the grass, trimming the hedges, and cleaning out our shed/workshop in the back yard. So cleansing!
• In spite of last week’s mid-week meltdown (which I will probably feel like talking about later, but not now), I was able to calm my fears, construct a workable plan, and think positively about my future. Sometimes you get buried too deeply in the BIG picture that you can’t reach the little things. I could have let myself wallow in self-pity and ambiguity for far longer, but I picked myself up (with some help) and kept on truckin’.

They say the Devil is in the details, but I think “they” are wrong.

What I needed after a week like this… April 11, 2008

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

- Carl Sagan

Drink your frustrations piping hot! April 10, 2008

This morning I received an e-mail from my department saying that from now on, they will be demanding yearly progress evals from all grad students. This in and of itself didn’t bother me. What bothered me is that they’re just now getting around to requesting this and they want it in basically 3 weeks. Great. As if there isn’t enough going on this time of the semester…

In a similar fashion, we received an e-mail this week saying that applications for departmental assistantship applications are due by April 21. On the application, it says they’re due April 1st, and I’ve heard talk that some people don’t turn in applications until mid-summer (for fall!), so they’re trying to fix this. I do see some progress here and there in the way of deadlines and paperwork, and that’s definitely good. Things in the department are slowly but surely shaping up, after a few years of disorganization and (at times) chaos.

Something on the serious tip April 4, 2008

This week, my department had the misfortune of losing a student. She had completed all of her coursework, passed her comps, and apparently was making good progress on her dissertation. While working on her comps, she completely neglected her health and worked far too hard, and it was more than her body could stand. Such a tragic loss for so many reasons: She was a kind person, always inquisitive, and an incredibly hard worker. The “worst” of her graduate studies were behind her, and she was really looking forward to making a life here for herself and her daughter (who is also a grad student), and now she’ll never enjoy the fruits of her labor.

As much as we all joke around about letting everything else in our lives go to pot during grad school, it really is no laughing matter. As a grad student, your work is never done. Ever. Merely doing the bare minimum will not get you by. There’s no point in pursuing a graduate degree if you’re not willingly going the extra mile, anyways. That said, at some point, you have to cry “Uncle!” You are not going to fail out of grad school if you allow yourself to sleep 7 hours rather than 4 hours a night. (If you are, then your problems are far greater than just some sleep.) Taking 30 minutes to eat something really is OK. Exercise is even better. It seems impossible to fit in that yoga class or 5K run in between reading, completing assignments, going to class, fulfilling your assistantship duties, working on your own research, etc., but if eating well, sleeping enough, and exercising regularly means that you will live to reap the benefits of your work, I’d say that you can’t afford not to do these things. Love your body, and it will love you back.

I used to be a masochist when it came to school. In college, I’d practice anywhere from 2 to 5 hours a day (I was a music major), after having a full day of classes (sometimes literally 8AM-5PM), and keeping a part time job on top of all of that. My diet was terrible, I exercised only occasionally, and sleeping more than 5 hours a night was indeed a rarity. I paid the price in many ways, and now that I’m sleeping 7-9 hours a night, exercising a few times a week, and eating a well-balanced vegetarian diet, I feel happier. Moreover, I feel like I’m actually more productive than I am when I deprive myself of my basic needs. The amount of time I “lose” to caring for myself is quickly made up.

While I realize this all sounds easier said than done, I encourage anybody who isn’t caring for him/herself to stop this self-torture and be kind to yourself. None of us knows how many days we have been allotted, and I say that we should enjoy them while we can.