Back in the kitchen!

Since I got back from my trip, I have cooked quite a bit. It is nice - although I do miss having a dishwasher!

I had a LOT of rhubarb from my sister. So far I have made strawberry-rhubarb squares, strawberry-rhubarb sauce for grilled pound cake (yes, on the grill - thanks, Aim!), strawberry-rhubarb lemonade, and blueberry-rhubarb coffee cake:
I still have a bit of rhubarb left and will probably take another friend's suggestion: pizza with rhubarb, goat cheese, and nuts. I might add some caramelized onions too. YUM.

I am also having a couple of friends over for dinner tomorrow night and am making quinoa-stuffed zucchini, sweet potato biscuits, and chicken with bulgar wheat.

Chewing gum

While I should be working (and I was, but it wasn't going well, so I stopped), I am visiting around the internets. I was over at Spark's, and she had a post about interviewees. It reminded me of something that confuses me every once in a while: chewing gum etiquette.

A quick recap of the relevant part of her post: One interviewee was chewing gum, and that is bad manners.

I am a gum chewer. I make a point of not chewing gum in professional settings (meetings, interviews, teaching) or when I meet someone new. I do chew it fairly regularly though, and, just as when I eat, chew it with my mouth shut. I used to forget to get rid of my gum a lot when I would teach right after lunch, and one of my older students commented on it in her evaluation instead of just mentioning it to me. I have never forgotten since I read that evaluation!

I actually do not really understand how it is bad manners to chew gum. I would not chew it in the situations I mentioned above, because it is distracting and can make you difficult to understand. I guess in those cases, I think it would be like eating food out of your purse during an interview, and that would be weird. Chewing with your mouth open, gum or food, is always bad manners.

Some people will say to use breath mints, but I find that they only work for about as long as they are in your mouth. Plus, my teeth always feel nasty afterward, even if they are sugar-free. I will chew gum after my morning cup of coffee or lunch to clean my teeth and freshen my breath. I suppose I could be better about brushing my teeth after lunch. Realistically I would not start carrying a tooth brush around with me outside of work just to avoid chewing gum.

Any input? I do think that chewing in a professional or new situation, or chewing gum with your mouth open, are all bad ideas. But when is chewing gum okay?

Who's inadequate?

Alright. That is a rhetorical question that need not answering at any point. (Is that redundant?)

Argh. I am trying to sit here and work on figures for my next paper, the easy part really (for me), because my advisor needs the photographs for a grant. I can not keep focusing though because I keep feeling inadequate.

I ask my advisor today if she has an idea of what she would like from me in two and a half weeks to submit this grant, as I had been gone for a week. She says, "Oh. Nothing you do not have already." I got a little more specific and asked what pictures she would want or what preliminary data she was including. "Oh. Why don't you just send me your job talk."

Only I do not trust her. So I took out all the whistles and bells and left in the figures and told her if she wanted the originals, to let me know because these were all compressed for powerpoint. She sends me some weird email back about the content, and I point out to her that what she seems to want IS IN THE PRESENTATION. So then she makes up more excuses. I am just trying to plan ahead so she does not ask things of me last minute that I could have done ahead of time?!

I just got an email from someone I used to be really interested in working for when I am done. His past couple of emails have been strange (granted I do not know the man at all). He came to one of the job talks I gave because he is in that department, and gave great feedback as someone who is very familiar with some of the things I work with. Honestly, I was scared of making a fool of myself and tried to explain where I am coming from without getting defensive. It is difficult to explain, but he is familiar with both sides of a controversial topic, and I am only familiar with the more vocal side, and he clarified a couple of things "for" me. So I try not to feel inadequate. I sent him a thank you email for taking time to listen to my talk, and the response he sent was somewhat dismissive. I just hope it is not because he thinks I am stupid. I hope it is because, as I have heard from several people in the department who know him, that it is because he is a nice guy and does not just want to say in an email, "leave me the f*&^ alone." I will have to get over this though, if I end up working in his department.

I may have posted about this before, but I remember reading that women in grad school will blame failure on their own inadequecies (however real or not), and men will blame it on the experimental design, saying it is too difficult (again, however real or not). Similar to something else I heard/read once about how men tend to walk over something in their way and women tend to walk around it. Who knows where exactly I heard these or if I am making them up. I always make a point of walking over things though, and I am trying hard to blame experimental failure on the experiment and not my own incompetence.

I am trying not to get angry that my advisor keeps coming up with ideas about potential experiments. Partly because some are valid, and partly because I recognize she is flailing around in deep water trying not to drown in literature she has not kept up with for the past three years. I REALLY need her to just focus and think about me finishing though. When she emailed with some vague experiment today, I emailed her back the experiment I did. Then she emailed me AGAIN saying that experiment is fine, but with "more" (VAGUE) information. So I emailed her back with specific questions, because really, who knows if what these people did is even relevent to what I am trying to do. My advisor likes to make crap up and I am resisting wasting time thinking about said crap.

I think my advisor and I need another heart-to-heart. It has been two weeks, after all, since I had my break-down in her office. Why not another?

[See this post for any thing that may seem confusing or need a reference above.]
[Also, I would come up with a nickname for my advisor, but the ones currently in use are not appropriate to be spreading on the internets.]

Vacation/work

I just got back from a week with CF and two interviews. The interviews were great, time spent with CF was great, and we went to the zoo again. Some peafowl photos I like...
This next one reminds me of recent logos I have had input in designing because one person mentioned logos should not have more than two prominent colors.

Gets you through!

I mentioned I turned 30 over one month ago now. These are the things that help get me through the rough times at school:

Good friends who decorate your office for the big 3-0. Apparently they had the makings for some mimosas, but I did not know and decided to go to the gym and then we had a group meeting. Whoops.
Giving your camera to your niece or nephew. At some point, you just start making funny faces at them.
Time at your parents' house in the woods with friends from all over to celebrate your birthday. We could not burn the giant pile 'o brush they had, so we stuck to a campfire. We even toasted Peeps. I highly recommend them - the sugar on the outside gets crunchy.
Flowers from CF because he could not make it to your parents' house because he had just gotten back from visiting his family (which involves international travel).

Exhaustion

I need to figure out how to do what I am doing right now without feeling so exhausted! I have about an hour of time per day when I end up playing scrabble on Facebook when I should be doing other things and then I go to bed worrying about all the things I did not do. Things have not slowed down, for better and for worse. I keep meaning to post something, but feel like it always ends up being a laundry list of what I have been trying to accomplish. Eh. It is what works for me for now. Plus there are some people who I should be getting in touch with on the phone more frequently, so they can get their Jenski updates this way. I apologize if it gets old, but you can always stop reading. :-)

Anyhoo. This also happens to be my 400th post. I initially started this blog to share my experiences with people I knew in real life about some good "ol'" internet dating so that I would not have to repeat stories. That lasted about six months, and then I decided to try to blog every day for 365 days. That lasted until last August when I went away on vacation. Then I met the boy, CF. Then I decided to try to haul a** and finish this misery that has been my grad school experience.

Admittedly, last fall, I did not feel as though grad school was all that bad for me. Recently, I probably have some sort of melt-down about grad school once a week. The spring seemed to bring an improvement in my mental and emotional state, but my advisor always manages to mess that up. Last week, I was set to meet with her in the afternoon about a grant she has decided to submit on my project in five weeks. One of those week I am away for interviews and to see CF after 3 months of not seeing each other. She also knows I want to finish ASAP. Good times.

I was nausious all morning and stressed out and could not talk to people because I was worried about the meeting and telling her how frustrated and anxious I was, so I made an appointment with the University counseling center figuring I would need it. After I met with her (and, well, had quite the break-down), I was STARVING because I had not eaten all day and the source of stress was over. I almost cancelled the counseling appointment, but seriously, I feel this anxious about grad school nearly all the time, so I did not. It definitely helped to talk about my situation, and I will be meeting with the counselor throughout the summer.

It helps to talk to someone completely unrelated to other parts of your life. She did not necessarily provide any insightful perspective, nor do I necessarily expect her to, but as I was explaining what was going on, I verbalized some things that are surely the source of my anxiety. Hopefully if I talk with her about them, I can let them go and chill out a little when I am with friends and family.

So here goes: I do not trust my advisor. I do not think that she realized how upset I am about school, and I am not sure that she will change how she acts even now that I have told her why I am upset. As a matter of fact, she is being excessively nice to me now. She is also explaining herself in emails and telling me when she wants information or why she is asking something of me. All good, I suppose. But the trust is gone. I am waiting for the other ball to drop...again.

University graduation was rough. I actually almost started crying when I was talking to one of my committee members whose student in my year finished her PhD this year. I need to pull myself together.

I actually have to make a conscious decision to not think about work when I get to see my family. My brother lives on the west coast and was in town last weekend for an interview, yet I felt the need to squeeze in a couple of hours in lab before heading to my sister's to hang out. We visited my grandfather (on one side of the family) and my grandmother and other side of the family that weekend. It was good to get away, but I also stopped at lab on my way home too. [Note to grad students who may have made the same mistake I did: Do NOT tell people that because you are in grad school you have a flexible schedule. What your grandmother may not realize is that now, when you are trying to finish, taking a week-day off to have lunch is sadly not high on your priority list.]

I am making a big effort to get back to the gym more than occassionally. In the past seven days, I made it six times. Not bad! I am sticking with the classes so that as long as I can get my butt out of bed and to the gym, I do not have to think about how to exercise while I am there. This has led to a certain amount of physical exhaustion on top of the emotional exhaustion, but I think it helps me sleep more soundly.

This week I have post-doc interviews. That's right. I contacted three different scientists out of the blue. One interview will be a serious full-day affair to meet each other and see if it would work. The other is at a different university in one department with two different labs. One has no post-doc openings, but is "still pleased to meet with" me. The other does not have money either, but she shared two currently submitted grants with me and we talked about her research for quite a while on the phone and discussed avenues for post-doc funding.

I will be giving a talk at both locations. I have yet to study up on the labs more than I had as of two weeks ago because I have been desperately trying to get experiements done. Fat lot of good that did me because several of them still need to be repeated. My brain hurts. I am becoming intellectually exhausted. I did also mention this whole grant-on-my-project thing? So while I am trying to learn about three different research programs so I can seem smart on interviews, my advisor, after five years of working on my project, all of a sudden wants to have intellectual conversations about my research. Wonderful timing. On one hand, it has me thinking and more ready for questions during interviews. On the other hand...seriously?!

So now, I am going to go put the finishing touches on that talk, work on packing because I head out Tuesday to see CF (and do all that interviewing stuff), finish watching Home Makeover, and pretend that I am not emotionally, physically, and intellectually exhausted.