on the other hand...

Things I am bothered by include the fact that I kind of half-arsed the star thing yesterday and that today I zeroed my unread posts for the first time in months, while still needing to do another hour's work to even get a star. And I'm not going to do the experiment I was planning, because now that I've procrastinated for 3.5 hours, it would require me to be here until midnight.
My eyes hurt from all the blog reading, too. I'd forgotten how bad it felt to stay in lab late at night, doing nothing but staring at my computer screen. I guess I've made more progress than I'd realised. I hope I'm not regressing permanently. At least I've procrastinated on preparing for my thesis committee meeting enough that I only have 5 days for self-destructive time-wasting...

no sugar: day 24, the end

I gave up on the no sugar thing today. I wasn't planning to, but I have been wondering what, if anything, I was getting out of it. I guess what I was hoping for would be that I would stop craving sugary junk food when I'm not hungry. Actually, that has been true. I haven't really felt like I've been missing out on anything, or not feeling satisfied with what I've been eating (although, I do have a stockpile of Cadbury chocolate that my housemate brought back from a trip waiting for me). Styleygeek reported that she appreciated the taste of other foods more. I'm not sure I've noticed that, although I have had some amazingly good pears this week. I was thinking I finally got lucky and found some at the perfect ripeness, but maybe they taste sweeter when not compared to refined sugar. Hopefully, I'll remember that eating lots of sugary junk doesn't result in any lasting pleasure and I'll restrict myself to eating just things I'll actually enjoy. In any case, I'm counting this as a reasonable success. We'll see if I immediately eat all my accumulated chocolate and go on a sugar binge now...
Oh, and why did I stop today, instead of continuing for the final week? My advisor brought in pastries for lab meeting and I couldn't think of a good explanation for not eating them... It's pathetic that, yet again, I couldn't just tell the truth, but after thinking about it, I didn't think I had enough of a reason to justify sticking it out to myself, beyond "I said I would". Maybe that should've been enough, but I'm not going to let it bother me. The azuki bean cream puffs were definitely worth it, anyway.

special treatment

Occasionally I feel like I'm in some alternate universe where everyone else sees things entirely differently from me. For example, every time I meet with my advisor, I'm terrified he's going to say something about how slack I've been, but instead he tells me how hard I've been working. I think it might be a short term memory problem, since he also tends to react as if I've come up with something entirely novel when I'm just reminding him of what we talked about the last time. Maybe he hasn't been keeping track of how very long I've been "optimising conditions" so that I can do some actual work. Or maybe he's assuming the fact that it's taking so long means it's very hard, I guess. Or, a possibility I thought was more likely until recently, he's just nice and encouraging and doesn't want to make me cry in his office.
I'm a little less convinced by the last explanation since I found out a few weeks ago that the reason a grad student who rotated in the lab didn't end up joining is that my advisor told her that she wasn't working hard enough and maybe she shouldn't even be in grad school. Apparently, if she were really interested she'd be reading on her own time and coming up with project ideas etc. When I heard this, I just stared at her, because I couldn't believe the difference between that and how he treats me. If those are his expectations for grad students, why did he let me join the lab? How can he not realise that I'm not reading or working or coming up with ideas? And if he does realise, why does he not say anything like that to me? Maybe he's already stuck with me and is just trying to avoid attracting anyone else who might be similarly unproductive.

optimisation problem

I'm trying to figure out the best (mostly cheapest) way to get home to C'land in May/June. After getting to the airport only 45 minutes before my international flight, I swore I wouldn't fly out of Nearish Hub City again, but now I'm tempted again.

The cheapest option is bus from here to NHC, fly to Not-my-hometown, C'land, domestic flight to Hometown. For an extra $70, I could fly into my hometown or for an extra $180 I could fly out of this city (it would be $400 extra to do both, which is too much). The first two trip options are about the same duration, but I could save 7 hours by flying from this city. I'm not sure whether my time is worth $25/hour. I could fly or get a train from here to NHC for $70 more, too, which would also save some time, or maybe I would just spend some of it sitting in an airport, rather than on a bus.

In an attempt to keep my head from exploding, I'm ignoring how I'm going to get from my hometown to the other two cities where my dad and grandmother each live. I was also considering the option of getting a one-way ticket home and return back, so that it would be cheaper to go home for Christmas, but then it would only be 6 months between trips and I think I would feel guilty taking that much time off (even though time spent here is barely more productive).

Hmm... I just looked up direct flights again, and there is an option that's only $40-70 and 6 hours more than the cheapest (and longest) one I had initially.

So, now I just have to figure out when and how long I can go for... The potential dates are 2-4 weeks after I'm supposed to get the next HPV vaccine injection, so I'm wondering if any of those would be close enough that I could wait and get it for free once I'm home. In which case, maybe I should include the $150 I'd save in my calculations. The later dates would be probably too late for the vaccine, but my mum would be on holidays so we could spend more time together. Then I'd miss a good chunk of the way-too-short summer here (and the 4th of July fireworks (I love fireworks)) and get more winter instead, although it's only "winter", I suppose.

Argh.

oblivious

Often when my mum calls, the same housemate answers the phone (we're the only ones who share the landline). She believes in telling everybody as much detail as possible about her life, and the lives of others, so she's talked to him a lot and thinks he's very nice (he is very nice). I always feel guilty because he's far more solicitous and interested in what she says than I appear to be. He's the housemate I do stuff with the most, too, so he would often come up when I was telling her about things I'd done. For a while, she was asking after him every time I spoke to her, always with the same hopeful tone of voice she'd use to ask if I'd "met anyone nice". Finally, she flat out asked if we were dating (I've forgotten which of her quaint euphemisms she used) and I had to disappoint her and say we were just friends.
Recently she's started using the same hopeful tone of voice again as she tells me how nice he is, every time we talk. Last time she also asked if he would like to visit C'land with me, and said he'd be welcome to stay any time. I don't know if she thinks I'm lying about us just being friends or if I'm reading too much into what she says*. I know she doesn't think I'd tell her if I were seeing anybody (which is probably true, and is something I feel a bit guilty about).
I never thought he had any interest in being anything other than friends (or rather, I assumed, as I usually do, that I was misunderstanding anything that could potentially be interpreted that way), but recently he admitted that he had had a crush on me at some point (from the context it was clear it was in the past and/or he wasn't attempting to do anything about it). He said this when we were waiting for a train, just before one arrived, so the subject got dropped, which I guess is good because I didn't know what to say. I haven't spoken to him much since then, because he's been away a fair bit, but I don't think things have gotten awkward. I feel kind of bad, though.
Should I try to be less oblivious? This isn't the first time I've realised in hindsight that what I thought was the extremely unlikely interpretation, that someone liked me, turned out to be correct, so perhaps I could predict these things better than I usually do. I'm not sure what I could do differently, though, other than feel more anxious and be more awkward, so I think I'm happier being oblivious.



*Actually, perhaps she is just less oblivious than me and has just been trying to give me a clue?

so boring

I just realised how very boring my blog has become. I knew I wasn't posting much, and I've been meaning to write more, but I hadn't noticed that the entire front page was taken up with Plan-related posts. I'm sorry! I do have a bunch of other things to post about, and I have my new laptop now, so I'll try to do better.

shrinking, again

Yesterday I realised I could go down to the last notch on my belt, so today I weighed myself at the gym and was down something like 5 pounds since the last time I weighed myself. LaKisha, commented on the last shrinking post, asking if I was eating enough, and I thought I was, because I'm eating when I'm hungry, and then some. I just went and calculated how many calories I've been eating and burning, though, and apparently I have a 700-800 calorie deficit each day. I hadn't been counting the 30-40 minutes I walk to and from lab every day either, so am I doing too much exercise?
I feel kind of obnoxious posting about this, because it's not supposed to be this easy to lose weight. Last time I was going to the gym, I was actually trying to lose weight and exercising made me way hungrier. When the doctor asked about how often I've been exercising and whether I was losing weight, because going to the gym every single day is a warning sign for an eating disorder, I tried to reassure her by saying that my goal wasn't to lose weight and I hadn't changed how I was eating. I guess I should have increased how much I eat, though. Plus, I also started bringing my lunch from home and cooking dinner, so I guess I did change what I eat a fair bit. It's hard to make a lunch that contains as many calories as pizza/chips/cake from the cafeteria... I mostly meant it when I said I wasn't specifically trying to lose weight, but it does make me kind of happy, so I don't really want to stop yet. I'm not losing weight unreasonably fast and it's not like I'm even remotely close to being underweight, but at some point should I start drinking cream in a cup?

struggling

I didn't think I earned a star on Thursday, since after going to seminar and lunch with the speaker, I just sat around wasting time online all afternoon, then went to see a band play. I had to pack to go skiing once I got home, but I was still intending to read some papers or do some work for long enough to get the star, even if it meant staying up until 2am, but I accidentally left my papers sitting on the printer, my data on the lab server and my sequences on the desktop, so I couldn't do anything. I'd resigned myself to restarting the current set of stars, but the Official Gold Star Arbitrator has ruled that since I hadn't explicitly said seminars didn't count as proper work, I can still claim my star, although seminars will no longer be admissible after this.
The first two star challenges seemed relatively easy, but I've been struggling with this one from the beginning. Most days, I've been scrambling to find something sufficiently work-related to make up the time late in the evening, having wasted all day reading blogs. I think I do better with things that have a timed (early) deadline and an incentive (greater than the stars, apparently) to finish. It's a lot easier to just put off the two hours' work until "later", if there's nothing (like being able to check my email) contingent on it. I didn't make the no-sugar thing the star requirement, because I wasn't sure I'd be able to stick to it, but it's seeming a lot easier than working.
I read this article recently, about a program where you have to pay (made-up currency) to send and read email. The idea is that you'll only spend this currency (and therefore, your time and attention) on email if it's really worth it. I wonder if I should implement something similar, where I have to work for a certain amount of time, to earn time to waste on blogs. I suppose I should really just activate the Kiwi Cloak, since that is pretty much what it's designed to do...

no more platelet donations

I tried to give platelets again today. The phlebotomist didn't have so much trouble finding veins this time, but I had to stop after about 5 minutes, and I ended up in tears... Apparently the returning fluid was going into my arm, not the vein, which hurt quite a bit, but that shouldn't have been enough to make me cry. I felt stupid because I just wasted their time and I shouldn't have even tried, because I've had trouble before. And then I got embarrassed about having tears in my eyes, which made it even harder to keep from crying. Plus, the phlebotomist was being all nice to me, which always makes me cry. I think I'm too embarrassed to ever go back there now. I just wanted to run away, but I was stuck in the chair with needles in my arms, so I couldn't move. I finally escaped without stopping for juice and biscuits, but somehow crying has made me sad more generally*. I'm not sad about anything in particular, but I still want a hug.

* On second thought, perhaps stupid hormones are to blame for both... I don't know if that should make me feel better about crying for no reason, but it never does.

no sugar: day 6

This took some willpower today. First, I had to resist the cookies at seminar (at least they weren't as cute as last week's). Then, I agreed to meet a friend at my favourite chocolate/coffee shop. I had to order tea, which I don't generally like, although the peppermint tea was okay. To top it off, we were there close to closing time, so they kept bringing out all the unsold pastries to give away. I did have a croissant (please don't tell me it probably contained sugar), but it was so hard to resist the chocolate cake and fruit tarts. I know where I'll be going on day 31.

physical

I finally had my physical, scheduled when I started The Plan in January, today. I didn't think I'd had one before, but apparently it's just a fancy name for the say-aah-deep-breath routine the doctor did every time I went for anything else as a kid. I'm sure at least two people in my class complained of being subjected to blood tests and follow up appointments, though, so did I miss out on something or am I just healthier than they are?
I discovered that I'm an inch shorter than the height I've been claiming (although, that number was arrived at by guessing at a number of centimetres when I got my learner's permit, aged 17, and then roughly converting to feet and inches in my head, so I knew it wasn't accurate).
I got referred to a dermatologist for a couple of not-alarming-but-not-entirely-innocuous-looking moles (yay for growing up in the skin cancer capital of the world!) and the doctor suggested that perhaps going to the gym 5 days a week, rather than 7, would be sufficient, but other than that, I'm fine.
Apparently, I'm a good candidate for the HPV vaccine, at least for the month remaining before I turn 27. It costs $450, though. I know, small price to pay to avoid getting cancer, but if I were at home, it would only cost $92, and those would be little, C'landian dollars, too. Actually, if I were a PhD student there, it would be less than $15! Stupid American healthcare system... At least I can get my program to subsidise part of it, I think.

shrinking, part 2

I bought a skirt today. I started with the size below what I was last time I shopped for clothes and still had to go down three more sizes before getting to the one I bought. Obviously, there's some serious vanity sizing going on, but it felt very odd to buy something in a size that is too small (numerically) to even exist at home. I wonder what genuinely small people do. Shop in the children's section?

no sugar: day 4

This hasn't been too hard so far, although it was hard to turn down peanut m&ms yesterday. At least the free food on Thursday was cheese, crackers, chips and guacamole, instead of cookies. And pineapple. Fruit doesn't count as sugar, right? I think I will be eating a lot of fruit.
Today I went grocery shopping planning to get some non-sugary snacks*. I thought I was doing well by choosing mini-bagels and wheat crackers, instead of tortilla chips and artificially cheese-flavoured things, but apparently sugar is lurking everywhere. I was going to be super-good and get whole wheat bagels, but they had four times the sugar of the plain ones, and twice the sugar of the cinnamon raisin ones! You'd think that after that, I would have checked the label on the wheat thins, but I didn't notice that they contain 12.9% sugar, until after I'd eaten a few. Yay for high fructose corn syrup, once again... Does this mean I have to start over?



* I'm fairly sure I won't be seeing the same results as Styleygeek in terms of "wanting to eat only when hungry" or "loss of junk food cravings", or even "unexpected weight loss", since I'm happy to substitute salty, high-fat snacks for sweet ones.

an odd lack of self-hatred

I was doing quite well this morning. I got to the gym, and therefore left the house, half an hour ealier than yesterday. I also ran on the treadmill instead of using the elliptical machine, as an experiment to see how much easier the elliptical feels*. I didn't get much work done, but I was sociable and had afternoon tea with SuperGradStudent and some post-docs from other labs. And, I ate fruit salad instead of cake, not because I was "being good", as one of the post-docs accused me of doing, but because I looked at the array of cakes and snacks and realised I did actually want fruit.
Everything went downhill after I was given a box of girl scout cookies, though**. I ate x cookies, where x >> the number I would willingly admit to, while sitting around catching up on some of the blogs I haven't been reading. I also chatted with a friend from home about the bizarre art the picture-obsessed student mentioned here is now exhibiting in an actual gallery, as well as the crapness of our fathers, which was fun. I didn't do the actual work I had to do until just now, though, which means I'm not going to get to any of the other work I should do.
I'm not exactly happy with myself, but I am bizarrely not inclined to beat myself up about eating crap for dinner, when I have yummy leftovers at home, and not getting any work done. Maybe I'll do better tomorrow. I have decided to make the new star requirement be 2 hours of productivity, on top of the half hour before email. I also think I might try Styley's no sugar thing, since I am currently feeling like the sight of anything sweet would make me feel sick (I know that feeling's not going to last, but it does help with making a resolution now).



*A lot, but I did jog for the same amount of time, without having to slow down and walk. It's also annoying that I can't read while jogging, but I did get to watch more quality kids' TV.

** I should have known better and refused them.

3 months and 44 emails

That's apparently what it takes to get 4 professors in a room at the same time. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that one of them won't discover in the next 4 weeks that they have something more important to go to than my thesis committee meeting...

And now I can start panicking about what I'm going to have to present and what they're going to say...

The Plan: month 2 (now with graphs!)

I made graphs of how often I've been doing all these goals, based on my Joe's goals data. Most of them are pretty boring, but I did realise I've been slacking off on a few of them, recently. I did the graphs going back to when I started using Joe's goals in November, so there are a couple of slack months at the start.

1. Health

I'm still going to the gym (and I just went to the yoga class again) and eating breakfast and real dinners etc. I'm starting to think I shouldn't get points anymore for things like that (the meals, at least).

I thought I was doing better at not eating when I wasn't hungry, but maybe I just haven't been bored and/or sad as much. I am a sucker for free food, too, which is unfortunate, given that my lab is on the same floor as the conference room so all the leftover free food is way too accessible.

I have not been doing well at getting up at 7.10, and therefore also not well at getting to lab before 10am (which I know is not very early, anyway). I've been sliding back to getting to lab at 11.30. It's hard to convince myself that I really need to be there earlier. I'm a lot slower at getting ready to leave the house when I don't have a fixed deadline. At home, I could get out of bed at 8.05am and still catch my bus at 8.27am, because if I didn't make it, I'd be an hour late. Now, if I'm 10 (or 20, or 30...) minutes slower getting out the door, I'm only late by that much, and it's easy to justify increments of 10 minutes. I guess that's the down side to frequent public transport. Last time I was going to the gym, I was working with someone who expected me to be there by 9am, so I was never more than 5 or 10 minutes late, too. I wasn't going to make the stars contingent on getting to lab by a certain time, because it seemed a bit like I would be setting myself up for failure, but maybe I need that pressure. Alternatively, I could decide that it really doesn't matter what time I get to lab, and focus on being more productive while I'm there, since there is certainly room for improvement there.

I've been doing okay at going to bed by midnight, but I don't think that's really early enough for me to get up at 7, or maybe I'm just lazy about getting out of bed. I could happily sleep a lot longer, though, so maybe I should try to go to bed even earlier.

2. Professional

This graph is a lot easier to read, since it's pretty sparse... I have had some good days, but also a lot of not-so-great days.
I've been doing at least half an hour of something productive per day (it doesn't always show up on the graph as work, because I counted reading a paper, or tidying my desk as being productive). My problem is now getting back to work, after I stop working to check my email. I should probably set a limit on how long that 30 minutes of work entitles me to waste time.
I feel like I've been more productive in my time wasting, since I haven't been caught up on blogs in weeks, but I'm not sure what I've been doing exactly. I'm trying to track my time this week in an attempt to figure out where it's all going.
I don't feel like I've made much progress on my specific projects. I have been using my GTD system, which I might post about at some point, but that's mainly helping me do small tasks. I think I need some larger scale way of keeping track of my projects, too.

• stage 1: finish optimising the assay conditions, repeat the big set of experiments, analyse data

I'm still "mostly done" optimising the conditions. At least I convinced my advisor to let me finish this instead of abandoning it with nothing to show for it. I'm currently doing the (hopefully) second last optimisation experiment.

• stage 2: make/find the new reagents I need, use

I have a list! Well, it's a lot more general than the actual list of things I'll end up using, but at least it's something. I guess my list is really for stage 2a, which is new. I just have to tidy it up a bit and send it to the collaborator who's going to do something with it.

• stage 3: in vivo stuff (not yet)
• New big project: figure out what I'm going to measure, and how

See that big spike of 11 papers on Sunday? They were all about this project. I still have to read more, though, and figure out what to do based on the reading.

• side project 1: help SuperPostDoc (and hopefully get my name on that paper, too)

SuperPostDoc has apparently decided not to bother with the approach we were going to take together, but I can probably still use the reagents he's making by himself. A tech in my lab took over the cloning that I was supposed to do for this. I feel bad about not doing it myself, but at least it's almost done...

• side project 2: help Swedish PostDoc figure out assay conditions for his experiments, and get him to help me figure out conditions for

This is still waiting on the cloning for the previous side project, too.

• reading: read table of contents every week and set up pubmed alerts

Every time I get the pubmed alerts I just hope none of the articles will be relevant, which is probably the opposite of what I should be thinking... I have been reading the TOC of my paper copies of Cell at least. Maybe I should arrange to have the others emailed to me. I did subscribe to the RSS feeds, but they're too easy to ignore.

• write in my lab book when I do experiments

I have to catch up on this...

3. Social
I still haven't emailed the procrastination group leader back. At this point, do you think I still can? I also need to email the therapist to say what CBT book I like. They all look the same to me, though, and not as good as the self-esteem one I already have, in terms of having specific exercises, rather than case studies.

I think I've now gone long enough (12 days) without the Celexa, that I'm not going to start again. No more scary psychiatrist!

I emailed everyone I owed emails to, I think. I just have to keep replying now...

I still haven't been hiding in my room and I went to SuperGradStudent's birthday party.

This month, I already have plans to have dinner with some people in my program and to go to a couple of concerts and someone else's birthday party and skiing with some other C'landians, so I think this is going okay.

4. Family
I'm still not entirely sure what my goals here are. I talk to my mum about once a week on the phone, or at least, she talks to me. I've emailed my dad a few times lately, but I don't really have much to say... I'm scared of contacting my older brother, in case he starts trying to make me talk about the Landmark crap again. I should talk to my little brother more, though.

5. Being Selfish
I guess I could donate platelets again.

I remembered that I really liked tutoring the equivalent of high school maths at uni, so I've looked into places to volunteer as a tutor here. I think I have to wait until the next school year starts, though. Or maybe not. I should contact someone and find out, at least.

6. Other
I knit the hat for my dad, but I haven't made any progress on the DNA scarf since the initial workshop. I've also only played the piano once, I think. Maybe I need some more specific goals for this...

I also haven't been blogging, or reading everyone's blogs. I'd like to blog more. I hope that will be easier once I get my new laptop.

I'm not sure where this fits in, but I have kept my room tidy for a few days now, which is nice.

The candidates for the next thing to do every day in order to get a gold star are:

1. get to lab by 10am
2. do x hours of work/something productive
3. tidy my room/desk
4. do something from the "other" category

Votes? I have to decide tomorrow.