I thought I was over the whininess, sorry...

I was feeling much better yesterday. I still did what I had to do for the experiment that I scheduled over the weekend, in order to get it done in time for the abstract deadline that no longer applies, even though now I'm just annoyed at having to be here all weekend.

Unfortunately, today I talked to the post-doc who was also considering submitting an abstract. Luckily, she doesn't have enough data either. Luckily, because I would not have coped very well if she'd been able to get enough results in the few months since she started, when I haven't after years. Talking to her still made me feel awful, though, because she was kind of horrified to learn that I didn't even have enough data for an abstract, after all this time. She hadn't realised that I was serious when I said I didn't have any real results.

That sapped any motivation I had for today, since it really hit me how little I have to show for my time here. I've been reassuring myself with the thought that if I just keep accumulating hours of work, it'll add up to something eventually. It won't, though, unless I have a specific plan to make sure what I'm doing is useful. The things I've been doing have seemed useful at the time, but I don't think any of them will ever be a figure in a paper, which is what I really need.

My advisor has been telling me for a long time to make a detailed plan of the figures that will go in my hypothetical paper. Every time he says this, I believe that he's going to want to see it next time we meet, so I try to map out figures. I always get overwhelmed at how pathetic my attempts are, though. I never get further than a list of experiments to try, because I have no idea what the point of this paper might be. It doesn't help that I think this project is pretty boring, either. You might think that this lack of interest might explain my apathy, but the only reason I'm working on this is that I didn't work enough on the interesting project to show it could be done, even though I thought it was very cool, and now I'm stuck with this unless I want to spend several more years in grad school.

Anyway, despite asking me to make this plan many times, my advisor has never asked to see my attempts. This is even after he made me promise I really would have it to show him, the second last time he mentioned it. He usually just talks about one experiment when I meet with him, then goes off on tangents that are supposed to be encouraging, but make me feel like crap. Not that we've even met much lately. The meeting that made me miserable on Tuesday was the first in a couple of months. I was surprised to hear that he's been insisting on meeting with the newer post-doc every week. She was all impressed that he has time to have individual meetings with everyone that often. I guess not with everyone.

I know I should be more assertive about getting him to meet with me and go through my draft, so that I know what I should be doing. It's hard to push for that, though, when I'm sure he's just going to be disappointed with how useless I am.