I-tee

I wish I could hug the whole country and make it better. It's not fair at all. Tragedy should spread itself out at least a little, but it always seems to strike hardest in the same places. What an awful nightmare.

I sent money to Partners in Health. It feels like so little. I wish I had a hospital boat.

Thyroxine

For a while now I had been having problems focusing on work. The structure of the end of grad school was partly to blame -- with a whole unstructured day in front of you, it's pretty easy to watch 4 West Wing episodes and think you'll still have time to work later in the day. But it became increasingly difficult to concentrate even if I was really trying. I felt foggy and stupid and lethargic, and I began to wonder if I was depressed.

I was depressed, and stupid, and lethargic, and so I went to the doc. She ordered a thyroid test, which came back borderline high on the TSH and normal on the thyroxine levels, but also a thyroid antibody test that came back positive, meaning my body is trying to take out my thyroid. I started up on thyroxine pills in mid-December and immediately felt better. It was probably a placebo effect at first, relief to know why I'd been feeling so bad. But I've continued to feel a lot clearer in the head since then.

I'd had a thyroid test years ago, but I think stupid Hopkins didn't order the antibody test. Who knows how much earlier I could have staved off these symptoms if the full round of tests had been ordered.

A

I started signing my emails as just "A" in college. It probably seemed to have some kind of stylistic motivation, but, honestly, I have the worst time typing my name. It's qwerty unfriendly. I often capitalize the second letter. For something that should have a lot of muscle memory attached to it, I sure screw it up in a lot of new ways.

Back in MD

The house is cold, but the TV is big and has football on it.

Work is tomorrow.

Also, my knees are way sore today after doing squats yesterday. Like, I can't even walk.

Worst paper ever

Every time I flip through The Trentonian I feel brain cells dying.

Once there was a way

Last year, I didn't mind so much being up in NJ for the holidays. But this year I've missed home a lot more. Even though I've had fun here.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I'm resolving to post more and play a lot more video games in 2010.

Yesterday we trekked over to Halo Farms for ice cream and came back through the rougher parts of Trenton, accidentally. We had delicious dinner at Villa Mannino, and later on proceeded to gobble up almost a whole pint of ice cream. When midnight rolled around, Joe didn't want to crack open the champagne, so we had ginger ale in champagne glasses instead. I also watched more Three Stooges yesterday than I ever had previously, and it turns out I didn't hate them!

The thing about this New Year is that it marks the occasion of me being almost 30, and given that the last decade rollover feels like yesterday, the next one will be here soon enough, and I'll be almost 40! But I'll put that aside to focus on the current day.

Actually a thing

I thought the listing of "Whack Job" for Keith Olbermann's show was Optimum Cable editorializing, but apparently it's the name of his show this week.

Academia

A lot of people in academia (medicine especially included) who are weird, off, eccentric, obsessed, and unhealthily passionate about stuff everyone else thinks is weird. Most of these folks have fairly pedestrian life outcomes. I don't think you can blame anyone for not assuming otherwise.

Framing and reframing

Vacation has been great for clearing my mind and feeling better. Sometime just before we went out of town I saw some metric that asked about energy level and mood level, and it felt like kind of a revelation that those were separate dimensions -- oh, just because I feel tired does not mean I can't feel happy, and just because I'm in a bad mood does not have to mean I can't get work done. I had been tying together mood, energy level and productivity together in a death spiral where all three were rock bottom.

So, since I've been back, I've been able to keep these metrics separate in my mind, and that has actually helped them all improve. I might be tired, but that does not mean I have to feel sad. I can poke at some work, or not, until I feel more lively, which happens inevitably, particularly if I don't get discouraged or anxious. I've also been using the end of the day more productively (and generally staying until 6), because I realized I actually do tend to perk up in late afternoon (circadian rhythms), and if I don't give up when I feel crummy in the earlier afternoon, I can actually make use of that time.

Revision

I'm going to revise my sourness between the lines on the last post. It helps to put all the data in one place to notice the real trends and not get hung up on the outliers.

What a difference a year makes

What I said about last year's class? If you give a lot, you get a lot, and everyone is happy?

Let's just leave it at how much I liked most everyone last year. I ran into a bunch of them at the conference and they were all so nice and happy! They worked hard and were on top of things and only complained a teeny bit when things were rough and they recognized that I was working hard too and made sure other people knew it. Nice, nice people who I'm grateful to know.

Yogurt

So, I bought a yogurt machine for $12 a long time ago, and then I never never used it. I finally decided it was about time to try it out. It worked great! This morning I had some delicious yogurt with NJ blueberries (which were plump and juicy). I ended up using Fage as a starter, and I processed the batch for about 5 hours, which was enough to make it solid, but not too tart (not as tart as the Fage at least). I think I'm going to look for a powder starter for future batches, because it does seem a little pointless to have to buy a yogurt to make more yogurt. Anyway, I love it when I make stuff and it's easy and turns out well.

Accord

We went to Carmax to look at an Accord we liked online, and maybe other stuff if they had it. We test drove the Accord and a Hyundai Sonata, and I liked both and Joe liked the Accord best, so we got it. It's a 2006, dark grey with black interior. It was so easy! It helped that we brought our own financing (thanks Navy Federal!). We were there less than three hours and left with a car, plates, and registration. I have to say, Carmax was awesome, esp because we could look ahead online and get a sense of which one to go to for the best chance of finding a good match.

I'm almost done finalizing my course syllabus, which is good since the class is only 2 weeks away!

We're getting a car!

Despite enjoying living without a functioning car, we came to the conclusion over the weekend that one was desirable. Neither of us was super eager to up and move to Rockville, and transit options were pretty awful for Joe staying where we are (90 minutes each way if all the connections worked out). Plus, it kind of sucks not to have a car. ZipCar has been useful, and Amtrak for NJ trips, but late night trips to the store and grabbing weekend dinner at Afghan Restaurant and lots of other little things we couldn't do made it not so fun.

I had a panic attack Sunday about the costs, but once we sat down and actually looked at the numbers, it became clear just how much better two paychecks are than one, at least in the short term. We can have our not-very-old Camry or Accord or the like, pay down debts, and build savings. We probably can't quickly build a huge house downpayment in the near term, but I hope we'll have one before the market turns back up.

Mostly, though, sitting down and talking about our money was only partly about feeling better about the money and turned out to be much more an exercise about feeling really secure about our relationship and that we were going to do things together in this life.

I hate writing

The cold I thought I was getting over a week ago came to fruition that evening and has been with me since. I stayed home from work to try to get better and felt okay this past weekend in Chicago, but since then I've felt the same cloudy tired blahness every day. My teeth hurt from the sinus pressure, I break out into coughing fits that give me headaches. The other night I went through half a box of tissues, although things seem to have dried up since. In the middle of a long cold like this I begin to wonder if I'll ever be back to normal, if maybe this cold will stick with me forever and I'll be forced to drag through all the rest of my days sniffling and coughing and holding my head.

Maybe I need to be hitting the whiskey -- I seem to recall that working when I was younger, and in my prime.

Anyway, in the midst of this illness I had grantwriting group, where I was simultaneously slammed and complimented almost to an embarrassing level. Slam: Your sentences are hard to read because they have too many words and clauses and subclauses (this is what happens when I have to cram 10 arguments into a single page). Compliment: This problem may stem from your extreme thoughtfulness as manifested in the fact that you are the best reviewer here and your comments are always wildly helpful. I was a little stung by the writing comment, as I've always considered myself a good writer, but I have always tended toward sentences that require a diagrammer's mind (like mine) to fully grasp in one read. But I was pleased with the reviewing comment because if there's one thing I think I'm actually good at in this world it is editing and, more broadly, figuring out how a piece of writing could be more compelling. I get to do some of that in teaching and advising and working with other colleagues, and those are the times I feel most useful as a human being.

Going down the spectrum of feeling useful is when I have to do any of my own writing. This week's task was to fix those Specific Aims we tore up last week and add a whole Research Design section. Fortunately the National Institutes of Health are soon moving to a shorter application length, meaning I only have to crank out 6-8 pages instead of 14. But the first thing I did yesterday when I finally got going was to completely re-write the Specific Aims page, by which I mean I wrote up Specific Aims for an entirely different study. I think it's a more interesting study (writing up the research design for the prior study sounded so boring I just couldn't do it), but it didn't move me forward terribly well. I need to write up some semblance of a Research Design to turn in tomorrow at group. I'm procrastinating, and my teeth hurt.

Because even further down the spectrum of feeling useful? Planning actual research. I know I managed once upon a time to pull it off, but often I have no confidence that I can do it again. It involves talking to people, building connections, relying on others, filling out paperwork. Everything that makes my stomach churn with anxiety.

Goodbye old car

My Buick had been sitting in my driveway since October when I decided I couldn't put any more money into repairs after I had just put a lot of money into repairs -- I decided to quit while I was ahead. I subsequently discovered that between walking, public transit, and ZipCar, life was manageable without a car. But the car sat in the driveway. We made some motions toward maybe getting it repaired, but the battery died over the cold winter and wouldn't recharge easily, and so it was too big a pain to do. Finally last week, prompted by pending registration fees, I set up a donation with Habitat for Humanity, which is where the prior owner got the car. We did a last few car-related tasks (changing the flat front tire, cleaning it out, removing a small garden that was growing in the crevice of the trunk, removing the plates), and last night (at 10:30... kinda late!) a guy came and towed it away. Today I mailed the plates to the MVA.

I'm kind of depressed about it. While it was in my driveway, I could feel like I still had my first car, even if I couldn't drive it. It's the car I would jump in dressed in pajamas to go to Joe's at night when we both lived in Baltimore. It's the car we took on vacation to the shore and drove up and down the island. It was nice inside and drove smoothly. So, it was sad to see it go off on a truck at night. But someday we'll have a car that's both of ours that's newer and nicer.

It also doesn't help that I think I'm getting a cold.

Scrivener is awesome

I don't think I've ever promoted this particular product before on this blog, but I wrote my dissertation in Scrivener and it was awesome. I never would have gotten going without it.

Of course, I opened it today to solve writers' block on the 30-page summary version of my dissertation for a contest, and the dissertation itself opened, as it was the last project I worked on using it. Meaning I probably haven't been doing enough writing.

Yay birthday

I had a really great birthday.  Monday night Joe cooked manicotti and cupcakes, and we had prosecco and bummed around.  Yesterday I got up at the luxurious hour of 9:30 (instead of my usual weekday 7am), and Joe went off to his appointment while I had an additional hour to drink my coffee and lounge before I went to meet him at Friendship Heights.  He usually takes the Metro there, but that is such an error because THE BUS IS BEST.  Those of you who remember my packet-o-schedules from my Union Sq, Somerville days know that I am a big fan of buses, and yesterday I got to ride a whole new bus, the Montgomery County Ride On #1, which is similar in direction to the J1 Metrobus I ride to work, except that it makes many thrilling diversions into the adjacent neighborhoods instead of sticking to the boring main road.  It was the best ever, and then I met Joe for lunch at Mei Wah, which was super tasty.

After lunch we went down to Union Station and walked over to the new Capitol Visitors Center, where we had a tour of the Capitol (fun, but I need to get on a staff tour because only on those is there the possibility of riding the Capitol Subway), followed by a quick browse of the little museum.  Joe was pretty worn out after all that being out of the house, so we went home and vegged for the rest of the evening.  It was fun to have the day off work; sadly, I only won $2 in last night's Mega Millions drawing instead of the $212 million someone in Ocean County, NJ won, so I can't play hooky for the rest of my life and will have to continue working.

A great day for Metro

I was very bummed about having to trek out to use the bus, but I became less bummed as I realized that the little bit of deck and walk I had to shovel to get to the street was far less work than shoveling the whole driveway and cleaning off my car, as I'd have to do if I were driving.  It was also not that bad a walk, whereas it would have been a very stressful drive, since the streets were pretty slushy.  The bus I caught was on schedule (later than the bus I would normally catch, but just fine for today).

Sadly, we care a lot more as a society about clearing roads than sidewalks.  We leave it up to businesses and residences to clear sidewalks (where they exist... there aren't any sidewalks on my street), but we expect that our government will clear the roads.  I kinda want to boycott work whenever it snows as a protest.  Despite the University being open today, most of the sidewalks were not cleared when I arrived around 10, which is lame.

I wish I had been able to stay home today (I had to come in for something that we ended up cancelling and rescheduling anyway), but tomorrow I'm off for my birthday, which I will spend with my sweetie.