The Slog

I am so tired these days. It feels like I'm running a marathon (except without the health benefits). Spending all my time in the lab, but it ain't that productive... and when I do go out it's usually to sleep on Sandeep's couch while other people play board games. Now he and Christine are in Alberta for a few weeks, so no more social life... although Nicola does want to go to TO on the weekend, so I suppose there's that.

But yeah, super run down, man. My HPA axis has been overloaded by chronic stress for too long and it's bottoming out. (Would this be any easier if I didn't know exactly what my brain is up to?) At least the marking is out of the way for another week, and we managed to submit my Hot or Not paper (second chunk of my thesis) on Monday. To a journal with an 83% rejection rate (aim high!) so everyone please cross their fingers. Still, it's a good bit of work and it will get published somewhere.

Got two conference deadlines coming up and piles of data that may or may not hold anything useful. STRESSFUL! Yesterday was Guelph Neuroscience Day and I tried to do some data analysis after, but was just too exhausted. Public speaking/interacting with people burns me out. Talk went pretty well though. My entire thesis in an eight-minute talk! There were no questions: I think I stunned people into silence with the flood of information.

Steph called last night and ordered me to take two days off in a row. I don't think I've done that since.... probably my trip to Windsor/Detroit. (Which was awesome, BTW - saw MuteMath, who totally rocked, and convinced Sandeep to take us on a driving tour of the urban prairies. His risk-averseness kicked in and he wouldn't stop the car at ALL in Detroit, but it was still fascinating in a post-apocalypic kind of way). Anyway, that was months ago and maybe she's right. Easter coming up, I suppose. Sounds like a good reason.

Things going downhill at the dept. Definitely time to finish and move on... one of the girls who defended in the Fall says you hit a point when you don't even care about your defense any more because there is too much other stress. She said after that it's easy. So, given that I don't have a postdoc or job lined up, I should be right in line to hit that point very soon...