It's been a loooong week.
Not because of anything that happened particularly, but I got my period this week which always makes me feel tired and ill beforehand (and during, really). Ahhh, the invention of four-periods-a-year birth control was great.
But at last it is the weekend. My parents are visiting though, so it'll be a bit busy. And then NEXT weekend I'm off to Montana for the Developmental Methods conference, so things are going to be busy for a while. Hopefully it'll be good though! I need to print my poster on Monday (had to go with an alternate version of the analysis in the end...I'm still searching for that original result. It is my white whale).
Other than that...the baseball project is on hold for a while, sort of, because they're hoping to collect data from basketball coaches and basketball season doesn't start until November. Probably I'll be doing data analysis again once the project co-manager sorts through all the stuff that's been done so far though. We're not going to be done analyzing video data any time soon, with such a tiny staff...video data takes ages to code.
In the meantime it gives me a chance to catch up on some stuff that got put on hold while all this baseball craziness was going on. Editing the paper that's been in process for two years...we finally resolved the weird issue with the data analysis so we're allllllmost at the point where we can submit it again. And then hope for a revise/resubmit. If the journal even remembers who we are at this point...it's such a low priority that a lot of other things kept being put over it. I was, after all, doing an entire project for like a year, and then we ran into the analysis issue and couldn't do anything until it was solved. As a side note, the solution was that the software was doing a different thing than we thought and there was no way to tell that (basically it was predicting likelihood of having a zero rather than of having a one. Which is completely backwards to what you generally would expect).
I'm also working on a poster for a different conference in December. This poster...I have some feelings about this poster. It's based on the data from the previous project; basically we're just presenting a new measure we created and tested as part of the project. To be more specific, I created and tested it, with our collaborators being moderatly involved (they had final say on which of the possible items I developed we kept, since it was intended for their specific use anyway, and they collected all the data). Project manager was entirely consumed by the black hole of the baseball project on that point and I don't know if she's ever even looked at the measure. BUT when we submitted the abstract for this poster way back in Spring, the idea was that she would write the thing. So she was listed as the first author, I'm second, and our collaborator from the client org is third.
(For peeps outside of academia, author order is supposed to indicate how much work you did on the thing. I say 'supposed' because it's also influenced by politics and stuff a lot of the time; that's considered shady but it still happens. The first author has generally done the majority of the actual writing. Second author usually either has also written a good chunk or done most of the analyses. Beyond that the order becomes more about politics or just meaningless; nowadays especially in bio you can have papers with 12+ authors, at which point all of them probably did some very specific thing obscure to people outside the field. Nobody is particularly impressed if you're like the sixth author on something. And sometimes people get added to the end of the author list because they're owed a spot and stuff like that. This is why some peeps in academia are pushing for a switch to having a little blurb in published papers that actually explains what exactly all the authors did. But as it stands, being first author is a big deal and having first-author publications on your CV is pretty vital to your career. Second author is still good, but it doesn't have the same value as first author.)
And yet, here I am writing the poster. Basically, at this point project manager is so busy that I just don't think she'll have time to write the poster (and if I don't write it, it will therefore get done at the last minute and might therefore not be super good). From the start, the baseball project has taken precedence over everything to do with this project and this project has been seen as less important/valuable (it didn't bring in as much money tbh, since we didn't do the data collection and thus didn't need to pay as many people's salaries).
(Again for peeps outside of academia...if you're wondering why less people = project less valuable, since more people would just mean spending money on salaries...the grant that pays for you is not necessarily all that you do. In theory, grant apps list what percent of your time is spent on that grant, but in practice, you do whatever needs to get done and that can mean other projects. More bodies in the lab means more people for data collection, to lend a hand with coding or random analyses, all kinds of stuff. And it also looks good to the university, and keeping the unversity happy with us is obviously important. So although the extra money would all be 'spoken for', the hours of work it would pay for could benefit multiple projects. I myself was listed as 100% time on this project's grant while it was ongoing and my salary was entirely paid by it, yet I spent many, many hours (for a few months, 100% of my time!) on the baseball project. That saved the baseball project a lot of money and kept it from going bankrupt for just a little longer. Indeed, aside from this project (which, again, I was supposedly 100% time on), I worked on three separate projects in varying amounts. If all of this sounds kind of shady...yeah, I don't know if the clients and grant funders we work with know about stuff like this? Maybe it's common knowledge and nobody cares? But yeah, in practice we are saying certain money goes towards work hours on Project X and then it actually goes towards Projects X, Y, and Z. All the agreed-to work DOES get done though. But, in theory it could have been done more cheaply if grants/clients were paying only for the hours actually worked on the project. For example, project manager was listed as 60% time on this project if I remember right. At first, this was true...but for the last half a year or so, she was near 0% time on it. And yet it continued to pay her salary (which is higher than mine so that was a nontrivial expense to the client, who probably expected that money to actually benefit the project in some way). So yeah. Academia: kind of shady a lot of the time. I wonder if most businesses are like that?)
Going back to the poster, there's also the fact that, as I said, project manager has never, as far as I know, actually looked at any of the data or the analyses. So she'd have to find time to do that as well as actually write the poster and the odds seem about nill. So it's like...logically it makes sense for me to write it, and also my name is on it so I want it to be well-written and leaving it to someone with no knowledge of the measure or time to produce the poster does not seem like a route to success.
But it is making me a liiiiittle resentful about not being first author, since I'm doing the majority of the work at this point. And yeah in fairness I could just not write it since project manager was supposed to write it from the start. But again...I want it to be good since it's essentially a presentation of my work, whether anybody knows that or not. Actually today project manager mentioned she was sending a reminder email to the client collaborators about registering for the conference, and then was like, I don't know how it will even work if we're doing data collection then. So...yeah, this poster does not seem to be a particular priority to her. And in fairness, the baseball project is important to her job (it is now paying her entire salary iirc) and also her career, and this poster has little importance. But it's important to me! I mean this is a measure I developed and piloted, I'm actually pretty proud of it and my work on that project overall. So I want it to be presented well.
As far as I know, though, once you've had a submission accepted you can't change it (including the author list). And even if you COULD, I suspect that potential drama that way lies. And, after all, it's not like anybody is MAKING me write the poster. I just feel like it's necessary. But I'm still kinda bummed...I'd like to be the first author and present it myself (by 'present', I mean stand in front of it at the poster session and hope somebody wants to look at it lol. Poster sessions are pretty low-key). Plus I am not too sure about someone with minimal familiarity with the measure and all presenting it.
Posters are not a particularly big deal (you basically only list them on your CV if you don't have many publications, because it's not hard to get a poster submission accepted and thus they don't prove much), so this is not like a professional concern or anything. I just, on a personal level, want to be given credit for my work here (particularly since it's work I'm rather proud of). Hm, well, I think it may bug me more than it otherwise would because I feel like project manager generally tends to take me for granted a bit. I've done many hours of work for the baseball project, yet she never bothers to keep me in the loop about even basic things. And in fairness I definitely haven't put in as many hours on this as her or the other project staff (mostly because I was doing a whole other project entirely by myself for about half of this project), but still: I've been put on the project team so I want to actually know what we're likely to be doing in the next few months. Maybe it's because this project grant doesn't pay for me (I'm on this random other project that I've done work for in the past but am not currently involved with. Again, grants...)? Like even if the project goes down in flames it won't mean I'm out of a job, whereas that's a risk for the project staff paid for by the grant. But even so, this is what I do all day currently, so it'd be nice to at least know what the deal is.
After having worked under project manager for two projects now (although for the first one, about halfway through she was pretty much out due to the baseball project), I'm overall not a fan of her management style and also not a fan on a personal level. Not that I think she's terrible or something, but personality-wise she's not my type. Kind of whiny and entitled. Management-wise, tends to be disorganized, never created protocols or like a basic project workflow or a properly thought out distribution of work. Hires her own cousins. I do sympathize with her, because this project was terrible from the start for many reasons that she had no control over (although some of it was our team's fault) and she spent months constantly sleep-deprived (she looked outright ill for a while there from stress and exhaustion) and lab manager has been not happy with her (he tends to freak out when things go wrong and he can scream at people. He's...an odd character, to be sure. Which is pretty common in academia, really...). And yet, I can't say I'll miss her when she finds another job and moves on.
I just hope someone who's a better officemate gets her desk. Officemates can be more of an issue for me than one might expect because of the sensory processing disorder...stuff that people do and think is normal/acceptable can be ultra-stressful and painful for me. Yet it's difficult to ask for accomodation because it's complicated and most people haven't heard of it and people tend to react poorly to things like 'just never eat in our shared office'. One day I may have to actually break down and spend the money on a pair of high-end noise-cancelling headphones...I've also wondered whether one of those little paper masks you wear for carpentry and stuff (the ones that stop you from breathing in like wood dust or whatever) could be repurposed as an anti-bad-smells kind of thing. I don't care if it looks weird as long as it works. Maybe if an alternative scent was sprayed inside of it or something? The main problem is that ANY smell, even ones that smell good, tends to make me feel sick after a while. A non-scented environment is best. I don't actually know of any technology that just removes smells though. I just want like a forcefield that can cancel out sensations that hurt me and leave non-harmful ones but sadly such a thing does not exist.
So that's the story of my job for this week! Writing various stuff, waiting to hear what the deal is with winter data collection. Project manager did say that to her knowledge, basketball games are all on weekends (the baseball games were mostly weekday evenings), which she was happy about but I am ambivalent towards. Yes, getting home at nine o'clock sucked, but spending Saturdays filming basketball games all winter would also suck. In a way it might be worse, because usually for me the weekend is a time to recharge/recover from stress during the week (due to things like sensory processing disorder and the rest of my diagnosis list, sometimes normal life is really, really stressful). Like, there is a good reason that I sleep so much, I'm not JUST lazy. Missing essentially an entire day (and if it really is all Saturdays, the day that I actually reserve for just resting, unlike Sunday where I have choir and am more likely to schedule social things) might mean chronic exhaustion/stress...well, it depends on how long data collection goes on I guess...if it's only for like a month it's manageable, but in Spring and Summer we were collecting data for a long time. And that was with more days to collect it on! So yeah, not too sure about this.
But, no use worrying about it when I don't even know anything about what will happen yet. Apparently the client org might be doing the recruiting again? Which seems insane to me because they have failed to recruit anyone THREE TIMES, why do we think the fourth time will be the charm? Like yeah, it is not our job to do the recruiting and in truth I don't know where we'd get the money, but if we HAVE to get this data...it's not clear to me that there's any choice but doing it ourselves. Project manager said that they would like...have the client org try doing it and see what happens? But given that sports seasons are pretty short (and the university has winter break right in the middle of basketball season), there's only so much time to do recruiting. I wonder if it'll work out...
Next week will be SUCH a short workweek lol, because my flight to the conference is on Wednesday (at like...6am. Meaning I'll need to leave the house at like...4am, since you need to get to the flight about an hour early. Hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep on the plane...). Ahhh, it's kind of nerve-wracking...this is my first conference submission, and also I travel pretty rarely. But I'm hoping to see some cool stuff, Montana is supposed to be really beautiful and the conference is actually at a lodge near a national park. Maybe there'll be time to do some nature walking? I'm bringing along a pair of actual shoes (not hiking boots but like, sneakers with actual soles and arch support. most of my shoes are just cloth shoes lol, good for the city, bad for the mountains) in hopes of getting out in the fresh air.
Oh man side rant here--I wear formal attire super rarely so I had to go through and try on my suit pants and stuff (due to my ongoing, and indeed lifelong, battle with the chubbs). And I'm just like, why is finding decent plus-size pants so friggin hard? Why are they all designed with those friggin slimming panels and stuff? It's like, newsflash clothing designers: I am ultra-chubbs, no amount of slimming panels will make me not look fat. They only make clothing tight and uncomfortable. Just design some comfortable, looser-fitting pants that you can sit and stretch properly in. I mean they're friggin suit pants, the purpose is not to make people look at my sexy legs or whatever, the purpose is to look professional while presenting, they just need to be neat and nondescript. And women's blouses! I actaully generally wear solid colored t-shirts (like nicer ones, not hanging around shirts) under a blazer, because it looks professional but it's actually comfortable. For some reason women's blouses have the worst friggin design. Men's button-down shirts are basically just relatively loose-fitting, straight-cut shirts. But women's shirts are like, wheeee let's have them tuck in a lot at the waist and have a weird fancy necklike so the shirt buldges awakwardly every time you move your arms and doesn't match the cut of suit jackets and let's make the sleeves formitting, because there's zero chance anyone will have larger arms than this! They're terribly designed. And the sleeves are always shorter than men's button-downs, so they never sit right under a blazer. And why are women's clothes always designed to be form-fitting? It's like, designers, I am chubby, my form does not fit these clothes. The best, most comfortable clothes I own (including one awesome pair of suitpants that are the best pants, evidently designed by someone with an ounce of sense) are ones that aren't baggy, but are loose-fitting so that they can slide a bit as you bend and move rather than tugging or bulging. Which is how men's clothes are pretty much always designed. I remember when I worked in Manhattan after undergrad, I'd be on the train in the morning, and I was amazed at the business people on the train, because the men would have these loose-fittng suits that almost looked like fancy pajamas, and the women had these close-fitting skirts you couldn't bend in and narrow-waisted jackets and heels. The men looked so much more comfortable. And yet, if women dressed in men's-style suits they'd be seen as unprofessional. SO MUCH BULLSHIT. Seriously though it's enraging that norms of dress for women essentially demand that they dress up sexy to look 'professional' while men can just be slouching about.
Actually the one article of clothing I may need to buy for the winter is some jeans...I have jeans that do fit, but the thing is that women's jeans ALSO tend to somewhat form-fitting, and denim is a stiff fabric so bending or sitting stretches the seams (particularly on the inside of the thighs) due to my chubbs. Which a) is uncomfortable and b) eventually breaks the pants because the seams give out. I hate clothes shopping though. Buying clothes online is hit or miss because when you are chubby the cut makes a huge difference; two pants the same size can fit VERY differently depending on how they did the hips/thighs. And it's a hassle to get to the mall by public transportation. And I hate buying clothes with my mother because she inevitably makes me feel terrible about myself because she has never, in my entire life, coped with the fact that I am chubby. It's like, oh my god lots of people are chubby, you don't need to talk about this like I have cancer or something. Seriously though she'll be like 'you might need a woman's size because you're...you know...larger...' in this semi-hushed voice. It's like on some level she thinks that I just haven't realized that I'm chubby and one day I'll be like, oh wow mom, I never noticed all these chubbs, now that you've told me this I'll instantly become thin! Le sigh. Like I am fully aware of the negative health consequences of fubsiness but I cannot instantly become thin, weight-loss is hard yo.
I actually think it's basically like, once you have reached a certain weight it's really hard to go backwards because your body adapts to that and sets that as your 'normal' weight, so your metabolism is working against you. That's kind of how it seems anyway? And I gained a lot of weight in high school and college because I was struggling with severe bipolar disorder characterized by predominant depressive episodes, and depression tends to make your eating habits get out of whack. It makes some sense--some foods (like sweet things) do actually trigger a mild serotonin response in the brain, and my bipolar was ultimately treated with an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor; basically it makes your brain stop sucking up all your brain serotonin so that it can have more of an effect). So eating too much of serotonin-triggering foods is in a way a logical thing to do if you are suffering from a lack of serotonin. It's like, short-term it's better than dying, but long-term it's a terrible idea. But although my eating habits are much better now (not that they're amazing, I still love sweet things...but other than sometimes eating sweet things, it's legit mostly vegetables and beans and stuff like that. Well, also potatoes, which scientists have now discovered are bad, sigh), it's really hard to undo the metabolic changes of gaining a lot of weight over a relatively small number of years. So, yeah...weightloss, it is hard. Also I should exercise more, in fairness.
But yeah, aside from all that...I actually do have enough suit pants to wear them every day of the conference if I wanted to. Although it's a bit weird to wear suit pants on the plane ride there since we're getting there a day before the conference starts (it was basically not possible to find a flight that would get in early enough on Thursday to actually attend the conference sessions. there weren't too many options for this flight lol, I guess there's not much air traffic). I should try on my jeans again...oddly, I weigh slightly less now than I did last year, yet some of my pants fit a bit worse. I guess it's because weight by itself can't tell you what's fat and what's muscle mass. Presumably I was more in shape last year and thus fit better into pants. My blazers still fit fine at least, which is nice. Haha I gotta figure out how to pack everything neatly in my suitcase...I hardly ever travel so I'm not that good at packing lol. It'll be nice to have this fancy phone, since I'll be able to like, email people and stuff even though I won't have a computer.
Haha it occurs to me that my business cards are all out of date, they have the address of the old office. But the contact info is what really matters lol, they have my email. And the smallest amount you could buy was 500 so I'm not eager to replace them after only using like ten. At the same I had them made I was sorely tempted by cooler-looking ones that had like bright solid colors or a neat design, but I went with a more basic white with just like a small design in the background. I think the prettier ones are really for art professions and graphic designers and stuff lol. Not sure development scientists are impressed by colorful business cards. I love stuff like that though.
Woooow, this post got long. But that's the story! Next week I either won't update or will tap out a short post on my phone I guess lol. Although, I think iPhones can do dictation, so maybe I can just SPEAK the post and have Siri type it! I'm such a noob with this phone lol. All I do is play Pokemon and check emails. Oh, and Final Fantasy Record Keeper, which I also downloaded. It's a weird game, it's like...shitty but also fun? It's VERY free-to-play, but in a weird way. I think it's just a style of ftp I personally haven't encountered, I saw people online calling it a Gacha game (which iirc is a particular type of Japanese gambling machine thingy where you get put money in and a plastic ball with a prize pops out...and to get a specific prize, presumably you may need to spend quite a bit of money). I remember seeing machines like those in the US when I was a kid, but only with ultra-shitty prizes, I think the Japanese ones have nicer stuff. But anyway it's a very ftp design, so it's rather awful in that sense, but the gameplay is fun in a simple way and pretty addicting. It's nice to have something to fiddle with if I'm just waiting around somewhere.
This week, work stuff. Next week--Montana! I hope the weather will be nice~ I want to take at least one long walk in the famous Montana mountains.
But at last it is the weekend. My parents are visiting though, so it'll be a bit busy. And then NEXT weekend I'm off to Montana for the Developmental Methods conference, so things are going to be busy for a while. Hopefully it'll be good though! I need to print my poster on Monday (had to go with an alternate version of the analysis in the end...I'm still searching for that original result. It is my white whale).
Other than that...the baseball project is on hold for a while, sort of, because they're hoping to collect data from basketball coaches and basketball season doesn't start until November. Probably I'll be doing data analysis again once the project co-manager sorts through all the stuff that's been done so far though. We're not going to be done analyzing video data any time soon, with such a tiny staff...video data takes ages to code.
In the meantime it gives me a chance to catch up on some stuff that got put on hold while all this baseball craziness was going on. Editing the paper that's been in process for two years...we finally resolved the weird issue with the data analysis so we're allllllmost at the point where we can submit it again. And then hope for a revise/resubmit. If the journal even remembers who we are at this point...it's such a low priority that a lot of other things kept being put over it. I was, after all, doing an entire project for like a year, and then we ran into the analysis issue and couldn't do anything until it was solved. As a side note, the solution was that the software was doing a different thing than we thought and there was no way to tell that (basically it was predicting likelihood of having a zero rather than of having a one. Which is completely backwards to what you generally would expect).
I'm also working on a poster for a different conference in December. This poster...I have some feelings about this poster. It's based on the data from the previous project; basically we're just presenting a new measure we created and tested as part of the project. To be more specific, I created and tested it, with our collaborators being moderatly involved (they had final say on which of the possible items I developed we kept, since it was intended for their specific use anyway, and they collected all the data). Project manager was entirely consumed by the black hole of the baseball project on that point and I don't know if she's ever even looked at the measure. BUT when we submitted the abstract for this poster way back in Spring, the idea was that she would write the thing. So she was listed as the first author, I'm second, and our collaborator from the client org is third.
(For peeps outside of academia, author order is supposed to indicate how much work you did on the thing. I say 'supposed' because it's also influenced by politics and stuff a lot of the time; that's considered shady but it still happens. The first author has generally done the majority of the actual writing. Second author usually either has also written a good chunk or done most of the analyses. Beyond that the order becomes more about politics or just meaningless; nowadays especially in bio you can have papers with 12+ authors, at which point all of them probably did some very specific thing obscure to people outside the field. Nobody is particularly impressed if you're like the sixth author on something. And sometimes people get added to the end of the author list because they're owed a spot and stuff like that. This is why some peeps in academia are pushing for a switch to having a little blurb in published papers that actually explains what exactly all the authors did. But as it stands, being first author is a big deal and having first-author publications on your CV is pretty vital to your career. Second author is still good, but it doesn't have the same value as first author.)
And yet, here I am writing the poster. Basically, at this point project manager is so busy that I just don't think she'll have time to write the poster (and if I don't write it, it will therefore get done at the last minute and might therefore not be super good). From the start, the baseball project has taken precedence over everything to do with this project and this project has been seen as less important/valuable (it didn't bring in as much money tbh, since we didn't do the data collection and thus didn't need to pay as many people's salaries).
(Again for peeps outside of academia...if you're wondering why less people = project less valuable, since more people would just mean spending money on salaries...the grant that pays for you is not necessarily all that you do. In theory, grant apps list what percent of your time is spent on that grant, but in practice, you do whatever needs to get done and that can mean other projects. More bodies in the lab means more people for data collection, to lend a hand with coding or random analyses, all kinds of stuff. And it also looks good to the university, and keeping the unversity happy with us is obviously important. So although the extra money would all be 'spoken for', the hours of work it would pay for could benefit multiple projects. I myself was listed as 100% time on this project's grant while it was ongoing and my salary was entirely paid by it, yet I spent many, many hours (for a few months, 100% of my time!) on the baseball project. That saved the baseball project a lot of money and kept it from going bankrupt for just a little longer. Indeed, aside from this project (which, again, I was supposedly 100% time on), I worked on three separate projects in varying amounts. If all of this sounds kind of shady...yeah, I don't know if the clients and grant funders we work with know about stuff like this? Maybe it's common knowledge and nobody cares? But yeah, in practice we are saying certain money goes towards work hours on Project X and then it actually goes towards Projects X, Y, and Z. All the agreed-to work DOES get done though. But, in theory it could have been done more cheaply if grants/clients were paying only for the hours actually worked on the project. For example, project manager was listed as 60% time on this project if I remember right. At first, this was true...but for the last half a year or so, she was near 0% time on it. And yet it continued to pay her salary (which is higher than mine so that was a nontrivial expense to the client, who probably expected that money to actually benefit the project in some way). So yeah. Academia: kind of shady a lot of the time. I wonder if most businesses are like that?)
Going back to the poster, there's also the fact that, as I said, project manager has never, as far as I know, actually looked at any of the data or the analyses. So she'd have to find time to do that as well as actually write the poster and the odds seem about nill. So it's like...logically it makes sense for me to write it, and also my name is on it so I want it to be well-written and leaving it to someone with no knowledge of the measure or time to produce the poster does not seem like a route to success.
But it is making me a liiiiittle resentful about not being first author, since I'm doing the majority of the work at this point. And yeah in fairness I could just not write it since project manager was supposed to write it from the start. But again...I want it to be good since it's essentially a presentation of my work, whether anybody knows that or not. Actually today project manager mentioned she was sending a reminder email to the client collaborators about registering for the conference, and then was like, I don't know how it will even work if we're doing data collection then. So...yeah, this poster does not seem to be a particular priority to her. And in fairness, the baseball project is important to her job (it is now paying her entire salary iirc) and also her career, and this poster has little importance. But it's important to me! I mean this is a measure I developed and piloted, I'm actually pretty proud of it and my work on that project overall. So I want it to be presented well.
As far as I know, though, once you've had a submission accepted you can't change it (including the author list). And even if you COULD, I suspect that potential drama that way lies. And, after all, it's not like anybody is MAKING me write the poster. I just feel like it's necessary. But I'm still kinda bummed...I'd like to be the first author and present it myself (by 'present', I mean stand in front of it at the poster session and hope somebody wants to look at it lol. Poster sessions are pretty low-key). Plus I am not too sure about someone with minimal familiarity with the measure and all presenting it.
Posters are not a particularly big deal (you basically only list them on your CV if you don't have many publications, because it's not hard to get a poster submission accepted and thus they don't prove much), so this is not like a professional concern or anything. I just, on a personal level, want to be given credit for my work here (particularly since it's work I'm rather proud of). Hm, well, I think it may bug me more than it otherwise would because I feel like project manager generally tends to take me for granted a bit. I've done many hours of work for the baseball project, yet she never bothers to keep me in the loop about even basic things. And in fairness I definitely haven't put in as many hours on this as her or the other project staff (mostly because I was doing a whole other project entirely by myself for about half of this project), but still: I've been put on the project team so I want to actually know what we're likely to be doing in the next few months. Maybe it's because this project grant doesn't pay for me (I'm on this random other project that I've done work for in the past but am not currently involved with. Again, grants...)? Like even if the project goes down in flames it won't mean I'm out of a job, whereas that's a risk for the project staff paid for by the grant. But even so, this is what I do all day currently, so it'd be nice to at least know what the deal is.
After having worked under project manager for two projects now (although for the first one, about halfway through she was pretty much out due to the baseball project), I'm overall not a fan of her management style and also not a fan on a personal level. Not that I think she's terrible or something, but personality-wise she's not my type. Kind of whiny and entitled. Management-wise, tends to be disorganized, never created protocols or like a basic project workflow or a properly thought out distribution of work. Hires her own cousins. I do sympathize with her, because this project was terrible from the start for many reasons that she had no control over (although some of it was our team's fault) and she spent months constantly sleep-deprived (she looked outright ill for a while there from stress and exhaustion) and lab manager has been not happy with her (he tends to freak out when things go wrong and he can scream at people. He's...an odd character, to be sure. Which is pretty common in academia, really...). And yet, I can't say I'll miss her when she finds another job and moves on.
I just hope someone who's a better officemate gets her desk. Officemates can be more of an issue for me than one might expect because of the sensory processing disorder...stuff that people do and think is normal/acceptable can be ultra-stressful and painful for me. Yet it's difficult to ask for accomodation because it's complicated and most people haven't heard of it and people tend to react poorly to things like 'just never eat in our shared office'. One day I may have to actually break down and spend the money on a pair of high-end noise-cancelling headphones...I've also wondered whether one of those little paper masks you wear for carpentry and stuff (the ones that stop you from breathing in like wood dust or whatever) could be repurposed as an anti-bad-smells kind of thing. I don't care if it looks weird as long as it works. Maybe if an alternative scent was sprayed inside of it or something? The main problem is that ANY smell, even ones that smell good, tends to make me feel sick after a while. A non-scented environment is best. I don't actually know of any technology that just removes smells though. I just want like a forcefield that can cancel out sensations that hurt me and leave non-harmful ones but sadly such a thing does not exist.
So that's the story of my job for this week! Writing various stuff, waiting to hear what the deal is with winter data collection. Project manager did say that to her knowledge, basketball games are all on weekends (the baseball games were mostly weekday evenings), which she was happy about but I am ambivalent towards. Yes, getting home at nine o'clock sucked, but spending Saturdays filming basketball games all winter would also suck. In a way it might be worse, because usually for me the weekend is a time to recharge/recover from stress during the week (due to things like sensory processing disorder and the rest of my diagnosis list, sometimes normal life is really, really stressful). Like, there is a good reason that I sleep so much, I'm not JUST lazy. Missing essentially an entire day (and if it really is all Saturdays, the day that I actually reserve for just resting, unlike Sunday where I have choir and am more likely to schedule social things) might mean chronic exhaustion/stress...well, it depends on how long data collection goes on I guess...if it's only for like a month it's manageable, but in Spring and Summer we were collecting data for a long time. And that was with more days to collect it on! So yeah, not too sure about this.
But, no use worrying about it when I don't even know anything about what will happen yet. Apparently the client org might be doing the recruiting again? Which seems insane to me because they have failed to recruit anyone THREE TIMES, why do we think the fourth time will be the charm? Like yeah, it is not our job to do the recruiting and in truth I don't know where we'd get the money, but if we HAVE to get this data...it's not clear to me that there's any choice but doing it ourselves. Project manager said that they would like...have the client org try doing it and see what happens? But given that sports seasons are pretty short (and the university has winter break right in the middle of basketball season), there's only so much time to do recruiting. I wonder if it'll work out...
Next week will be SUCH a short workweek lol, because my flight to the conference is on Wednesday (at like...6am. Meaning I'll need to leave the house at like...4am, since you need to get to the flight about an hour early. Hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep on the plane...). Ahhh, it's kind of nerve-wracking...this is my first conference submission, and also I travel pretty rarely. But I'm hoping to see some cool stuff, Montana is supposed to be really beautiful and the conference is actually at a lodge near a national park. Maybe there'll be time to do some nature walking? I'm bringing along a pair of actual shoes (not hiking boots but like, sneakers with actual soles and arch support. most of my shoes are just cloth shoes lol, good for the city, bad for the mountains) in hopes of getting out in the fresh air.
Oh man side rant here--I wear formal attire super rarely so I had to go through and try on my suit pants and stuff (due to my ongoing, and indeed lifelong, battle with the chubbs). And I'm just like, why is finding decent plus-size pants so friggin hard? Why are they all designed with those friggin slimming panels and stuff? It's like, newsflash clothing designers: I am ultra-chubbs, no amount of slimming panels will make me not look fat. They only make clothing tight and uncomfortable. Just design some comfortable, looser-fitting pants that you can sit and stretch properly in. I mean they're friggin suit pants, the purpose is not to make people look at my sexy legs or whatever, the purpose is to look professional while presenting, they just need to be neat and nondescript. And women's blouses! I actaully generally wear solid colored t-shirts (like nicer ones, not hanging around shirts) under a blazer, because it looks professional but it's actually comfortable. For some reason women's blouses have the worst friggin design. Men's button-down shirts are basically just relatively loose-fitting, straight-cut shirts. But women's shirts are like, wheeee let's have them tuck in a lot at the waist and have a weird fancy necklike so the shirt buldges awakwardly every time you move your arms and doesn't match the cut of suit jackets and let's make the sleeves formitting, because there's zero chance anyone will have larger arms than this! They're terribly designed. And the sleeves are always shorter than men's button-downs, so they never sit right under a blazer. And why are women's clothes always designed to be form-fitting? It's like, designers, I am chubby, my form does not fit these clothes. The best, most comfortable clothes I own (including one awesome pair of suitpants that are the best pants, evidently designed by someone with an ounce of sense) are ones that aren't baggy, but are loose-fitting so that they can slide a bit as you bend and move rather than tugging or bulging. Which is how men's clothes are pretty much always designed. I remember when I worked in Manhattan after undergrad, I'd be on the train in the morning, and I was amazed at the business people on the train, because the men would have these loose-fittng suits that almost looked like fancy pajamas, and the women had these close-fitting skirts you couldn't bend in and narrow-waisted jackets and heels. The men looked so much more comfortable. And yet, if women dressed in men's-style suits they'd be seen as unprofessional. SO MUCH BULLSHIT. Seriously though it's enraging that norms of dress for women essentially demand that they dress up sexy to look 'professional' while men can just be slouching about.
Actually the one article of clothing I may need to buy for the winter is some jeans...I have jeans that do fit, but the thing is that women's jeans ALSO tend to somewhat form-fitting, and denim is a stiff fabric so bending or sitting stretches the seams (particularly on the inside of the thighs) due to my chubbs. Which a) is uncomfortable and b) eventually breaks the pants because the seams give out. I hate clothes shopping though. Buying clothes online is hit or miss because when you are chubby the cut makes a huge difference; two pants the same size can fit VERY differently depending on how they did the hips/thighs. And it's a hassle to get to the mall by public transportation. And I hate buying clothes with my mother because she inevitably makes me feel terrible about myself because she has never, in my entire life, coped with the fact that I am chubby. It's like, oh my god lots of people are chubby, you don't need to talk about this like I have cancer or something. Seriously though she'll be like 'you might need a woman's size because you're...you know...larger...' in this semi-hushed voice. It's like on some level she thinks that I just haven't realized that I'm chubby and one day I'll be like, oh wow mom, I never noticed all these chubbs, now that you've told me this I'll instantly become thin! Le sigh. Like I am fully aware of the negative health consequences of fubsiness but I cannot instantly become thin, weight-loss is hard yo.
I actually think it's basically like, once you have reached a certain weight it's really hard to go backwards because your body adapts to that and sets that as your 'normal' weight, so your metabolism is working against you. That's kind of how it seems anyway? And I gained a lot of weight in high school and college because I was struggling with severe bipolar disorder characterized by predominant depressive episodes, and depression tends to make your eating habits get out of whack. It makes some sense--some foods (like sweet things) do actually trigger a mild serotonin response in the brain, and my bipolar was ultimately treated with an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor; basically it makes your brain stop sucking up all your brain serotonin so that it can have more of an effect). So eating too much of serotonin-triggering foods is in a way a logical thing to do if you are suffering from a lack of serotonin. It's like, short-term it's better than dying, but long-term it's a terrible idea. But although my eating habits are much better now (not that they're amazing, I still love sweet things...but other than sometimes eating sweet things, it's legit mostly vegetables and beans and stuff like that. Well, also potatoes, which scientists have now discovered are bad, sigh), it's really hard to undo the metabolic changes of gaining a lot of weight over a relatively small number of years. So, yeah...weightloss, it is hard. Also I should exercise more, in fairness.
But yeah, aside from all that...I actually do have enough suit pants to wear them every day of the conference if I wanted to. Although it's a bit weird to wear suit pants on the plane ride there since we're getting there a day before the conference starts (it was basically not possible to find a flight that would get in early enough on Thursday to actually attend the conference sessions. there weren't too many options for this flight lol, I guess there's not much air traffic). I should try on my jeans again...oddly, I weigh slightly less now than I did last year, yet some of my pants fit a bit worse. I guess it's because weight by itself can't tell you what's fat and what's muscle mass. Presumably I was more in shape last year and thus fit better into pants. My blazers still fit fine at least, which is nice. Haha I gotta figure out how to pack everything neatly in my suitcase...I hardly ever travel so I'm not that good at packing lol. It'll be nice to have this fancy phone, since I'll be able to like, email people and stuff even though I won't have a computer.
Haha it occurs to me that my business cards are all out of date, they have the address of the old office. But the contact info is what really matters lol, they have my email. And the smallest amount you could buy was 500 so I'm not eager to replace them after only using like ten. At the same I had them made I was sorely tempted by cooler-looking ones that had like bright solid colors or a neat design, but I went with a more basic white with just like a small design in the background. I think the prettier ones are really for art professions and graphic designers and stuff lol. Not sure development scientists are impressed by colorful business cards. I love stuff like that though.
Woooow, this post got long. But that's the story! Next week I either won't update or will tap out a short post on my phone I guess lol. Although, I think iPhones can do dictation, so maybe I can just SPEAK the post and have Siri type it! I'm such a noob with this phone lol. All I do is play Pokemon and check emails. Oh, and Final Fantasy Record Keeper, which I also downloaded. It's a weird game, it's like...shitty but also fun? It's VERY free-to-play, but in a weird way. I think it's just a style of ftp I personally haven't encountered, I saw people online calling it a Gacha game (which iirc is a particular type of Japanese gambling machine thingy where you get put money in and a plastic ball with a prize pops out...and to get a specific prize, presumably you may need to spend quite a bit of money). I remember seeing machines like those in the US when I was a kid, but only with ultra-shitty prizes, I think the Japanese ones have nicer stuff. But anyway it's a very ftp design, so it's rather awful in that sense, but the gameplay is fun in a simple way and pretty addicting. It's nice to have something to fiddle with if I'm just waiting around somewhere.
This week, work stuff. Next week--Montana! I hope the weather will be nice~ I want to take at least one long walk in the famous Montana mountains.