Too long, don't read
Mar. 6th, 2008 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirHaste Street, on the Feast of Ste. Colette
Oh no, another introspective post.
I woke up this morning, feeling that unique sort of paralysis that usually comes with burnout, which is odd because for once in my life, I have no reason to be burned out. I sat there, on my bed, with the blanket pulled over my head for a good twenty minutes before I could get up. -_- Wondered what was wrong with me and concluded it was probably hormones.
Then I learned from a professor in class--incidentally, my first rotation advisor--that two PNAS papers came out from my undergraduate lab just last week. I knew, of course, that they had submitted but had no idea when the papers would be published. Anyway, I'm third author on one of them, as promised, which is nice given that my main contribution to the paper could probably be summed up in one supplemental figure. Okay, I did more work than that, but in everything else, I was just a pair of extra hands to help with what was a fairly large-scale project. Actually, I think my greatest achievement in that lab was to teach the post-doc I was working with how to touch-type. Also, when I think of how long it took me to write that unwieldy module of Excel macros and how I could now write an R script that performs the same function with only half the lines, I can't help but wince. Anyway, getting a paper into PNAS doesn't mean much because the last author on the paper is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which means that any paper she submits will be accepted, but it will be a nice addition to my C.V. nonetheless.
(For the curious, the paper is here. I was glad that my labmate, who passed away in a car accident over a year ago, was also named as an author. It doesn't make up for all the science he will never get to do, but at least somewhere his contribution to research has been recorded for posterity.)
Anyway, that lifted my mood for the rest of the day, only to have it plummet down again because I didn't notice that the heat block I had set for 80° C had turned off until the very moment when I needed it. Which meant staying in lab an extra half-hour, waiting for the temperature to creep up again. I don't even know why I felt so upset--I mean, there's not much difference between coming home at 9:30 versus 10 PM, and it's not as if the extra lag ruined my experiment--but I do hate being at the mercy of such inexplicable mood swings. I mean, I don't consider myself to be an emotional person...wait, that's not true. I do feel my emotions keenly, but I usually have the happy facility to detach myself from them when they grow too overwhelming. Sometimes though, detachment is not so easy, and then I start thinking that maybe I should just turn Buddhist, join a monastery deep in the mountains, and chant to the click of prayer wheels for the rest of my life. Excuse my flippancy.
Just finished up eating dinner, which was a pot of ramen with tofu, enoki and sesame oil plus an apple. I'm beginning to think of ramen as comfort food; I make it on days when I come late feeling miserable for no good reason.
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aiwritingfic had a long navel-gazing post about writing, so I thought I'd do some navel-gazing of my own.
I've probably said somewhere on this journal that for me, writing is transmutation; it's a way of not-saying what I'm feeling. I write in linear bursts, often in one or two sittings, from start to finish, but I do a considerable amount of outlining and planning in my head, visualizing scenes and crafting particular phrases in detail before sitting down and stringing them together into text.
I've often said that my writing is very mechanical, by which I mean, I establish a whole set of more or less arbitrary rules for myself for a particular work of writing. A few examples: using fewer adverbs, adjusting the narrative-to-dialogue ratio to different extremes, maximizing alliterative phrases, repeating paragraph structures, limiting description to a single sense, oscillating between different character perspectives or different points in time. Never quite the same set of rules from fic to fic; the whole point is to set yourself a new challenge each time. The ultimate challenge being, of course, to evoke a very specific reaction in the reader. I had a stage when I was trying my best to write very ordinary, everyday scenes in such a way as to make them utterly fascinating to the reader, though I don't know if I ever managed it. I also had a stage when I wanted to make the reader to feel a certain emotion without my directly mentioning it or to gently subvert it by using images that might normally cause the opposite emotion. Though if you actually look at my output, I don't know if you'll actually see any of these intentions in the actual writing.
I have a bad memory for quotations, but I do almost always quote my own writing exactly. (Not that I go about quoting my own writing in public.) I think it's because I remember the process of deciding on a particular combination of words; I once lost a file I was working on but was able to reconstruct it from memory. Now if only I could transfer this ability to remembering other people's apt choice of phrasing...
Occasionally, I will write a story that seems to come out of nowhere, kind of like a very odd dream that seems to make sense while you're dreaming it but doesn't hold together once you subject it to analysis. These usually tend to be original fiction and erupt under deadline pressure. Luckily I haven't submitted any such story to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
imaginarybeasts yet.
Lately, I've been looking through my archive, in bouts of late-night procrastination, and I find that I've been more prolific when feeling particularly frustrated by an infatuation. Sublimation, much? -_- I suppose that goes back to whataiwritingfic often says: you only write when you're dissatisfied.
Yours &c.
Post-script: I said I wouldn't bother doing one of these memes again, but oh well, jumping on bandwagon: brutal honesty meme.
Oh no, another introspective post.
I woke up this morning, feeling that unique sort of paralysis that usually comes with burnout, which is odd because for once in my life, I have no reason to be burned out. I sat there, on my bed, with the blanket pulled over my head for a good twenty minutes before I could get up. -_- Wondered what was wrong with me and concluded it was probably hormones.
Then I learned from a professor in class--incidentally, my first rotation advisor--that two PNAS papers came out from my undergraduate lab just last week. I knew, of course, that they had submitted but had no idea when the papers would be published. Anyway, I'm third author on one of them, as promised, which is nice given that my main contribution to the paper could probably be summed up in one supplemental figure. Okay, I did more work than that, but in everything else, I was just a pair of extra hands to help with what was a fairly large-scale project. Actually, I think my greatest achievement in that lab was to teach the post-doc I was working with how to touch-type. Also, when I think of how long it took me to write that unwieldy module of Excel macros and how I could now write an R script that performs the same function with only half the lines, I can't help but wince. Anyway, getting a paper into PNAS doesn't mean much because the last author on the paper is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which means that any paper she submits will be accepted, but it will be a nice addition to my C.V. nonetheless.
(For the curious, the paper is here. I was glad that my labmate, who passed away in a car accident over a year ago, was also named as an author. It doesn't make up for all the science he will never get to do, but at least somewhere his contribution to research has been recorded for posterity.)
Anyway, that lifted my mood for the rest of the day, only to have it plummet down again because I didn't notice that the heat block I had set for 80° C had turned off until the very moment when I needed it. Which meant staying in lab an extra half-hour, waiting for the temperature to creep up again. I don't even know why I felt so upset--I mean, there's not much difference between coming home at 9:30 versus 10 PM, and it's not as if the extra lag ruined my experiment--but I do hate being at the mercy of such inexplicable mood swings. I mean, I don't consider myself to be an emotional person...wait, that's not true. I do feel my emotions keenly, but I usually have the happy facility to detach myself from them when they grow too overwhelming. Sometimes though, detachment is not so easy, and then I start thinking that maybe I should just turn Buddhist, join a monastery deep in the mountains, and chant to the click of prayer wheels for the rest of my life. Excuse my flippancy.
Just finished up eating dinner, which was a pot of ramen with tofu, enoki and sesame oil plus an apple. I'm beginning to think of ramen as comfort food; I make it on days when I come late feeling miserable for no good reason.
aiwritingfic had a long navel-gazing post about writing, so I thought I'd do some navel-gazing of my own. I've probably said somewhere on this journal that for me, writing is transmutation; it's a way of not-saying what I'm feeling. I write in linear bursts, often in one or two sittings, from start to finish, but I do a considerable amount of outlining and planning in my head, visualizing scenes and crafting particular phrases in detail before sitting down and stringing them together into text.
I've often said that my writing is very mechanical, by which I mean, I establish a whole set of more or less arbitrary rules for myself for a particular work of writing. A few examples: using fewer adverbs, adjusting the narrative-to-dialogue ratio to different extremes, maximizing alliterative phrases, repeating paragraph structures, limiting description to a single sense, oscillating between different character perspectives or different points in time. Never quite the same set of rules from fic to fic; the whole point is to set yourself a new challenge each time. The ultimate challenge being, of course, to evoke a very specific reaction in the reader. I had a stage when I was trying my best to write very ordinary, everyday scenes in such a way as to make them utterly fascinating to the reader, though I don't know if I ever managed it. I also had a stage when I wanted to make the reader to feel a certain emotion without my directly mentioning it or to gently subvert it by using images that might normally cause the opposite emotion. Though if you actually look at my output, I don't know if you'll actually see any of these intentions in the actual writing.
I have a bad memory for quotations, but I do almost always quote my own writing exactly. (Not that I go about quoting my own writing in public.) I think it's because I remember the process of deciding on a particular combination of words; I once lost a file I was working on but was able to reconstruct it from memory. Now if only I could transfer this ability to remembering other people's apt choice of phrasing...
Occasionally, I will write a story that seems to come out of nowhere, kind of like a very odd dream that seems to make sense while you're dreaming it but doesn't hold together once you subject it to analysis. These usually tend to be original fiction and erupt under deadline pressure. Luckily I haven't submitted any such story to
imaginarybeasts yet.Lately, I've been looking through my archive, in bouts of late-night procrastination, and I find that I've been more prolific when feeling particularly frustrated by an infatuation. Sublimation, much? -_- I suppose that goes back to what
aiwritingfic often says: you only write when you're dissatisfied.Yours &c.
Post-script: I said I wouldn't bother doing one of these memes again, but oh well, jumping on bandwagon: brutal honesty meme.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 10:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 05:50 pm (UTC)I find though that no one is ever actually brutally honest on a brutal honesty meme.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 01:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 05:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 11:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 04:14 pm (UTC)But yay, you got published! I'm so excited for you :D
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 05:56 pm (UTC)Thanks! <3 I'm tickled by the fact that I'm searchable on Pubmed now (well, searchable in the sense that two of the results actually refer to me).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 05:01 pm (UTC)And I'm glad the memory of your labmate will live on.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 05:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 08:43 pm (UTC)Congrats on getting published <3
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-08 07:38 am (UTC)Thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 11:31 pm (UTC)Hormonal non-detachment, boo!
Meme, deleted!
Oh, today I attended this seminar by this Brazilian guy, who compared their hypothesis involving neutrophil reaction to sepsis, to Brazilian football teams, where the 1970 one was competent and coordinated and won the world cup, while the recent one, though had good players, wasn't coordinated and lost to France in the competition. Showed us football clips and everything. And it made sense. And he was freakin' adorable in a Hobbit kind of way. Is it too dorky to squee over someone's powerpoint? He had some really sweet animations as well. One of our PI's was impressed and probably kinda jealous and went "oooh~"
XD
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-08 07:41 am (UTC)In the latest mood swing, I spent today feeling bubbly and happy. Go figure.
Aw, too bad about the meme. But you're brutally honest with me anyway, so I'm sure you could tell me to my face. Er, my digital face. My LJ icon? You know what I mean.
You can definitely squee over Powerpoints, though so many of them are not up to scratch. -_- The football analogy sounds cute though!