No More Behaving

Happy Holidays folks...whichever, if any, you may be celebrating.BH and I are off to my beautiful home state to spend some time with my family (Mom says there's snow!). Yay!Since my parents live in the boonies, their internetz are agonizingly slow. Being that patience is not one my most prominent virtues it is unlikely that I will be online much, if at all.So with that, I will see (blog) you next year.Cheers!

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Arrrrrgh! It drives me bat-shit crazy when other people mess with my stuff. I think I'm generally pretty reasonable about this sort of thing. I don't really mind when people borrow my personal reagents so long as they put them back where they found them and order me some replacements. I have even been known to share critters with my colleagues when it is arranged in advance (and even in one case when it wasn't). I'm fairly gracious and generous with my time and reagents when other people have a need for them. I think that this makes me a pretty good colleague. There is little drama so long as my work (and the things I need to do it) are respected...and they usually are.But truly messing with my stuff without saying anything to me really crosses the line. I recently discovered that someone re-sorted all my samples while I was mid-way through processing them. This person had their reasons, and technically the authority to do so, but they didn't need to do this. In fact, this person doesn't actually use these samples themselves. If they had talked to me first I could have explained my reasons for maintaining their current organization until I finished processing (just a few days). This would have saved me several hours of work reorganizing my data to reflect the New World Order. Not happy about this. But what's really chapping my hide is the total lack of respect for my work and my time that is evidenced by the fact that this person just didn't think it would be pertinent to inform me of their interference either before or after the fact. I discovered the New World Order myself while trying to get through the second step of processing in a very limited time frame and had to spend even more valuable time sorting it out so no information was lost in the crossfire. Really not happy about this.

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I am burned out. It's only Monday. I have a ton of things going on and moving forward and the data are looking pretty darn good. But dang. I'm tired!I took Sunday off completely. First day of not coming in to the lab AT ALL in a very long time. It felt really good. Got my head back in a good space, planted some corn and sunflowers in the garden, took the dog out for a bike ride, spent some quality time hanging out with BH, and really truly relaxed. It was awesome.It really did my brain some good. So much so that I came in today totally energized to bust out some hot data and also had some time to think through a couple of potential papers that I might be able to get out be the end of the summer. I feel like I've been so busy getting stuff done that I haven't really had time to think for a while. The beast of a manuscript is so close to finished that I can almost taste it. I need one more rep to get it all in order (assuming that rep actually works - trust my luck to have a reagent go bad now). Fuck, this thing has taken FOR.EV.ER. to finish. I feel like once that one's done I'll have knocked down a wall or something and the next ones will roll out a little more smoothly. I feel like they already are. It took years to get the data for the ManuBeast, and months to work out an outline and get the fucking ducks (ducking fucks?) in line. While I'm trying to get that one wrapped up in a nice little bow, I've got visions for two more, and the experimental design is working itself out in my sleep. Geez, why couldn't I have had this kind of mojo with the first one? I am a science machine.I've been turning over some thoughts on a neat little result that I got a couple days ago. I think it could really change the thinking in my sub-sub-field if my hypothesis pans out. I haven't told GrAdvisor about it yet because the data looked pretty shitty thanks to some equipment failure. But I know what I saw, and it won't be hard to repeat. No sense mentioning it to him until I can back it up with some evidence. So I'm waiting for some more critters and then I'll have at it again. In the meantime, I'm trying to decide whether to roll it into my current ManuBeast, which will no doubt increase the impact of that story, but will delay submission. If this thing sits on my hard-drive for much longer I will self-destruct. It needs to go, and I don't want to wait for another piece of data that will require a refocusing of the Beast.The second option is to write it up as a stand-alone paper. It's certainly significant enough, and though it's related to the ManuBeast, I'm not sure it belongs in the same story. Also, the finding is important and (I think) somewhat paradigm-shifting in our little corner of science, but I don't know that there's much that I want to/have time to say about it other than "hey look guys, we were wrong about this one thing all along...and now we can start thinking about all those other things differently". I am hesitant to get too excited about this because what the hell do I know, but if I'm right I really think that this could take the blinders off of how we think about this whole system and lead to some cool new stuff.However, I don't have the time here to see all that through. I gotta graduate. I'd really kind of like to throw this out as a short communication in a fairly visible journal and just get on with things. Someone else can then pick it up and run with it and cite the hell out of it.There is maybe a third option. I'm considering an in-lab collaboration. Potential In-Lab Collaborator (PILC) has some nice data on other stuff in the same system, and I think that our results complement each other nicely and support an interesting paradigm-shifting hypothesis. We've kind of talked around the relationship between our findings and I'm thinking about maybe rolling them into a co-authored paper. Maybe still just a communication, maybe something a little more substantial.Not sure though. My hesitations are thus:PILC has nice data, but doesn't really know what to make of them. So I'm not sure how cool this paper really would be. Then again, I'm not much better off with my own data at the moment so who knows.PILC has insinuated that "maybe you want to keep yours for a first authorship"...I do want a first authorship out of this it's true, but I was envisioning an "equally contributing" first authorship if we roll these into one paper, and I think PILC is trying to tell me that PILC wants sole first author if we collaborate.PILC feels the need to get this paper out quickly, even into a mid-tier journal since someone else has the same reagents in hand and is likely observing the same phenomena. (But PILC won't be ready to submit for several weeks, so I've got time to get some good-looking data that could be combined with PILC's.)PILC is very opinionated, but lacking a foundation in our sub-field. Sometimes PILC embarrasses PILC's self by throwing out hare-brained hypotheses and conclusions, just because PILC has not taken the time to educate PILC's self in the fundamentals of our field. If we were to co-author a paper together, I can keep it to a minimum in this manuscript...but do I really want to hitch my star to someone else's name that might gain a reputation for crazy? Or worse, sloppy? On the other hand, PILC is moving on soon and won't be sticking around this little corner of science, so do I really need to worry about PILC's reputation down the line? I think probably not.I'm leaning toward broaching the collaboration thing again once I've got some more data in hand. Perhaps PILC has not considered the equally contributing authorship yet, but I'm not handing over the golden egg for a second author position. I need that first authorship. PILC doesn't. PILC wasn't planning on writing this up at all. PILC has more data in hand currently, but it's all from the same experiment -I don't think that more raw information necessarily means greater contribution if it all ends up in a single figure. Especially not if I'm the one doing all the intellectual heavy lifting.I really hate all the possessive territorial bullshit that I'm feeling over this right now. It makes me feel greedy and mean and bitchy and cranky. I know I have to play the game. I don't have to like it though. This is probably why I feel so tired.

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Folks, I know you've all been missing me terribly lately. I can hear you clamoring in my inbox.Actually, no, that's not true. I don't have pages of messages from desperate fans. I assume that's because you all have your own life. So do I, which means I probably wouldn't have time to get to all that imaginary fan mail anyway. So it's all for the best really.Anywhooo, the blog fodder has been particularly lame of late. It's because in real life, things are blowing up!! Not literally of course, but damn people - I've been busy. A good kind of busy - lots getting done and that kind of forward momentum is gold. On the other hand, that kind of momentum can only be sustained for so long...at least until someone gets that perpteual motion machine finished. What I'm trying to say is that I need a break from it all so I can come back fresh to the bench and fresh to the blog.So in order to spare you any more boring posts, I'm going to give a quick update for those of you keeping score at home, and then I'm taking off for a week or so to go do something fun and important and completely unrelated to science. Here goes:Things are really coming together on my little collaborative project - I think it's really starting to build itself into a nice little paper and I continue to be delighted with the working relationship I've developed with my collaborator.The ManuBeast continues to be a beast. I have what I hope to be the very last and final experiment running right now, which I will analyze upon return from my brief hiatus and bust ass to get the sumbitch submitted this month - wish me luck.I have had some post-doc interviews that have gone largely well. One lab I rather like and I expect an offer from them any time now. Another lab I really like rather a lot, but am waiting with bated breath to hear about funding. More interviews to come.I've been collecting samples for my potentially-interesting-observation-that-might-become-a-short-report, but no time to analyze them yet since the ManuBeast is Priority A #1 at the moment. I hope that by having all these samples waiting and ready to go in freezer I will be able to take a concerted crack at this observation as soon as the ManuBeast gets sent out for review. Fingers crossed.New Technology project is also going full speed ahead, in spite of all the business with the ManuBeast, thanks in large part to a remarkably talented and capable undergrad who's been working with me. (Summer students are often a big time suck, and occasionally rewarding. This one has been a unique experience for me. All those times I've said I could get twice as much done in half the time if only I had another pair of hands? Well, now I've got them and I'm pleased to find that my prediction is true.) Technology development is a new experience for me so I'm not sure how to package this one for publication yet, but we've got a few more bridges to cross before we have enough to get a feel for this yet.So yeah, that's the scoop. Talk at you next week.

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