Hmm, Oh! You're Still Here?

Warning: Whining and self-absorbed blather ahead.

It's kinda funny that now the the photo365 blog is going gangbusters, my normal blog dries up.

Actually there's a little more to it than that. I've said this before, but I guess I still haven't gotten into a healthy pattern here at Urban Sprawl U. I'm still struggling with my motivation, and I guess I'm trying to figure out what in the world I'm doing here. The people around me all seem to have really nice conctrete plans about where they're going and how they're going to get there. There're all over writing grant proposals and sending off papers to journals and conferances, and well... I'm not.

I know that these are common anxieties to face after moving and for people looking into a long slog through the PhD process, but that doesn't really make it easier. And if I'm honest, I can see a little bit of it in the other gradfolk around me too.

The other problem is that I had to cut back on my running becauase of the tweaked knee so I wasn't able to run the marathon, so now I feel like a big slug with no energy at all.

This week I'm going to be turning in a paper to turn an incomplete into a complete from the fall, and frankly it's nowhere near my best work. I had an interesting topic, but let the professor lead me on to one of the professor's pet ideas and it really didn't work that well. Rather than tossing out the bad and workign on the good I've spent too much time trying to keep it all in there to please the prof. All that extra time is just going to end up as a couple of paragraphs in the intro talking about how the pet ideas might frame the argument. Ugh. It'll be good to just get that paper out of my head.

Spring break is going to be a very needed thing. But why am I more excited about maybe being able to get out and take fun pictures than being able to put together some good research time?

As a side note - one of my good friends from Old U called and told me that not only is her day job going super well, but she's also just hooked a super-sweet internship at the Smithsonian! Rock on! She has a social life and is dating, and she's got a career working. I really am very happy for her, but jeeze... Maybe I should have taken the MA and gone to DC too - seems to have worked well for her.