All work and no play…

I woke up and couldn’t sleep last night between 3.30 am and 6 am…. Ironically, since I really need to sleep these days. I have been working a bit too much lately, and strange hours, which makes me a dull girl/woman/scientist. (pick the word that fits the best.)

My mind was reeling into what I used to call “over drive”. And at the fun hour like that?! Isn’t that just great?! Now, what I refer to as “over drive” means “the hope and dream that I could plan my whole life and feel safe and have it all planned out and how would I plan the rest and what will happen in four years and where will I go and what do I see and how can I make that…. [ad infinitum]”. Well, somehow I wonder why I haven’t learned the idea that planning isn’t really the key to it all… and the future can’t really be planned and safe and all those other things I was contemplating last night.

Trust me, I should’ve gotten the memo real well. (Or is it ‘good’? I always seem to have a problem with when to use well and when to use good.)

Anyhow, I digress – I lay in bed trying to tell my brain to SHUT UP and let me enjoy the sleep and the dreams and when I finally fell back asleep, yes an hour before the alarm woke me again, I ended up with a nightmare. (Partly about getting my wallet stolen with my credit cards and pass port and phone and could I remember someone’s phone number with out the phone…and did I really exist since I couldn’t prove my identity without any of the cards… or a quarter for the phone… etc. The whole thing was an evil dreamabout stranding me in the middle of a department store packed with [selfish] Christmas gift shoppers and nowhere else to go…. See something I might not have done yet? Christmas shopping.)

Absolutely lovely. And don’t you just love when your subconscious is repeating things to you when you sleep, and when you know that you have ‘forgotten’ about it?!!? Due to this nightly endeavour, I am now trying – for the third time today - to make sense of the sets of data assembled during these 13 days of constant working. Let’s just say that I have tried and tried again to divide them into the correct groups so I can make survival and weight loss curves and draw some conclusions…. And let’s say again that I can’t seem to get them right.

And what I need to do is to make sense of that as well as running a bunch of gels and go back into cloning mode… you know, things that take kind of long time since you need to understand where you left off and did that sequencing come back?

I also realize that I am whining and not really making a good blog post either. All work and no play makes me…..cranky. (at least I am not crazy like Jack yet. More tired and sad and did I mention cranky?)

I’ll just try and make something the next 90 mins before I will leave and come back tomorrow and make the nice graphs and show my PI.

Plus, I hope I can sleep tonight. If nothing else I am sorely tempted to try and have a drink and see if that helps….. which probably is a really stupid plan but if my mind could stop shifting into ”Future, what will happen in the future? What do you want to do when you’re done with your post doc?” and stay in the NOW….. I would be a happy person. And a less tired one as well. Today I think I have found a good correlation… tired = cranky.