more omphaloskepsis - on falling out with my research part 2

In part 1, the last post, I basically concluded that

• there is a lot of People Stuff and People-related Emotional reactions tangled up around research in my work-life at the moment, and 
• that I am possibly being a little bit teenage by rebelling against processes and institutions I disapprove of (REF, lookin' at you, new faculty control-freakery and Incoming's assumption that we're all best buds really and should engage in a lot of communal sharing stuff, you too) in a way that isn't to my own benefit.

A clear illustration of how interesting this post is.  There is not even any paint in that box to dry...

I said then I'd go on to write about the actual research, but that doesn't seem to want to come into words yet.  I have thought of another few things I should add to the list of 'fuzzy stuff' around the issue, though, so here are some poorly expressed bullets of "that woman is very mixed up, poor thing/how irresponsible to let her near impressionable youth!" type rambling.

• webs of obligation can sometimes create teenage-rebellion-type-resistance
• even when they are the result of positively chosen and mutually beneficial collaboration they form constraints around what one does and in what order one does things, and make it difficult to see a clear path
• Psycgirl has been blogging about her own set of career 'crisis' musings, and this post about clearing her research plate in particular made me Feel All The Things.  Still trying to unpick why, but one element is definitely envy - of her self-confidence and ability to make a plan and act?  Her strength?  Her clarity of vision about her list?  (Because even the most annoying things on my list become surprisingly dear when I think about striking them off, stupid brain!  Stupid sunk costs!).  I wonder if I want to do this?  I've certainly let a lot of things slide, but has that been a properly thoughtful process, did I let go the things _I_ wanted rid of or things I felt I _ought_ to be rid of (or someone/someones else told me I ought to be rid of)... and I still have a very long list... maybe its a process I want to try?  Or rather, don't WANT to try but NEED to.
• Part of it is definitely a feeling I've had pretty generally lately as the internet talks about going for tenure, about saying no once you have tenure, about mid-career malaise - I want tenure dammit!  I want to have some kind of external guarantee that a blip year or two, time to recalibrate and think and read and generally ignore all the obligations around research stuff, all the KPIs and REFables and blah blah blah, will not put my job at risk.  I know, I know, it costs a lot to get rid of someone in the UK university system on a continuing contract, I just got promoted so clearly I'm valued, yadda yadda yadda.  This is NOT about reality, it's about belief in reality.  Belief is what makes feelings, and I am jealous of people with that special security of tenure.  Would I take tenure over the promotion?  Yes, absolutely.  Yes, I know it's NOT a guarantee of a job for life and that things are REALLY REALLY bad in parts of the US system right now.  I know all those things. But I feel insecure in my job and I feel like I have to constantly watch over my shoulder for the Research Police and it seems like tenure might at least help with that.  Lord that's childish, but it definitely gets added to the pile of fuzzies.
•  I also wonder if I've allowed myself to buy in to the "impact and income" narrative of what makes research valuable.  I said in my post about being useful that I value research as research, as a means of practicing what I try to teach students about critical thinking, systematic enquiry, objectivity, uncertainty, synthesis, evidence-based communication etc. etc., and research mentoring as a way of supporting students to learn, practice, demonstrate and own those skills, regardless of the subject of that research.  I have also said in various places that I believe in the free pursuit of knowledge, in blue skies research, in working out how the world works, as a valuable and civilised thing, something that should be supported.  But maybe I feel negative about my research at the moment because it just isn't that important, that sexy - I don't know why we've come in academe to behave as if our teaching has to be good by institutional standards, but our research has to be good by international standards... I mean, I get it, it's about communities and sub-fields and all that, that really the teaching comparison and the research comparison are with groups of people of about the same sort of size etc., but the difference feels striking.  Do I secretly judge my research as lacking impact, as not being worthy of income under the current competitive, impact-focused, minimal-resource regime?  Have low paylines and the expectation of disappointment for all but the most 'sexy' and 'significant' of projects, and a dislike to the point of prudish judgement of 'lying' about how every project is going to transform the intellectual world in three years, been masking a negative self-judgement of my own work?
• I know that reading other grant applications, especially successful ones, always makes me feel like there's absolutely no point trying.  Mind you, when I think about competition, I think about sport, and there feeling like there's no use trying is my learned position - a history of being picked last, of being continually corrected and critiqued, of not having any fun, of being promised endorphins that never came, of feeling stupid and incompetent and wanting it to just be over, of not wanting to win since the other person/team seemed to care so much and it was only a stupid game...  Hmmm.  When did I start feeling like research was also just a stupid game?
• Actually, I can pinpoint that quite well.  The year Baby Professor joined the department, I think, and told me that since I couldn't recite the strategic objectives of the five year plan of the funding council and refused to apply for funding for a grad student to do work I had no idea how to do just because it was on a sexy topic, I didn't belong in a 'top rated department'.  He was only being his usual sarky motivate-by-insult laddish self, but that interaction both stuck in my mind and came to summarise, typify and articulate the change in the mood of the department, the university, and in many ways the whole of the UK academic framework in the last decade or so.

Not sure what to do with this stuff, but there it is, OUT.  In conclusion:

Stress and academia

It's the time of year for LISTS and surveys and the like, and as so often our profession features.

A US article here ranked 'professor' as one of the top ten least stressful jobs - although they did clarify down in the comments that the 'study' considered only tenured, Full Professor, ignoring everyone else in the hierarchy and the difficulties of getting to that position... for soldier or nurse they didn't pick only the highest, most secure version of the profession for their analysis, as far as I could tell.  Anyway, it sparked off the usual spate of "I'm so stressed so we are all so stressed" and "shut up you're so lucky and it's all your own fault anyway" posts around the academic blogosphere... two of the more considered positions are here and here, where two bloggers try and take a more nuanced approach to identifying stress within the job. 

A UK report found a rather different picture; this one considered all kinds of academics and universities, and found that the self-reported experiences of stress made the sector a very difficult one.

The contrast between these two reports struck me.  The US article looked from the outside - that is, it compared things like the responsibility of the role (so that a medical role which works directly with people's lives is innately considered more stressful than an academic role) in some kind of scaled, semi-objective way.  The UK report drew on the opinions of people within the professions being compared.  It seems to me that in this difference lies the true issue. 

Stress is about individual responses to sets of circumstances - a situation which one person finds dull can be high-pressured to another.  A friend from college is a medic who likes to work in intensive care or emergency sections - she says geriatrics is depressing, orthopedics is boring etc. etc.  Boredom is stressful - she likes the buzz of being needed, thrives on emergencies, and was frankly pretty wearing to be around as an undergrad when all that thrill-seeking focus was looking for something to operate on.  Another moved from academia to accountancy, because he was sick of the vagueness of the outcomes and moving goals of academic work - he loves the tidiness of accounts which are right or wrong, the structure of commuting and working standard hours and ticking things off neatly.  People choose a profession partly because it suits them and their needs, right?  But my feeling is that there is a big flaw in academia; the selection process requires a different set of skills than the job-as-experienced-today, especially in the UK setting.  The selection process - the years of study and research and post-docing, the teaching training, developing your own teaching philosophies and research plans etc. etc. - selects for independence, for self-management, for the ability to go off alone into your own head and into the depths of a subject.  It selects for the ability to think outside the box, long term, and to work towards big goals.

Being an academic, however, you lose most of the nexus of control.  Your research is now mostly controlled by your ability to get funding, or the work of your students or post-docs - so you are now responsible for more e.g. people's work and careers (which you are probably stressed by, if you are both conscientious and used to working alone) and have much less control over how things actually get done (my fingers still ITCH to sieze some labwork off students and say "just let me do it" because I KNOW why stuff is going wrong and it's driving me NUTS waiting for them to follow through on my advice or even better/worse learn for themselves how to fix it).  When my first post-doc project went seriously off the rails due to some fieldwork problems in the first few months, yes, I was stressed, I was anxious - but I was also able to throw myself into the reading, thinking, talking, writing needed to find an alternative route, to implement it, to put in the hours needed to find the new track and push the work onto it.  And if I failed it was MY failure, not my FAULT but not in my control and affecting others.  Your teaching is controlled at the least by departmental and programmatic structures - curricula are communal things, which modules you are assigned, modes of assessment, length of and number of classes, types of location - all these things are not fully in your control.  I'm in a team-teaching-loving environment, with all sorts of extra layers of approvals and rules such as no more than three assessment items, no two assessment items can assess the same set of learning outcomes, all assessment items must total this number of hours of exam or this many words, all items must be set by the week before the semester starts for approval by a committee etc. etc., so I feel that only the time I'm in the classroom is in my control... and since my preference is to NOT be in total control of the classroom, since learning happens whilst doing rather than whilst listening, perhaps the only thing I really do control is the words on the handouts and powerpoints, and whether those get copied on time (which also depends on things like whether there is any paper or toner in the copier or a queue, and those things are not mine to control).  Then there's the bureaucracy and changing priorities and firefighting...

And my point is, these things may not be very stressful on some absolute scale of stressful life events, but for the kind of person who typically makes it into an academic job in a middling institution, they are very stressful indeed.  I mean, I was really good at science, right?  Predicted great grades at A level.  The school just assumed I'd apply for pre-med or vet school, because I had the academic skills.  But I knew myself, and I knew I'd crumble under the people-handling demands of those jobs.  Some people get good stress from life and death situations, a joyous surge of energy and sense of being alive and valuable that they thrive on.  Me?  I get the toxic kind of stress from even the smallest emergency situations like dealing with a cut finger in a laboratory.  But the thrive-on-stress people would probably get the toxic stuff from carrying out thousands of identical measurements, or meeting with ten different groups of students to explain correlation analysis ten times for the second time this year and doing that every year.

Academia IS stressful, these days, for the majority of those involved in it.  Partly because of the changing culture, the poor economy, changes in society, etc. etc.  Partly because we are whiners, maybe - certainly we do like to articulate and critique everything we encounter and feel, it's what we're trained to do.  But partly because many of us aren't really in the right situation to do our best work, or even to do OK work - we're awkward hand-carved pegs of all sorts of special shapes, mostly being managed by people who are the same as us and therefore no good at it or who have no patience for the boring necessities of good management and leadership because they are expected to ALSO teach and research and so on as well as manage with minimal training or support, and it's STRESSFUL for US.

Maybe that's because many of us wouldn't do great in the 'real world'.  I've done my share of 'minimum wage' type jobs, and I wasn't great at bag packing or dealing with shop customers or receptioning - couldn't manage the 'look cheerful all the time' bit for a start.  Shelf-stacking was OK if it was overnight when there weren't customers around, but I was a bit too prone to daydream and to 'making inappropriate comments' (such as saying 'oooh it's like a build your own cow kit' after spending an hour sorting all the different cuts of beef and organs and stuff in the big freezer, apparently that traumatised the girl I was working with).  Bar work - I was good at the sums, and eventually learnt to both pull a decent pint and to mix the bizarre cocktail preferences of the darts team, but lacked the ability to build a rapport with people needed to be really good at it, and didn't enjoy the need to be 'in public' all the time.  I liked my really boring data job (I checked paper forms to make sure that all the boxes had been filled out and that some numbers added up before someone more senior entered them into a computer) - clear goals, clear outcomes, a nice quiet desk in a corner of a busy room, and permission to read a book in the lulls as long as I worked like the clappers in the busy times.  I liked working in the sorting room at the post-office, the teasing of the students was good-natured and the work was mostly repetitive and came in flurries with the odd bit of interest and the odd bit of sitting around.  I've done contract work, depended on clients, written tenders, written reports in different corporate styles - not much, but enough to have an idea what's involved, and to appreciate the challenges it presents.  I'm also a first-generation-to-university type, so no-one in my family had an academic job, so I know what different kinds of work are generally like. 

I'm not totally ivory towered.  And yes, I'm a delicate little flower with a sense of entitlement I expect.  But I continue to find my work stressful, both in the lack of control and in the conflicts between the stated purposes and aims and the actions that are required or rewarded, and at the same time struggle to find an alternative which would suit me and my talents and my weaknesses, especially now I have these various health issues... Anastasia, for example, writes a really interesting blog about her transition from academia to high school teaching which is clearly going well for her.  I am totally in awe, because no way could I handle the people-work she describes, clearly relishes and seems to excel at.  That sort of thing - I can do it, if I'm honest, I do do with some of my students, but I can do it for an hour for one or two people and then I'm wrung out and have to find somewhere to hide and recuperate.  I would not consider classroom teaching as a possible role for me in a school during the compulsory school years.  Nu-uh.  Just... no.  Horses for courses.

update part 1: depression

Thank you everyone who commented on my various whingy I-feel-awful depression posts recently.  I only have two 'outside the computer' acquaintances who also have mental health problems so might understand, both of whom do not work and do have kids/local networks etc., and the one I am in contact with more often is always iller than me, in what can feel like a very competitive manner.  I've never really talked about it with my parents, because they worry so, because my Dad has a history of depression himself, because they know about the anxiety and THAT makes them very anxious.  I love that they care, but their worry is an extra burden for me (especially as they worry anyway because I am ::gasp:: single, childless and in my 40s - oh yeah, and much worse at housekeeping/life-organisation than my suitably married, childed etc. younger suster - so whilst they are proud of my job and degrees they are also always a bit confused).  I've mentioned before the complexity of being partly 'out' with mental health problems at work and the reasons I don't want to be more so - just the diagnosis leads to discrimination, never mind actually admitting to having 'an episode' (I am NOT going to say relapse, that term to me implies that depressed me is a bad state and functional me is a virtuous state, and that the transition from the latter to the former is partly a backsliding on my part.  They are both me).  It helps a lot to know that I can 'talk' to people who understand, and have some support.

The worst of the low mood has slithered away again, my feet touch the bottom and my head breaks water, and I wish I knew why.  This is where it can be SO frustrating, trying to track one's own health - there is no control self to compare actions against and use that to develop future strategies.  So, what changed?

• I didn't change my medication regime, I didn't start taking more exercise or eating differently to any noticeable degree beyond the inevitable (since both change as my mood changes anyway).  What DID I do?  I gave in to it and cancelled a few things that felt intolerably hard to do.  Did taking that time help?  Was it just part of the symptom package of that low?  Was it self-indulgent and unnecessary, because I'd've coped and also gotten better when my mental weather decided anyway, regardless?  COULD I have done those thing, if I hadn't been looking ahead to the more daunting larger things later this month? (see, I need to compare the outcomes with a me that actually carried on and did stuff.  _Did_ her back sieze up and her migraine get worse, or did she actually benefit from the day outdoors? etc.etc.).  
• The weather got cooler and more overcast, and it's been raining lately.  I do like cool, rainy weather!  I menstruated, maybe there's a hormonal component.  
• I talked to PDF, and explained that I might not be able to do everything she might expect in the field, including explaining the physical aspects of my back problem (because yes, all aches and pains are affected by anxiety - everything is tense! Fight or flight preparedness! - and by depression, AND I have a history of psychosomatic illness, on top of the actual underlying malformity and old injuries.  Plus, backs are not benefited by persons spending 12+ hours a day in bed and much of the remainder huddled in a chair in 'hiding' posture, which tends to be the default physical response to depression).  That's a positive.  But one negative and one stressful thing happened at work too.

The lack of a pattern - and of predictability - is infuriating!  I do still feel fragile, but the ground is fairly solid under my feet even if it's not certain very far into the future, and I'm enjoying that feeling while I can.  Yes, I should probably go to my GP.  I certainly will at the end of the summer.  But... what can he do?  I already have scope to vary my medication within certain limits; I'm not at the maximum dose for my current SSRI by any means.  Why didn't I whack it up to my permitted maximum during this last bad patch?  Maybe because it was a bad patch... and I did use the range of anxiety medication (cautiously, since raising that too far tends to make me rather zombified if I'm NOT absoluately pumping out the adrenaline...).  I'm not ill enough to be referred to a psychiatrist - heck, I didn't even need a sick note during this episode, I was essentially functional (although you should see the state of my house - no, actually, I'd rather you didn't!) enough to continue to complete essential work duties, to keep myself and my cat clean enough and fed - and I respond acceptably to the current medication.  I can probably get referred for another 6 sessions of CBT, which I don't find very useful - I can observe and reflect on my inner voices and thought processes possibly a bit TOO effectively, and changing negatives to positives in my inner monologue doesn't help fix any of the structural stuff which needs fixing.  I probably need to look privately - i.e. pay! - for therapy using a different approach or longer-term, and I don't really know how to start (and am already paying for chiropractic).  As both the back and the depression are long-standing conditions, I'd not get insurance cover for them now.  I guess that, once the summer's travels are over, I could try the 'new' outsourced university staff limited-time counselling provision.  I think that I should also go and see occupational health again.  But...

this week, two bank holidays, three days of exam paperwork frenzy and preparing for the field week
next week, teaching a field week and attending exam boards
the week after, exam boards, curriculum meetings and preparing for three weeks overseas
then three weeks overseas on fieldwork
then back for 6 days
then ten days on fieldwork in the outer reaches of this country
then daily summer student supervision for four weeks, probably around local fieldwork and definitely around a ton of lab-work
then perhaps a conference (I may withdraw),
maybe as much as ten days OFF
and a week of teaching prep and 'staff retreats' and curriculum meetings etc.
and teaching starts again.

and there's paper writing, and grant writing, and office-taming and stuff to do before then.

Hello duvet, can I crawl back under you for a month or so??  I do miss those long summer holidays as a kid.

A challenge

I resolved over the weekend (as I often do in hot weather) to eat well for a few weeks before we leave for fieldwork.  Make the most of all that lovely seasonal fruit and veg etc. etc.  I did well for the first few days.

Today a student gave me a box of particularly nice chocolates as a thank you for helping her with her statistics and listening to her worries, even though she wasn't officially my responsibility.  So nice of her!  But... mmm, chocolate! 

Yes, I COULD share it with people at work.  But the main people who scarf all the free goodies include the person who was officially responsible for the student and kept refusing to help out with the statistics, leading to the student being in my office in the first place (and this is a bright, but very anxious student, who we all knew would need support during that stage of their thesis).  I didn't feel like the person whose job I had done deserved to have the nice chocolates!  Yeah, I can be petty like that...

Today, I did well.  I ate two chocolates, and put the rest of the box in the freezer.  Frozen chocolates take a LONG time to eat, meaning that they have to be savoured.  We'll see how long I can make the box last... at two a day, that would be about 15 days...

No field for me

because:
a) I have a migranous headache (yes, they're stress-related)
b) my back yelled at me when I put on my walking boots, and got worse not better as I wandered around getting ready
c) my period started early and heavily (no fun to deal with in open country)
d) I am a lazy wimp who worries far too much about maybes.

Of course I only decided no field for sure when I got into the car, was siezed with the 'certainty of throwing up' feeling, and the leg with the compressed nerve at the hip went numb.  I thought "why am I doing this to myself?" Now, since I got up at 5-30am and forced myself through my whole morning routine, back stretches, shower, field clothes and all, I actually feel a bit better having been sick, taken off the boots, eaten a piece of dry toast and had an email exchange with PDF (only stating reason a!) which made me feel like a really bad PI although the making me feel bad bit was almost certainly 90% in my head (she's stressed about getting all the work done this year.  We ARE pushed, as all projects tend to be, and on the one hand I should have addressed this earlier and on the other I DO feel it is the post-doc's job to keep an eye on progress and report issues, especially when they were asked repeatedly to do so...).  Feeling better means I feel like a fraudulent wimp too (and therefore also like blogging, for some reason). 

Although my knees are shaking and my eyes hurt and I'm back to bed after this, so it's not like I really think I'd've been much use if I had gone.  Part of this IS 'matutinal dysphoria', the part of depression that probably makes me most unrecognisable to my normal larkish self; yesterday lunchtime fieldwork seemed impossible, by 8pm yesterday I was happily packing my backpack and hunting out field clothes.  But the aggressive headache isn't, and the 'my legs feel different lengths in these boots and ow everything in my back between waist and start of thighs is a single sheet of rigid, spasming something and part of my right leg is completely numb, edged with 'bee sting effect' tingles' isn't (although both might wear off.  Or might not.  The latter went as soon as I took off the boots... add 'hunt for new boots' to the 'things that must be done in the next few weeks' list.  Sigh.  Those boots cost me £125 and took months to find).

I read something helpful yesterday, which said that true malingers don't second-guess themselves and question whether they are really unwell/unable to do a task, they tend to embrace their inability whole-heartedly, so if you spend a lot of time worrying about whether you are malingering, you aren't.  If that makes sense.  It did yesterday.  Today, I'm mostly feeling guilty and anxious about whether I am putting too much stress on PDF, since her texts were mostly about how worried she is about the project (and how she isn't going to push herself today, mind you, although that IS sensible given the forecast heat and that BOTH of us being crock would not help anything).  Hopefully she will shed any short term 'my supervisor is a lazy moron and I am Put Upon' sulks over the weekend, and we can do a serious reassessment of the project on Monday.  Mind you, I wanted to do that a few weeks ago, but asked her to bring a list of issues and she basically said there weren't any... sigh.

At least I found my favourite fieldwork hat during yesterday evening's preparations!

it's complicated...

I cancelled an appointment with my chiropractor today. 

I'm not having a good day, and last time I went to him whilst this... fragile?  Off?  Whatever you call it, anyway, he wasn't able to achieve any productive treatment - my back just sort of locked up and sulked!  Part of it is that chiropractic involves being vulnerable (after all treatment involves lying or sitting mostly unclothed whilst someone fully clothed stands over you and does painful things to you!), and I'm afraid of starting to cry or be upset or some un-namable other emotion-storm thing and not being able to stop if I do let myself be that vulnerable (some treatments involve relaxing and allowing the chriropractor to make a sharp, rapid move which 'cracks' a joint with an audible crunch - on GOOD days I can only make myself allow that once, after that my body says no, and past chiropractors have gotten quite cross about that seeing it as me not trusting them - it isn't, it's that my physical self doesn't really trust itself...).  part of it is that the blooming stupid weather has changed again and the whole upper front of my head is throbbing as my sinuses protest the abrupt changes in pressure and temperature and the prevalence of pollen - lying face down with the face in one of those massage couch hole things REALLY presses on the sinuses, and it can be quite unpleasant.  Part of it is that I am a WIMP and I don't want to go.

Now, see, this is where I think myself into circular cul-de-sacs.  I don't want to go, I have both a physical and mental sense that I am 'not up to it' - that is, that I will not gain anything and will probably feel distinctly the worse for going.  But is that wimpishness?  Avoidance of the briefly unpleasant treatment, or exposure to people, or vulnerability, rather than an accurate assessment of the situation and an appropriate judgement?  I feel bad about it - since they were not fully booked today, they don't charge for missed appointments, and I've rescheduled, but I'm inconveniencing other people, and since "your existence in a trouble and a nuisance to everyone around you" is one of my depression voices (the ones you're supposed to 'replace with positive thoughts'), I just confirmed it.  A wimpish submission to the body's disinclinations, as coloured by brain chemistry and outside weather, feels wrong.  But I felt clear relief when I hung up the phone, as if something too-tight around my throat had eased, and having gone when instinct said not a couple of weeks ago and it being a wasted visit (so much so they refused to charge me for it!), I suppose I made the right decision...

Now I get to think about tomorrow.  I'm supposed to go to a local field site with PDF.  I cancelled the last time I was supposed to go out with her, in that case for a chiropractic appointment.  The site is quite open and exposed, but the forecast is for a bit less heat than today, and I have to get into the field soon, I'm teaching a course in two and a half weeks' time after all!  I don't know what to do, so I guess I'll think about it later!

Internalised attitudes

Someone who's blog I read was recently diagnosed with a chronic physical illness, and I was jealous.  I really, really want some sort of nice tidy physical explanation for my many physical creaks.  I want people to stop telling me that I'll enjoy whatever once I'm doing it, and to understand that I hit my limitations sooner than most, and have to balance my energy and resources more carefully, and to... well, to have an acceptable label.

But I DO have a proper chronic health problem.  I have depression with a generalised anxiety disorder, and I am on the edges of a depressive episode (I've been circling the abyss for months, I slipped but managed to crawl out at Easter, and it's getting really boring).  I have a condition which I don't tell people about... partly because those I have told tend to respond with comments like 'well you don't act depressed' (it's called acting) or 'just lose some weight'/'just find a lover'/'wear cheerful colours'/pull yourself together.  I hate being big and solid and fat and verbose and generally robust looking and acting, because I'm not, but people, even good friends and relatives, think I'm being dramatic when I try to ask for help or empathy.  And I'm terrified that if I let the mask down for more than a few moments, I'll never get it back.  Terrified of losing what grasp I have on being functional, even though it's so painful to hold on.

I have caught myself wishing more and more for a 'real health problem' like laryngitis or a broken leg, so that I can get out of this summer's stressors.  I'm afraid of getting really ill again and yet I want to, because this limbo of barely coping is just horrible.  I wish I could take a few months off!  But it's always 'maybe next year'.

A colleague has been off work for nearly 6 months now, on sick leave.  We haven't been told why, and we don't know if or when they'll return.  Many comments, increasingly snide comments, are being made about how this person clearly has 'stress related issues' or 'mental health issues', since we've not been told what the problem actually is.  The quotation marks are becoming audible.  The dismissal, the insult, the belittling, is becoming audible.  Even at the last staff meeting, someone asked about their return, someone asked for information, then one person said well if it was stress it was clearly the colleague's own fault for getting stressed and another said something about how easy it was to deceive occupational health over mental health issues, and no-one stopped them.  I didn't speak up either, and I don't like myself for that (but as I have been told off for being neurotic, over-emotional and unhelpful at these meetings before, by people who don't know my 'labels', I also know my comment wouldn't have been heard - it's like calling this lot on sexist jokes, it's a sign of lacking a sense of humour, you know?).

It took me about 12 hours after writing the 'I'm a little jealous' comment to realise that I, too, was behaving as if my health problems are NOT chronic, serious and real, or at least as if they are less worthy, less valid than other peoples' problems.  If I think and act like that, how can I expect anyone else to take my problems seriously? 

I hate this. 

And I should probably be grading, or writing a paper or a grant, or 'engaging'.

Oh well

My physical self decided for me that I wasn't going to dinner yesterday.  As I finished organising my contribution to the data we needed for the day's task (after the others had left to buy wine to take to the restaurant), my repetitive strain problem decided to flare up, and my neck and shoulder (the main area of pain is along the inside edge of my shoulder blade, so maybe that's upper back?) went into muscular spasm and the shooting pains from fore-fingers to elbow woke up.  Stretching didn't settle it, so I decided that home and ice would be much smarter than going to dinner... if it got much worse, I'd've not been able to drive (as it was I was happy it was my right side playing up, since I would've struggled to keep reaching to change gear).  This morning it's back to being a dull ache/awareness that things are tight or out of balance, and I'm staying WELL clear of any tasks that require mouse use since that was probably the trigger!

I guess the others had a good time, as they wandered into the office about 10am this morning, and are still trying to finish getting their parts of the data organised now (11:15).  I'm leaving at 4 to see the chiropractor, whether the tasks are finished or not!  Fortunately I have a double-appointment so maybe he can look at my shoulder/neck as well as my lower back...

weekends are supposed to be fun

I ended up spending most of the weekend pottering away at preparing data for reanalysis for the second paper (which is now being urgently demanded... sigh...) for DataCrunchingProject (see recent rant on the subject).  Not very exciting. 

I spent most of the time doing things two or three times to correect small errors (or large errors)... which is actually a GOOD reason to do this sort of thing AT HOME, where I am less distracted and can more easily walk away when it gets maddening and think things through. 

But doesn't make the process any less annoying, boring and fiddly.

Especially when I am essentially revisiting materials prepared by someone else, for a different purpose, 4+ years ago, so waste a lot of time trying to reconstruct what is going on.  I've dropped one sample from the dataset and flagged several others as potentially problematic because I just can't work out the datasheets.  If I can get publishable results from the remaining data, I don't really see the point of trying to sort it out (if it's even possible, which it may well not be this far removed).  IF.

Also, some bread got in the house and got consumed. :-(

So not the best weekend ever!

Next week:

• grading arriving in dribs and drabs
• complete two refereeings of articles and one summary-of-literature
• planning for summer teaching week
• at the end of the week I have two days of visitors/data crunching for odds and ends paper
• catching up meeting with PDF and hopefully re-submitting her first thesis paper that came back as minor R&R
• two lots of back-poking (chiropractor - no doubt good for me but at the same time costly and painful!)
• must chase up blood test results

 So I'm not likely to make much progress with DataCrunchingPaper2.  Oh well, there's always the weekend...

Quack!

Ismay commented:

That is awesomely cute! And yet, they do look like a multi-headed duckling monster too. Duckling hydra? :) 

 And she's (I assume she's a she?) quite right!  It's like some kind of feathery quilt sprouting stripey heads and beaks...

I had a very vivid dream last night, in which my next-door-office-colleague (a rather sensible and unimaginative person outside of their particular research field) and I were drawing up a list identifying our colleagues as ducks (paddling like mad to keep the department and its teaching going), zombies (persons not just not helping but actively hindering those efforts - I assume that might be some kind of subconcious feed through from having recently read Cherie Priest's three steampunk novels in which volcanic gases lead to zombie-ism, because zombies do not appeal to or particularly appear in my mental stock of archetype-type-imagery) and Alien X's (whose motives and actions were inscrutable but mainly worked out beneficially).  Then we both had a lively chat with a senior colleague who we'd assigned as Alien X and were having trouble persuading him that it wasn't an insult and that he'd earned the right to be inscrutable. 

I assume my sub-conscious was processing some things from the meeting yesterday morning... it was quite unusual for a work dream because I wasn't upset or distressed during it or by it, it just felt like we were doing a necessary task.  It definitely felt necessary to know who belonged in each category.  I woke up this morning confident that I was a duck!  Which is an odd sort of thought really.

It reminds me of the apocryphal story of examination stress overcoming a candidate at AncientInternationallyRenownedUniversity.  The candidate is supposed to have suddenly stood up in the middle of an exam, and pronounced: "I'm an orange! I'm an orange!  And I just realised that oranges don't do exams!" and ran out of the hall.  Ducks don't actually have to teach, grade, prepare for the REF, deal with group members' many vaguaries and student crises and bureaucratic stuff and collegues, even though in my dream they were the category metaphor for people who did all those things, so maybe I was just envying the freedom to lie around in the ivy with family?

Yay for Sort-Of-Skiving Without Much Guilt

This is one of those days when I decide not to feel guilty.  I have a 4-day-week, contractually, which yes, means I get paid less than full timers.  I deliberately planned to have either Monday or Wednesday as my usual day-off-in-teaching-term, partly because if you just have Monday, you effectively lose all your Bank Holidays...

Anyway, this week there was a Bank Holiday, and although I did work during the day, I had not done much during the weekend largely thanks to Feeling Wierd (I am still very anxious, and I can't work out what's different, but I am Off Colour...).  Today, there was a big faculty research event for PhD students (none of my students are involved, for various reasons) about which Many Emails had been sent about how we must Be Seen, Be Dynamic, Be Impressive... and there was also a seminar in the Three Line Whip Series (we have major seminars every 2-3 weeks with the idea that people will be more likely to attend... doesn't work that well).  On a topic I have some abstract interest in, but the presentation was likely to contain images of something I am mildly phobic about (in my Beach Studies analogy, let's say it's a talk on rock pools and I get creeped out by things with tentacles like sea anemones).  And I still declared it to be my Day Off.

Tomorrow I have to teach - the final class of the module I'm covering for the person who left in January, as an extra to my work load, and have had added permanently to my list of duties which I am deeply disgruntled by as I was told it was only a one-off so there's major prep to do for next year plus I don't like the module.  At all.  Rationally AND/OR irrationally Do Not Like, plus a feedback session on the statistics unit, plus do some Urgent Bureaucracy related to my third class this semester.  Friday there is a full department meeting, which only happens about once every three months, but is supposedly the one and only forum in which the faculty as a whole has a say in the running of the department.  In practice, it's more like one of those truely awful Whole School Assemblies where you're all crowded in together, being Scrutinised by the teachers standing at the end of the rows, whilst the Headmaster, Heads of Year, Head of Drama etc. etc. all read out notices and Admonish Generally The Lack Of School Spirit.  We had those weekly at senior school, so I suppose it could be worse; at department meetings we are unlikely to be lectured about the wasteful levels of use of and inappropriate disposal of paper towels in the Lower School Boys Toilets (a remarkably constant theme, as I recall it).

So anyway, I took today 'off', and the only work I did was to check my email, send some emails, answer some emails, add reminders to the VLE about tomorrow's sessions, and exchange texts and eventually a call with PostDocF - who is currently in a field in a sunny European location with GoodBeer showing some colleagues the new methods we've developed as part of the Bequest Project, and wanted some input from me on the details of the theoretical underpinnings of our choice of sand scooping protocol.  Plus read a volume and a half of Maya Angelou's autobiography, went to the Back Poking Man (ow), bought some tasty low-calorie pre-packaged snacks from messers marks and spencer (mmm!  Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips in 95 calorie portions!  apricot and almond flapjack in 125 calorie pieces that are PACKED with TASTY goodness!  125 calorie pieces of dense, banana-y banana bread with pumpkin seeds...) Although I don't normally keep snacks in the house, the likelihood of raiding the snack machine at work - at at least 70p and 200 calories per snack - is approaching 95% at this time of year with about a 60% likelihood of a second visit on any day when a first has occurred, so I decided it was worth the risk of 'accidentally' eating the lot one evening to have, and take to work, some less fattening snacks.  Not much less costly - 40-50p per snack - but that does add up over time too when the machine-visit-frequency is high), made a nice large slab of roasted mushroom and herb frittata for lunches for the next few days, Faffed, and chatted to my Mum on the phone. 

Must Work Tomorrow!  Lots Of Work!  Bummer... even if it IS work with Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips on the side.

My Writing Space - now with added cat pictures

The Spring 2012 writing group (hosted by Dame Eleanor, over here) prompt this week was about writing space.  I began to comment over there but like Topsy it growed and growed so I came back over here.,

One thing that bugs me about my writing spaces is that they are NOT dedicated to only writing.  At home, I have an Ikea curved desk-table in the window corner of the second bedroom, which also houses my spare bed, my wardrobe (which has been half-way through a 'these don't fit/these might fit one day/never wearing these again' reorganisation for the best part of a year now), the old dining room table which holds craft supplies, mending, an old sewing machine, a quilt which the cat has taken to sleeping in, and the underneath space is mostly filled with storage crates of things like outdoor clothing and files, plus two bookcases of miscellaneous and one of study-that-isn't-pure-work stuff.  The desk itself has an old computer which is too good to throw away, a few of those smart boxes that are meant to make you organised but actually become homes for random stuff (which is at least out of sight most of the time), a printer, writing slope, assorted detritus, a pile of knitting magazines open at projects I will work on one day, the lap top I currently use for writing at home (perched on a stack of those boxes in an attempt to make me sit up better) and a cat-mat (because before I had a cat-mat on the desk, the cat used to either push stuff off to make space for herself or lie on whichever piece of paper I needed next...

Furball, lounging on her cat-mat.  Her fur-suit is unfortunately palest on her wobbly undercarriage, as you can see...

 Gazing out of the window whilst sitting on the cat-mat.  Her behind tends to hang off the windowsill... it IS narrow.  Her fur-suit looks all torbie (tortie-tabby, or talico in US-speak I believe) from behind - the ginger and white is underneath.

The cat-mat is positioned under the window, and the desk is pulled slightly away from the wall so that the heat from the radiator flows up the gap and is deflected by the windowsill onto the cat-mat - this seems to have finally stopped the problem where she presses herself against the heating vents on the computer...).  Under the desk is an old suitcase (cat bed for more serious sleeping)

Grumpily on the suitcase-bed

and a stack of pillows and stuff that go on the bed (occasional cat bed) and various socks and slippers kicked off under there and not yet retrieved and things the cat knocked off the desk that rolled to hard-to-reach corners.  On the spare bed is a slew of stuff, mostly work papers, with some magazines, novels, letters, various toiletries waiting to go into the storage closet, CDs, clean clothes waiting to go away (or rather, ones I actually wear which never get to the cupboards) and a disgruntled plushy dinosaur (my teddy-bear equivalent, made by my Mum when I was about 4.  Mostly disgruntled due to wear and tear and occasional use as a, yes you guessed it, cat bed).

Triceratops-bear on a bed of general stuff.  Must. Clean. All. The. Things!!!

Hmm, my cat clearly likes to have options, doesn't she?  Yes, there is only one of her... currently snoring in the craft table duvet nest.

At work, my office desk is of course full of non-useful-writing work, administrivia and random bits of student work and teaching materials and memos and a toy mammoth and several novelty kitchen timers and a plush Bagpuss and a few interesting rocks and a cardboard plant which is supposedly unkillable but looks rather battered and a pile of reference books and key texts which I pull out to show to students so often that it seems daft putting them back on the shelf and coffee cups and the only reason there isn't any bench-work clutter is that I also have a basic microscope desk set-up in my office and so bench-work clutter compatible with office life (e.g. slides, notebooks, record sheets, special pens, random boxes of partly used dry supplies) goes there, along with bits of field equipment and maps and at this time of year the whole is lightly top-dressed with a mulch of teaching-related paperwork.

Any time I HAVE had a writing only space, it is a real tussle to keep it that way... I'm just not single-minded and my space reflects this, I guess.  ALL my space.

Next summer, I hope not to have much if any fieldwork.  And one of my plans around the house is to get a couple of nice screens and to partition the space in the second bedroom (door and window are in opposite walls but both at the eastern end of the room, so I could divide it into an inner space and an outer space), then reorganise the STUFF so that craft stuff, wardrobe stuff and guest-room (or more normally room where I sleep whilst guests sleep in my more organised, double-bedded first bedroom) is all in the hidden space and the outer space with window and door is actually an office... but it will take committment (and a not-bad back!), or else THAT will end up half done too, and half done is even less comfortable to live with than undone...

Briefly

The new chiropractor seems nice.  And favours deep massage over just 'poking the hurtiest places' which makes treatment more pleasant, so we'll see if that works.  It hurts differently this evening which is, I guess, a start...

Post Doc F is off on holiday next week - and I have 59 statistics reports and 8 independent research projects to grade, with more to come.  ::pout::

The work level in the department has been very low the last few days, because a flotilla of ducklings (not sure if that's the right word but it ought to be!) hatched out in our building's courtyard, the duck having hidden herself away under some ornamental plantings, and we have been advised to let them stay there for a few weeks, safe from most predators.  They seem unphased by cooing students with cameras, have been enjoying the puddles left by the recent rain, and are being fed special food for baby chicks from a farming shop that a colleague who is usually very rigid and formal insisted on rushing off to buy from his own pocket the day they hatched (in case there wasn't enough food in the courtyard).  When I left this afternoon, the post-grads were arranging a duck feeding rota for the weekend.

I finally began a horrible administrative task that I've been putting off for weeks now - everyone in my department of senior lecturer level and above is expected to read the possible REF submissions of other colleagues in their research 'supergroup' and rate them on the REF scale, then the results will be compiled (everyone's work having been read by several other people) and used to decide who is REF-able and who isn't.  If that doesn't mean anything to you you are lucky! (REF = Research Excellence Framework, formerly known as the Research Assessment Exercise).  I was assigned three colleagues' papers to read: Very Difficult Colleague (who is a Bully), Touchy Colleague (who has already told me what score their papers should get - surprisingly enough, they're ALL of top international standing!) and Colleague I Teach With A Lot.  So it's been really hard, in that I know these people, and I find it tricky to separate that from assessing their papers, and also that I am kind of scared of one of them and wary of the others (in that if they take agin me life could be harder for a while, and it's happened before, so...).  Plus, I think the whole thing is STUPID.  Another reason I may never get to be a Prof!

a grey day, and a 'day off'

It's grey and raining and blustery here, and it's my day off.  Fortunately I had someone coming round to give me a quote for some much-overdue house maintainance so I had a counter-argument to my wilful brain's determination to stay in bed and snooze all day.  I also have a GP appointment this afternoon, which has (so far) helped in refusing the lunchtime nap urge.  The late afternoon nap may be succumbed to, however...

The appointment is, or rather could be, for multiple things.  I need a referral letter to continue seeing my eye person (long story, but I have an eye problem which is beyond the scope of the standard high-street optician, and once a year or so I get a check up with a specialist.  Far various reasons - some of which may be 'academic snobbery' on the part of my specialists' clinic, as they keep telling me that there is only one hospital in the north which they consider to have an 'acceptable' level of expertise in this really rather minor and stable peculiarity I have and its management, and that one happens to be about as far away from NorthernUni as you can get and still be in the North - I have continued to go to the same specialist near AncientInternationallyRenownedUniversity who originally confirmed that I had the problem during my PhD.  This is now well outside my 'catchment based on post-code', and occasionally presents challenges (as in 4 hour trip each way for half hour appointment can be a pain to schedule, or is far more likely to be affected by bad weather/the wrong kind of cow on the line/train strikes etc.).  Anyway, there was a paperwork snafu, and the clinic there discharged me, and now I need to be reregistered (or registered somewhere else, if my GP won't refer me out of area)).

But... should I also ask about this latest episode of depression?  About the remnents of the cold I had which leave me wheezing sometimes (or is that the anxiety?  Who knows?  Or allergies?)?  About my stupid back, which is making walking slow at the moment, and worrying me increasingly as it doesn't improve and fieldwork gets closer?  (except I expect I'll get The Weight Lecture and I know that's important and I also don't need the lecture, I'm fed up with myself enough already, and it's not like they've ever been able to offer anything helpful in the past).  Should I ask about testing for wheat intolerance? (I'm... suspicious that this might be something I have.  I crave bread and a few other foods rich in wheat far more than sweet or fatty foods, and I have NO willpower around such foods, and after eating them I often feel worse than normal - lethargic, or unhappy stomach.  I am/was dairy intolerant - a period of complete abstinance from all dairy brought me to the point where much as I love cheese and milk etc. I can eat some, but if I over-indulge I break out in eczema and have to cut back to nothing for a week or two, but am generally able to tolerate low-fat dairy in non-excessive amounts... and I don't crave it anything like as badly as I did before the period of no-dairy.  Which was no fun, but did help the eczema a LOT).  But all of those things are too much for one appointment, right?  And anyway, they are so vague and I don't want to start crying at him because I feel like such a fool - here I am, PhD and 'proper job' and all, unable to stick to a diet or even leave half a loaf of bread in the kitchen for more than a few hours... I know all the theory and most of the science, I know what I need to do, I just can't make myself do it.  Failure!

I get very tired of living in this limbo between ill and well, and yet the energy to get out of the rut is as elusive as ever - staying in the rut and not falling into giant potholes of 'ill' is quite enough to do.

However, I did type 1176 words of notes towards the next grant application already this morning, run a load of laundry, empty and refill the dishwasher, and read a third of a novel (and put down the remaining two-thirds for later, which is an achievement in itself - it would be more impressive if the book was truly gripping but I'll take what little victories come my way!). 

And now, I am going to look for another 'definitely useful' task to do which is NOT writing REF-reports on my colleagues' papers, which i should have done weeks ago, and am DREADING.  I am SO TEMPTED not to do it properly for my more difficult assignments, and just give them high scores, and arguing about the morality of that (and of engaging in the game at all) has effectively enabled me to leave it until it;s now really overdue.  Bugger!

fine, OK, that was a waste of leave time

Dame Eleanor Hull left a comment on "the blahs":

I once had a massage therapist who told me that in Chinese thought, spring is an angry season. So it often seems in my life.

Anger and depression are very closely related - in fact I often think depression is about a complicated mixture of denial of anger and submission to anger, or at least frustration. After all, if you can only change yourself, and you're failing to change, then it's your fault, right? Which makes you angry/frustrated/annoyed - but who is there to be angry at? You can't change other people, they can't change you - clearly YOU are at fault.

I don't like Spring much. Partly because in the academic year it's the time when things are going stale - students are restless and stressed, final exams and assessments competing with summer plans and the lure of better weather. Colleagues are demanding and short on patience. The department is short on resources - university financial years end in July. In my case, at least the last couple of years, I'm also stressing about field work - the summer is MORE trammeled and constrained than the term, and I usually end up working full time and beyond most weeks. This year there's the 'last push for REF papers and grants' pressure, but there's always SOMETHING extra.

And right now I'm mad with myself for wasting this break. I wrote:

I don't want to do NOTHING with my break - that is great in some ways, but it leads to backache from lying around reading too much, neck and eye ache from curling over the computer surfing the internet too much, and added pounds/reduced energy from eating too much junk food; basically I slide oh-so-comfortably into teenage behaviour and I'm a bit too old to do that, sadly.

My aims were:

• 2 hours a day on the house, with the aim of getting everywhere superficially tidy and clean. Managed about 6 hours. total.
  
• I will aim to think about everything I eat and eat it deliberately, enjoyably. I'd like to lose 5-7lb. Gained 5lb. Some of that is pre-menstrual, some of it is just crap eating. I hate myself. I have no control. i KNOW how to do this and I Just Don't and I don't know why.
  
• I'll try out some new recipes. Nope. barely cooked
  
• I'll do some online shopping. Did that
  
• I'll visit my niece Did that, it was great!
• I'll aim to spend two hours a day writing. Managed about 1 hour every other day
  
• I WILL do some hobby-like creative things. Nope. couldn't find the will to do them
  
• And the rest of the time will be my own! and I didn't even enjoy much of the wasting of it.
  

I feel as if I've spent most of the break being ill, not being well-and-on-staycation. Maybe that's how I should try and think of it, as having gotten ill as soon as I stopped work (which I usually do. I did have a sort of cold in the first week, but it may have been allergies), and therefore as inevitable that I didn't get much done.

And I'm still dreading the summer :-(

the blahs

What happened to yesterday?? I went to the dentist, did a little shopping, came back, I had one of those naps that turns into a sleep, then... I guess I got sucked into that void which is the internet (more specifically, into pointless games on the internet). And ate far too much toast. Oops! Very little break left, and SO much to do, but I don't WANT to. I also really, really don't want to go back to work. SO MUCH don't want to.

This may have something to do with the fact that I checked my email today. There are lots of 'do this', various 'questions from students who can't be bothered to read the syllabus' and an email from the GradStudentWhoseDataIAnalysed saying he's found another twenty samples that he forgot to finish off in the lab, so it'll be another month or so before he's finished that stage, and is that fine? Well no, but you can't analyse samples any faster by wishful thinking...

Also my back is playing up, a lot, and the scales aren't going down, and I am getting into that nasty cycle of self-reproach and feeling like a failure and the grinding destructive urge to do something to suppress those feelings which takes some to the bottle or the razor, and me to the breadbin... oh well.

I love to visit with my niece, but it tends to make me dwell on paths not travelled. On being 43, and single, chronically single, so most unlikely to ever have the care of a child. To wondering who will care when I am old. Care for me FIRST, that is - friends are great, but nearly all my friends have partners and children, who of COURSE come first. It's pathetic. Part of me thinks, at least you have a great job. If you'd focused on getting married etc. to the exclusion of working and studying, and hadn't, you'd feel an even bigger waste of space. But then the job turns around and bites... ah, this is why I shouldn't STOP. Because when I take a break, all these... Things come up and yabber (jabber? yammer?) at me and my head becomes a very dreich* place. I guess this is mostly just my Spring Depression (which seems to come around most years...) - I've been on the edge of tears/crying randomly over the stupidest things, or over nothing, for the last week, and I can't seem to get enough sleep - or to sleep properly - and I'm having a variety of anxious-dreams. The urge to just curl up in a small space and hide from something is strong - and it's so frustrating!

Time to break out the chocolate rabbit (dark chocolate Lindt bunny, easter present from Sister, yum!) and do SOMETHING productive, I suppose.

* an expressive Scots word I re-encountered yesterday which resonated powerfully. I heard a nice Scots lady on the radio say that the day was dreich in Edinburgh - a familiar British weather condition which is not at all dramatic, but grey, wet, mizzly or drizzly or Scotch-mist-y, dull, gloomy, overcast, dismal, dreary, miserable... The Merrian -Webster dictionary offered these synonyms for driech: black, bleak, cheerless , chill, Cimmerian, cloudy, c0ld, comfortless, dark, darkening, depressing, depressive, desolate, dire, disconsolate, dismal, drear, dreary, gloomy, elegiac, forlorn, funereal, glum, godforsaken, grey, lonely, lonesome, lugubrious, miserable, morbid, morose, murky, plutonian, saturnine, sepulchral, solemn, somber, sullen, sunless, tenebrific, tenebrous, wretched. Some of them seem a bit extreme! But some of them are really rich on the tongue - disconsolate, lugubrious, tenebrific. Anyway, cold, grey, miserable and tedious is a good description of where my mood is today and has been most of the week (despite the brief excursion into colouring!).

writing practice

I visited with my niece today, and we mostly worked on our writing. (Niece is six). We co-authored a story about a naughty kitten (who pushed his friend downstairs! Then his friend dressed up as a villain from their favourite cat TV show and scared the naughty kitten! Who wasn't naughty after that... until the next time), by the amusing method of writing alternate sentences, then we drew and coloured in illustrations (mostly I drew and she coloured in). I forgot my camera - I should have taken pictures for you to 'admire'.

We also played some board games and with the family's dogs, and even my always-busy house-work-obsessed sister came in for a round or two of 'lava mountain' and did some colouring.

It was about 4.5 hours of driving total for a 5 hour visit, but it was a FUN visit! Colouring in is GOOD.

if I were a moderately well off person...

Nicoleandmaggie over at grumpy rumblings have a post up asking what people would do if a) they didn't have to work (were financially independent) and b) for some reason had to cut all the ties with their current job/line of work. It's an interesting version of my usual conundrum, the question of what my alternatives are if the unpleasures of my particular job and its effects on my health come to consistently and noisily exceed the pleasures, noisily enough that I really have to face up to it?

For the sake of this thought-exercise, I shall assume the financial independence to be comparable to my current standard of living - enough not to need to count every penny and allow the occasional impulsive amazon-raid (oh kindle, you are so good at inciting those...), but not enough to finance a round the year round the world cruise or require/allow one to spend most of one's time looking after the money and finding good causes for it to support (which would be kind of scary, at first at least, I think).

I anticipate 6 months to a year of simple 'recovery time' - reading all the unread books, knitting, getting the house in order, watching dvds, catching up with friends, hopefully developing a better, healthier pattern of sleeping and eating and exercising which would generate a less substantial JaneB with fewer joint sulks and back aches. But after that - ah, that's the question.

The thought experiment stipulated that one should assume that for whatever reason one had to cut ties with ones current profession - I assume that means both academia and beach studies. My rather childish impossible dream would be to carry on studying - to do maybe a couple of degrees, to do another PhD in a wildly different discipline (dead languages or linguistics has a lot of appeal for various reasons, not least because the small, highly select (and highly eccentric) group of students taking courses like Anglo Saxon at InternationallyRenownedUniversity always seemed to be having so much fun. And I love to teach, despite the bureaucracy, but I'm not allowed to stay in the academy - so maybe I'd find a mix of volunteering or very casual work in some kind of training role (maybe with a gifted children's programme? or as a maths tutor? maybe tutoring home-educated kids in science?) and learning some other skill that I could teach, maybe knitting or T'ai Chi, something I could do with small groups.

I really like MarketTown, NorthernCity has many pluses (even for a non-city person like me) and I like living in the north. But would I stay here? Probably not - freed from the tie to the academy and to NorthernUni, I'd probably feel almost obliged to move towards my parents, to a distance where a day-visit is feasible. That would leave me in landscapes I don't like much, but near cities with good libraries - near rather than in given the budgetary constraints I've chosen, because the other criterion for a move would be to find a house with a little more garden and with a layout conducive to having two or more cats - aged about 8, I once solemnly told a teacher that I wanted to be an English Eccentric when I grew up, and Mad Cat Lady seems almost obligatory. If I'm only working short hours, I might consider having a dog too - something cat-friendly and low-exercise-demanding like a retired greyhound.

In the inevitable future which I try not to think about too much when my parents are no longer alive, I guess I might move again to a landscape I prefer. Perhaps to FavouriteIslands? Being an incomer would be a disadvantage, and most of my friends, my sister and niece and brother-in-law, would be a trek away. I wouldn't really want to be a dual home owner, but that might be the practical way to be. More likely, I'd just move back northwards, to hills and sea and sky - if I could afford to have somewhere which permitted me to continue to have cats, and to stroll to the shops/station/drs/other necessities when I didn't feel like using the car. That was a surprisingly coherant vision for me...

The purpose of this sort of thought experiment is to encourage you to work out how to incorporate some of the facets of this 'dream life' into the every-day now. For me, that's where the problems arise. I don't have the energy at the moment - whether this is a chronic health issue, that is that I'd always have less 'spoons' than the average person regardless of occupation, or related directly to my current line of work and stress levels I don't know, but I do know that doing enough to earn a living in this profession takes pretty much everything I have, and also makes me unreliable. A volunteer or evening class teacher or student needs to be able to do certain things at certain times every week regardless, and I can't. Some weeks, sure, others... no.

That uncertainty about my own consistency would determine what I'd do with myself after the few months of 'yay! Read All The Books Clean All The Things!' catch-up and holiday, in the end, and makes it hard to know what might work and what might not.

In fact, you know what I'd rather, if I had the income but not the 'cut ties with current employment' condition? I'd like to work maybe 2, 2.5 days a week, at my current uni or elsewhere. It'd be even better if I could earn 40-50% of my current salary, and turn 40-50% of the private income into a research fund - or be paid in research support rather than salary even, a PhD studentship or funds to buy research assistance as needed and travel and buy analyses and the odd bit of kit. Now THAT would be delightful - freedom from grant applications! Or at least, the knowledge that an absence of grant success would not prevent one from doing fun stuff...

some pictures

After a LOT of trawling around the shops I found an Easter present for my first-cousin-once-removed (yes, I'm late mailing this stuff. See, I did MOST of the family presents for the weekend away which left me feeling reeeeallly smug...and I forgot the few that still needed mailing. I am a crap relative). She's hard to buy for. I'm very fond of her, she's had a very hard life and is a good and loving lady despite it all, but she's very, very hard to give presents to. And I always WANT to. Because everyone should get little presents sometimes, for the holidays, because someone else has thought of them, and she's the kind of spiky, fiercely independent elderly person with no surviving close family and friends equally poor and trammeled by logistics who misses out on that sort of stuff. The gift has to be non-food (what with fat-free for her cholesterol and heart diet and sugar free for her diabetic diet and a couple of other things for this complicated arthritis diet she's on, it's hard. Until the diabetes kicked in, it wasn't too bad - there's a fancy deli near here which sold wonderful crystallised fruits done the traditional way, which were fat free and not too sweet, and those were apparently OK if she cut them into pieces and had a little piece now and then as a treat, and she actually liked them... but she recently added diabetes to her roll-call of health issues so no candied fruit), actually useful (she can't stand 'fripperies', they offend her personally), not too expensive (because we are not to throw our money away) AND something of a treat (because a present should be something you wouldn't buy yourself, but would enjoy having)... anyway, I settled on a tube of wild rose hand cream which my aunt (who also has arthritis - I'm actually surprised I haven't started it myself yet it's so markedly present across my family tree, and in early onset forms) says is lovely, and which doesn't smell too old-lady-ish (my cousin would like everyone to be quite clear that she isn't old yet, OLD people are in their 90s). Oh well. Hopefully she'll appreciate the thought, if not the item itself, and she can always regift it to my aunt if she won't use it, so it isn't a 'frippery'!

At least my aunt and uncle, the other people I needed to buy stuff for, were easy - Uncle adores Cadbury$ Cre@m eg@s, those childish, too-sweet 'how do you eat yours' lumps of seasonal gluttony, so a six-pack of those will keep him happy. Aunt likes cute things, and has to be careful of her diet so likes things with a lot of flavour, so for her I bought some minature 'hot cross buns' made of marzipan with chopped raisins and spices - very cute, seasonal, and only a few in a package! Yeah, I know, should have done it earlier in the week. Well I didn't, like a lot of other things I should have done, but... if I'd actually had a bad cold, it would have been OK to have not done things, so just because I've been rather mentally worn out and grumpy and tired, I've decided that should also count as 'not really well enough to be expected to get my act together'.

A fancy flower shop that I walk past on my way to get the Skinny Chai Latte I rewarded myself with for finally going to get these easter gifts has got a very attractive window display - this is a bad picture, but I always feel a right prat in the street with my camera and windows are hard to photograph. It's just empty jam-jars, quite widely spaced on a strip of artifical grass, each holding a few sprays of spring flowers in strong yellow (tulips and primulas and my favourite tete-a-tete daffodils and narcissi), deep blue (grape hyacinths and those large, single ornamental Ranunculi that are very close to aenemone but not quite) and a few of the early small Leucanthemum (like little ox-eye daisies), along with occasional pale green globes of some sort of Allium. The colour and simplicity of it is really charming, much more striking than the more 'arranged' and structured floral art they usually include in the window. Mind you, one of those charmingly simple jars can be purchased for considerably MORE than my drinks chain chai latte cost, because this window is not JUST for the pleasure of the passers-by. But I enjoyed it!


Also - what is a picture post without furball? - a grumpy furball (who looks quite hot cross bun-ish herself) would like to know where the SUN HAS GONE. Also, stuff all that nonsense about soft airs and how it's good to have the window open a little bit to air the house and allergens etc., and SHUT THE WINDOW because her normal afternoon napping spot on my desk is IN A DRAUGHT so she's had to retreat to the spot under my desk and I have messed up her routine. And get rid of that stupid camera. Honestly, humans, sometimes she wonders why she allows one in her house.