I'm baaaaaack.
Back in October of last year, when I began fantasizing about what this month would be like – and by that I mean, my first month without teaching in almost a year – I conjured grand plans for myself.
I would work in lab for long, continuous hours, riveted by my thesis work and only able to drag myself away to attend informative departmental seminars or to dutifully meet with my advisor.
I would rise early each morning to run up East Rock if it was above 15 degrees or run at the gym if it was below. I would start lifting weights again. I would finally “let my brain go soft” in yoga class on Wednesday nights.
On Sunday afternoons, I would cook tasty and economical bucket food meals that would both supply me with lunch and dinner for the entire week and help soften the blow of the newly shrunken non-teaching paycheck.
And to prove those wrong who criticized me for not getting out of lab/New Haven enough, I would find a weekend somewhere in the month of January to finally go down to New York City to see the Fra Angelico exhibit at The Met.
And now it is January 9th, a little more than a week into this brand spanking new, utterly teaching free year of 2006 and I have discovered that what I really enjoy doing with all this new free time is napping. Another favorite hobby is going to bed at 9:30 instead of midnight. And getting up at 7:30 instead of 5:45.
I have been up to the top of East Rock a few times and I did make it to yoga once last week. (Though I hid from Heidi’s ‘core intensive’ class, opting for Niki’s more napping-intensive class instead.) And when I do wander into lab at the luxurious hour of 10 a.m., I am ready to work steadily until mid-evening.
But rather than being crowded with ideas for new experiments and novel interpretations of data, I find that my mind is filled with thoughts of my soft bed full of hot water bottles, and the peaceful sound of my little Casio clock ticking in the dark quiet of my room.
It’s like Sleep and I have just met and we’ve only been on a few dates and we’re still kind of giddy.
The problem is, and I can feel the knot tightening in my stomach as I type this, I’m going to have to break up with Sleep soon. Our long term goals are just not compatible and pretty soon my Dissertation and my Research in Progress talk are going to find out that I’ve been cheating on them and seeing Sleep on the side.
I’ll have to try to let Sleep down easy, though. I’m a little afraid of a vengeful, jilted Sleep. The last thing I need is to get drowsy when I finally attempt to make sense of the racks and racks of identically numbered test tubes I left in my lab freezer before Christmas. I can remember thinking to myself half-heartedly that of course I’d remember the difference between the samples labeled 1 to 24 in blue Sharpie and the samples labeled 1 to 24 in black Sharpie. I can also recall being too tired to really care if I remembered difference or not which must be why I failed to write out even the simplest key to my organizational system and simply left a note to “figure out freezer stuff” on my “To Do in 2006” list on my computer desktop.
I’ll probably end up throwing them in the biohazard bucket with the other twelve tubes marked only with a red dot on the cap, the bleached out microscope slides I forgot to move from my sunny bench top to the safety of my dark drawer, and the gummed up glass plates that I soaked in methanol for almost the entire month of December that refused to get clean.
It’s not so bad I guess. The loss of a few racks of anonymous samples is a small price to pay for the stupidity I committed last semester. Still not sure why I thought teaching Sex Class for another semester would be a good idea. There was the money, of course. But I’m too paranoid to spend any of it. There was the football team captain in my 1:30 section who I my fellow TA’s and I got to moon over. But we had to stop short of having any real fun with that because of some pesky subsections in the Yale academic ethics code.
But now that’s all over and I’m back to my blog and I’m free to play coy with Sleep and to quote liberally from the term paper of a student who will remain anonymous who reminds us that “there are one-to-one correspondences with the everydayness of everyday.”
Whatever that means.
I would work in lab for long, continuous hours, riveted by my thesis work and only able to drag myself away to attend informative departmental seminars or to dutifully meet with my advisor.
I would rise early each morning to run up East Rock if it was above 15 degrees or run at the gym if it was below. I would start lifting weights again. I would finally “let my brain go soft” in yoga class on Wednesday nights.
On Sunday afternoons, I would cook tasty and economical bucket food meals that would both supply me with lunch and dinner for the entire week and help soften the blow of the newly shrunken non-teaching paycheck.
And to prove those wrong who criticized me for not getting out of lab/New Haven enough, I would find a weekend somewhere in the month of January to finally go down to New York City to see the Fra Angelico exhibit at The Met.
And now it is January 9th, a little more than a week into this brand spanking new, utterly teaching free year of 2006 and I have discovered that what I really enjoy doing with all this new free time is napping. Another favorite hobby is going to bed at 9:30 instead of midnight. And getting up at 7:30 instead of 5:45.
I have been up to the top of East Rock a few times and I did make it to yoga once last week. (Though I hid from Heidi’s ‘core intensive’ class, opting for Niki’s more napping-intensive class instead.) And when I do wander into lab at the luxurious hour of 10 a.m., I am ready to work steadily until mid-evening.
But rather than being crowded with ideas for new experiments and novel interpretations of data, I find that my mind is filled with thoughts of my soft bed full of hot water bottles, and the peaceful sound of my little Casio clock ticking in the dark quiet of my room.
It’s like Sleep and I have just met and we’ve only been on a few dates and we’re still kind of giddy.
The problem is, and I can feel the knot tightening in my stomach as I type this, I’m going to have to break up with Sleep soon. Our long term goals are just not compatible and pretty soon my Dissertation and my Research in Progress talk are going to find out that I’ve been cheating on them and seeing Sleep on the side.
I’ll have to try to let Sleep down easy, though. I’m a little afraid of a vengeful, jilted Sleep. The last thing I need is to get drowsy when I finally attempt to make sense of the racks and racks of identically numbered test tubes I left in my lab freezer before Christmas. I can remember thinking to myself half-heartedly that of course I’d remember the difference between the samples labeled 1 to 24 in blue Sharpie and the samples labeled 1 to 24 in black Sharpie. I can also recall being too tired to really care if I remembered difference or not which must be why I failed to write out even the simplest key to my organizational system and simply left a note to “figure out freezer stuff” on my “To Do in 2006” list on my computer desktop.
I’ll probably end up throwing them in the biohazard bucket with the other twelve tubes marked only with a red dot on the cap, the bleached out microscope slides I forgot to move from my sunny bench top to the safety of my dark drawer, and the gummed up glass plates that I soaked in methanol for almost the entire month of December that refused to get clean.
It’s not so bad I guess. The loss of a few racks of anonymous samples is a small price to pay for the stupidity I committed last semester. Still not sure why I thought teaching Sex Class for another semester would be a good idea. There was the money, of course. But I’m too paranoid to spend any of it. There was the football team captain in my 1:30 section who I my fellow TA’s and I got to moon over. But we had to stop short of having any real fun with that because of some pesky subsections in the Yale academic ethics code.
But now that’s all over and I’m back to my blog and I’m free to play coy with Sleep and to quote liberally from the term paper of a student who will remain anonymous who reminds us that “there are one-to-one correspondences with the everydayness of everyday.”
Whatever that means.
posted by Eva Marie at 10:07 PM
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