January 18, 2004

Sunday night, 9:15 p.m., and I just got home from work. Tonight's task was choosing a paper to present for my lab because it's my turn to do journal club this week. Journal club is when we devote our normal lab meeting time to discussing a paper from the current literature of interest to the lab.

The key to a successful journal club is the selection of the paper, which is why this task took me about three hours longer than I was hoping it would. The paper should be interesting to most people in the lab, but focused enough to have some significant findings. It should be a good, important paper, but ideally also something that people might not have otherwise seen. And most importantly, it should deal with something that the presenter already knows something about. This is crucial, because then, when people ask you questions about the paper, you can avoid a. looking stupid or b. having to do a lot of background reading to avoid looking stupid. And it's even more crucial for me right now, because I don't have time to do background reading this week.

Since I know more than anyone in my lab about endocrinology, I had originally planned to present an endocrinology paper, but wow, there are a lot of really stupid endocrinology papers out there. My favorite one that I saw tonight was a paper on the effects of kissing on allergies. The paper was by a Japanese researcher, and in the paper he wrote that the study subjects were Japanese and thus did not kiss regularly. Apparently kissing is not a Japanese trait. Anyway, the researcher presented subjects with an allergen and then put them in a room alone with their significant others for 30 minutes with soft music and instructed them to kiss. Apparently, the subjects weren't monitored for the intensity of their kissing or to see if they engaged in any other sexual activity. Maybe that isn't Japanese, either. But apparently, the kissing did decrease the intensity of the subjects' allergic reactions. But I decided not to present the paper anyway, despite these promising results.

I actually haven't picked the paper yet, but I did manage to narrow it down to two contenders, which I printed out and took home with me, because I was sick of being in the lab. One of the papers is more interesting and unusual, but the other is a better paper. But ack, at this point, I can't even look at them anymore. I'll decide in the morning.

Work has seemed overwhelming lately. First there was my thesis committee meeting, and now I'm trying to write a followup proposal (I had originally planned to complete this in two weeks, but seeing as how Tuesday will be the two-week anniversary of my meeting and I haven't started yet, I have my doubts that this will happen). And then there's the fact that I still have my ongoing experiments in progress except that the guy who has been doing this stuff with me is mostly at home with his wife these days still trying to get the hang of living with and caring for their newborn baby. It is, of course, hard for me to begrudge him this time spent caring for his firstborn daughter instead of helping me weigh fat mice, but, you know, I do anyway. No, not really. Well, sort of. And now I have journal club to deal with, too.

So, how do I deal with work stress? Did I spend all weekend in the lab? Well, no. I procrastinated by coming up with other non-essential but productive and unpleasant tasks to carry out. This way, I feel like I'm being productive without actually having to do the work I'm trying to avoid. I did get a lot done: I cleaned my apartment, went to the farmers market and the grocery store, had my car's oil changed, purchased TurboTax 2003 software, and caught up on my e-mail correspondence. On Friday, I even spent an hour on hold on the phone with the city of Oakland, trying to ascertain the status of my most recent bogus parking ticket. At least there I got some good news: the ticket had been reduced to $10 from the $120 they were threatening me with in the little card they sent me in the mail, and even that is still "under review" to see if I owe them the $10 or not. And being on hold with the city of Oakland is actually somewhat entertaining. Sure, they play you the standard soft jazz music while you wait, but over that are spoken messages about various city services. I got to hear messages about what numbers to call if I am homeless or about to be homeless, to report blight in my neighborhood, and to get information about household waste disposal, all of which would be more useful if I actually lived in Oakland and wasn't just plagued by bogus parking tickets from that city, but it's better than just the music.

In addition to all that, I went for a couple of pretty decent runs, and registered to run the Chicago Marathon in October--motivation to get back to a more disciplined running schedule. And, OK, I went to the symphony on Friday night and to a party on Saturday, but at least I don't feel like I squandered the whole weekend having fun. I squandered it on real life instead of work.