Final Approvals Secured.
My boss and my VP have agreed and I will be joining the PHRG on a part-time basis as a Research Scientist. We’ll follow up and review how it’s going at quarterly intervals. My, my boss, and my new mentor. I will have to work a lot harder I think, but I will be getting to do far more exciting stuff than I’ve been doing in a much higher profile environment.
I will have an outward facing website and an excellent new title, and even a horrible fishbowl glass-walled office. It’s very exciting. I share the office, but I think it’s a time share not a concurrent thing. I’m not entirely sure. Those are the trappings. That’s the neat stuff that I’m glad to get instead of the basement cube I have now and for the foreseeable future.
But the really exciting stuff is I get to work on public health and epidemiology again. I get to apply computer simulation to policy and analysis and write blog posts and white papers and give talks and attend meetings where my ideas and innovations will hopefully be taken seriously by people who actually write policy and influence those who write legislation and regulations.
The kind of people, support services, and international credibility that the PHRG has will help my work find its way into better papers and may yield some new grant funding. They have that stuff locked in – it’s a funding machine. They secure millions of dollars a year for their work. I will be able to participate and hopefully benefit those efforts. I’m really excited. Apprehensive, naturally, but excited.
I hope to be able to do some good work.
Ownership and Addiction.
Almost everyone in AA thinks that people outside AA could also benefit from working the program in their lives. Not giving up alcohol, but the core concepts of doing inventory, relinquishing control, accepting what we can’t change, changing what we can, and taking radical ownership for our problems. I’m not so sure.
AA works because the program allows me to address my deep issues. I have a disease that tries to convince me I don’t have a disease. That my problems are not my fault. That I am a victim. That the appropriate response to my troubles is to slug down as much alcohol as possible and tell the world to go fuck itself. I know other people aren’t like that.
I cannot confront my disease without taking hard personal responsibility for the outcome of my choices. Indeed, I cannot confront my disease without recognizing my choices. For example: my ex-wife spent an enormous amount of money which devastated me financially. But that wasn’t her fault. It was mine. Because I was making the money, I had exclusive access to it. I could have put an end to her spending easily.
It would have meant getting divorced much earlier. She was clear about that. Quite explicitly, she told me that if I “put her on an allowance” (a term which covered making a budget), she would leave me. So I didn’t. And so I ruined my finances. That was my choice. It was a terrible choice to have to make, but it was my choice.
But I own it. Does that ownership absolve her of anything? Nope. I have no idea how she feels about it now, as we don’t speak. I hope she’s happy and free of resentments. But if she does have any, those are her responsibility. But I do not get to blame her for the choices I made. I own my acts.
I’ve had people tell me that my thinking on this is warped, and that I should blame her. But what would that get me? It would leave me resentful, embittered, and not a dollar wealthier. As it is, I’m free from this, because I can look at my own decisions, separate them from hers, and release her from my regrets about my financial decisions. I had a choice, I made a choice, I live with the results. It’s about me, not her.
I’ve adopted this severe framework of ownership because it works for me. It allows me to be sober, to be happy, and to learn from mistakes and make different choices moving forward. I’m sure I’ll make bad decisions again from time to time. But I have changed my relationship to money and now I have some savings and good credit. And I don’t drink about it.
For most people, the consequences of not taking this kind of radical ownership (a phrase a friend in recovery introduced me to) are not nearly so dire. Most people can tolerate resentment (or manage it a different way) without it risking a cumulative cascade ending in an cataract of ethanol. My framework was established to help people like me, who do not do well when we think other people are the causes of our problems.
I live pretty high on the privilege scale, but I have seen this framework function well for people from as low on the yardstick as it is possible to be. I’ve seen non-gender comforming persons of color with felony convictions and multiple mental health diagnoses use the program of AA to rise from squalor and establish happy and successful lives.
Much of how we live in the world is how we choose to see the world around us. If we think we don’t have choices, then we don’t. If we think we can’t make changes, then we can’t. But if we’re willing to look at ourselves and search for the choices we have, the ones we had, and the way we allowed ourselves to get into a situation we wish we hadn’t? If we take ownership of that? We can start seeing the way out.
That doesn’t absolve the world. The world really does do us wrong in many ways (and does far worse to some than others). Some people are victims of acts and systems that they do not deserve to be subject to. But we all still have choices of act and attitude that we can make to change what we do and how we live, and how we choose to see the world.
But maybe that doesn’t work for normal people. Maybe my alcoholism really is a gift, and advantage, rather than a liability. Because my brush with terminal mental illness has given me a perspective and a set of tools that other people just don’t need, or can’t use. I have a life preserver. But other people, maybe, just swim. The tool I have isn’t necessary for them. It would be a hindrance, not a help.
I like to think the world would be a better place if everyone used the program. Most of us in AA do. But maybe it doesn’t work like that. Nevertheless, if a person is overwhelmed, unhappy, and can’t see a way out? Look for your choices. The ones you made. The ones you can still make. They’re there. You have more power than you think you do.
Big Bricks.
Yesterday I did my second or third bike/run brick of the training season. Those are the hard ones. Mondays I do a run/swim brick, and now Tuesdays I do strength/bike. I was supposed to just run Wednesday and bike Thursday, but work got complicated and blah blah, so I made it up on Thursday. Which is long-bike day. So it was a big day.
I’m working hard at picking up pace on the bike. I was moving pretty rapidly a lot of the time yesterday. I even did a whole mile at 21 mph, and it was on flat ground without a sympathetic wind. Just me and my legs and my bike, churning out a sub-3 minute mile. Overall I averaged 15.55 miles per hour for 25 miles. That included a stop to pee and multiple traffic stops, slow rides over cobblestones and gravel and boardwalks, path congestion in places, etc..
It took me an hour and thirty-seven minutes. That’s a solid ride. I was especially gratified that I wasn’t quite as saddle-sore as my prior long ride, and my hands didn’t go numb at all. I still have a lot of endurance to build. It’s different on the bike than running, where it’s all about fitness. On the bike, I just have to train my body to accept the insult of the position and seat for long durations. It’s challenging.
After the bike, I planned to go right out on my run, but I had to chat with my boss for a half an hour on the phone. So I ran after a short break. Which is fine. I think on race day a nice sit for ten minutes or so at the bike-run transition might well be called for. To let my back muscles ease up and relent from the hunched-over grip they assume after a long time on two wheels.
I was able to go out and run a hard 4 miles, at a 9:11 pace, which is fast for me, and for now. I’ve been running fewer miles lately due to the pick-up in other exercises and also due to me skipping a couple of long runs that I didn’t feel up to. That’s a bad plan, but I have the right to rest my mind as well as my body when I feel like I need to. If it makes me hurt more on race day? Well, race day was always gonna hurt.
My heart rate was way up on the run. Up in the 175-180 range for a lot of it. That’s too high. But I felt fine. I was able to turn in one of my miles at an 8:40 pace. It was cool and dry, and I don’t expect to be able to make anything like that pace even for the Olympic triathlon in June. Which is fine. I know my June Olympic will be slower than last year’s triathlon, because the bike course is about 6 miles longer.
My only goal with triathlons is to crawl across the finish line with one second to spare. June will be hot. September will be hot. Both might be humid. It will be difficult and painful. But I think I can get there. I hope I can get there.
Curriculum Vitae.
My career path has been a weird winding one which I would recommend no one emulate. Starting back at the beginning, back in high school, everyone thought I had a lot of potential and put me in all the accelerated classes. For whatever reason, scholastic mastery was never really important to me though. I didn’t work very hard. I worked hard enough to get B+’s. Parents and teachers were often vexed. But my understanding of the material seemed strong.
I got into a reasonably fancy college on the strength of those grades, pretty good test scores (I got a 1310 on the SAT back when there were only two sections and 1600 was perfect). Not great scores. Pretty good. Not great grades. Pretty good. But amazing recommendations. Everyone agreed that I had big potential, it seemed. Also, I wasn’t asking for financial aid (thanks, Grandpa!).
In college I did the same as in high school. I got B+’s, mostly. A’s in my major, for the most part. C’s in some breadth classes. Overall, I averaged a B+. But my mastery of the material seemed good, and a few professors took a shine to me. I also tried to circulate with the smarter kids. I had several friends, like LawnBoy and PanurgeJr, who were there on full merit-based academic scholarships.
My advisor thought he saw something in me and offered me a fully-funded graduate assistantship. I was also offered a position in the school of engineering at Columbia. I stayed where I was out of fear and depression. And it was probably the right decision. In graduate school I got B+’s. That’s less acceptable in graduate school, but B+ is as hard as I’m willing to work. I’ve never discovered a diligence inside that lets me do better than that.
In graduate school I discovered alcohol, and I spent 10 years “studying” and doing engineering research while drinking a bottle of whiskey a day, basically. My advisor eventually pulled my stipend to force me to finish. It still took two years. Then I did nothing for two years. I was trying to start a business, but I was failing. I participated in a health care advisory board without compensation. But basically, I was unemployed, floundering, and useless. And drunk every day.
It was around this time, February of 2008, that I went to an inpatient rehab, sobered up, and was offered a job through that advisory board. It was at the VHA, and paid about like a postdoc, though I was a staff employee. I worked for the chief of staff of a hospital who was also a full professor of both engineering and medicine. Like so many others have (but I never did) he saw something in me.
Sober now, I worked more effectively. But really, still, at the B+ level. That has never changed. I helped my boss write grants and publish. I wrote a small grant of my own and won it, under his guidance. Eighteen months later, I got promoted. Still technically staff, I was a principal investigator now. My salary almost doubled. I wrote and won another grant, about an R03. I was in negotiations to join the faculty part time at a local research university.
Then my boss quit. The new hospital leadership did not give the first fuck about research. I was told to cover my salary with grant fund instantly or I would be let go. There was no way to do it. I started looking for jobs. The part time faculty position was approved, but hung up in funding limbo. It wasn’t going to start in time for me to avoid unemployment.
I reached out through my vendors and found that MECMC – my current employer – was looking for someone to do what I do, in a 100% operational context. I interveiwed and was offered the position. It meant moving a thousand miles from home. Overplaying my hand, I told them I wanted to keep 10% of my time protected to write manuscripts of the work I was doing. They agreed.
And so I joined the staff at MECMC. It’s an academic hospital but I was far from the research apparatus. The faculty saw me as what I was: a low-level administrative functionary with unique technical skills. But gradually I moved up. Promoted twice, on a managerial track, in three years. I petitioned for and was given permission to hire an underling engineer. A young man with a bachelor’s degree in engineering. Sort of like a student.
I also wrote tiny little grants and won them. I petitioned the IRB for principal investigator privileges. I wrote manuscripts of nearly every project I worked on. I published my operational work as research in medical journals. The 10% protected time vanished by fact if not by intent: I had too much to do. But I managed expectations well. And so while publishing and grant-writing were not part of my job, I did them anyway.
I reached out to the faculty here, and at VFU. I made friends with professors. I did side projects with academics I met on twitter. I did side projects alone. I published them because they interested me, and because I wanted to be able to return to the world of academics one day. I wanted to create something that everyone says doesn’t exist: a position on hard money that allows me to pick my projects, write grants and papers at leisure, and make a difference in my local environment.
Now I’ve met the leader of the PHRG. He loved my work and methods. He invited me to become a Research Scientist in his group. Still a staff position, not faculty. But a principal investigator and a nearly-academic title. Hard money. And a champion to find me that faculty title soon. It is happening.
My CV has gaps and embarrassing inclusions and omissions. It only has a little grant money won. No major journals in my bibliography. I have a good school there, but my prior institution is not fancy or prestigious. MECMC is. I am 42 years old and I made a mess of my 20s and early 30s. I’ve had to claw back from unemployment and alcoholism to a place, almost a decade later, where I am within striking distance of academia again.
From something I once didn’t even know I wanted – an academic legacy – to thinking it was lost, to now being on the cusp of it again. I’ve scratched and scraped and made wrong turns and been thwarted. I’ve had people advance me without my having earned it, and I’ve had people dispose of me despite obvious merit. This pathway is not in any of the manuals. This is not how anyone would tell you to build an academic career.
But this is how I’ve done it. This is how I’m doing it. One stupid mistake at a time. One audacious request. One unsupportable demand. One side project. One manuscript. One little grant application. One little extra thing. Telling the people who employ me what I want. What I want more than money.
I want to make a difference. I want to have a legacy. I want to have a retirement ceremony where people expect a speech. And I want to be the proof: it’s not impossible. There’s always another way. You don’t have to follow the path they say you have to follow. Bad luck doesn’t have to end your dreams.
Once lost in a labyrinth of depression and addiction, underperforming and constantly making bad decisions, I finally and slowly turned. In the past 9 years, I have mazily progressed toward the thing I have coveted. I’m not there yet. But it is happening.
Never give up.
Lesson Learned.
As my triathlon training ramps up, I’m doing “bricks” (or two different sport workouts in a single day, back-to-back) two to three times a week. Mondays are run/swim bricks, and Tuesdays are strength/bike. Others occur with haphazard periodicity. This week though, the weather Tuesday was garbage, so Monday, in anticipation, I decided to switch up the swim and the bike, so as to take advantage of the indoorsness of the gym and pool.
So Monday I did a 12.5 mile ride in 49 minutes and then a 4.1 mile run in 42. A great little brick with satisfying speed. I felt strong and fast. I’m getting close to goal paces on everything. My hope is to do the Philadelphia triathlon in reasonably close to three hours, depending on the weather. 3:10 to 3:15 would be fabulous.
The half-Ironman is only a little bit longer than double the Olympic distance, and so if I turn in a 3:15, I’ll be very happy. That would indicate that an 8 hour half-Ironman is within reach. I’m in pretty good cardiovascular shape right now, my heart rate is behaving and I’m hitting really good paces on my speed intervals.
But I did learn a big lesson yesterday. Since I’d done my bike/run brick on Monday, I had gym/swim on Tuesday. So I lifted heavy metal things for an hour, including two honest-to-god hands-forward pull-ups, a bunch of chin-ups, and several sets of TRX rows. Basically, I completely thrashed my lats. Then I got in the pool.
I was supposed to do 1500 meters. That’s 0.93 miles, and the length of the swim of an Olympic triathlon. My half-Ironman is 1900 meters, or 1.18 miles. I did not have 1500 meters. I swim freestyle (what I grew up hearing called “the Australian crawl”). It places big demands on the lats to pull the arms through the water. Mine were sore and tired.
I felt like I was lying low in the water. Breathing felt like a challenge getting my head up high enough out of the water to make it safe. Everything was about three times the effort, and I was swimming significantly slower than I had a week ago. I cut the workout short to 1000 meters.
Regardless, I’m doing reasonably well and I feel ready to do the Olympic distance tomorrow if the race were tomorrow. I’d be slower than I expect to be by the time the actual race day comes around. But I can do the distances now. The big race? Well, it was always going to be a stretch. I’ll see what I’ve got when the time comes.
Want Me to Come Talk?
I have a vacation coming up. I’m taking May 13-29 off for my first 2+ week vacation in three years. I travel a lot, but often on a short time frame (our trip to Hong Kong was about 118 hours including 32 hours of flights). Recently, trips that felt a bit like vacations also involved a big working component. My trips to Rome and Saskatoon were both for conferences where I was giving talks.
This time, it’s a real vacation, but our flights are May 18-29. That gives me a full five days at the beginning to do whatever I want. BB will still be working, and so I’m looking to do something solo, and have fun. I would love to go give a talk somewhere. So, do you have a need for a speaker and a venue? Are you interested in having me come speak? I’ll even pay my own way.
Potential topics:
- Alcoholism and Recovery
- Computer Simulation (applied, not theoretical)
- Hospital Operations – using computer simulation
- Public Health – using computer simulation
- Health/Public Policy – using computer simulation
- Gender and Racial Bias in Peer Review – using computer simulation
- How to Build a Pretend Academic Career
You may get the feeling that mostly I can talk about computer simulation. This is because applied computer simulation is really the only think I’m an expert in from a professional perspective. But I’d be happy to talk about alcoholism as well. Or academic careerism from the outside.
Just a thought. If you’re interested in arranging an audience and a venue (need an emergency Grand Rounds fill-in?) I’d be happy to come blather for an hour. Monday or Tuesday the 15th or 16th of May.
The Plan Proceeding!
Today I met with the director of MECMC’s population health research group. I had applied for an Associate Professor position with his outfit, which is a collaborative unit between MECMC and VFU. When I applied for the professorship, I knew it was an unlikely stretch. But what it did was get me an invited talk. I gave my talk, and frankly, I nailed it. I gave an engaging talk on my methods and how they directly apply to the work that the PHRG is doing. Lots of robust discussion and excited chatter ensued.
That was last month. The director asked me a few weeks ago to meet with him today. So I showed up at his fancy new digs and sat down. He had read my intent perfectly. He commented that I wasn’t right for the tenure-attached professorship (they’re specifically looking for someone bringing a lot of money). I told him I knew that.
But then he said, “Look, I love your work, I love what you do. I think there’s a natural marriage between your methods and the PHRG’s interests. I want you to work with me. Let’s figure out how to make it happen and get you a faculty title.” Which is, basically, the answer to all of my dreams. He then took me around and introduced me to people, telling them that he wants to make me a part time research scientists and put me on the website and give me an office as soon as July.
I’m thrilled. Because PHRG is part of MECMC, my current charter should allow me to “support” them. Now I just need to convince my current boss to let me sit elsewhere 1-2 days a week. We’ll see what happens. I’m optimistic. I was able to work my long-term plan, which is now in about phase three, toward the outcome I want: a hard money position that allows me to do research and comes with a faculty title. Eventually a position directing advanced engineering methods at the whole of MECMC across all demesnes.
Currently, in the academic world, nothing like what I’m trying to create exists that I’m aware of. I’m building something from scratch and convincing people to support it based on my ability to deliver cool results. I’m not going to set myself on a path that relies on the vagaries of the grant market. I will build slowly and surely by making myself valuable and then asking for what I want, and not taking it with any attached strings I don’t want.
I’ve been building this since basically 20 days of sobriety. That’s when I was offered my first job in a hard-money engineer-to-the-Chief-of-Staff position that included research and grant writing. Thereafter promoted to a staff researcher position. I won a few grants, wrote a few papers. Became adjunct faculty at ILU. From there I moved to be an advisor at MECMC. Then a program manager.
And now I will hopefully be able to become a program manager and research scientist with my own office and website. Participation on grants and writing blog posts and policy briefs. I would have the apparatus of the PHRG at MECMC behind me, which is pretty significant. I’m excited and hopeful.
It’s been 9 years. In nine years of sobriety and just less than that of work, I’ve gone from a low-level flunky to someone running an engineering program and on the line for a joint appointment with a prestigious policy organization. Today I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. And proud that I never let people who told me that my way can’t work dissuade me from finding a way to build my dream career.
Fighting All the Battles at Once.
You can skip this post. Really. It’s a white man’s writing about social justice movements. I’m going to get shit wrong and probably piss people off. So, if you ignore the warning and proceed and you start to get mad? Well, me too. I’m mad. That’s why I’m writing this. We need to do better. We need to do better sooner. And I don’t know the best way to do that. So I’m not going to be prescriptive here. I am not trying to tell people what to do. If I knew what to do, I’d be doing it instead of moaning here.
Specifically, the thing I’m thinking about today is the Science March. But the issues of the Science March bleed into all the issues of all the movements. The entire resistance to the Trump administration. And generally into society itself. Basically, we need to advance specific causes in order to create a better society, and while doing that we need to specifically spend attention, effort, and money on correcting disparities between citizens in how those causes’ benefits and participation are distributed.
This means that every progressive movement has a cause, and a meta-cause. We need to increase science in the domains of funding, education, public literacy, and influence on policy. And while doing that we must also improve disparities in the participation in the production of science, and in the benefits of scientific advances. Too much science is conducted by and for white men with little regard for other sorts of people. To all of our detriment.
These efforts are inextricably linked. But they are not identical. Among social conservatives (among whom I group the libertarian-type scientists who place “reason and evidence” above all other things) there is the misperception that these goals can be decoupled. And among social progressives, there often seems to be little acknowledgement that these goals are in any way addressable through divided efforts.
I land firmly on the side of the progressives in these argument, generally speaking. The issues of disparity and participation are intrinsically associated with funding, education, and policy, because we do those things worse (we fund lower quality proposals and make poorer policy decisions) when the lion’s share of science production and benefit are conducted and consumed by a strict subset of the population. One often heavily selected for lower-quality scientists due to systemic biases.
However, the issue of science funding advocacy – for example – can plainly be advanced without rhetoric that invokes disparity and participation. And there are cases where that may be the more pragmatic approach to take. There are members of the GOP, for example, like Newt Gingrich, who are champions of the NIH. The GOP is, as a rule, opposed to things that they can cast as affirmative action or civil rights “overreaches”. Therefore, when advocating for NIH funding to Republican senators, it is probably worthwhile to pretend social justice issues aren’t relevant.
This is where the side of the progressives struggles at times, I think. Yes, it would be better if the battle over disparities and participation were won at the same time as the battle for elevated significance of science in the national discourse and budgets. And yes, those two battles are connected skirmishes of a larger campaign. But if every discussion of science with every audience must focus on disparity, we are going to lose the ability to convene with people who might be allies on one front while foes on another.
Without science funding and without evidence-informed policy, we cannot address the issues of disparity and participation at all; too little science will be done whatsoever. But it is unconscionable to tell groups suffering from those disparities not to advocate for themselves, or that their needs should not hold positions of prominence in an agenda. They should. It is unconscionable not to support those issues whomever you are.
But I fear that always leading with disparity and participation leaves us all flailing to do science with fewer resources than we might have. I suspect there is room for a phalanx of influential policy lobbyists for science for whom their sole advocacy is funding and policy, leaving social issues of race, gender, and other identities entirely to others. But the rest of us, and the masses of us, need to stand for the eradication of disparities.
And I think there is good reason for us, when we see influential policy lobbyists who leave disparities off of their list of advocacy priorities, to pause and refrain from vilification. We should not assume hostility to a social agenda simply because a person is tactically silent about it. Additionally, if advocacy for increased funding is successful – for example – there is still the second-wave opportunity to advocate for reductions in disparity and improved participation at the later stages of review and dispersal of those funds.
Progressives lose, often, because we fall upon each other for perceived insufficiencies of commitment to the cause. We berate and denigrate one another whenever one of us prefers a different issue or approach from another. We are easily dividable, and the regressive right laughs at how easily they can disrupt our agendas by sending us spinning into rabbit holes of investigations for the least-privileged constituency. Never has a global movement, in my awareness, been so susceptible to being derailed by minutiae.
This is especially true of scientists: reductionists by nature, we obsess over details and are steamrolled by big-picture oppressors who are willing to accept a flawed victory rather than demand their battle plan be perfect – and unwinnable.
This weekend, the Science March goes off. Many of us are entirely jaded about it because it fails this constituency or that one. And it should have done better, absolutely. It should have done much better. But can we not breathe and be grateful that millions of Americans are going to march in the streets to protest a regressive and oppressive administration’s abandonment of basic human inquiry?
No millions of us will all agree on a social agenda. We have to fight those battles as brigades, not divisions. At least for now. And we do have to fight them. Because the rights and benefits of our nation’s wealth and freedom belong to every one of us, and should be spread widely, not retracted into a fearful bristle – our hedgehog right wing must not be allowed to squash the progress of liberty and justice.
But on April 22nd, some millions of us at least will all be agreeing that science matters, and should be a priority for our government in funding and policy. Can we celebrate that?
Publishing as a Nobody.
This week I published the 12th peer-reviewed article of my 4 years at MECMC. Three papers a year feels like reasonable productivity for someone who is not required to publish at all and has little to no incentive to do so other than vanity. It is arguably a little bit harder for me to get papers into high profile journals because I don’t have an academic title. On the other hand, my discipline is esoteric enough in the medical field as to warrant little attention from such periodicals anyway.
And so I’ve done what I’ve always done in my career. Aim low. Of the 12 papers I’ve published (counting a book chapter), zero are in top tier journals. Three are in highly-regarded specialty journals, and the rest are in workhorse journals – they get read and cited, but you can’t make a storied academic career by publishing in those. They don’t get your name remembered.
My name will not be remembered. But I may have, quietly, helped improve hospital care at institutions that have never employed me, and that’s good. And I may have created jobs for practitioners of the kind of engineering I do, and that’s good. And I may have created a CV that will be well-received when I want to move on from where I am now. Papers can, at least, serve as tangible evidence that the projects I did worked. It makes me less reliant on recommendations.
But what’s satisfying about it for me is that I’m able to do things I think are important, and disseminate the lessons from them, without having had to compete constantly in the world of titled academics. I was able to create a space for myself that relieves me of the constant pressure of grant-writing while still being able to make a contribution. In the past 4 years, I’ve written about 70 pages of academic prose, and they’ve all been published (except for four grant applications totaling 9 pages – two funded for a gobsmacking total of $15,000). The average professor has written hundreds, and most in rejected grant applications.
While doing all that, I’ve succeeded in arranging for several student and first-time authors (including three of my bosses) to become authors. I’ve helped place one undergraduate mentee in medical school and another in a biomed PhD program. I’m very proud of all the academic work I’ve managed to do while it’s entirely outside of my job description.
And I’m also incredibly vain. And I feel the need to keep up with all my academic friends who are out there actually discovering things and making real scientific improvements. My field is using computer simulation to understand how hospitals (and some other systems) work, and how to improve them. How to design them better in the first place. It’s a useful field, but it’s by no means glamorous. I lunge at productivity so that I have a sense of belonging with people I mostly don’t really know, and who wouldn’t care if I didn’t. People who are better academics, smarter, and more diligent than I am.
I’ve always been a climber.
Bleargh.
Hopefully the disruption is over for now. I haven’t actually changed hosting sites yet, I just ended up screwing things up. But luckily I was able to get it all back. I think. For now. I’ll try again when I can muster more mental energy.
I’m tired and sore and exhausted. I am not performing particularly well at work, and I am not interested in fixing it. I’m becoming a bit slogged by my boss. She’s not very good at clarity. She knows it and works on it, but it still leaves me not knowing what she wants from me. I fall on the other side: without an extremely clear picture of what’s expected, I can feel adrift.
Training is going reasonably well. I was very pleased to run 4 miles at a 9 minute pace after a nearly 16 mile ride at 15 mph. I’m hoping to get my bike speed to 16 mph for the race, but that’s a tall order for a 56 mile ride. I’ll just have to see what I can do when the time comes.
Mostly I’m looking forward to a break. I want to take a lot of time off and rest. I really want to take a sabbatical of three months or something. Write a book or take on a different problem. Train harder and get some rest.
Infactorium 