Closet full of collared shirts

Every Monday morning, my advisor stops by the lab and asks how my weekend was. I dread it. His seemingly innocent, if not downright nice, inquiry into my life only serves to make me feel like more of the workaholic loser that I am. The only difference between my weekends and my non-weekends is that I wear a t-shirt to work on weekends, rather than a button up collared shirt (hey, I can be wild and crazy!).

So, how to answer the dreaded question? Smile…say ‘good’…nod your head a few times…change the topic.

Lately I’ve been dreaming about work; writing a review paper, setting-up an experiment with my honour's student, and giving the same presentation over and over again. They aren’t stressful dreams, I’m not panicking and they aren’t nightmares, but I wake tired and disappointed that I didn’t get any of the work I was dreaming about done. What’s also frustrating is that it all came so easy in my dream. Last night the entire introduction to my paper was perfectly laid out in front of me, but reverted to that shapeless thought-bubble of an idea when I awoke.

It’s hard to describe the thought-bubble process. My ideas first come to me as shapes in my mind. I spend some time, turning them around, getting an idea of what shape they are, and which end might be up. I then go to the literature to find supporting ideas that best fit and fill-out this thought-bubble, but it’s like a giant 3-D jigsaw where not all ideas fit together, and not all ideas are supported or available in the literature. This is when I get most excited, when I can see how much empty space exists in the bubble, because empty space means ‘me’, it means innovation and my contribution to the topic.

But the thought-bubble process is also frustrating and sometimes embarrassing in those first painful stages. Sometimes I don’t even know what it is I’m thinking about yet. And when asked to bring these ideas to the table, literally, like at lab meetings and such, I have nothing to say, because I can hardly get up and describe my ideas through a series of mime-gestures.