Happy Holidays from your favorite grad student!

Nothing like a family Christmas (or five) to remind someone of how awkwardly introverted they are. Does being around other people tire you out? Need to be alone to recharge? You're an introvert. Imagine what an introvert feels like after five Christmases. After that, I start to wonder if I'm autistic. Things turn into "stop asking me about school, I'm not in college classes. I'm thrilled your so-and-so is in college too, mid-way through their second year of their bachelors. No, it is not just like this. Go the fuck away and let me exercise my OCD and clean things."



A grad student holiday travel diary, in seven (of nine) days.



December 20, dawn: Leave town to drive to family home for holiday
December 20, noon: Car dies in the middle of a blizzard. Spend most of day in very rural town, no food.
December 20, dinner: Drive back to where I left. Car will not drive whole distance to family home. Attempt two, tomorrow. Re-pack items. Open festive holiday beer. Abandon beer 30 minutes later.

December 21, dawn: B's car does not start.
December 21, mid-morning: Get on a fucking airplane. Fly first class, motherfuckers. Check all the bags for free. Forget about drowning self in free booze until airplane descent.

December 21, noon: Land, begin baking/cooking/cleaning/assembling children's toy gifts. Begin drinking heavily.

December 22, mid-day: Travel.
December 22, evening: Continue baking/cooking/cleaning. Booze begins to have no effect.

December 23, morning: Complete two hours of work. Finish reading journal articles (the only work accomplished the entire week).
December 23, mid-day: Stop cooking, begin cleaning/arranging/organizing.
December 23, evening: Email from co-worker, paraphrased to read as: "So I ran this assay that you've been working on and if you manipulate the data in this crazy way that doesn't make sense, it actually turns out like its supposed to. You should probably do that for the six months of data that you have and re-do the graphs, correlations, and analysis for all of it. Oh yeah, have a great holiday!"

December 24, noon: Travel. Continue cleaning/organizing. Start cooking again.
December 24, evening: Email from bossman: "We need to meet about your CV that I finally bothered to look at instead of throwing back at you. It is terrible."

December 25, midday: Travel, attend remaining Christmases (of 5). Clean up after two family Christmas dinners, continue organizing. Twitch. TwitchTwitch.
December 25, evening: Email from bossman: "Stop writing your thesis and work on this manuscript instead. (implied: You have no hope of defending in a timely manner anyway)"
December 25, evening: Second email from bossman: "We need to meet as soon as you're back. Happy holidays."

(Aside: December 26, morning: Go shopping with parent to purchase failed Christmas items. Come home with nothing. Parent comes home with two pair of shoes, five skirts, five turtlenecks, one sweater, and socks. Are you fucking kidding me?)

December 26, evening: Email from bossman: "I wrote a letter of reference for you. We need to meet about everything else you're submitting for fellowship X, its terrible."
December 26, evening: Second email from bossman: "Here are a bunch of edits you need to make on your thesis, I finally read the intro and the conclusion and the abstract for it. However, please abandon your thesis entirely and work on your manuscript."
December 26, evening: Text from B: "Family is having another Christmas on Saturday, please attend." Panic.


Please, for the love of fucking darwin, leave the grad student alone. Leave the introverted, slightly autistic, defending-shortly graduate student alone. Go away. GTFO. Let the graduate student sit down. Or sleep. And please stop pushing the grad student to wallow in the depression of writing a manuscript, a thesis, fixing all of the data ever, not having a job, and not having a place to live after March. No big deal. Go away.

Your data doesn't correlate? Design a crazy, irrelevant equation that makes it correlate!

Me: Well, this shows that A does not correlate with B or with C. There is no clear relationship. Therefore, the information given to us by parameter A does not realistically predict parameters B or C.

Bossman: Well, I want you to manipulate B and C into one value, and make it correlate with A. Try doing B/C or something. You might have to change the units. It might get complicated, but I want you to figure out how to combine B and C so that the resulting value correlates with A.

Me: *blink*