Day 322: Stuck

Ever feel like you’re just going around in circles like a hamster in a wheel? I’ve been working on about a million different things and I just can’t seem to get them off my plate. The work just keeps going and it’s got me somewhat down. Maybe I just need a day off or something.

Between the pandemic and the protests I’ve just felt a bit overwhelmed and I think what I really need is a day off. Nothing I seem to do gets a project done. I don’t like that feeling, I survive because I don’t get stuck, it’s how I’ve made it this far. I mean it will pass I know this, you know this, we all know this.

Still while I’m in this moment I don’t feel like there is ever an end. If I could just get one of my million of projects done I would feel better I think. The pandemic makes a lot of that more difficult unfortunately so I’m left with this feeling.

In lieu of complaining more, why don’t I just list a few examples of things that never seem to end. That should be… fun? Why are you even reading this right now? I feel like this is probably the most boring post I’ve written in a while. Anyway let’s talk about the work I’ve got.

I’m first author on a journal paper that I’ve been writing and it never seems to end. I’m still trying to get it done and today I’m meeting with the senior author (the professor we’re collaborating with) to get another round of edits in. I just really want to get it finished!

I’ve also got a book chapter that I’m assisting with writing. That has been… long and I just want to get that done too. We wrote the chapter almost a year ago, but we just got it back with some suggestions for changes and we’ve been working on that. It will be two weeks minimum before that is done, so yet again stuck!

I’m anxious to get some data collected for my PhD dissertation proposal defense, but that seems to be going… slow. I don’t honestly know when we’re going to start and with the pandemic it’s hard because we do human experiments so it’s difficult all around.

I’ve also been working on an experiment we started at the beginning of the year. It’s not that the project has been going slow, it’s just that we keep needing to collect more data so it gets dragged on. We are (probably) still going to need a few more subjects worth of data so the experiment continues unfortunately.

So yeah, just a small segment of the work I’ve got going on that just won’t seem to end. Sometimes research isn’t very glamorous, but it’s what I’ve got going on now. Maybe we all feel stuck sometimes, so hopefully not a totally useless post. Anyway, it’s really got me down, but it’s temporary, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.