Well, this probably is the worst year on record. Sigh. It had such potential. Last November, I was optimistic that I’d be done with my search for invisible decays of the Upsilon, I’d have at least one other publication in addition from another rare decay search, and that by now I’d have a third paper out in the community and I’d be getting ready for vacation. Life has a funny way of intervening in one’s outlook. Belle, the competitor experiment to my own, did their own search for invisible decays of the Upsilon and literally crushed my approach before it even saw the light of day in a journal. The other papers have been delayed by a thousand reasons, all small but all additive. This summer was a real beast, with the rush to conference that fell short, the hope of other projects coming to fruition dashed, and the coupe de grace: my mother’s heart attack last week.
The good news in all of this is that my mother is fine. Thursday night and Friday were a real crash course in modern healthcare. My mother’s heart, choked for oxygen by a blood clot that formed after a plaque broke free from an arterial wall, started to go into the stages of a heart attack on Thursday. That night, I got the news from my father. By then, she’d already been through a successful surgery to remove the blockage, install a stint, and check for other damage. As of yesterday, she was released from the hospital and as of today she’s up and about, making meals and working on music. She sounds great, and I should feel great. But I don’t.
Today, I had my second profound meltdown of the summer. The first one was about three weeks ago. Standing in front of a whiteboard, explaining to a student the two reasons why one of my research projects was at a stand-still, I suddenly felt overwhelming panic. The accumulation of lost sleep, skipped meals, stress hormones, and artificial deadlines converged and wiped me out. I insisted on going outside to play frisbee, anything to take my mind off the stress. After the game, the same panic overcame me. I put a stop to my work that weekend (yes . . . that **weekend**) and went home, determined to rest and skip the conference deadline.
Today, I found myself at work yet again doing a job I volunteered for, regrettably, but am not normally responsible for. My own fault, but I found myself so angry about all the work that has piled up on me that I lost it. I couldn’t even talk for over an hour, I was so frustrated and angry. I suppose this is normal – the stresses of life and work do this. I always let them get to me (usually because I mix them). I squandered three-quarters of my weekend on work, work that I should have not even agreed to do in the first place.
Time for a second rule [1]:
- Do not accept time-sensitive work after Wednesday. There is little chance you’ll get it done, and if you have a guilt complex like me you’ll likely waste a perfectly good weekend doing it. Refuse to accept the work, unless the deadline well into the next week.
