I’m trying not to be paranoid, but I think the universe is trying to tell me something. It started over a year ago, when I had my last real vacation. It was Christmas break, and Jodi and I did our usual family-to-family cross-continental hop. That’s tiring, with driving and flying, but it’s always a pleasure to see everybody possible in both families.
The intervening year, 2007, was a difficult one. I won’t review the highlights, but it was rough on both a personal and professional level. As the summer had approached, I was looking forward to taking a week in August to catch my breath and spend lots of time with Jodi. However, my job change in July made asking for an immediate vacation a little impolite, so I put off my vacation plans to Christmas 2007.
Well, as we all know that was anything but a vacation. Congress canceled Christmas, BaBar went from making B mesons to making Upsilon mesons, and I dug into the full experience of a rapidly adapting experiment. Exhilarating, yes, but also exhausting – without any mental breaks of more than a day, maybe two, and tons of stress packed in between, I’ve found myself in a state of constant fatigue. I’m having a harder and harder time doing my research.
Add to that this week’s lobbying trip to Washington, and I’m wearing down. I just need to survive this week, and then I can spend a few days with my family in Connecticut. It will be the reward for carrying the message of the physical sciences to Congress one more time (this time with emphasis on the process of actually appropriating money for the physical sciences). But this weekend will be far from a real break. It’s a 6 hour drive from the Baltimore area, where I’ll be on Friday, to home. That leaves me a day and a half to rest and enjoy the company of my family, before returning to California.
Jodi and I have been planning, since Christmas, another vacation. Just a short one – a week – but originally, we planned it for March. This was for two reasons. It was after the end of the Babar run (March 1), and before the ramp up to the summer conferences. Of course, now BaBar is running through April 6, but we’d already spent money on our plans. Sigh.
Add to all of this the fact that our vacation was put in jeopardy on Thursday. The center of the whole vacation was a sleeper train trip to Seattle, a 24 ride in total peace and comfort from Oakland to Seattle. As of Thursday, a landslide closed down the train route and suddenly my sleeper car on a train turned into a shitty bus ride to Portland followed by a normal train to Seattle. BLAH BLAH BLAH.
I was livid. Was the universe trying to tell me something? Do I risk missing some super-important moment of discovery the week I decide to rest? Must I constantly sacrifice my personal life and my mental health for physics? Well, the cosmos appears to have something like this in mind.
Jodi and I regrouped. We canceled all our original vacation plans, and simplified. We’re retreating to a familiar location a little closer to home, but far from the wants and needs of everybody at SLAC. It will be enough, a few days of peace by the sea. That’s enough to get my mental batteries back up to capacity.
Cosmic conspiracy? Let’s see what great things I miss while recharging. No doubt, something will go wrong, and somebody will curse the fact that I’m away for a few days. But we all have to realize that if we are fatigued, we are useless to each other. Don’t each of us deserve the professional respect of a few days’ unpaid peace away from our chosen professions?
