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Yeah, so this little corner of the hyperdimensional blogosphere has been relatively quiet this season, hasn't it? Since a handful of you actually check in here to see what I'm up to on a personal level, let's see if I can't eke out something substantive as I sit here supervising (can I stop saying stuff with s's now?) yet another mindnumbingly boring lab for challenged undergrads.

Hmm. Nothing's coming to me.

See, the problem is, writing in any form is a creative endeavor for me, and the creative process derives its energy from the joy and passion in my life. Lately, I am just plumb out of that. Blog? Eh. Bass guitar? Eh. Photography? Eh. I absolutely have to set fire to my shorts to do so much as update the Young Dems website after a long day of self-loathing in the most abysmal laboratory building ever. Scratching out a witty vignette about my social life is far beyond my mental capacity on any given afternoon these days. Yeah, yeah, I got that dog, and her whole purpose was to lift my spirits and re-energize my life and bla bla bla. The problem is, she's too good. She's very well behaved, so if I don't take her to the park for a couple days, she doesn't start bouncing off the walls and shredding the furniture. She's also unbelievably loving, and a dog can love a miserable, uninspired bastard on the couch just as much as she loves a motivated athletic owner. Top that off with the fact that we agree I have one of the most comfortable beds in town, neither of us are inclined to spring into action first thing in the morning. So the lethargy and apathy have returned to their position of dominance in my life.

Let's cut to the harsh reality: I'm about to wrap up my fifth year of graduate school, and I have navel lint to show for it. The first three years saw some experimental catastrophes and life plan re-evaluations, but they ended with an impressive enough data set, an aggressive thesis, and a new perspective on The Grand Plan. I rocked the PhD qualifiers the following Spring, and then…. Nothing happened. What's supposed to come next is A Great Idea, a Dissertation Proposal, and candidacy. Here it is, a year and a half later, and I haven't accomplished that leap. Not even close.

I blew the summer recovering my mental elasticity, running a little subcontract program, and starting to peruse the literature for a new research topic. Pratt & Whitney was flirting with our lab and sounded like they had lots of money lying around to fund several students across a spectrum of superalloy studies, so I started collecting literature on thermomechanical fatigue and smiled pretty at the meeting we had.

Not so much. Pratt barely came up with enough for two of our guys, forcing one of them into a lackluster thesis-free Master's of Engineering exeunt. I went back to class to flesh out my Internaional Affairs minor and kept daydreaming of potential research topics, assured by my advisor that surely something would come around in the next funding cycle. This part was important, you see, because while my NSF money would keep the roof over my head and food in my belly till May '05, without a funding customer, I had no actual STUFF to run TESTS on. The only crap I had handy was some leftover material from a GE-funded project never got 'round to testing in 2002. Nothin' like hand-me-downs! There were barely enough specimens left for a decent test program, and certainly nothing comprehensive, but when you work in a lab that brings in less funding than the crackwhore at the corner of Ponce and Charles Allen, you try to make do.

As Fall became Winter, another guy in a different part of Pratt rang us up and said he might like to work with us, so the scent of money got me to write up what I had so far into a nice little research proposal that I thought was right up his alley. The Russian reacted to it like a straight man who just got bought a drink at a gay bar, saying it looked like an interesting program but oh look is that the time oops I don't have any money for you kthxbye. Thus endeth 2004.

I did some more reading up on that proposal idea and continued to hate everything about engineering as the end of my paycheck loomed, with the advisor reassuring that the department takes care of its own. That was of course before the Republican takeover bankrupted the educational system and Tech eliminated all but the most crucial teaching assistantships. Thus it was very unfortunate that General Electric got in touch after a long silent spell, saying they had some funding to spend and would I please drop what I was doing to research and write up a totally different proposal topic; predictably enough, the money vaporized shortly after I reoriented my life to their whim and a couple more months were wasted, just as I had to beg the department for support after the NSF kicked out in May.

The support? Not there. No TA'ships for the summer, so it was pretty much “Fuck you, eat Ramen noodles and sleep at the library” for a few months while I boned up on my third research proposal and hated the entire universe, particularly the part in 30332. August brought me a rent-paying TA position, but the amount of time required babysitting nineteen year olds is a total and complete barrier to getting any research done in an efficient manner, not to mention the fact that I am NOT a design major and know little about how this class works. This is definitely the TA assignment they give to people they hope commit suicide — a risky gamble, I think, to take with researchers who are fully capable of fabricating weapons of minor destruction in their spare time. Every Friday, I would stare at my day planner and wonder where the hell another week went — another week turning over into another month, another two months, another three months that I was behind schedule for my proposal defense, and I still hadn't even had time to finish a computer model of the test, still hadn't finished reading up on the constitutive equations, still hadn't gotten trained on the electron microscopes. Each week I'd maybe have one minor writing accomplishment to report to my glorfied group therapy session, and the facilitators would lavish unjustified and unhelpful praise upon me for nudging the ball half a yard down the field with seconds to go in a losing game. “I really don't think you give yourself any credit for what you've accomplished,” some psych post-doc would coo at me, not realizing that their compliments were about as appropriate as patting a recovering alcoholic on the back for at least making it to the toilet before vomiting and passing out this time off the wagon. The bottom line was that I was still sitting on top of 18 months of wasted life with absolutely fuckall to show for it. I turned 30 in this hellhole and had no credible expectation of ever getting out with another degree. I often found myself thinking of the life I gave up in Phoenix, and coming to Tech became more and more the biggest regret of my life. I might still have been just a cog in the boring machine at Honeywell had I stayed, but I'd be a cog with a job and a house and friends he hung out with, a cog that occasionally delivered a tangible product and participated in some kind of larger vision, some kind of progress. Here, I'm just a shiftless punk in a t-shirt whose only contribution to society is entropy and late payment fees.

I used a lot of past tense verbs up there that might give the impression I'm suddenly all better, and life is coming up roses. I really don't think that's the case just yet. I still occasionally notice that 10 minutes have evaporated without me doing anything more than staring hopelessly at the wall, wondering where my life went wrong and how it could ever be right again, concentrating on the simple act of breathing. And then I pet the dog. She sidles up to me, leans against my leg, and heaves a massive sigh like she knows exactly how I feel. And then she gets bored and licks her crotch, but whatever, I know she cares.

Three weeks ago the advisor approached me with a broad smile, saying that his back-and-forth with Pratt of “We have some money” “Gimme some more” “No we just have this much” “But I want more” “Seriously Jack take it or leave it” ended with the very real prospect of my research getting funded next year. We'll just ignore for now the fact that this little victual only fell into my lap because the wonderful advisor failed in his effort to get enough funding for a whole new project with a whole new grad student (leaving me screwed and unfunded in his dust). At his command I whipped up a third research proposal over the weekend and we shot it off to Pratt in advance of a telecon that Friday. Hooray, right? Well, after not reading my proposal and making me explain the whole thing over the phone, our man at Pratt basically said, “Yeah, that's nice, but here's another idea: how about you do something completely different altogether?” Yeeeaaahhhhhh, I'm gonna hafta ask you to go ahead and change your whole research plan again, mmm-kay? Greeeaaaaat.

I'm not sure where the communication breakdown was (advisor? maybe? possibly?) that led the Pratt fellows not to realize I study nickel base superalloys at high temperature, not titanium alloys at low temperature under completely different mechanical loads, but it was a stunning blow, and I almost walked out for good. Then I remembered that my only alternative to actually completing this godforsaken PhD is joining al Qaeda, and I really can't quite grow the beard for that. So for better or worse, I'm learning about multiaxial loading and titanium really, really fast, and hoping against hope that this won't be my third gigantic anal de-funding fiasco. I won't trust anyone until I see the signed contract myself, though.

And that, my dear friends, is why I don't blog much these days.