It’s that I just don’t care.

Once upon a time, deadlines motivated me, and the few days leading up to a big presentation would be filled with all-nighters, Cuban coffee, and amazing feats of productivity. Sadly, those days are gone, and as Pratt & Whitney and NASA prepare to visit Atlanta and wreak unholy wrath upon my posterior, I’ve kind of resolved myself to being made a fool, taking a verbal beating or three, burning what’s left of my shredded self-esteem in a bummed Camel, and moving on with my daily drudgery of tinkering with whatever machine in the lab is preparing to break next. I mean, what can they do, fire me? One way or another, I’ll have a defensible dissertation sometime this summer, and it wasn’t my crackpot idea to set a research review meeting this optimistically early; if you want to have results to share with the group on a five week deadline, you’re going to have to run a better lab than this.

This is not good.