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I have this problem with anticlimax.

Maybe it’s just a biological hangover that comes from two days of adrenaline, but I’m pretty sure it’s mostly psychological. I got the same way after weekend trips to the weddings of my college friends: I always hated the Sunday mornings. Friday night and Saturday were just non-stop upbeat fun, reuniting with old friends, making new memories, opening a new chapter of life for at least two of them (who knows what else happened in those hotels), and then…Sunday morning, there were the chance encounters at breakfast, hasty checkouts through clouds of hangover to catch a mid-day flight, rushed and unceremonious goodbyes, and plenty of invisible early departures that didn’t even garner a hug. Those Sunday let-downs always made me queasy and mopey.

Wandering around Charleston on Tuesday looking for a WiFi cafe and comparing my immediate past to my near-term future was little different, and that emotional concussion combined with trying to spool back up and remember what the hell it is I do here in my lab both contributed to the delay in this recap — and will surely mute the representation of what it was actually like.

A big part of the bummer has to come from the fact that I just flubbed it. Looking back on what the hell it was I actually accomplished with the trip, I have to say, not much. This was my first trip that I didn’t actually get to talk to Joe Biden, although more quality time with some of the staff was nice; I didn’t have either the time or the chutzpah to acquire the kind of celebrity video footage I might have hoped for; and I certainly didn’t get noticed by anyone in particular, despite what I thought was a pretty novel mobile-streaming addition to an already webbed-out event. I probably would have come to this conclusion on my own, but it was hastened by the fact that immediately upon waking — facing an ordinary Tuesday as once again a mere mortal, in a strange hotel room, with a bit of a hangover, TV beaming the face of a much more celebrate political vlogger right back in my nameless mug — a Twitter tweet thrust me toward a lackluster explanation of my general failure as citizen-journalist (though I was apparently supposed to read it as a compliment rather than coming out with guns blazing as I did).

But hey, I did get to see the inside of a spin room, interview two major CNN anchors, get more footage of my candidate, meet some awesome Charlestonians, and drink a few beers on Google’s tab. Not bad for a road trip.

Sunday night, my friend Sarah gave me the nickel tour of her favorite drinking establishments: a quality Irish pub in North Chucktown, Madra Rua, and a total dive-bar by the Citadel named Moe’s Crosstown Tavern. I talked a little shop with guys from the Biden campaign there before enjoying an Irish Car Bomb at a Polish bar and turning in for the night.

And right there might have been the crux of my dilemma: I think I fumbled the job of citizen journalism because I was always also trying to think like a Biden volunteer. Sunday night we divvied up who would be where videotaping what, and keeping a campaign itinerary in mind significantly hampered my ability to be an equal-opportunity in-your-face smartass with a camcorder. Once the debate was over I had one eye ever on the door waiting for Biden to come in so I never coughed up the chutzpah to go talk to the tall redhead we both apparently like best about Kucinich. I wasn’t interested enough in the “top tier” candidates’ focus-grouped positions to muscle my way through crowds just to hear from their surrogates. And I didn’t have time to wait for Chris Dodd. Conversely, all weekend I had one eye looking for generally applicable and amusing footage, and thus wasn’t focused enough to go up to the people we encountered and ask them what they thought of my guy. I tried to have it both ways, and shined at neither. Alas.

Outside the spin room, during the debate itself, the press hall was a rather dull experience. I sent an email out to a number of vloggers that I thought might be in attendance to see if they wanted to join me on live-stream for a little running color commentary, but I only heard back from James Kotecki, who could only reply vaguely and apologetically that he had no idea where he’d be or what he’d be doing — which I now know was the result of a gag order from YouTube to keep their importation of a handful of “top tier” political YouTubers a surprise. All those kids spent their time in the debate itself and not lingering in the press hall, and the other bloggers in the Yellow Room with me were pretty much quietly tapping away on their laptops, quite uninterested in any snark from the Peanut Gallery. (Oddly enough it was the Republican sitting next to me and the as-yet-unidentified older guy with big hair behidn me who were most inclined to contribute anything to the webcam.) I’m wholly unsurprised at this point by the lack of any reply from Jeff Jarvis, who doesn’t seem to feel the same need to engage in dialog that he expects from presidential candidates; and I don’t know what happened to the guy from TechPresident who never claimed his seat.

I was largely too busy writing, keeping up with the chat room, or tweaking the video feed settings to pay close attention to the debate, but I was generally unimpressed with the new format. It seemed like the same ol’ same ol’, just asked by a few plebeians who had been allowed into the Citadel by CNN’s big screen. The lukewarm response in my media room suggested the same general impression. And plenty of other bloggers have already pontificated on the subject, so I’ll leave it at that: color me unimpressed.

The evening’s campaign activities weren’t quite as fun as the daytime ones: Biden gave a very short (I mean shorter than some of his debate answers) speech for the firefighters’ benefit at the SCDP party on campus, and then we rushed over to the Courtyard by Marriott for a campaign after-party. That was basically face-time and signatures for the South Carolina volunteers, prefaced with stump speech material that I have already learned by heart because I like the guy for a reason: I know what he stands for and I like it. It wasn’t too long there before my unaffiliated citizen journalist side began to rear its head again and tap its imaginary wristwatch to remind me to get a-movin’ to the Google party downtown.

By contrast, Monday morning had a thoroughly informative press conference in a park complete with gigantic million-dollar Tonka toys — the new MRAP vehicles Biden has been pushing for — and some flesh-pressing with higher-up campaign staffers that I hope will be able to help me with a Biden event for the Young Dems of Atlanta. Then there was a trolley-ride through town to my favorite kind of destination — a pub — for some schmoozing with local IBEW types. I felt compelled to patronize the establishment for their troubles as they were swarmed with media of all types, and I barely had time to swill most of my Guinness before we walked up the street to another park for a lemon ice. I was walking backwards filming the Biden entourage when I realized that there was some more hubbub behind me, because lo! and behold, John Edwards wanted some photos at that particlar fountain, too. The two campaigns stayed on opposite sides of the fountain for a while, with the Biden side being louder and much more decorated (I think Edwards blew his sign load on the absolute carpet bombing of a park in front of the Citadel the afternoon before), before two rivals shook hands in advance of the competition.

The next few hours before game time were just a blur of schedule coordination, ticket pickup, wristband re-engineering, and shopping for liquor and flowers; not too much to recount there. And the Google-hosted after-party, well, that’ll earn its own video post later, I suppose.

So yeah, that’s that. And I’ve noticed lately that apparently some bloggers actually get financial support to go and bring back tribal knowledge for the community, so if you liked watching the webcam’s live-stream from the spin room (or its archived recording), feel free to put something in the tip jar to offset the kind of gas and hotel money an unemployed graduate student ain’t got lying around; I am happy, of course, to teach you what I learned about pulling such things off technologically. I know the audio quality left something to be desired — I had the levels set way too high so the general cacophony of the spin room created significant distortion in the sound — but that’s one of the lessons learned from this experimental endeavor. And frankly, there were enough of you watching who knew how to hail by via text message as I frequently requested, but no one let me know (complaining the next morning is easier), so you get out what you put in. Support blog research, and I will come share the brains!

Goodnight, Charleston. I hope to see you again soon.

My sister graduated from NYU’s drama program just as I was embarking upon middle school, that magical step in learning in which you actually get to pick a couple elective classes all by yourself. I thought my sister and the whole notion of theater were both pretty nifty, so I kicked off fifth grade with Drama 1 and some really cheesy pantomime routines.

Four years and several productions later, I moved on. I changed schools and decided to mix things up a bit by switching from theater geek to cross-country geek. For a while I had given serious thought to pursuing theater in a much more substantial way, but I had also been strongly urged to consider future academic pursuits that would lead to a “real job.” Acting was a fine extracurricular activity, but being a grown-up apparently involved working 9 to 5 and earning a salary, and this would require a degree that involved numbers or something. Well, good thing I thought airplanes were pretty nifty, too, and I wasn’t too shabby with the maths, so I became a fledgling rocket scientist. Along the way I did one more play and spent a few years playing bass in a funk band in college, just to reassure myself that one could be an engineer in real life and a stage whore on the side.

Several years later still, I was in my third or fourth year of graduate school, doing more of them maths and crap, and generally hating life. My disaffection with engineering — or research anyway — took its toll on my passion for just about anything and was it painfully apparent to my family when I went home for Christmas. Late one night, my mother asked me a very silly question: “If you could do anything you wanted, now, what would make you happy?”

I call it a silly question because I considered myself well beyond the reach of any such contemplation. It was too late for such flights of fancy; I was pushing 30, I had invested a quarter of my life into becoming an engineer, and I was well-programmed into the Real Job 9-to-5 paradigm. I had also succumbed to delusions of — well, not grandeur, but at least importance. Or relevance, anyway. In this post 9/11 world I figured I could theoretically put my geek skills to good use someday in a way that might make this country safer; I can figure things out about rockets and submarines and energy supplies if I have to, and I can ’splain ‘em to people who make decisions. Even if I still wanted to get back to the joy I feel on stage, how the hell could I walk away from this responsibility to society that I’ve manufactured for myself? To do what, be on stage again for a living? Even if I made to the silver screen and took home an Oscar, what would that accomplish besides getting millions of schmucks to pay $5 for a bucket of popcorn?

So this week I’ve been struggling with the whole what-the-hell-do-I-do-next issue, combing the internets for jobs and spending far, far too much time trying to craft the language for business cards to hand out at conferences. I can’t quite figure out where to look for the right job because I’m not entirely clear what that job is; I can’t decide on the exact phrases to put on a card because I’m not sure who I’d be giving them to or what I want them to think when they see it. I don’t want to do engineering anymore, but I don’t want to ignore the fact that I am an engineer. I want to get into politics, but I don’t want to really be in politics. And I’m certainly not about to lend any credibility to the capricious notion of getting back into the creative arts, even though I compulsively dump much of my spare time and money into blogging, podcasting, video production, and even good old music on occasion. What the hell purpose on earth am I trying to serve?

And last night, while I was trying to explain this all to a friend of mine on four pints of beer and a bag of peanuts, I think I discerned the origin of my identity confusion: I’m not really an engineer, I’ve only been acting the part of one this whole time.

Now I just need to figure out what the hell to do with that idea, because this show has definitely jumped the shark.

A couple of months ago, you may recall, I left work early and holed up at a bar to have a little pity-party for myself when I discovered that my dream post-doc fellowship was out of reach. Surprisingly enough, the intense binge of pathos did the trick, and the next day I felt pretty good about life and my future again; I had gotten all the woe-is-me out of my system in one fell swoop, and taking advantage of the bar’s free WiFi I managed to find a number of other rather interesting post-graduate opportunities that I might look forward to. The world was once again my oyster, even though I’m really not a big fan of oysters. Why anyone wants to do a shot of snot covered in hot sauce that someone found on the ground by the shore is still a mystery to me.

A few days later, however, the back of my brain finished chewing on something that it had picked up in my peripheral vision and brought it to the attention of the rest of my consciousness:

Q: Do I have to have PhD to apply for a AAAS Fellowship?
No. If you have a master’s degree in any field of engineering with a minimum of three years post-graduate professional experience you may apply for a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship.

Huh. Isn’t that interesting. I happen to have three and a half years of post-graduate professional experience and a master’s degree (it’s true, I looked it up, the dictionary says post-graduate means “relating to a course of study undertaken after completing a first degree,” and my first degree was my BSAE, damnit). Maybe I could get in on a loophole….

And then I promptly procrastinated. It took a good two or three weeks before I resolved to sit down again and tackle the AAAS application. But just to be sure I wasn’t going to waste my recommenders’ time, I wanted to verify that my interpretation of “post-graduate experience” was the same as that of the AAAS. I called their office and asked to speak with someone about fellowship requirements.

Eight minutes of back-and-forth later, the receptionist finally had a solid grip on what I was asking. (”So, you’re just now finishing your master’s degree?” No, I got my master’s three years ago, but I’m still finishing my PhD. “But do you have three years experience?” Yes, I did that before I came back to school. “And what was your degree in before that?” I had a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering. “How long did you say you worked?” Three and a half years, in the aerospace industry. “And you have a master’s in engineering?” JESUS YES, URGH.) She put me on hold for a few minutes while she went to recount the convoluted version of my rather simple professional history to someone who could actually make the call.

And then, a little voice in my head said, Oh, come on, just come back on the line and tell me no go already.

Asssphinctersezwhut?

The little voice was not at all interested in a “happy ending.” It was not saying please oh please tell me I can still get in gimme a chance c’mon please lemme apply. It wanted confirmation that that door was good and shut and there was no use trying to pry it open again lest I lose a finger or two in the process. The little negative voice got what it wanted, in the end: their take on “post-graduate” is “post-graduate-degree.” No soup for me. Hooray!

Huh? What the hell is that all about?

In my Dissertation Writers’ “No This Is Not Therapy” Group, we frequently talk about the sources of procrastination, both in the proximal (internet, TV, beer) and the psychological (parental expectations, prodigal siblings, impostor syndrome) sense, and this please-don’t-hire-me phenomenon definitely provided some good food for thought in the latter category. As we sit around the table and complain about our lives [sic], most of us say things periodically like “I just want to get out of here” and “I can’t wait till I’m finished.” But then when push comes to shove, most of us could be doing a lot more to actually achieve that goal, namely by sitting down and churning out pages and saying enough is enough with the literature review already. Obviously, we don’t want out that bad.

Is that what the little voice was? Fear of the Real World? As crappy as thinking about crack, doing math, and fighting with broken machines for $16K a year is, it’s the only life I’ve known for six years. I can sleep late when I want to, wear jeans to work, be mean to undergrads on occasion, and blog from the office without fear of being Dooced. Hell, I even have a certain amount of street cred around this lab simply by virtue of having been around longer than damn near everyone else. I know things. I’m good at stuff. And if I don’t know stuff or ain’t good at stuff, who gives a crap? It’s not like life or death hinges on my stupid freaking crack growth model; 98% of the things we do here seem to get filed away under Black Hole and never read again, and probably for good reason. This is like the Pirates of the Caribbean Disney World ride of engineering: there’s lots of things going on and some of it is kinda scary, but really, there’s nothing in those blunderbusses.

If I finish, then I actually have to, like, find a job, dress like a grown-up, show up bright and early with my face all shaved, report to people who can fire me or worse, and do things that might make a serious impact on people’s lives. Egad.

Maybe it wasn’t all that dire. Maybe it was just that I don’t like going back on Big Decisions and Resolutions. I had already had my pity-party, drank my beer, thought of a number of alternatives, and gotten over it. I woke up the next morning feeling so fresh and so clean clean, ready to move ahead with my alternate future. I had Decided it was not the end of the world, and I had Resolved to eagerly apply to a whole host of other opportunities. “You’re dead to me,” I said to the AAAS in my best jilted Jewish mother voice! I had Moved On. But no, the AAAS had to rear its ugly head again and tease me with a very slim possibility that I might could try again. Problem was, if just being told I couldn’t apply hurt bad enough to warrant a PBR-laden pity-party, why would I want to go through the even less likely to succeed application, when the rejection would surely sting far more than not even being able to apply? I’m over you, damnit, stop calling here!

It probably doesn’t help that after almost two decades of always succeeding at anything I’ve really tried to do — get straight A’s, get the part in the play, win cross-country championships, get into college, get awards, get a good job, get a great fellowship — my first taste of flat-on-your-face failure was a doozy. It wasn’t just the “thank you, we’ll keep your resume on file” form letter, it was being psychoanalyzed, poked and prodded, and then strapped in a chair in a small room and derided for two days rejection. I’m not sure I’ve really “put myself out there” for anything risky and rewarding ever since. Jesus.

Maybe I gotta find one o’ them “Yes this IS therapy” dissertation writers’ groups.

My advisor just forwarded us all an obituary published (of all places) in Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures. His preface to the two-and-a-half page PDF attachment included the following sage advice:

As many of you are looking ahead at your life, think of how full a life is possible if you “go for it”. [sic]

Man, if he thinks a day goes by where I don’t contemplate my obituary, he’s sorely mistaken. But now on top of that morbid daily moment will be added the fear that my obituary will end up someplace like Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures, and that the “fullness” of my life will be measured in a laboratory.

Speaking of group, uh, not-therapy, another recurring theme among my fellow writers is the fact that, while a truism for a reason, it is quite difficult embrace the fact that “the only good dissertation is a done dissertation.” A corollary to that tells us that procrastination can actually be a symptom of perfectionism. If that’s the case, I’m obviously a bigger perfectionist than the OCD detective Monk on TV, because boy do I knows me some procrastinatin’. And that’s probably why the Young Dems of Atlanta don’t have a new website yet.

I kind of walked into this job unawares, goaded for some unknown reason to run for Communications Chair even though there was already some girl interested in the job, and if history has shown anything it’s that Young Dems aren’t really into contested elections. She was more of a web design specialist, though, and the theory was that she and I could be co-chairs for Communications, with her handling the website and email lists and me dealing with press and publicity. And then, for some other unknown reason, she dropped out of the group and I inherited my uncontested position, complete with responsibilities I was only marginally qualified for. Sure, I’ve been blogging since before I knew we were called bloggers (roughly 1995, though the hiatus from 1997-99 makes that an optimistic anniversary), but you remember what my website used to look like, with its non-W3C-compliant claptrap strewn about and overabundance of bgcolor=#0000ff. I’m clearly no expert.

Considering I was already in college when the internet really came of age, I’m willing to forgive myself. What is more astonishing, some thirteen years later (arbitrarily defining the birth of the modern internet as the release of the Mosaic browser), is just how many young people are still so absolutely lost on the world wide web. In the political sphere, I think this unabashed lack of computer skills is tantamount to suicide, but as I look around at the comatose state of my committee and the very shallow bench from whence I might draw a net-capable successor (a low bar, considering how rudimentary even my skills still are), I just don’t see it getting any better. I have to wonder, is it like this with the Republicans? Is it like this everywhere? Or maybe it’s just Georgia, the 49th or 50th state in the union in the brains arena according to some studies. Who knows.

Anyway, I continue to hold a hand-carved HTML website together with duct tape as I investigate the seemingly endless options for a new, glitzier, more functional and (most importantly to the Communications Chair) easier to update website system, a project I’ve managed to draw out for over half of my tenure so far. This blog of mine is now Wordpress largely because I spent considerable time and effort looking into how to coax Wordpress into behaving like a full-fledged CMS for a group with several hundred visitors and at least two or three levels of contributors. Its use of open source PHP code and the popular MySQL database are terribly attractive, a feature shared by Drupal and the related CivicSpace, which currently have my attention and keep me up late at night trying to master their modules and style templates. It’s proving to be far more work than I expected, much to the detriment of my sleep patterns and social life, but as methods of procrastinating the dissertation go, it’s outstanding, and I think I’m actually enhancing my career skills in the process.

What all this tedious web jargon has to do with perfectionism and procrastination is that I could have had a new, slightly glitzy looking, and adequately functional website launched and running months ago if I had only gone along with the crowd and, like our parent state chapter and many other county chapters, bought a spam-in-a-can website from a local progressive and county party post seat holder. These prefab websites are sold as being tailor-made for political groups and candidates, with their integrated contributions modules, pretty mass mailings, and RSVP events module.

Unfortunately, it also caters to the web-tarded, though maybe not as web-tarded as anyone who might hoist a power adapter cord into the air asking “Do I use this?” to connect to the wireless internet (true story). Upon logging into the control panel, anyone who knows their way around an FTP program will immediately freeze in horror, making that same face that my dog my made every time I bandaged her cut feet and wrapped them in sandwich bags and medical tape (”How the hell am I supposed to walk in these, you schmuck?” is precisely what the face said). To administer something as important as your Latest News posts (which are like a particular category blog entries but with less control over how and where they show up), you have to go to a menu item called “extra page goodies.” If you don’t find that pedantic and insulting, by all means, buy a site for yourself. There’s no other way to access the back end of the site and upload your own pages — you can pick from about a dozen preconfigured pages and slap them up from the control panel, that’s about it. There are about as many site “themes” as well, which is why every YD chapter site looks largely the same, and no apparently way to do any of your own styling without personally harassing the site host — something my officers tell me is no big deal since she’s a friend of ours, but it just shouldn’t have to come to that in the first place. For all the ease and convenience built into a ColdFusion-based site that doesn’t cooperate well with Macs in general and either platform’s Firefox browser in particular (yes, it is best suited for IE on Windows, cough hack puke), you get a whopping 20MB of server space and 100MB/month of bandwidth. (For those of you bad at math, that’s not enough room to store two episodes of our podcast, and ten subscribers would break the bank in downloads.) Such roomy accomodation comes at $99/year, whereas $60/year is currently buying us 400MB of server space and 10GB/mo of bandwidth. But hey, less is more, isn’t it?

While the neophytes may think this is just the coolest web system since sliced rocks, I’ve desperately been trying to figure out another way to combine functionality, ease of use, and non-scariness-for-newbies at a minimum cost. This isn’t exactly something that can happen overnight, particularly given the lack of web designers at my disposal and the fact that I have this little dissertation thingy to occupy my days. I believe in my heart that it would be a disservice to an organization I want to succeed to let them settle for the spam-in-a-can site, but I am nonetheless being admonished to “shit or get off the pot,” even though the current duct-tape based site is operating just fine.

In short: it’s time for me to accept the fact that I cannot achieve perfection within the finite time alotted, and to kill myself trying to achieve the impossible is downright silly when mediocrity will meet the minimum standards and free me of my obligations.

Sound like something a dissertation writer ought to repeat to himself every blasted morning? Yeah. Seriously. It’s not something that comes easily to me at all, either. In the past week I’ve flip-flopped a dozen times between “Screw ‘em, I’ll build them their crappy prefab website and let them deal with the gaping security holes and lack of expandability after I’m gone” to “Screw ‘em, they can just wait till I’m good and ready to launch a website that can actually grow with the organization” (assuming, of course, the organization continues to grow and branch out rather than implode). Going with the can of spam would take a huge load off my shoulders and give me more time for the finer things in life, like sleeping, and God would it be nice to just be done with it (a sentiment I’m sure I share with the other officers who don’t know what they’re wishing for). But then, I’d have to have my fingerprints on it. Spam in a can would be the legacy I leave behind. I’ve already got one really crappy master’s thesis out there with my name on it, and I’m sure to publish some seriously questionable models on the effects of shear loading in mixed-mode crack propagation in 2007. It’s really hard for me to relinquish the one project in my life I feel like I actually have some control over, one place where I feel like I might actually be able to excel, even if it only ends up being like screaming on the moon.

Ah well. Screw ‘em.