Dissertation Avoidance Complex

Yep, I have this.  Today, I did very little in the way of writing my dissertation or doing research.  I just can’t do it.  My brain is mush.  I am burned out in a long term way…not like I used to get burned out from a rough semester, but in a more profound, neural pathway changing way.  What I did do today was print out calendars for the months December2009 to May2010 and visualize myself finishing.  Very productive, I know, but it was somewhat motivating.  I also had my 19 year old imaginary skinny-punk rock personal assistant print out a fresh copy of a chapter I need to edit and send out to my advisor.  It is sitting on my nicely organized desk for the morning.

I have to defend by April 26 to graduate in May2010, which means I need to have my dissertation completed by March 26 to give my committee time to read it…I think all but one of them will indeed read it, word for word.  I set the deadline of February 24 for myself, which gives me a month’s worth of fuck-up time.  Really, I have an additional 3 months of fuck-up time, because I am funded through August2010, but I need to finish this bitch so my serotonin can resume flowing freely.

Here’s my basic dissertation outline.  The colors represent the amount of panic the chapter in question is causing me.  They correspond with our country’s ingenious method of telling us how afraid we should be when we fly on airplanes.

Chapter 1 – Introduction – not yet written

Chapter 2 – Background – written, but not set out to my advisor yet

Chapter 3 – Passive Multi-Frequency High Resolution Imaging – written, pretty much finished

Chapter 4 – Active Multi-Frequency High Resolution Imaging – not written, but well researched

Chapter 5 – Two-dimensional Multi-Frequency High Resolution Imaging – not written, not well researched

Chapter 6 – Active Imaging using Retransmission – written, but not set out to my advisor yet

Chapter 7 – Conclusion

Also before my defense, I plan to submit two journal papers and at least one conference paper, all which will be right out of my dissertation.  If I can, I will also try to get another two journal papers out of my dissertation, but I’m not going to kill myself to get that done before my defense.

I get lots of work done at Starbucks for some reason, so I calculated some interesting things about Starbucks and my dissertation.

If I go to Starbucks every weekday for 4 hours while I am finishing my dissertation, I will spend about $250 and ingest approximately 10000 useless calories.  To put this in perspective, the money spent could feed a family of four meager meals for one month and if I didn’t modify my diet to account for the yummy, sugary drinks, I would gain 2.8 lbs.  Seems worth it to me if it meant that I finished.

FINISH THE BITCH!

Iodized salt and soy milk

Lately, I’ve been having some issues.

I am constantly cold.  Which usually isn’t that odd, because I’m always cold, but I’m talking ridiculously cold like I can’t get warm unless I take a burning hot shower…so cold my joints hurt.  My house is at 70 degrees, so it’s not like it’s cold in here.

I think I’m losing more hair.  It’s just ridiculous when I shampoo and style my hair how much hair ends up in our bathroom.  Good thing this only happens once a week.  It’s not like I’m balding or anything, but my hair overall looks thinner than it did a few years ago looking at old pictures.

Somedays I’m so tired, I can’t even stand it.  All I want to do is lay in bed, and sometimes I do.  Like Sunday, I was in bed all day long.

Some of this probably has to do with hating school and being unhappy and stressed out, but it has become more pronounced since we started our new diet.  One could just and say “you’ve gotta start eating more meat”, but I don’t think that’s the case.  I have done some research and found that my symptoms fit an underactive thyroid nearly perfectly.  It has been shown that soy inhibits the thyroid, as does black tea, two of my favorite things.  It makes sense that the symptoms would get worse upon starting the diet because my soymilk intake increase by about 1000% since starting it.  Also, an iodine deficiency causes thyroid issues.  I’ve known for a while that we get most of our iodine from iodized salt because our diets, even healthy ones, generally don’t provide enough of it, but I thought that all salts were iodized.  Turns out, they aren’t.  It also turns out that we’ve been using non-iodized salt for years.  Great.  Considering that we eat out less and eat way less processed food, there no way I’m getting enough iodine.

So I’m going to try using the iodized salt and cutting down on soymilk.  I’m also taking a mega-dose of biotin everyday to help get my hair growing again.

New foods

One could call me a picky eater.  There are many common things that I simply do not like.  This can make going to other people’s houses for dinner difficult.  I do not like fish or seafood, period.  Even the non-fishy things all taste like a mouthful of ocean water to me.  People shit into the ocean.  Also pretty much any raw vegetable I am not going to like.  A partial list of vegetables I will not eat raw: Carrots, tomatoes, broccoli, peppers, onions, mushrooms.  You can imagine I cringe when someone else makes me a salad or puts out a veggie plate for an appetizer.  Sometimes I will chew on a single raw carrot to be polite for 20 minutes much like my dog.  A partial list of vegetables I will not eat cooked: mushrooms, sweet potatoes, spinach (or any cooked leafy green), brussel sprouts, big squashes.  This is usually OK, because most cooked vegetables I actually really like, including most on my “do not like raw list”…except for the mushrooms.  People that like mushrooms, love mushrooms and want to adulterate everything with them.  I also do not like beans, especially when they are ground up into mush, which makes Mexican tough.  Hello tacos.  Also, not a big nut fan.  Honey roasted peanuts only please.  I never got people and their damn cashews and pistachios.  What an over-priced, over-hyped food.  The perfect way to ruin cookies or brownies is by putting nuts in them.  Gag me with a spoon, grandma.

However, as I am getting older, I’m finding that I wish that I liked all of these foods.  I feel like I am missing out on a lot of good things.

Since starting our new lifestyle, I’ve been forced to abandon my childish ways and try many foods that I never would have normally tried.  When you limit the amount of processed food you eat, you need to expand your horizons to keep you palette interested.

It turns out that I am starting to like (or can at least learning to tolerate) most foods that I thought I didn’t like.  Foremost are nuts.  Turns out I actually love almonds and walnuts…just plain or on a salad or in an appropriate dish where meat should have gone.  I still don’t want them ruining my brownies though.  I’ve also learned to eat radishes and sprouts on my salads.  While I don’t enjoy the taste of them individually very much, they give a nice texture to the salads I eat twice a day.  Plus they are really good for you.  I’ve even tried mushrooms on my salad – cut up into very small pieces and with the creepy gills removed, they can be quite delicious.  I actually prefer them raw.  Cooked they still gross me out, but even still, tonight we are trying grilled portobello mushrooms.  I am forcing myself to try them…well because I never have.  They are marinating and look absolutely delicious.  I hope I like them, because I kind of miss steak…and they are the steak of mushrooms.  I’ve also tried butternut squash, which was really good both in texture and taste.  I’ve sort of had to learn to like beans…they are a good source of protein for us non-meat eaters.  Plus they make you feel full for a while unlike vegetables.  I wouldn’t exactly eat them solo, but in soup or chili, they are actually pretty good.  Raw vegetables, still not a fan.  Sometimes I put raw tomatoes on my salad, but I chicken out everytime and put them on my husband’s salad when he’s not looking.  Maybe someday.

Day 3 – dinner!

For dinner we had a little watermelon and a half an orange.  Watermelon was the first thing I bit into.  It was so sweet and so delicious…I just wanted to keep chewing it.  The orange tasted quite tart, more tart than usually, which is good because I think my salivary glands forgot how to work…this got them going.

I weighed in at 1XX+2 and weighed out at 1XX-3.  That’s 5 pounds.  Holy crap.  I’ll probably gain most of it back, but it would be nice to keep it at 1XX!  My husband lost 6 lbs and wants to gain like 12 back.  Haha.

We may have some more later tonight…wait, we definitely will, unless I barf first.  Herbal tea is whistling!

Day 3 – breakfast time

I slept through the night without throwing up!  Yay!!!  I did feel a little bit sick right before heading to bed, but it went away.  I almost slept through the whole night, I woke up twice and just pet the kitty for a while…a real kitty you perv, her name is Maggie.

Last night we exchanged massages.  My body has actually been sore, especially my lower back.  I’m not sure if it’s the decreased activity and so much sitting or if this is what it feels like when your body cannibalizes itself.  It’s not that bad, but not really pleasant.  The massage definitely helped.

This morning, I feel pretty good…not hungry, but I am really looking forward to the watermelon tonight.  Today I will take it really easy, just rug making and some grading…and probably against my will, some football watching.  Yesterday, I was fairly active.  I vacuumed the whole house, which takes about 30 minutes and we took a 30 minute walk.

We also went to Whole Foods to get some food for Monday, since we have none.  It was a little bit like torture.  I’ve never really spent a significant amount of time in that store because I don’t have much desire to buy organic vegetables; however, they have some really great conventional food too.  They have a great selection of rices, grains, dried fruit and nuts, which are all cheaper than the grocery store we usually go to.  We have been mostly avoiding peanut butter since we started eating much healthier because of the hydrogenated oil and sugar they add to it, so we ground our own peanuts into peanut butter there.  I’m soooo excited to taste it.  It’s probably great!

Day 2 – lunchtime

Sooo, last night kind of sucked.  I went to sleep just fine around 11:30pm and slept until about 5 am, where I was awoken abruptly by a dream where I found out I was pregnant.  I felt my heart pounding in my chest when I woke up and felt like I was going to throw up.  My hands and feet were a little tingly.  I woke up my husband because I was freaking out, ran into the bathroom to throw up nothing.  I had nothing to throw up at all.  I drank some water while hanging out on the bathroom floor and felt much better and went back to bed.  An hour or so later, the same thing minus the pregnant dream happened, but I had some water to throw up now.  So I got up and walked around a little drinking some water.  I stayed up and felt OK for about another hour and threw up again.  After this I went back to bed and stayed there until 11am and haven’t throw up yet.  I feet generally OK, though my hands, ankles and knees are a little bit tingly sometimes.  I’m working on my area rug and watching some trash on TV.

Supposedly puking while fasting isn’t that uncommon.

Day 1

Today for breakfast I had some orange and pineapple, cream of wheat and a cup of herbal tea at 9 am.  This is my last meal until Sunday night, which will just basically be some watermelon.

It’s now 5 pm.  We just got back from running some errands and stocking up on movies.  We got three movies and I’m pretty excited about them.  One is Forgetting Sarah Marshall – it’s one I wouldn’t go to see in the theatre, but it’s probably pretty entertaining.  Another one is Secretary – it’s an older movie pretty much about a kinky BDSM relationship between a submissive secretary and her dominant boss.  The other movie is some Spanish/Math movie, Fermat something, which is really more up Derek’s alley, but it will be interesting I’m sure.

Around lunch today, I was feeling pretty hungry.  Hungry past the point of just stomach, it was in my head too.  This lasted for an hour or two during which my mom called and talked about food to me – she’s not cruel, she’s just starting the vegan eating like we’ve been doing she had some questions.  She’s been feeling worse starting eating vegan for three days than I’ve felt during the fast so far.  During errands I was feeling OK, not so much hungry and now I sort of just feel relaxed – all I want to do it sit on the couch kind of feeling.

I’ve realized that I go get food out of boredom a lot.  When I was doing some grading and thinking about research, I walked into the kitchen at least three times knowing that I can’t eat and just sort of looked around – there’s nothing except the watermelon.  Since I work from home, eating is very easy.  Since I hate my work, I get bored a lot.  Bad combo.  This is probably why when I waited tables I was at my smallest ever – even though I ate restaurant food a lot more, I didn’t have time to snack.

Right now if I could eat anything it would be: a banana, strawberry and pineapple salad with honey on top and some popcorn to go with the movies.

The fast

This weekend, my husband and I are fasting.  Friday breakfast will be our last meal of the weekend.  Sunday, “dinner” will be some watermelon.  Monday, back to vegan eating, but maybe a little lighter if our stomachs are upset.

Upon my husband getting a book a month ago titled “Fasting and Eating for Health,” we decided to give it a try.  This is our third week being “vegan”.  I put it in quotations because vegan is the best way to describe it, but we are not actually vegan.  We still eat meat and dairy, but not on a typical day…maybe once a week.

No, we are not insane.  No, we are not sadists.  No, we are not religious.  We are doing it for health.  The idea of the fast is to give you body time to rest totally.  When you are digesting food, your body is not at rest and may try to conserve energy by ignoring other less urgent processes.  Think about when you get really sick and food just sounds gross…it even tastes different.  Your body doesn’t want you to eat so that it can focus on beating the virus or bacteria.  We have been raised to believe that we have to eat 3 meals a day everyday, even when sick or not hungry…or we are going to die.  I remember this as a child, my parents would always force me to eat “to keep my strength up”.

The first time I was really sick as an adult was in college.  I was a freshman, so I lived in the dorm.  I was far to weak to get up to walk and get food, so I didn’t.  I just drank juice from the vending machine on my floor.  The next day, I felt absolutely fine.  I don’t get sick all that often, but the next time I got really sick (and my husband too) was right after our honeymoon.  We had the flu, bad.  I really thought that I might die.  I could only get out of bed to barf (my husband was lucky enough not to be barfing).  I didn’t eat for at least a day, maybe two, but at the end of the second day of being sick I thought “I have eat, or I am not going to be able to fight this”, so I made some soup.  This soup (Minestrone, my favorite) tasted like crap.  I could barely taste anything except for this terrible sewer-like taste.  I couldn’t even finish it.  It was the same with juice…I’m a scientist, I had to check to make sure it wasn’t just the soup being spoiled.  One more example before we learned our lesson was just recently when we were in Europe.  My husband was really sick towards the end.  Everything he ate basically went right through.  So what did he do?  He kept eating…and then again, right through.  After a few days of this, he stopped eating for maybe a day and we were so paranoid the next day, “he just had to eat something”…again, right through.  He didn’t get better until he stopped eating entirely and just drank a light electrolyte solution.  Only in retrospect do I realize the value of not eating when you are sick.

Mark my words: I will never force my children to eat when they are not hungry.

Anyway, I plan on doing nearly nothing for the entire weekend.  I have been feeling mentally exhausted also.  I plan on watching lots of movies, reading some books, working on my area rug and working on my flexibility.  There will be no research, no ballet (aside from the stretching), no running, no cooking, no cleaning.  It sounds awesome, and it will be guilt-free because I am not allowing myself to do anything.  I am really looking forward to it.

My weight as of this morning is 1XX+3.  I imagine that I will lose about 1.5 lbs of fat/muscle during the fast and who knows how many lbs of water.  I’m interested to see what it is.

Lunchtime activity

I hate useless clutter.  We have a fairly clutter free household save for school related items and a few sentimental things tucked away in the closets.  One of the biggest, most expensive useless clutters I have sitting around is my old laptop.  As a break from my work, I am attempting to make it work well enough to use as a computer for music in our arizona room.  It has startup issues – it starts up just fine sometimes, and other times, the screen is just black, the computer is on, but not booting up.  I’m updating all the software and drivers and cleaning out the crevices.  I am pretty sure there is something wrong with the wireless card because sometimes when it was my main computer when I would turn it on or off, the computer would just shut down.  Maybe I’ll just rip it out.  It’s a last ditch effort anyway.  Right now, it’s running beautifully with only one screw holding the whole thing together.  I’m afraid to turn it off again though.

Jbot2.0

We have rolled out a new model, Jbot2.0.  This new model includes:

• increased optimism in research capabilities
• new diet
• better skin
• pointework capabilities

Remaining complaints include:

• long, scraggly, desperately-needs-to-be-cut, over-bleached mixed with fading black hair
• nagging issues

We expect the hair problem to be resolved sometime in November as it requires a trip to Society Hill Philadelphia for specialized treatment.  The nagging problem is not fixable directly, as being anal is hardwired into the motherboard, but could be fixed environmentally by a maid installation or an upgrade of the current Husband mess-recognition software.

Anyway.  Today I feel good, maybe it’s all of the vegetables…

After a long, painful conversation with my advisor on the phone, being hammered about how horrible my writing style was and then re-reading my dissertation, I realized that my dissertation was indeed sounding rather pessimistic.  This is not surprising, because I have hated my research and life for quite some time.  I was just presenting results – I have about 90 pages of pure results not all that logically organized with nothing in between making it flow or sound like it’s a significant contribution.  So now what I am doing is pretty much re-writing the entire thing, but trying to tell a story – which is much more enjoyable than writing up results.  It’s more difficult though, especially because I don’t think my research is that great.  That conversation though may have just been the kick in the ass I needed to finish this bitch.

I love this new “diet”.  It’s great, and I feel like it’s sustainable.  It’s basically vegan 6 days a week (except I eat honey regularly and still wear leather shoes).  The other day, meat is allowed, which will likely coincide with the one day per week I can drink alcohol.  It’s also mostly a whole food diet (except I use olive oil (which is not a whole food)(p.s. I love nested parentheses, it really shows my command of the English language), vinegar and splenda so I don’t get cavities).  On day 5 of it, I feel really great.  Maybe it’s mental more than anything, but that’s OK for now.  And to think last Thursday I ate In-and-Out Burger…ha.  And it’s great because my husband and I are doing it together.  He’s pretty into it too.  It’s nice to do something like this together.

For some reason, a few months ago, my skin miraculously decided to be awesome.  I am zit-free right now for perhaps the first time in a few years.  I have been skipping washing my face in the morning.  I’ve just been rinsing it with water or using face lotion as cleanser, as weird as that sounds.  At night, I use facewash and then exfoliate with a stridex pad, but rinse it off afterward, then apply a mild benzoyl peroxide cream all over.  Whether it’s the sun here or the regimen, I don’t care, just keep the good skin coming.

I love that I got to start pointe at my studio.  It’s so exciting.  I’m not exactly dancing gracefully across the floor yet, but hopefully I will be soon.  I seem to have taken to it quite naturally and I have “good feet”.  This week I am actually taking a break from ballet altogether to rest my achilles tendons, which have been bugging me for about 2 months.  Starting pointe only made it worse.  I, and everyone else, heard a loud snap in class last Friday, which is never good.  If it doesn’t get better with this rest, I suppose I will have to go to the doctor.

I guess my point is that I feel like maybe I am finally starting to come out of my 2+ year funk a little bit.  Funks suck.  I actually feel like my brain is different than it was before.  Instantly, whenever I think about my research, I get depressed.  I can procrastinate like no other, have you seen my farm on Farmville?  or how clean the house is?  If it’s a bad research day, that depressed feeling will carry over into other things.  It has even gotten as bad as science and critical thinking generally leads directly to the depression center of my brain.  My enjoyment for crossword and other puzzles, riddles, random scientific facts and knowledge and just learning cool science for the heck of it has dwindled tremendously.  Doing something with my body is about the only solace I can get – hence the ballet, the gardening, the cleaning.

If I can finish my dissertation, take a break from research for a few months maybe even a year, know where I am going to live and get a job that is nothing like what I am doing now, I think I just may be OK with minimum permanent damage.