Last week, I wrote about a relationship which ended in a somewhat disappointing way, but I did not know the half of the situation. It turns out to be worse, yet more ironic, than I could have expected.
During the intial few weeks, he made strong declarations of interest, even saying that he hoped that I turned down the postdoc abroad; I felt a bit bad that I didn't reciprocate his strong initial interest, but I did get caught up in it and took his apparent assumption that this would continue as an indication that I could stop looking for signals. Then a few conferences, Thanksgiving, and the end of his semester; although he works nearly full-time during his PhD program, we saw each other in the short periods between travels and it seemed as normal as possible. During our separations, I spent time with four (!) men whom I would have otherwise dated (one of which was Gene), but I decided to be loyal to this guy so I mentioned with each that I was seeing someone and acted accordingly.
His prior relationship had ended 10 months earlier, traumatically: a long-distance relationship with a woman from the middle of nowhere whom he met while traveling; after her move to this city, he joined her, sacrificing his social life and PhD program acceptance, in reward for which she didn't have sex with him for the last year of their relationship. (And somehow it took him a year to break up with her!) The online profile that I responded to was his first venture in dating, he said. I made a joke about how I must be the rebound; he blanched and said more seriously than I'd ever seen him, "Oh, no. Definitely not." He was extremely good-looking (I thought), but did not have much dating experience, no sexual experience outside of relationships, wasn't at all sexually active for most of college, and hadn't had sex until his mid-20's.
Now, fast-forward to just before Christmas. I was at a job interview. He had no home phone; had "lost his phone" the previous week, right before leaving for a conference; and (this is where I should have been suspicious) did not show up on Skype (which he used to be on all the time b/c a family member lives abroad), so the only contact we had for over a week was by email. We had an exchange about weekend plans which turned into breaking up. The last time we spoke on the phone, we had planned to spend the weekend before Christmas together before going back to our respective families. A friend had asked me if she could stay with me that weekend. I wanted to verify that it was the weekend before Xmas and not the weekend after that we would spend together. He replied that if my friend was still available, he would love to meet her and he could have us both to dinner. I said that if he wanted to transition to being friends, I would prefer if he said something directly.
He took a "it's not you; it's me." approach: I'm everything he ever wanted in a partner, but he's just not ready for a relationship, and he truly hopes that we can be friends; at the time that seemed plausible given his neglectful and maybe abusive previous relationship, and (okay, I'm naive) because he said halfway through the email that this seems so trite, but it really is true. I replied to this email completely earnestly, buying the story that he wasn't ready for a relationship because of his past relationship, apologizing if I did anything to make him uncomfortable (since he is a pretty sensitive guy, the sort who cries randomly), and telling him about the people that I was in date-like situations with where nothing happened but I felt guilty and might have over-compensated for.
Now, the new part:
Less than a week after sending this email, I noticed on facebook that he's "in a relationship." I could not resist looking at his facebook profile. He and a girl whose name was both very unusual and sounded familiar had been leaving each other messages on their facebook walls about how cute the other was (who does this on their facebook walls?), and one of her messages even said "you're addictive too." (he recycles his lines!)
Her name was unusual, and I remembered seeing it on facebook in the fall when I was looking at the list of his friends right after we first met. Her name was long, a bit unwieldy to pronounce and when I saw it, I sounded it out a few times and wondered where it could be from, and if it was Moonbazi (not the real name of the language, but the world is too small.) The Moonbazi population is relatively large, but so concentrated that if you meet a Moonbazi, you can always ask if they are from city A or suburb B; most are from one of them, but even if they are not, half their family lives there and most are a little surprised that you know the name of the suburb. I once lived in city A, and a long-term ex-boyfriend lived near suburb B, but she was the first person I'd seen in this city, so her name stuck in my mind.
It turns out that she is not facebook friends with anyone else that I know other than this guy, so his profile is probably the only place that I could have seen her name. Nonetheless, I looked back on his facebook newsfeed (I couldn't resist) and they became facebook friends the day he broke up with me, and facebook "in a relationship" exactly a week later. So he may have reconstructed his facebook history to hide that he knew her prior to breaking up with me, and I only knew otherwise because I'd paused on her name the first time that I saw it. Looking back at his facebook newsfeed for the past week, I saw half of his status updates were presumably about her. "Mr Passive-Aggressive is happy after a great night.", "Mr Passive-Aggressive is counting the minutes to tonight.", etc. Given that they already knew each other prior to this week, I'm guessing that much of this was to communicate the relationship's existence.
Now, the irony. Of course, I googled her name. First, the last name to verify that it is Moonbazi because I was still curious and hadn't checked it out; indeed, the only other instances of the name occur in the two population centers, so it's likely, but not positive. Second, her whole name, which came up in two main places: her congratulations on at least a dozen wedding announcements and her testimonial for a how-to-get-married-ASAP tape series promoted by a right-wing religious organization that I know Mr. Passive-Aggressive would find appalling. The tape series was called something like "Marriage NOW" (the real name is even better), and after each person's testimonial, if the person got married, they put the length of time until the purchaser got married, all less than 1 year, and almost always less than 6 months). She clearly means business. My guess: Mr. Passive-Aggressive will be engaged in 6 months and married within the year.
What I'm guessing happened: Mr. Passive-Aggressive had some kind of on-going interest in this girl whom he already knew. Things developed when I was away, he felt bad about it, and he didn't know what to do. He gradually distanced himself, and maybe tried to stay ambiguous until he was sure he knew where things with the other girl was going, and tried to find a graceful way out of the situation without actually causing any rifts. My email may have made him feel more guilty since I said that I turned down the opportunities that I had purely from loyalty. He decided to reconstruct the situation to look like he had just met this girl the day that we broke up, which is completely improbable: if he wanted to make it look random, he should have picked a day several days before or after. He can't do anything about his claim that he wasn't ready for a relationship.
It's a good story. If only I could ever verify it.
Whatever happened, this was the single most painful dating experience I've had. Having had my expectations raised so high because of his abnormally strong declarations of interest and in spite of my better judgement, there was much farther to fall. What bothers me most was not losing the relationship, but the realization that there's no correct time to let down one's guard and take a dating partner's statements at face value. It would have been paranoid for me to look for signs of disinterest after he had already made such explicit statements of interest, and I'm glad that's not my habit, but such paranoia and skepticism may have been my only defense from feeling like he pulled the rug out from under me. Communicating about commitment would not have given me warning, but it would have either revealed that he did not want to commit (given this girl he apparently liked) or put the onus on him to change the relationship's state rather than making me drag it out of him; I had not felt the need to have an explicit conversation about commitment after 2 weeks of dating, but it wouldn't have been out of place given how well it seemed to be going.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
No one got the postdoc
Earlier, I posted about a postdoc where initially she was extremely interested in me by the end of the interview and her interest visibly fell off. I concluded that they just weren't that into me, possibly because I owed a paper to her colleague. (The paper existed in a draft, but wasn't interesting enough to submit yet.) Not an hour after sending off the paper in question, which was in great shape I think, I got the following letter:
The naive part of me is curious what she wanted and to see the next announcement that goes up. The realistic part of me knows that it really doesn't matter. She was just disappointed by the quality of the candidates and wasn't all that into me.
Which happens all the time in dating: sometimes people say whatever they have to to make the other person go away, and it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It would be funny if people sent out emails like the above to follow up on first dates.
Dear New Postdoc,
I wanted to thank you for applying for the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Albatross Albatross and Albatross Research through the Department of Albatross at Albatross University. After an extensive search, I have decided not to offer the position to any of the applicants. I am fine-tuning the focus of the search and will be reposting the position next year for a September 2008 start.
It was delightful to meet you and hear about your interesting and diverse experiences in Albatross Albatross Research. I hope to see you at professional meetings in the future.
All the members of the search committee join me in thanking you for your day of interviews. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Albatross Albatross
The naive part of me is curious what she wanted and to see the next announcement that goes up. The realistic part of me knows that it really doesn't matter. She was just disappointed by the quality of the candidates and wasn't all that into me.
Which happens all the time in dating: sometimes people say whatever they have to to make the other person go away, and it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It would be funny if people sent out emails like the above to follow up on first dates.
Critiquing papers
Last week I had a critique due, my second ever "real" one. We wrote many for classes during the first year of grad school; at the time, I didn't understand why. I turned it in first thing in the morning the day after it was due. I hope that I don't forever have a black mark next to my name for that. The day that it was due was the day that I got back from my interview and had to process both the interview and guy situation, and I didn't get a whole lot done that day.
As far as I can tell, I was asked to do this critique because I was cited in the paper. I imagine that it's different in a field like history where citations are everything, but in my field people are not so thorough about the literature: the literature review simply has to include a few relevant papers, rather than being comprehensive. As I've noticed in my (overly thorough grad school) lit reviews, people often cite a source which gives a broad array of other sources rather than citing all sources individually.
This paper cited me in three different places, which was very flattering until I saw that the cites were concerned with something other than the central purpose of my paper. People don't pay enormous attention to the literature, as far as I have noticed, so only the author would bother to make any note of who should be cited where. In two places, they cited me because of my literature review, rather than citing the original authors; in that case, I just referred them to the one major researcher in the area who has many papers with many different coauthors, figuring that's something that someone else would know. In the third place, they cited me in a place which didn't make any sense, making me wonder if they had read any part of my paper besides the literature review. In this case, I really wanted to say that the implication of my paper would be for them to write a totally new paper, rather than the paper that they had written, but I kept my mouth shut. Naturally, I had a small conflict of interest: I can use all the cites that I can get, even if they are inappropriate. If they like my literature review, please go ahead!
I've reviewed two papers so far, and each time, my reaction has been the same. "This is on a topic that I really don't know anything about it," I exclaim to myself. "Someone else could deal much better than I could with all the intricate details, I'm sure. I'll probably miss a lot." And so I start reading it, and feel a bit intimidated. As I went on, though, I discovered (for both of the papers; I am sure it's not typical) that I could not only understand what the paper was doing, but also how terrible it was. It truly did not add anything at all. The first paper as much as admitted it with its title, which was something along the lines of "Some thoughts about [An Intricate But Somewhat General Subject]" and it lived up to the title: it was certainly some thoughts. They would have been very good course lecture notes. I actually wrote that in the review. Now I wonder if that was too mean.
In this case, the paper was poorly written, and I waded through quite a lot of the paper before I figured out what they were trying to say: the paper could have easily been a few pages shorter without having less content. Even after I waded through the paper and read it a few times, I wasn't sure of either its purpose or conclusions. I think the conclusion was that researchers should think more. My review ended up being several pages long, about 25% of the length of the original paper, of almost solid criticism. I did give a window of hope about how they could rework the paper, and I hope that they do, but they have dauntingly far to go.
An excerpt from my review:
It occurs to me now that that's the definition of a paper. I'm sure the draft that I am working on right now could use some of that too.
I know a professor who says that he takes about 15 minutes to review a paper and is much more generous that he used to be in his recommendations. I think that's probably a good approach: 15 minutes would be way too little for me, but to jump to the very heart of the paper. I spent a lot of my review nibbling around the edges looking at things like the lit review. Looking at the heart of the paper before I've looked at the tangential parts is a little scary. I can stand on firm ground to say that they should cite A and not B, since that's easy to establish, and also whether they are following basic conventions of writing like telling the reader what you're trying to do. It's even not so difficult to say whether their claims are supported by their evidence, and if they left out any logical steps; in this case, I had the (hopefully rare) situation where they gave lots of evidence but didn't reach any conclusions at all.
It's much harder to look at the central purpose of a project that someone has spent months on and figure out if the project makes sense and if they met their goal. In my mind, that's the purpose of a professor or academic advisor.
If you're doing a review in 15 minutes, that's the issue that you look at, and it's the most important question of the whole review. It's not that I'm intimidated to answer the question, but rather I feel like I might be off the cuff or missing something. Emotionally, it's a difficult statement to say that someone has just wasted their time. Especially if there is nothing to salvage.
So both times, I've read the paper over and over, convinced that the authors must have hidden some material which makes the paper good, and been surprised when I failed to find it.
The other day I went to a seminar at my university and their research was a textbook example of what (they taught us) you're not supposed to do. They're people who I think are quite smart, but I'm not even sure if there is something to salvage in their research at all. I stayed quiet while people debated minor points, and at the very end I asked about whether they considered ways to get around [the flaw], maybe an argument they could make to mitigate the problem. They were, of course, aware of the problem, but for whatever reason didn't have the ability to do better. It's not a minor flaw: any academic in a different field could find it.
It's a bit of a circle: the people in the "top" schools (which has a social meaning as well as an academic ranking meaning) are socialized to accept certain high standards and have almost a visceral urge to stay away from certain mistakes, and they end up being able to meet the high standards because they have access to the state-of-the-art knowledge and resources. People without such access don't have such a strong socialization to stay away from the flaws, and have fewer resources anyhow, so have a harder time meeting the higher standards, and perhaps have less knowledge about tricky alternative ways to get around the mistakes when there's truly no choice.
Happy Christmas to everyone who celebrates it.
As far as I can tell, I was asked to do this critique because I was cited in the paper. I imagine that it's different in a field like history where citations are everything, but in my field people are not so thorough about the literature: the literature review simply has to include a few relevant papers, rather than being comprehensive. As I've noticed in my (overly thorough grad school) lit reviews, people often cite a source which gives a broad array of other sources rather than citing all sources individually.
This paper cited me in three different places, which was very flattering until I saw that the cites were concerned with something other than the central purpose of my paper. People don't pay enormous attention to the literature, as far as I have noticed, so only the author would bother to make any note of who should be cited where. In two places, they cited me because of my literature review, rather than citing the original authors; in that case, I just referred them to the one major researcher in the area who has many papers with many different coauthors, figuring that's something that someone else would know. In the third place, they cited me in a place which didn't make any sense, making me wonder if they had read any part of my paper besides the literature review. In this case, I really wanted to say that the implication of my paper would be for them to write a totally new paper, rather than the paper that they had written, but I kept my mouth shut. Naturally, I had a small conflict of interest: I can use all the cites that I can get, even if they are inappropriate. If they like my literature review, please go ahead!
I've reviewed two papers so far, and each time, my reaction has been the same. "This is on a topic that I really don't know anything about it," I exclaim to myself. "Someone else could deal much better than I could with all the intricate details, I'm sure. I'll probably miss a lot." And so I start reading it, and feel a bit intimidated. As I went on, though, I discovered (for both of the papers; I am sure it's not typical) that I could not only understand what the paper was doing, but also how terrible it was. It truly did not add anything at all. The first paper as much as admitted it with its title, which was something along the lines of "Some thoughts about [An Intricate But Somewhat General Subject]" and it lived up to the title: it was certainly some thoughts. They would have been very good course lecture notes. I actually wrote that in the review. Now I wonder if that was too mean.
In this case, the paper was poorly written, and I waded through quite a lot of the paper before I figured out what they were trying to say: the paper could have easily been a few pages shorter without having less content. Even after I waded through the paper and read it a few times, I wasn't sure of either its purpose or conclusions. I think the conclusion was that researchers should think more. My review ended up being several pages long, about 25% of the length of the original paper, of almost solid criticism. I did give a window of hope about how they could rework the paper, and I hope that they do, but they have dauntingly far to go.
An excerpt from my review:
The paper needs to be more clearly focused and structured: stating the questions of interest, their practical implications, how they will be answered, and then giving the results and explaining away alternative explanations.
It occurs to me now that that's the definition of a paper. I'm sure the draft that I am working on right now could use some of that too.
I know a professor who says that he takes about 15 minutes to review a paper and is much more generous that he used to be in his recommendations. I think that's probably a good approach: 15 minutes would be way too little for me, but to jump to the very heart of the paper. I spent a lot of my review nibbling around the edges looking at things like the lit review. Looking at the heart of the paper before I've looked at the tangential parts is a little scary. I can stand on firm ground to say that they should cite A and not B, since that's easy to establish, and also whether they are following basic conventions of writing like telling the reader what you're trying to do. It's even not so difficult to say whether their claims are supported by their evidence, and if they left out any logical steps; in this case, I had the (hopefully rare) situation where they gave lots of evidence but didn't reach any conclusions at all.
It's much harder to look at the central purpose of a project that someone has spent months on and figure out if the project makes sense and if they met their goal. In my mind, that's the purpose of a professor or academic advisor.
If you're doing a review in 15 minutes, that's the issue that you look at, and it's the most important question of the whole review. It's not that I'm intimidated to answer the question, but rather I feel like I might be off the cuff or missing something. Emotionally, it's a difficult statement to say that someone has just wasted their time. Especially if there is nothing to salvage.
So both times, I've read the paper over and over, convinced that the authors must have hidden some material which makes the paper good, and been surprised when I failed to find it.
The other day I went to a seminar at my university and their research was a textbook example of what (they taught us) you're not supposed to do. They're people who I think are quite smart, but I'm not even sure if there is something to salvage in their research at all. I stayed quiet while people debated minor points, and at the very end I asked about whether they considered ways to get around [the flaw], maybe an argument they could make to mitigate the problem. They were, of course, aware of the problem, but for whatever reason didn't have the ability to do better. It's not a minor flaw: any academic in a different field could find it.
It's a bit of a circle: the people in the "top" schools (which has a social meaning as well as an academic ranking meaning) are socialized to accept certain high standards and have almost a visceral urge to stay away from certain mistakes, and they end up being able to meet the high standards because they have access to the state-of-the-art knowledge and resources. People without such access don't have such a strong socialization to stay away from the flaws, and have fewer resources anyhow, so have a harder time meeting the higher standards, and perhaps have less knowledge about tricky alternative ways to get around the mistakes when there's truly no choice.
Happy Christmas to everyone who celebrates it.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Moving on. The benefits of online dating.
It's amazing what a day or so of solid sulking can do: Now I have a new friend and am going to visit an old friend.
For a solid day, I sulked. And caught up on journal reading. I thawed and ate a piece of Mr. Passive-Aggressive's birthday cake, which I'd made for a dinner party a few weeks ago. (He had gotten sick and didn't come to the dinner; since guests had brought other dessert, I froze the cake for later. A day and a half later, he went to an all-day volunteer program, and I didn't hear about his sickness again. Weird to see his avoidance in retrospect. I wonder how far back it goes.)
I found a date on okcupid with such a well-written and funny profile I thought for sure he was way more suave than I. Also very clever: he's a PhD student in a dorky field and perhaps wisely didn't mention that in his profile. He turned out to be smart, kind-of cute, and a bit neurotic, and we had a nice evening of coffee. The fact that we met online is a real benefit here. His profile and his webpage were extremely funny, in a very smart way. Really high quality humor. Yet he was not even slightly funny on the date. He didn't seem otherwise nervous or shy, but he must have been because otherwise I would have expected at least a glimmer of funniness. And I wasn't attracted to him at all. Just from the date itself, I am not sure I'd be so into seeing him again, but because we met online, I know there's more there, so I'm okay being patient to see what emerges if he gets more comfortable with me.
Meanwhile, I found a good price on a last minute fare so am off to see an old and very close friend (it's complicated!)
For a solid day, I sulked. And caught up on journal reading. I thawed and ate a piece of Mr. Passive-Aggressive's birthday cake, which I'd made for a dinner party a few weeks ago. (He had gotten sick and didn't come to the dinner; since guests had brought other dessert, I froze the cake for later. A day and a half later, he went to an all-day volunteer program, and I didn't hear about his sickness again. Weird to see his avoidance in retrospect. I wonder how far back it goes.)
I found a date on okcupid with such a well-written and funny profile I thought for sure he was way more suave than I. Also very clever: he's a PhD student in a dorky field and perhaps wisely didn't mention that in his profile. He turned out to be smart, kind-of cute, and a bit neurotic, and we had a nice evening of coffee. The fact that we met online is a real benefit here. His profile and his webpage were extremely funny, in a very smart way. Really high quality humor. Yet he was not even slightly funny on the date. He didn't seem otherwise nervous or shy, but he must have been because otherwise I would have expected at least a glimmer of funniness. And I wasn't attracted to him at all. Just from the date itself, I am not sure I'd be so into seeing him again, but because we met online, I know there's more there, so I'm okay being patient to see what emerges if he gets more comfortable with me.
Meanwhile, I found a good price on a last minute fare so am off to see an old and very close friend (it's complicated!)
Friday, December 21, 2007
Liminal letdown
Phrases that people search for that turn up this blog:
I wonder if they found what they were looking for.
What is someone looking for if they are googling "postdoc dating"? There could be websites: "Postdoc Match: Because sex is hottest with someone as smart, busy, and miserable as you are!"
For that matter, what is someone doing if they are googling "postdoc sucks" or "postdoc letdown"? Are they looking for tales of woe to beat their own? Is this blog really so depressing and down about postdoc life? Are they trying to talk themselves into applying for real jobs?
"Single liminal" appears to be a term related to gastroenterology imaging, and one of my posts talked about the liminal existence between single and married. Clever semantics.
- postdoc sucks
- postdoc letdown
- single liminal
- postdoc dating
- appearance matters for marriage
I wonder if they found what they were looking for.
What is someone looking for if they are googling "postdoc dating"? There could be websites: "Postdoc Match: Because sex is hottest with someone as smart, busy, and miserable as you are!"
For that matter, what is someone doing if they are googling "postdoc sucks" or "postdoc letdown"? Are they looking for tales of woe to beat their own? Is this blog really so depressing and down about postdoc life? Are they trying to talk themselves into applying for real jobs?
"Single liminal" appears to be a term related to gastroenterology imaging, and one of my posts talked about the liminal existence between single and married. Clever semantics.
Dating disappointment
I've written so many posts about postdocs and academia that you might think that this blog was about postdocs, so I will include a dating post, since I'm sure that my readers (if there are any) were waiting on tenterhooks for an update on my romantic life.
I was totally excited about the guy whom I was dating, but had to travel a lot, so we only got to see each other between trips (mostly mine, but some of his), but he did a "It's not you, it's me" and disappeared. I've never said this about any friend of mine, male or female, but his previous relationship sounded like she was borderline abusive, and at the very least negligent. Understandably he wants to avoid falling too quickly into anything, and doesn't feel ready to have any relationship at all. It's been less than a year. Still, it's hard not to take that personally. It's always possible to be kinder or sweeter, and I feel like if he liked being around me more, he wouldn't feel like this. But there's no sense in talking about the counterfactuals. If it's meant to be, it will be.
The part which particularly sucks is that he lost his phone a couple of weeks ago before going on a trip of his own --- and I'm pretty sure he really did lose his phone. He has probably replaced his phone by now, but shows no indication of having it, and is no longer visible on Skype, and so all of this happened by email, much while I was at my interview. In theory, he wants to be friends, which seems to mean that he'll hang out in a group but not separately. He's so sweet, and I hate to ascribe any bad motive to him especially since his emails were so apologetic. He did handle the situation in the most passive-aggressive way possible, avoiding me and generally giving me the feeling that he didn't want to spend much time around me, until I said something.
Just a week or two ago, it seemed like I had so many potential dates, but these naturally seem to have evaporated.
And that's the closest thing that I have in the way of potential. As disappointing as it is to be dumped by a guy who I really liked, I'm even more disappointed to have to start going to events and online dating sites again.
I was totally excited about the guy whom I was dating, but had to travel a lot, so we only got to see each other between trips (mostly mine, but some of his), but he did a "It's not you, it's me" and disappeared. I've never said this about any friend of mine, male or female, but his previous relationship sounded like she was borderline abusive, and at the very least negligent. Understandably he wants to avoid falling too quickly into anything, and doesn't feel ready to have any relationship at all. It's been less than a year. Still, it's hard not to take that personally. It's always possible to be kinder or sweeter, and I feel like if he liked being around me more, he wouldn't feel like this. But there's no sense in talking about the counterfactuals. If it's meant to be, it will be.
The part which particularly sucks is that he lost his phone a couple of weeks ago before going on a trip of his own --- and I'm pretty sure he really did lose his phone. He has probably replaced his phone by now, but shows no indication of having it, and is no longer visible on Skype, and so all of this happened by email, much while I was at my interview. In theory, he wants to be friends, which seems to mean that he'll hang out in a group but not separately. He's so sweet, and I hate to ascribe any bad motive to him especially since his emails were so apologetic. He did handle the situation in the most passive-aggressive way possible, avoiding me and generally giving me the feeling that he didn't want to spend much time around me, until I said something.
Just a week or two ago, it seemed like I had so many potential dates, but these naturally seem to have evaporated.
And that's the closest thing that I have in the way of potential. As disappointing as it is to be dumped by a guy who I really liked, I'm even more disappointed to have to start going to events and online dating sites again.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Post-interview exhaustion
I'm always a bit out of sorts the day after travel. When I was in a long-distance relationship, my boyfriend and I were both a bit out of it for the day or two after each weekend of visiting, meaning the next week was always a bit off. Kids always puzzle why adults find travel to be so tiring since you are just sitting there, after all. Being an adult now, so susceptible to these forces, I really have no idea why --- the psychological displacement? different food? lack of real cooked food? --- but travel is tiring.
The out-of-sorts feeling is even worse after an interview: weeks of anticipation, days of preparation, arriving in a new place I've never seen before, two days of being "on", and then suddenly it's over. Like a date, it almost always goes well, and yet you can't assume anything until you have the signed offer letter in your hand. You only need one, and yet since the unexpected can always happen, you have to try others until one finally sticks.
Last night, I was so tired after getting back from my interview that I fell asleep fully dressed with my light on at 8 pm, and woke up at 2 and then 3 am, finally going to bed at 4 or 5 am and waking up at 8, feeling anything but fully rested. The day has somehow just passed, and I would be better off doing errands than attempting to do work. This is how last spring slipped away from me.
The out-of-sorts feeling is even worse after an interview: weeks of anticipation, days of preparation, arriving in a new place I've never seen before, two days of being "on", and then suddenly it's over. Like a date, it almost always goes well, and yet you can't assume anything until you have the signed offer letter in your hand. You only need one, and yet since the unexpected can always happen, you have to try others until one finally sticks.
Last night, I was so tired after getting back from my interview that I fell asleep fully dressed with my light on at 8 pm, and woke up at 2 and then 3 am, finally going to bed at 4 or 5 am and waking up at 8, feeling anything but fully rested. The day has somehow just passed, and I would be better off doing errands than attempting to do work. This is how last spring slipped away from me.
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