Siliceous and Delicious

I wouldn’t have thought it would ever come as a relief, but here it is: I’m actually glad to be working on the rad lineages project today. Switching lanes when there’s a roadblock ahead is an advantage of the many-projects approach.

Decided to start at the other end today, with the Didymocyrtis-Diartus lineage. In doing so, discovered a massive, massive problem: the Neptune data—at least in the form in which I’ve downloaded it, from Chronos—does not contain full sample information on each taxon occurrence, only the age. In other words, as far as I can see there is no way for me to tie a particular occurrence back to a particular prepared slide or even a depth interval in a core. Fuckity fuck fuck. This is incredibly frustrating.

I am really starting to lose it. The anger and frustration over my complete lack of progress over the past days (and years, of course) has once again built to an intolerable level. I don’t know what to do.

I think I just need to email Dave and ask him for advice. I’ve done it a million times and I feel like an ass constantly asking him for help, especially since he’s not my advisor and has not stake in it, and even more so because I feel that I should now more—or at least something—being a fifth-year PhD student. Yes, I’m embarrassed to ask for help, horribly so. But I think it’s my only ray of hope at this stage.