Siliceous and Delicious

The last three days have been a whirlwind of busyness with rather little in the way of sleep. While there was some fun socializing involved (dinner with Tinker and friends on Friday, a visit with Pierre on Saturday, and brunch at Evan and Katie’s on Sunday), there was a lot of intense wedding work (the website all of Sunday afternoon and evening, the invitations Thursday evening past midnight and Friday from early morning through four in the afternoon), and no work at all preparing for the meeting with Mike Foote today.

This lack of preparation has left me something of a gibbering wreck of nervous, and resulted in another low-sleep night last night. (The night before it was the cat, who decided to wake up and mew incessantly from 3:40 am until I finally got up at about 6 after trying time and again to get back to sleep. She promptly curled up and fell asleep on the bed.) All manner of destructive thoughts of the familiar variety—regret and shame over the many years with no tangible results to show, no product to talk about—came back to haunt me as the hours ticked on. Not helpful to think about, of course, but in mapping out how the conversation might go, it was difficult to avoid the difficult questions that might very easily come up—so, what have you done over the past five years? Why didn’t those projects work out? Not things I much enjoy thinking or talking about.

It certainly also didn’t help that the decision to meet with Mike, while ultimately made by me, was urged on externally. For much of the last few days I couldn’t quite put my finger on why exactly I was meeting with him—Jerry’s justification was that he thought I should meet with him so I could scope out the possibility of doing a post-doc in Chicago, but I’m neither interested in a post-doc, nor moving to Chicago (feelings difficult to comprehend for an academic, of course), so this left me somewhat bereft of a purpose for our conversation. Of course, if I had something more tangible to talk about—for example, a first plot of the morphospace results or some measurements of radiolarians—I might well be able to ask his advice in how to analyze or interpret this data. But given that I don’t have any results yet (there again, the deep-rooted source of my anxiety), there’s not much to talk about. I can (and probably will) talk to him about what I’m planning to do, and how I’m doing it—the morphospace character choices, the link between the morphospace and the Neptune database, the Fourier-based outline morphospace, the database and measurement interface for the radiolarian lineage project—but it’s not quite clear in those conversations what I’d actually be asking him—other than to sit and listen to what I’m doing. Kati made the very helpful point in the morning that I was meeting a human (of sorts—at least in all likelihood), and it was OK to meet someone just to get to know them, because you have overlapping interests, and because you work on similar things. It’s OK to meet someone because you although you don’t need or want anything from them, like a job, you’d like to know them because they might know somebody who might want to give you a job. I don’t want to post-doc with Mike Foote in Chicago, but he might know somebody at the small liberal arts school on the East coast that wants to give me a job.

The chat didn’t go as badly as I had feared. If anything, I talked too much—I had been so nervous about not having enough to talk about that I had gone over and over in my head what I could talk about to fill the deadly silence I feared, that I might have steamrollered Mike a little bit. I think I would have bored him to death with my monologue had I not had the foresight to suggest we go for a walk outside—it being a reasonably warm day and he, presumably, having spent the morning locked up in stuffy offices. This turned out to be a great suggestion, and one he seemed very keen to follow. We walked around and I rabbited on about my projects, and asked him about his opinions on the new Alroy subsampling algorithm. The only point where I might have blown it, or done a particularly good job (I’m just not sure), was when he raised the question of the future at the end: “So, what are you going to be doing next? Looking for a post-doc,… etc?” which may have been out of politeness and curiosity only or may have been some sort of exploration toward my availability. Either way, I answered perhaps a bit too candidly, and gave him my honest feelings about not being sure whether the academic path was for me, how hard I had found it to deal with so much effort going into so many failed or stalled projects, but that I really enjoyed teaching and wasn’t ruling out academia. I expected this to elicit a totally dismissive response, or a “ah, you’re one of those, I’m not interested in talking to you anymore” glazing-over of the eyes, but he actually had something nice to say. While I don’t think he had anything like the sort of PhD experience I did (he finished in four years, if I correctly overheard the end of an anecdote he was telling the student he was with when I went to pick him up), he said that he’d had a number of projects that had failed over the years, and one in particular that he’d keep coming back to every year or so for a couple of months, get frustrated with, and then drop. In the end he said that particular one was the project he’s most proud of in his career, because in spite of having started it in about 1995 he eventually did recently crack it and publish it, and he told of how the reward did pay off much of the frustration. He also said, which I felt was a very supportive thing to say, that if everything you work on pans out, then you’re working on the wrong things.

Anyhow, above all else I was delighted that it was over, and between that relief and a working database interface, I was happy to call it a good day.