Siliceous and Delicious

For the first part of the week, the new pep-talk motivation strategy was working quite well. I finally started down the list of Cretaceous taxa to add to the morphospace, and though it was slow, I was making progress, and that felt pretty good.

On Wednesday, however, Andy asked me to lead the discussion for the dreaded Pearson-Johnston-Knoll joint lab group meeting on Friday, on a paper of my choice. I was in no position to decline, given that I haven’t presented anything at lab meetings for several years, and have in fact abdicated from even attending them, as they are completely unproductive for me: it always ends up as a discussion among faculty (or between them, if it’s only two) witnessed by a large group of 10-30 silent graduate students and post-docs.

So I sank the better part of three days into catching up on three years of silica/diatom literature, choosing two papers, trying to read and understand them, pull together a few slides, and come up with discussion points. Predictably enough, the meeting went exactly as described above (Andy, Radcliffe visitor Paul Falkowski, and Zoe where literally the only other people to speak during the entire ninety minute meeting).

Strangely, though, it was a decent discussion, besides being utterly weird because it was 4 people talking in a room of about 25. I felt that it was oddly worthwhile to throw myself deeply into thinking about a couple of complicated problems for a while, and oddly engaging to lock antlers with Paul, who is terrifyingly sharp and very knowledgeable. His engagement in the material (versus the 21 others in the room who were completely still for the entire time) somewhat made up for his dickish “you must be in your 3rd year” remark the other week.

Perhaps the most vindicating part of the interaction was after we had finished and were walking out of HUCE we got into a discussion about the greater linkage between the silica cycle and the carbon cycle through silicate weathering. Paul brought it up and I was staggered, because this notion that accounting for silica in quantifying past changes in the global carbon cycle (through exercises like Berner’s “geocarb”/”geocarbsulf” models) was something that had struck me very early on in my time at Harvard. I had tried to sell both Andy and Dan on the idea, both of whom were very dismissive of it. Dan to the extent of falling asleep during my presentation on the matter in his class.

But Paul seemed to be quite excited about it, and seemed to understand exactly how this was important—and suggested that we get together and draw up some equations to describe it all… That was quite rewarding, and vindicating. I’m not such an idiot for thinking about these things after all. Fuck them all. Perhaps the biggest idiot I’ve ever been is in listening to others’ advice or waiting for “senior” scientists’ approval of my ideas. (How ironic, then, that this vindication has to come through a senior scientists’ approval…)

In other news, Mateo offered for me to join a dissertation writing group—so far just him and one other student. My first response was “I’m not ready”, but in further discussion and upon reflection I realized that it’s not too early to start, and it would probably be extremely helpful for me to start to think and write about the big-picture background of what I’m doing, rather than just sinking deeper into the morass of the ground-level mechanical exercise of the research grunt work itself. I haven’t yet gotten myself to the point of accepting his invitation yet, though, since I’ve also felt extremely overwhelmed during the past week, and the thought of adding another commitment makes me a little queasy. Something to think on a little more.