Siliceous and Delicious

Worked through the weekend—trying to get as far ahead as I could in the Cretaceous list of taxa. It’s the futility of the exercise that makes it so hard. There are so, so many Cretaceous occurrences of diatoms that I would never be able to add them all to Neptune and the morphospace. And others have written eloquently and much more competently than I can about morphological innovation in diatoms during the Cretaceous (there’s a whole section on it in a paper by Sims, Mann, and Medlin). So with the three (!) assemblages I’m coding, I’m not going to capture that diversity—in fact, I’m most certainly going to under- (and hence mis-) represent it. This makes me hate the exercise. This, and the fact that the work of coding the taxa is itself so dull and dispiriting. Endless hours of scrolling haplessly through google search results, trawling for any mention of the taxon in question, getting ever more frustrated at the crappy scraps of description that are useless for the exercise at hand, wondering where the information I seek might be, that surely somebody must have it… It is endlessly frustrating.

Anyway. That’s not helpful to think about. I just need to get through this idiotic exercise and move on. I built up some good steam over the weekend, working full days both Saturday and Sunday, but now I’m exhausted, frustrated, and pissed off, and haven’t been able to maintain the pace. I am growing my confidence in my smartness, my capacity, my ability—thanks to the pep-talk I’m starting my days with—but I am realizing again just how idiotic the work is that I’m doing. What a total waste of my talents, my capacity, my smartness, my ability. Nothing intelligent can be said with the data I am collecting right now. Literally the only reason I am doing it is because Andy insisted that I should. I don’t know what to do with that. I want to tell him to shove the fucking Cretaceous where the sun don’t shine, but he’s the one who will have to approve my thesis, so that’s not an option.

Bailed early.