I just got an email from a friend of mine. My ex girl friend is getting married on May 29. I knew this day was going to come at some point in time, just didnt know it would be so soon. All it took were 7 lousy words to throw me back into the pits of depression. How did I get so screwed up?
I got this email yesterday. Kind off lifted my spirits up. Maybe I am not as useless as I think I am.
—-
—
For the last few mins I have been thinking about what I would do I quit now. I realized I have no real skills. No one is going to give me a job. Afterall who would want to employ a failure? I am going to die as an annonymous stranger on the sidewalk on a cold night.
I don’t think my device works. I am not sure about that. At this point I am not sure about anything.
I have another set of devices that will be ready on Wednesday. If they don’t work either, its back to the drawing board for me.
All I know is that I have spent the last 9 months designing and fabricating this, now there is a chance that it will never work due to a design flaw.
I am a really bad engineer and a worse researcher. I should probably quit before I waste anymore time on a PhD I might never get.
I couldn’t get my new devices fabricated in time. I hacked into the old ones, concocted up a really bizarre mirror, prism, and lens assembly, attached it to the microscope, and now I have the ability to image anything off normal to the surface of the scope. You would think that after working on this for about 3 days I would be able to get it working, but then you would be wrong. It barely works, and I am being very generous with the definition of “barely”.
I emailed my supervisor a bunch of pictures that look like those used in psychiatric tests. You can make them out to be anything you want them to be. I would like to think of them as proofs that my device works atleast in one state while some may say these are pictures of the Pope doing the “robot”. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is my proof.
Its friday again. I hate fridays. It brings the fact that I am single with nothing better to do right to front and square. There is no escaping it. I can sit in my office and work my ass off but then I look up and see I am the only one there in the entire bloody building. Well me and another prof who cant seem to get a date either.
I tried the whole relationship thing, but it is so difficult. The last time I had a relationship that lasted longer than a Mento was nearly year ago. We had plans to go a fancy Halloween party that evening, and my adviser asked to me to work on paper and get it done by the morning. I had to cancel our date, and that was the last I heard from her. Why is it that people dont seem to be able understand that the priorites of a grad student are a bit different from normal. Is it that they really cannot get that for us our work is our life? or is it that they just cannot stand the fact that there is something more important than them? or is there are trick to having girl friend that I dont know off?
Sometimes being a single grad student isnt fun.
Well the reunion dinner was not as fun as I expected it to be, but it wasnt blah either. Everyone there other than me had actual jobs and were practically talking in an alien language. May be I was not expecting them to have moved on so much. Anyways, no biggie. It was fun nonetheless.
I am meeting a bunch of my high school friends over dinner today. I havent seen them since 1997. It should be fun. What is the probability that all of us end up in the same city half way across the world at the same time? I am really excited. More on this after the meet.. I have to rush now.
I finally found someone to train me on the new machine at 3.30 PM today. Ok. Now I atleast have a non-zero probability of sucessfully fabricating a new set of devices. Small probability, but non zero. I am happy.
I did a bit of fiddling around with the device I have right now to see if I can get a semi-decent optical image of them working. Kinda worked. Well not really.. but it shows promise. I am going to dig further into this direction tomorrow. I think I now have images of it working in one of the states. If only I can get it to atleast seem to work in the other, my work would be done. Fingers crossed.
I hope atleast one of the two approaches works. In anycase, I am keeping my supervisor updated every hour on the hour. Now he can not blame me for not having tried hard enough.
Ok. I just learnt that the facility manager is on a vacation till Friday afternoon. I have emailed two other co-managers to see if they can help me out. I am too tired/frustrated to type anymore. Just wanted to say “screw you” to the entire world. Now that I have, I can go sleep in peace.
