Transition

So, today I ate a cheeseburger, as per my 101/1001.  And I ate a ton of sweets.  It hasn't been the best of days.  Tears, screaming, kicking (of furniture), all before 9 AM, followed by a meeting with my PI and a combined total of 5 hours of seminars.  Willpower being a finite resource, I was pretty well screwed (or so I justified eating dinner at the Great Dane with Intaglio: we split sustain-a-burger and a chocolate-nut torte, among other delicious but awful foods.)

The truth is: Grad school has been rough.  In medical school, my goal was to get As.  After I finished medical school, my goal was to get a great score on the boards.  All of my energy was focused toward each single goal; it required a lot of work and tedium, but I was capable of it. 

Now, my time is split between lab and work, at minimum 50-50.  On top of that, I'm supposed to be writing a review article, and, at the risk of sounding like Teen Talk Barbie, immunology is hard.  Which is why I'm reading papers and writing this review article, but right now it just feels like one more thing to tick off my list.  One more thing preventing me from doing research, which reminds me--the controls have been fuzzy, the cells aren't growing as fast as they should be, and no one has worked with viral particles before in our lab.  Coming home each night, my goal is always to work, or at least read, but realistically I just wash dishes, do laundry, tidy up, or wind up poking around reddit.  And then I go to sleep.  And then I get up and run, and then the day begins.

Intaglio is in the same position as me; he's gone from working on his prints full time to less than 50% of the time, as he now works in the frame shop and teaches classes on the weekend.  So at the end of the day, we're tired, we're dispirited, and we're not really in the mood to feel sympathy for anyone but ourselves.  We haven't been gentle with each other.  We haven't really been interested in each other's struggles.

We made up, but the damage to my diet was done.  Nothing to do but start fresh tomorrow (and have Intaglio take the remaining Ghirardelli squares to work).  When I disappoint myself like I have today, I often feel like that's the only thing to say.  Tomorrow I'll be closer to the person I want to be.  Just because it didn't happen today doesn't mean I can't make it happen tomorrow.  True, I suppose, but today it just feels false.  That's why there's tomorrow.