Creative drain

Last night I went to fencing. In and of itself, that was a great way to spend an evening, other than the now-undeniable fact that I need to wash my gear. Febreze will only take you so far, kiddies. There comes a point when everything is so sweat-drenched and revolting when you actually need to wash yo bidness. My gear is at that point.

Anyway, I fenced some (literally!) world-class fencers and lost to them, which was ok because I'm not that good. Yet. I was able to go down with a fight, at any rate. But I was talking with my coach after, just trying to think how I can fix my game so I don't make all the same mistakes next time. He said a couple interesting things, some good, some to think about.

The thinking first. It wasn't out-and-out criticism, and I definitely wasn't smacking my head into the steering wheel the whole way home going, "IIIIIIdiot!!" He said I wasn't creative enough with my actions on the strip. Now... that was the body, mind, and soul of my game when I started out with epee at NYU. I learned how to parry, I did point control, and then they let me loose on a strip and said, "Hit the other girl. Beat her. Feel free to make her cry." Check, check, and check. The good bits about that (lack of) strategy:

- I was a total wildcard. No one knew what the hell to do with me.

- My timing and footwork were brilliant because I couldn't do anything else. My counter-time stop hits were like lightening. I learned how to flinch and simultaneously extend my arm and usually score. At the very least, a double touch. Super-aware of where every part of my body was.

- When I got angry, I LET myself get that way, then I just beat the shit out of whoever got on the strip in front of me. I was unstoppable. And kind of crazy. But I won a lot of bouts pissed off.

The bad aspects of my old game:

- To be unstoppable, I had to get furious. This is hard to just do unless I'm having a really bad month PMS-wise. I had to lose to really bad people and feel like shit about myself before I could get angry enough. This is neither a healthy nor a sound reliable strategy.

- If someone could read my bullshit, I didn't have anything underneath it.

I decided I was going to revamp my game from the bottom up, which I've been doing. For instance, I was going to stop frenetically bouncing around because ultimately it's a waste of energy, and I'd also stop leaning forward. So, I tried keeping my back heel down a little more and sitting more upright in my en guarde. Leaning/frenetic bouncing = gone. I did find a middle ground, because if you sit too upright and don't bounce at all, you lose a lot of mobility. Paired with lots of rope jumping, it's becoming very effective in keeping me grounded - literally - but mobile.

Generally, I think it's going well, because the good bit of the convo was about how I don't have any compulsive tendencies on the strip in a bout situation, save for relaxing a little too much when I retreat. Some people have a tendency start with their blade high and then cut over and finish low. So you nail them over their shoulder. Others compulsively take a given parry when offered the blade. So you know they're going to do it; you disengage and score. Another great thing about last night was I angled my blade the tiniest bit, and all of a sudden, I was landing wrist touches again. Wrist touches over the blade, under it, on the side... it was awesome.

But that thing about needing to be more creative on the strip. I was talking to Danny, and the truth of it is that at the end of the day (and even the end of weeks) I just feel so drained and beaten down mentally, that summoning the effort to be in any way creative is so Herculean, I just can't. To try to think anymore than absolutely necessary, to try to be more than just a functioning body is nearly impossible. Day in day out, I'm working on the same problem in lab. I've been running these wretched experiments for going on 4 years now. It's very hard to describe the incredible lack of desire to do anything at all. The most incredible boredom and laziness combined with feeling like the world owes me huge for the trouble I'm going to. I'm not saying these feelings have anything to do with fairness or logic, they're just there, and it sucks when I want to do well at fencing because they're quite a hindrance. It's one thing to not like what you're doing and feel beaten down at work, but why does it have to bleed over into my general well-being and infect the things that I really love?

Oh well. Try harder, I guess... because that's about all I can do.

Wack.

I had to work on Sunday.  This means rolling out of bed, grumbling, donning various stretchy spandexy items of workout clothing, and trying to pretend I'm driving into the glorified truck stop of a college town for a workout, and oh yeah, by the way, I'm also going to drop into lab and do some work.  Me, working on the fucking weekend for the equivalent of minimum wage 4 years ago, Pushing The Boundaries Of Humankind's Knowledge.  

What utter bullshit.  

This fall, I'll be starting my fourth year of graduate school.  After a particularly impassioned rant to my advisor, he is 100% on board with my need to publish something, anything at all really, so I can start to gain some science cred.  We had a weird discussion Friday.  He said I should shoot for a publication in JBC, the Journal of Biological Chemistry (full disclosure: I had to look up the acronym when he said "JBC" because I'm useless remembering shit like that).  He described JBC as "reputable, but crappy."  After trying 4 possible definitions of "crappy" in a bid to figure out just how fucked I am, it turns out he meant conservative, un-groundbreaking science, and I had a moment.  

A moment, when I almost did a double-take to his face, because people, NO ONE outside of maybe 20-something people in the whole world give a rat's fart about what comes out of this lab.  Like, hello, you are the principle investigator of this lab, are you not?  You dictate the direction of all of our research, am I right?  Have you NOTICED how completely arcane the subject matter is that you are studying?  Let me put it this way; we are not curing cancer here.  But a publication is a publication.  I don't care, but to describe JBC as crappy because it publishes conservative science?  Whaaaat.

Anyway, that's why I was working on Sunday in a foul mood.  I slouched in wearing my nubbly Adidas slide-on sandals (they are truly magical; it's like having a foot massage as you walk), and I noticed this professor as I walked down the hall towards my lab.  He is always sitting in his concrete cube looking ancient, and if he's not in there, he's shuffling around the building staring at the floor/walls avoiding any and all eye contact, still looking ancient.  One time I spoke to him because his -80 C freezer was beeping in a way that signaled its imminent failure.  Mainly I was glad it was his freezer and not him.  I see him literally ALL THE TIME, and try as I might to just make eye contact and smile, nary a word passes between us.  

So he's sitting there, on his office door is an NYU sticker, and I thought to myself, "Hey, we share an alma mater, maybe I should start a conversation," because I was wearing an old pair of NYU standard-issue shorts, and, you know, we could bond over the purple or something...  And then I thought, why bother him?  Obviously he's here, sitting in a concrete bunker sans even a window on an uncharacteristically gorgeous, cloudless, warm, dry Sunday in late July, for a reason.  As I plated my cells, I mused on why the hell he'd opt for a weekend like this.  Maybe he's henpecked.  Maybe his plumbing is getting fixed.  Maybe this is a form of mental illness.  

That's when it struck me.  The academic ideal IS a form of mental illness.  What joy can someone get, closeting themselves away from the rest of the world WITHOUT EVEN A WINDOW every single day for the rest of their life?  What kind of person does it take to do that?  Who do you have to be to be willing to obsess over one problem literally for the rest of your life?  Because that's what you're SUPPOSED to do if you're a good academic.  

Granted, the stereotypical tweed is lovely, but that's quite a price to pay to wear tweed.  And no one does, at least not here.  It's bad sneakers, even worse khakis, and polo shirts.  Unless, of course, you opt for socks and sandals and ill-fitting jeans and the odd Hawaiian top.

I did make it to the gym after doing the plating and prep for Monday.  Hopefully soon, I'll be writing a paper.  Hopefully not too long after that, it'll be thesis + graduation time, and I'll be done with this idiosyncratic hodgepodge of questionably sane people before I start looking as antique as my fellow NYU alum down the hall...