not just play hard

You will not believe how I worked last week. That was a new state of stress in my academia life, which is different from memorizing not-very-useful words for GRE, and different from the first year of graduate school, and different from preparing for the comprehensive exam, and different from writing the dissertation.
It was new. My body reacted in a pretty bad way, which produced even more stress.
Being a postdoc is tough. I have only been one for less than 4 months, and I have been questioning my goal of life for half of the time, which is the past 2 months.

At 3 o'clock on Friday afternoon, I dropped dead. I refused to do anything more to push for the Monday deadline and went for the farewell party for Andrea the IRB officer.
She's leaving us for going back to school. Yes, for getting a graduate degree. I was almost saying to her "Don't get a Ph.D." But I did not because she and I are not close enough. You do not discourage people from doing certain things unless you are close to them.

I fed myself with potato chips and cookies, and listened to Matt complaining about a stupid American kid who discouraged a China girl from applying for medical school.
Matt calls everyone kid. Matt also is American. He basically is a good-natured easy-to-get-angry-and-physically-aggressive kind of guy.
The stupid American kid, according Matt, was telling the China girl not to bother for medical school application because of her poor English. Matt was angry because this is America.
I am serious. That really was Matt's reason. This is a free country. You do not stop people from doing things they want to do as long as they work hard.

Yeah.... I figured I would not tell Andrea not to go for a Ph.D. right at that moment even if I was a close friend of hers. Matt would smash me or pronounce the perfect accent for F-kY-u! with a finger pointing me twice for emphasizing the F and Y. This is a free country. She should pursue her goal.

So I kept smiling and nodding and soon turned to Peggy.
Peggy is another postdoc who has been here for two years. She is finally another girl in my generation going with this name.
I told her my frustration with the project proposal. She has been very good at giving useful advice to all my requests.
She confirmed what I'd wanted to do for some hours and comforted me what I'd wanted to do is a right thing to do.

Therefore, I postponed the proposal for one more month.

And, more importantly, I left the office at 5pm.
It was pouring outside, wet and cold like a winter day in Taipei. But happiness came.

It started with singing in the rain. In the leaky subway too.
Cal and Jon did it.
Followed by accidentally tangoing in DC for 7 hours after 4 hours of happily singing driving with potato chips and cookies. Cal did the singing part mostly. I was simply being happy and eating.

Followed by a fabulous sunny day with my ritual imitation of human-form sculptures.
And it's Monday again. Inevitably.
Another week of hard work.
I'm gonna fly to San Diego for the zoo and milonga in 6 days :)
And for presenting a poster on "spatial bias induced by monocular patching" seriously.