Look who's Ms. Productivity today!

What I've done today:

Went to the gym. And probably sweated out, oh, 20 gallons of sweat. Nice, I know. I was uber-gross today. Okay, every day!

Finished up and emailed the people I've been working for the completed data set + codebook that I created. Only one left to go...or hopefully none...or maybe I'll dally so long with the thing that I'll stop being funded before I finish it (or do much on it). And the second I'm not getting paid, I am NOT doing that crap work!

Sent my revised paper out (after hand-collating 5 copies of it!) (Oh, and I have recovered emotionally from the experience now. Mostly. And it turns out that a phone call to the editorial assistant made my life way easier. She was very whatevs even though the website sounded super-strict. I guess it pays to ask).

Applied for a passport (Joshie and I are going to Europe - Austria, Italy, and Greece, to be exact, for a few weeks in the late summer!)

Did last night's dishes...Ok. That one's not so impressive. I usually do the dishes before going to bed but there was this one annoying pan that really needed to soak...

Anyway, not bad, huh?

Left to do today...Figure out PAA outfits. Ack! Grown-up clothes! And, oh yeah, that diss stuff...

Update: And now I have completely fizzled out. At least I had this morning...

But, if you haven't checked this out, be sure to read go fug yourself. Holy crap. I about peed myself. I had seen a picture of that insane-o sculpture and was like "Wha?" I still think "Wha?" about the whole thing and also "Ewww", but those fuggers are so friggin' funny!

Another attempt at the cute

Well worth the wait, huh?

A few moments for some deep breaths, some cuteness, and maybe a trip to Whole Foods*

Ok, I've been trying to upload one of the cutest pictures ever of my friend Cristina's baby, but blogger just doesn't want it to happen. And that's okay. I'll just try again later. For now I will focus on the deep breaths and a little walksie to WF. My place of zen.

But just so you know, 10 cpi is basically 12-point Courier, which made my 27 page paper (which I had worked so hard to shrink down that far) grow to 35 pages or so, give or take a few tables one way or another. FanTABulous!

For those of you with real problems out there, I am sorry to be such a whiner.

*And most definitely some booze later on.

Somebody throw me a bone. Please.

So I've been working on revising my paper to submit to a different journal. But I've been doing it wrong. Somehow, when I tried to look up the info about submission, I found this weirdo looking website (with kiddie comic sans font or whatevs) that said the whole dealio needed to be 30 pages or less (including tables, footnotes, etc). Mine was exactly that but I just wanted to tweak a few things and I thought I would be ready to send. Things seemed to be going well until...

Well, I was perusing the website, looking for some more info just to be sure and discovered I had been looking at some weirdo old version of the website. I found the new version and apparently the whole paper is supposed to be TWENTY-FIVE (25) pages or less. Um. Ok. That's kind of a lot different from what I have. It also says to use 10 CPI font. I looked up what that meant and found it means 10 characters-per-inch. Great, but what the hell kind of font is that in Word? Totally clueless and google isn't helping me. And do you think that the 25 page count includes my title page? If not, I got 29 pages to cut down instead of 30, which would be a nice thing. Or a slighter nicer thing.

And all of this has me (yet again) thinking: why am I doing this? I don't even really care. There is NO WAY I'm going to get an academic job. This paper is just going to be rejected again. Gary will have me sending it to a high school newspaper before too long. And even they won't want it. And from the looks of things, I don't have a lot of hope for a non-academic job lately. My recent online job searches have basically come up with crap. Crap. I just feel like I suck at EVERYTHING lately. I can't do anything. I can't even be a good homemaker. You should see the pigsty-ness of out apt. Ok, you shouldn't. It's not pretty. But JEESH!!! I am just so mad and sad simultaneously. And I know I should just get over myself. My life's not so bad at all. It's really actually great except for this "career" (or lack thereof) crap.

And I so wanted to post a nice post with pictures about my weekend DC visit and the cute babies I hung out with. Maybe later.

Update: Actually make that "what's 10 cpi font in WordPerfect?" since that's what my printer (Joshie) has access to.

Flowers and hair

Want to see some? Here you go...


V. pretty but someone's head's in the way, sort of.


Monet's table.


I love orchids.


Omg, I love orchids. There would be more but I tried to control myself.



Papi and Rachel plus interesting hanging display/tree thing.


I love my hair! And my mom and Rachel!

Doing better

Thanks, everybody. I needed that. And G suggested another journal, so I'll try that. It'll be next week's project.

Anyway, today should be a nice distraction. The parents + Rachel are coming into town for the Flower Show. Rachel thinks it's a nice treat for my mom, and my mom thinks Rachel's dragging her to it. Those two! My dad is actually getting dragged to it (sort of), but what else does he have to do? He's retired! And this means he gets to hang with (most of) the fam, and he doesn't get to do that every day. So I consider that a treat. And it's the same for me. I'm just going to hang with the fam and smell and see pretty flowers. And get some non-Flower-Show-related good eats. I'm thinking More Than Just Ice Cream for dinner/dessert with its mondo cake/pie/ice cream combinations!

Rejection

Yep. I was rejected. Or my paper was rejected. The age of the data and sample size made it "unsuitable for publication." Or "for this publication." I refuse to look at the letter again to find out, but either way it means the same thing: Not getting published. Ouch. That took a long time for all that. Wish I had sent some craptastic early version of it to find that out rather than spending 2 million years on it before getting rejected b/c of that.

This does not bode well for the job market. I had been planning on basically giving up and assuming no one would hire me (or no academic jobs would hire me and I'd just go all non-academic), but then when I sent that out, I got inspired. I actually even have another project stirring in my head that JJ and I are thinking about working on for some Add Health conference. And now this. Crushed.

I emailed Gary and Betty to ask for advice. I hope they can work miracles.

Hair! Hair! Hair! Hair! Haaaaaiiiirrr!*

OMG. I love my hair. I got it colored yesterday. Back to darker brown. Love the color. It's so much better. It's fun to change every now and again, but some things are just best. Like Lindsey Lohan with red hair...

Speaking of Lindsey...okay. I'm slightly obsessed. I mean, I think she's beautiful. I worry about her. It seems like she has some problems (and perhaps her parents do not seem to be making things easier for her, but what the heck do I know?), but I always hope for the best for her. And I think she's BEAUTIFUL. With red hair. Like in Mean Girls. Swoon. She looked so great in Mean Girls. But I like her new bangs now and the super dark hair is quite nice. But the bangs...okay maybe I love them. And now I have them! I have bangs! And for the first time in my life after cutting bangs, I am not growing them out! I want to MAINTAIN them. They are great. Yes. Great. And maybe some day soon, when I've done myself up, I'll make Josh take my picture and you can all revel in the glory that is my hair.

*That's my written interpretation the song "Hair" from the musical "Hair."

Thoughts on Ash Wednesday

So it's Ash Wednesday. The start of Lent. And I have a meeting with the rabbi* this afternoon and then a class on Shabbat tonight. It's weird. It was plenty easy for me to forgo mass these past, oh, 10 or so years. Actually, I think I probably went to mass for Ash Wednesday all four years of college, so that would make it more like 8 years without going. And I always hated it as a kid. Ash Wednesday was the worst. Even though I was in Catholic school and everybody had ashes on their forehead, it was so embarrassing. I was always convinced that whichever priest ashed me, the cross on my forehead was the darkest and thickest (and probably sprinkled all over my face for that five o'clock shadow look). But it felt like such a sin to wipe it off at all or even touch it. Somehow, amazingly, perhaps miraculously, all the popular, pretty girls' crosses never seemed so prominent, and something about their skin seemed to make them fade throughout the day until there was only the slightest hint of a cross by the time we got out of school.

I would think about my parents and how they would wear their crosses all day at work or doing errands or whatever. They seemed far less ashamed of them than me, even though they were not constantly surrounded by other people with the same thing on their heads. Of course, I'm not saying that I knew I didn't want to be Catholic from birth. I know it was about insecurity/social hierarchy in school that made me feel so bad. But I never did feel what my parents seem to feel.

So now I'm back on the East Coast, in a very Catholic part of the country. I wonder what I'll see today. I wonder how the people with the ashen crosses feel. I hope they feel good. I hope they feel proud. But it's not that time for me. I won't give anything up (can't even remember if/when I ever did, that whole deal used to make me kind of mad). Not until Pesach. And then I'll give up all things leavened. But before that, we party on Purim, making and sending hamantaschen and getting so drunk we can't tell Haman from Mordechai...while trying not to break anyone's desks. Sounds okay to me.

*I almost always write "rabbit" and then have to fix it. Whoops!

P.S. Still can barely walk today. What did that man do to us?