Lab this week has been an annoying beast. I ended up staying around a long time on monday. At first it was the usual bit, with me arriving at 11am and Dr. Zivago fracturedly mentioning what he wants in the National Institute of Health grant on glucose. That lasts all of two sentences before he becomes lost in whatever mental detour was up here.

Then all of the sudden, boom, there's Hideyoshi from his stint in Japan. As a short bio. note, he's quickly insinuated himself in the lab and gotten noticed very quickly--and promoted likewise. We work well together, I like him. He occasionally has a look in his eyes in the same way Brutus must have looked at Caesar, but he's reliable and competent.

So as he sits there not 7 minutes after he's come, Dr. Zivago decides to launch into a full-blown 15 minute explanation about what he wants. I'd been busy writing down all the journal article references for the grant. Hideyoshi pulls out paper and begins jotting notes. At first I thought Dr. Ziv was just going for the usual two sentence fragmented thought deal, but then I finally realized this was the real thing. This was all the briefing Hideyoshi or I would get.

We'd also made a plan to meet on Wednesday...at 8am. Not a bad meeting time, mind you, but it normally takes two hours to drive, park, ride the bus and walk to the office in the morning.

So there I am, 5:45 in the morning, having just gotten anywhere between 2 to 5 hours of sleep. I'd woken up from a dream where an old king was crossing underneath an underground tunnel, when he reaches an opening to a lit room and 3 ghoulish creature things begin to seductively devour him alive--face first, torso later--which didn't leave a great taste in my head.

The morning clung to me like that ball of ooze in your throat when you're sick. I kept complaining in my head about the sheer needlessness of having a meeting at 8am on winter break. Even so, I got there on time, said hi to Hideyoshi, continued writing up my sheet of proposed experiments and had it done by 8am.

I waited 5 minutes to see if Dr. Z was about to come down. No show.

I went up to the 6th floor to see if he was there. No show. I waited another 10 minutes to see if he'd come in along with Hara Kiri. No show.

I went back downstairs, nervously joked with Hideyoshi, edited my proposal sheet, printed out some more, edited it again, printed out yet another set, and waited 5 minutes besides. No show.

It was 8:30 as of now. I went back and forth between up and downstairs, in 10 minute waves, until at 9:00am Hideyoshi and I agreed: he wasn't going to show, nor did he send a note or leave a phone message.

Now perhaps there's some reasonable explanation why he wasn't there: his dog spontaneously exploded, his car got sick, his plant held his book collection hostage.

I don't care.

Furthermore, I give a big helping of 'fuck you' to where empathy is concerned. Why? if I didn't show up to a previously scheduled meeting and didn't call in or leave an email explaining myself AT LENGTH, I'd get holy hell for it. He does it and we just smile and shrug the next time we see him.

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That next time is tomorrow. Since I've still got the proposals, I'll hand them to him, smile, and put on my nervously-optimistic-walking-on eggshells-by-the-fireside-of-General Patton act that reduces the likelihood of him getting angry for some unknown reason. Now I could try to speak with him, using words, to convey my ideas, but the usual would happen: I'd speak for 3-4 sentences, he'd look progressively annoyed/confused, wave his hands in front of him and say "stop, stop!" I'd then be grilled on an arbitrary and likely irrelevant point for 10 minutes, given sound advice, sent forth and left to ponder.

Fuck that shit. He just gets the paper. I'm sick of trying to speak to someone who can't be bothered to listen to his head research associate.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, though! I will get word back from the graduate schools sometime in march or april. If I get accepted anywhere--ANYWHERE--else besides Mt. St. University, I'm getting on a plane and getting my ass there early. And if I just get accepted to Mt. St. University? I'm 85% certain I couldn't do it. I mean, think about it on your end: do you want to read shit like this for 5 more YEARS? I've almost spent one in this lab and I'm at my wit's end.

I enjoy bitching as much as you enjoy reading it, but here's a list of what I feel are good reasons to be pissed off:

1) We have no funding. What drugs and other things we do get are paid for by Dr. Z. I therefore can't get paid anything, but I'm expected to come in on Monday-Wed-Fri every week and any other times deemed necessary.

2) We keep tacking on more and more projects to do--but we don't have the means (see #1) or the facilities to do it.

3) Because of 1 and 2, moral is low with most of the undergrads. Some of them really want to get started on work, but we can't provide anything--and that genuinely bothers me. I try keeping them involved, but most of the stuff I can have them do is administrative or menial. We haven't done any research since this past summer.

4) As all of you can tell, Dr. Zivago and I do not get along. We can sometimes work reasonably well together, but it seems as though I'm pushing against him whenever I try to lay some concrete plan down. When he tries to lay a concrete plan down, we somehow get derailed or side-tracked.

5) He's unnecessarily harsh. I don't expect sympathy, smiles, or for him to be my friend--and I wouldn't want any supervisor to do those things. I go to work to work, period. What I increasingly can't brook is having him raise his voice in anger at me for arbitrary reasons.

I shouldn't get chewed out, for instance, because I asked him a question about doing something new like putting a reluctant rat in a plastic holding tube.

I shouldn't get cut off while explaining something.

Most especially, I shouldn't get the kind of confrontational, defensive and generally very unpleasant attitude he gives off whenever I discuss lab business with him and getting shit going. That attitude is unprofessional, insulting, and instills no sense of confidence or security. I half expect him to say something like "get the hell out of my lab" every time he comes to talk to me.

See, I'm a volunteer. Perhaps he just sees me as his apprentice or graduate student--but I'm not. I'm a volunteer who puts in 20 hours a week and has gotten 4 "thanks" and 3 indirect "good job" comments over the last year.

6) I've been here for nearly a year and I never know what to expect when I come in. Either he has an entirely new #1 priority task for me to take care of, has changed his mind about which research projects we're doing, or has decided to drop something that I'd been working on. All I ask for is some kind of consistency. Yeah yeah, 'change is good for your mind and keeps it flexible!'. There's a difference between healthy change and frenetic fucking chaos.

7) It's almost as if he wants the lab to be like this. I try organizing 10 minute blocks with him to get a firm research goal in mind for project X, Y or Z. For the last 2 months I've asked, but he's busy and can't be bothered. I largely get my instructions from passing comments, sometimes from inferring what he might want. To say that I feel out of the loop is an understatement--and I can't imagine how confusing it must be for the undergrads.

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There, seven good reasons for why I'm edging toward somewhere beyond frustration. An eigth would be that, even if I want to leave now, I can't: Dr. Ziv can rescind his letter of recommendation at any time, for whatever reason.

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At least it is friday, though.

And tomorrow I'll try to force myself to sit down and write about the lovely times I've had with Selene and The Captain this past and current week.

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For now, music and answering the email from the U. Wisconsin guy that wants me to fly in and interview with him.

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