Work Frustration

I think my delight at having my spleen shrink has worn off. I was pretty depressed yesterday, so depressed that I left work early. The only task I had to work on yesterday was to make some slides for HotNets, and I just couldn't make myself work on it. I'm sure that everyone has their off days at work, but this was not the only such instance for me.

In fact, I feel like it's been going on for a long time. I really feel that over the past 4+ years in grad school I've become dumber, lazier, more distracted, and more frustrated when it comes to my work. This might surprise some people, since I've actually been very successful in the past two years; see my publication record on my web site, though it's missing my latest IMC paper and the fact that Persona won the best student paper award. However, I find myself working twice as hard to do half as much.

Until now, I just blamed this feeling on the aging process. Now I have no choice but to question if Carmichael has been to blame for some of it. Have I not been getting enough oxygen to my brain? Or do I just want something to blame on my own failures? This inability to tease out what the effects of Carmichael are and what are "normal" changes to my body is incredibly frustrating. Which of these changes can I prevent, and which are inevitable?

These are the thoughts that went through my head as I walked home. It really weighs on me, because I've always prided myself on a job well done, and without that, what do I have? I'm really worried about Sigcomm this year; heck, I'm worried about finishing this presentation in time for Syschat on Wednesday. In the end, I suppose the only thing I can do is to try my best, as tacky as that sounds...

Racing heart

Well, I did manage to finish installing and configuring Ubuntu 9.04 last night around 5 AM. I think in the long run I'll be happy that I had to install from scratch. The system is running very smoothly and I'm pretty satisfied with it.

After finishing, I tried to go to sleep, and had a lot of trouble. I had been retaining water all day, and my legs felt very odd. Laying down was pretty uncomfortable, and I noticed my heart was racing. I was especially nervous since Ted wasn't around to help if I had a problem. I made it through the night, and Ted returned today.

Whenever my heart races, I can't help but feel nervous. Right now all of my blood cell counts are low, and I worry that if something did go horribly wrong that I wouldn't be able to tell that it was coming. This just makes my heart race more, so I had to really focus last night to calm down and keep a steady beat going. Eventually, counting my heart beats put me to sleep, and I made it through the night. Around 8 AM I got up and turned on the TV, then fell asleep again on the couch until 10:30. After that, I was fine, and a lot of the fluid retention was gone. I'm still retaining a bit though; I've been drinking a lot of water all day long, so hopefully that will help.

I'll try to give some updates on the progression of my blood cell counts after my appointment on Thursday. I will be very interested to see those results, and I hope that they've gone up from last week.

I need to do some work tomorrow; hopefully I'll finish cleaning up the camera ready version of my HotNets paper, I'll write my part of the quarterly report for the GeoMAN project, and I'll pick out and read a paper for Syschat on Wednesday. These all kind of depend on when my medicine arrives tomorrow; I'll wait until then to explain the deal with my medicine. In any case, I'm going to bed now to try to fix my sleep cycle. Goodnight!