My Valentine

Two things just happened.

First of all, this morning I sent S.L. (el jefe) a draft of my poster for the meetings in April. At this point I should note that the meetings have been an underlying cause of stress for me since the moment I submitted my abstract on September 14. In truth I had no idea how I was going to write the paper I had outlined in the abstract. We have a couple of terms (coined by S.L. himself) to describe meetings presentations that have totally bombed. One is "train wreck" and the other is "jumping the shark." There are even hand motions to go with these, so that in a crowded lecture hall, you can gesture your disgust to your colleagues. At any rate, my complete lack of ability to do anything with my dissertation data over these last 5 months has been weighing on me like a ton of bricks. I'm not out to be the biggest name in primatology; my presentation doesn't need to shift any paradigms here, but I need to at least come up with something to present, and I know that S.L. won't let me present anything that either wrecks the train or jumps the shark.

So, I made Rob crunch some numbers for me in Mathematica, I took these numbers and ran some really clunky statistics, and have spent countless hours immersed in writing about the lack of significance in my results. I put this together into a poster and sent it to S.L. this morning. I didn't expect him to get back to me right away, but when a reply from him showed up in my inbox just now, I couldn't take another breath until I opened it. Much to my surprise, he said he had looked over it and thought it was generally okay. The biggest problem is that I am throwing out way too much information, and he had some suggestions about how I could pare it down. It will still be a lot of work to get it into shape in the next few weeks, but at least it seems manageable (so long as I keep to my schedule of working into the wee hours of the morning). I am not yet to the point where I can breathe a sigh of relief and turn off the fight-or-flight response that is raging through every cell of my body, but I think that I will eventually be able to get there.

The second thing that happened was immediately after receiving S.L.'s email, a message from Leda popped up in my inbox. She wished me a happy Valentine's Day! Of all things! She said that she hoped I had plans to come back to Ometepe soon and that everything was going "super bien" for me. It still amazes me, how small the world can be. Here I am, wearing 3 layers of clothes, staring at the computer and trying to make a punch-line out of a year's worth of data. And there she is, in the blistering heat, having been washing tourists' clothes by hand and cleaning bathrooms since 6 o'clock this morning. It feels like we must live in 2 separate worlds, and it is so nice to have this reminder that its really one in the same. Thanks for reading.