I’m so effective at work with everything that concerns teaching and service, running around, organizing meetings, grading, interviewing, everything.
But today is my research day and. . . it was horrible. I made soup. And cleaned the kitchen counters. And cleaned my desk. And stared stupidly in front of me. A lot.
The soup is great. I had two bowls. But that’s the extent of my accomplishment. I’ve so been looking to going back to my research. I cleared everything out of my way for this day: the committee work is done, the teaching is planned for the next ten days. But today’s been a total waste of time.
I feel stupid and useless. And very guilty because it’s like I took Klara to daycare so that I can stare at the wall and eat soup. And I don’t even feel rested because guilt is very exhausting.
Clarissa's Blog 
i’ve had this happen more than once. But are you sure it was a waste? Maybe you really needed some stare-at-a-wall and make soup time, and/or maybe that project was percolating as you did apparently unrelated stuff?
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Let’s hope so!
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I know how you feel. I have had many a day cleared up completely for research go to waste and often feel I do more on days when I have teaching and other interruptions than on days that are supposed to be distraction-free? I think scarcity theory holds here as well: when one’s time to do research is so severely limited, one tends to treat it with wild abandon?
I can’t remember life without kids. But I know that ever since I’ve had kids I have been starved for time to goof off but also to do intellectually challenging work. Research requires getting in the zone and cannot be done on cue, especially when you are also tired, sleep deprived, and also pulled in every direction, yet you now have to do it within a schedule that is constrained form all directions: classes, daycare hours, childcare hours at home, and simple limits of human endurance.
Don’t beat yourself up. I am convinced this is a normal response to a generally tightly restricted schedule with very little time for research.
I see the same phenomenon when I take a day off: I end up so anxious that I have to make the best use of it that I end up wasting it. I want to see a movie but nothing seems appealing, I want to go out get a bite to eat but cannot decide what to eat so end up eating something stupid from fridge, etc.
So no worries. I won’t tell you to not feel guilty, because you feel how you feel and I have been there many times myself, but I will reiterate what you already know: Klara is fine, she’s not hurt when she’s away from you and in daycare; research requires focus/flow, and some days you just don’t have it, and that’s life.
And you have inspired me to get some soup!
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“I see the same phenomenon when I take a day off: I end up so anxious that I have to make the best use of it that I end up wasting it. I want to see a movie but nothing seems appealing, I want to go out get a bite to eat but cannot decide what to eat so end up eating something stupid from fridge, etc.”
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BTW, in case you are wondering why some people who use ¡Yahoo! have suddenly changed accounts or gone off-the-air so to speak, apparently ¡Yahoo! has had over one-half billion E-mail accounts håxørëd:
El Register (UK) —
“Half! a! billion! Yahoo! email! accounts! raided! by! ‘state! hackers!'”:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/22/yahoo_500m_email_accounts_hacked/
“‘We have confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor,’ said Yahoo!’s chief information security officer Bob Lord on Tumblr today.”
Some of us got that news a bit more rapidly than the others …
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Dreidel here…
Isn’t EVERYTHING hacked nowadays?
A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from Google asking me to confirm that I’d requested to change my password for my e-mail address (I hadn’t), and about that time WordPress started blocking my “Dreidel” comments on Clarissa’s blog (and apparently still is).
I’m really not concerned about any personal hacks. I have multiple firewall / threat-blocking software on my system that keeps the bad guys out, and if I mistakenly let one in, I can wipe all of my connected hard drives clean and replace every single byte on my 8 terabyte system in less than 30 minutes. (As for the “cloud” — I don’t trust it and have nothing in it for anybody to steal.)
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BTW, you’re using “the cloud” more or less when you use Google, ¡Yahoo!, etc.
I think what bothers me isn’t that a Web portal company as crap as ¡Yahoo! got hacked, but instead that the “state-sponsored attackers” were able to mess up my day in the slightest.
My reaction went from being moderately irritated, skipped being offended outright, and leaped straightaway toward being massively appalled.
Fortunately it was just a personal account, I keep telling myself.
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What are you working on nowadays, research-wise?
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The literature that was created in response to Spain’s economic crisis. I’m very proud of myself because at the very beginning of this project back in 2014 I predicted that the crisis was going to become a political one within a very short period of time. And it’s exactly what happened.
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