Started on the Stegosaurus last night, using a ball of green Emu dk from the stash. But I switched over to the Verona Shawl after a while, so I could read my newest issue of American Scientist and knit.

Sometimes I wonder - and usually, it's brought on by anxiety over something or a big mess-up like forgetting my grant deadline - if having hobbies is detracting too much from my ability to get research done. Nevermind that they're mostly done in the evening, or at times when I couldn't be out in the field otherwise. I don't know, there are just times I feel terribly GUILTY for not working as close to 24/7 as I could.

But on the other hand - most of the other people in the sciences that I know have spouses and many of them have children. Or they have other things they do; one of the guys in my department writes poetry and fiction in his spare time. So I don't know. I surely don't spend more time in a day with my knitting or quilting than a parent would spend with their children.

It's kind of hard because I don't really know what's expected. Maybe EVERYBODY has all these half-finished research projects, or research they began and dropped because it wasn't working out and giving meaningful results. Or because they are so crushed by the load of other things that they are doing, that they regretfully put it on the back burner. But I look at myself and all the ongoing research projects where there's no clear progress and all I see is a big mess - that I'm a big mess and that if I could force myself to focus more and not piss away my time and energy on things unrelated to my work-life, I'd be a lot more successful. And that I really don't want to be just mediocre at things. (Although maybe the pissing away of time is some sort of a psychological defense mechanism; it's a lot more comfortable for me to say to myself "If I weren't so lazy and scattered, I'd be a lot more successful as a researcher" than to consider owning up to the fact that I'm just not very good at research, that I don't really know what I'm doing at least 80% of the time that I'm working on research, and for that matter, I'm not that hot as a teacher. It's hard for me to contemplate embracing mediocrity, because all my growing-up years people were telling me I was so great, that I could do so many things, bla bla bla. Maybe the old crack that they make about Einstein and Edison [who both essentially flunked out of school] vs. "A" students is true - that those of us who were "A" students are really just unimaginative drudges who will never achieve anything significant in our lives.)

I don't know. Just thinking out loud here. Life seemed so much easier when I was a student. (And even when I was a grad student and just had ONE research project to focus on, and my advisor worried about grants and deadlines and that sort of thing).