slow-moving morning

Slow to get going today: I have my six-months' checkup (apparently that is indicated for those of us on blood pressure meds? I don't know). I don't like going to the doctor. I hope eventually familiarity will kick in and I will be less uncomfortable with it.

I am very healthy, the only thing I could get a lecture about would be diet/weight, but these days my diet is okay (I could eat more vegetables, but then again, so could probably everybody) and my weight at least isn't going UP. And I work out and have shrunk a little in size, if not appreciably in weight, in the past six months. And at least I'm over the stomach crud of this spring so I won't get a referral for a scoping or similar.

If I can work up the gumption to, I'm going to talk to her about getting a dermatological referral just for a check....my dad and both his brothers have had little, low-grade skin cancers removed and even though I tend to be pretty obsessive about sunscreen and wearing a big hat when I'm out I still worry. Also a man I go to church with had to have a goodly portion of one ear removed because of skin cancer on it and I'd rather, if I'm going to have to have stuff cut off me, have it done when it's small and Mohs surgery will handle it. I'm younger than when any of my relatives first showed up with the issue but still. (It's also possible, given that she's a GP, that she can do it. Erhm. I hope she's not all, "Okay, take off your dress and we can do the check right here" because eep, I need to work up to doing that kind of thing.)

Also, it's my v. short break. I do have plans: finish the current chapter and do the next one, and also start reading up on R. Because, yeah, though my chair is going to fight for us to keep the user-friendly stats program we have (and I have also heard some people in Psychology are very, very up in arms about losing it), still, it's good to be prepared. Because I could see us getting SPSS back for THIS year as a "Well, okay, we kind of sprang it on you fast but you need a plan in place for NEXT year." thing.

Still, I am trying hard not to be resistant to this, because I know me, and I know when I get resistant to something, I can't learn it. Reasons I am resistant:

1. I really shouldn't have to. It's bananas that a university expecting research to be done and stats classes to be taught will not provide analysis tools. (Yes, Excel has some, but they're totally pants, based on what some people have told me).

2. "Everything that makes my life easy is being slowly taken from me" - the whole hang up with "things are bad and they're never going to get better." I am good at catastrophizing and extrapolating from this data point* to "They're probably going to shut us down in another year or two and THEN what will I do?"

(*Which is possibly totally erroneous and is someone in an office making a boneheaded move they think will save money)

3. "I'm no good at programming and this is programming" I don't have ANY experience writing code; the only "programming" I have ever done was fooling around with BASIC back in the day, and that wasn't much more than making goto loops to print "FART" 100 times on the screen or, at the most, animating little sprites to do very simple dances. I have, I guess you could say, written code in the old command-line versions of SAS and SPSS, but that is somehow different because I had models to work from. And I wasn't expected to teach it to people.

4. "I'm gonna look totally incompetent trying to teach this when I don't really know it" I hate having to tell students, "I don't know why you got that error" or "I don't really understand this myself' because dangit, I'm supposed to be the EXPERT and while I can say, "Let me look it up" there's always the chance I won't be ABLE to find why they got that error and then I just look like a dumb bunny and it will take just that one person with a chip on their shoulder going "You don't know what you're talking about, do you?" to totally derail the class.

5. I'm tired and my brainspace is taken up by too many other things. I'm contemplating dropping my little study of German for the nonce while I contend with R because I have only so much "working memory" and a lot of that is devoted to other things. There's only so much I can concentrate on and I have my classes and my research and those textbook chapters already and it makes me sad because I want to keep learning German but.....this is how it always is, as the phrase I got in Duolingo the other day said, Spaß kommt zulezt or "Fun comes last." And I get so tired of putting my own fun last after all the other things I MUST do. 

I'm trying to reconfigure it as "it will be a challenge" or "maybe you'll be really outstandingly good at it and you can help other people and get coauthorships and stuff" or even "You can make abundant pirate jokes in class if you teach it" (because, R, get it?) but am mostly failing at jollying myself into it.