Lately…
Lately I’ve been busy. Sure I’ve been busy before, almost every year when certain yearly deadlines roll around (I am thinking of the satellite observatory proposals), I get swamped with work and put in marathon shifts. But this is a busy I’ve never known the likes of.
I’ve always worked within the confines of the mantra: Work smart, not hard. And up to now it has worked wonders. I implement all kinds of efficient and time-saving measures like masterful use of Regular Expressions, writing scripts that talk to other scripts that run other scripts on multiple platforms (astronomical software can be so disjointed), and taking advantage of the fact that few students use the powerful number crunching Sun workstations over the weekends. On some weekends I’ll monopolize every single machine to perform data analysis tasks on large archival data sets. Of course, a key part of working smart means not actually having to set foot into that computer lab and managing everything from the comforts of the arm chair in my home.
But it isn’t working anymore. That is, the mantra isn’t cutting it. I’ve gotten to the stage where it is time for the elbow grease. I raise my head from a desktop of papers, sheets with calculations, and my TI-83 solar powered calculator (which I inadvertently stole from my high school back in 1995), and wonder, this must be what other graduate students mean when they complain about being treated like slave labor but I recall that no one is asking me to work so hard, I am doing it out of some twisted desire to achieve something for myself.
What I have found is that all work and no play eventually triggers a state of myself I never knew existed; a state of heightened concentration, increased drive, and perceptible and measurable progress. I am surprising myself, but I still have so much more to do. In less than a month I feel like I must accomplish the tasks that would have normally taken me three. And yet…
And yet I find myself watching more movies, preparing more elaborate meals, and reading more books than I have in months. This is like an uber-state of activity. Surely I must burn out, it is inevitable. But in the mean time…



