the trick is to keep breathing

What the fuck happened to 2015.

I feel like I can capture 2015 in three stages:

• Jan-April, where my life was dominated by work; I was working (solo!, since it was confidential, rather than in the team of 8-10 the project should have had) on the engineering work to produce the first draft-stage of my new pilot plant
• May-September, where my life was nothing but work: this was the site shutdown, which happened for some very serious reasons I won't blog about, in which I was given a strict budget and a strict deadline and told that if we didn't have the plant running by X our ability to, well, stay here in Akron as a place of employment would be severely hampered, and had to work a miracle with only one other co-project-leader and some contractors. Literally I did nothing but work during this time period, 60-80 hours per week maybe, evenings and weekends all morphed into additional office hours. Health suffered; house suffered; I drank a lot, picked up a life partner almost by accident, and in the end we saved the site. It's 20% of what it used to be and lumping along slowly on broken rims and superglue, but it's running.
• October-December, during which I realized just how much my own health - physical, mental, spatial (my well-being is severely affected by the state of my own home), emotional - had suffered from the previous 9 months and started the long slow job of digging myself out of a black hole. Also, child care, as my second niece was born and both she and my two-year-old niece (and their parents) needed my help and love and time. Have you ever had a two-year-old as your best friend ever? It's quite nice, she's fucking hilarious.

2015 was also an odd year personally;

• My grandmother passed away in August. She was the greatest. She was my best friend. I miss her so much. We all knew her health was failing - it had been for 5 years, acutely in the most recent year - but it's still a Hell of a Thing when someone goes. She and I had a special bond: she was what I will be like when I am 92; I was what she would have been like born into a different generation; as the sole grandparent and the sole single grandchild we spent most family gatherings together, and she was just my favorite. She was horribly tactless, incredibly impatient, occasionally directly rude, insatiably stubborn, very demanding, overbearing, sometimes overemotional: and I fucking loved her for it, because she was me in so many ways, and also because she just didn't give any more fucks. I'm still reeling from the loss.
• As I said, my second niece was born late this year. In the process of helping out there I've become much closer to my first niece, and I like it; I love all my aunts, but wasn't ever really close to them in this way, and I've realized that I really do need to be in her life (their life). Family comes first. Our relationship is something special, because I'm not a parent or a grandparent, so I'm... exempt from a lot of the expectations there, so I just get to be whatever I want to her and with her. I'll do the same for the younger one as well. Realizing how important this is was surprising, but shouldn't have been. I'm quite keen on kids even if it seems cooler to hate them these days; they're more honest than adults and usually more fun. (What I hate, I'm finding, are shit parents, but that's neither here nor there.)
• relationship - hmmmm. Not sure if the word applies. I have a something. It's complicated. And private. But there. Something very odd happened during the Shutdown Months and I found someone I quite like and enjoy who feels the same about me -- and that's enough for me, for right now.

Every year I say "this is the year I got my ass kicked by work" but this is the year it really truly happened: I hit my limit, I found the edge, I have located rock-bottom and I have absolutely no intention of ever going back there again. Working in a 72-year-old chemical facility doesn't make this easy, or a thing I have control over; but I do have control over my own energies and I have always been very. very good at saying no.

I'm looking at this year as a real learning experience: a lot of it was, frankly, awful as fuck, but I know I've learnt and grown from it. I like who I am right now, even if I'm still working on portions of my life that aren't great (social life, for example, what the fuck is that and who has time for one with all the working and the sleeping). I'm finally coming to terms with the fact that fibromyalgia, immunodeficiency, arthritis, asthma, anxiety, OCD, depression - that these things need to be considered, that I can't ignore them and plod stubbornly forward: so instead I'll stubbornly deal with them and balance my life better as I go.

That was a very, very odd year. I'm proud of what I've done, but I miss my life.

Lots of people have already posted up their "2012 in Review" and "2013 Resolutions" posts yet. Look, I am 7 days late! It is because I'm awesome. Or, it is because I am busy. Either way, I'm going to do mine now. Seven days into January seems a fine time for someone named Seventhe P. Dragomire to post up some summary lists of memories and goals.

( 2012 was the year when… )

( and 2013 will be the year… )Resolutions are hard. And interesting; it's easy to throw out a bunch of things at the beginning of a new calendar year and let that changing number signify a lot of changes, but I still maintain these things could be done whenever somebody feels like they're important. I also feel like doing them in large swathes can be hard: small changes are also good. So I've picked a couple things to try for January. We'll see how I do.

Overall my goal for 2013 is to have more fun. I have a pretty fun life in general, but I also work really hard for it -- I just want to keep on keeping on and be more happy. :D

novel_machinist is trying to pull together some resources to help younger graduates feel better about finding jobs and more confident about the things that they do! This is a(n) small LOL RIGHT essay I've pulled together to help share my own experiences with interviewing and hiring. I hope it helps someone!

The information here is a lot about me and my experiences. I come across as a really grumpy asshole. But guess what! That's who is interviewing you. I don't come to work to make BFFs, I come to get shit done. I recruit in the same way. Lots of other people do too. Here's the list of ~secret~ things we're really looking for, and how you can make even a grumpy buttface like me want to bring you into my company. SPOILER: They're not so secret.

( Some Information On Interviewing From The Other Side Of The Table, or: What Too Much Of Sev's Job Has Become and How You Can Hopefully Make My Life Easier When I'm Hiring. )

All of this advice can be boiled down to the following: We want to hire someone who wants to be hired by us for this specific job. We are not looking for people who want "a job", "any job". We're a puzzle piece looking for a piece that fits well, that improves us, not just any piece that's close enough. Your job is to use the interview time to determine whether or not you are a good fit, and if you are, to show me why you're the best puzzle piece out there. Because there are a lot of other puzzle pieces very similar to you, and if I don't see that tiny two-pixel difference between you and the last person I spoke to, I may throw you both into the "meh" pile.

I win at analogies forever.

Enjoy. And good luck. And if you have questions, or you want to hear the horror stories, just ask.



...Also I pick on Taco Bell a lot in this and I want to make it perfectly clear that it's just an example and I love me some shameful 3:30am TBell just like every other engineer in the world.

Medical talk about my eyes, ahoy! Skip if you need; otherwise please give me some GD advice.

Yesterday I went in for an evaluation with Dr D, in consideration for laser surgery (LASIK or PRK). I went through the barrage of tests - and I am serious, barrage; my appointment was at 9 and I didn't actually see Dr D until 10:30 - and got my eyes dilated (spoiler, if you've never had it done: it sucks. Your long-distance vision isn't so bad, but anything closer than 10 feet is all out of whack, you have NO depth perception and can't read anything, including your own phone, trying to look at your fingers gives you a headache, and oh also all light is now a minion of hell itself). I sat there for a bit while Dr D looked at my charts and looked in my eyes a little bit and HMMed.

There was a lot of HMMing. He talked to the [nurse? assistant? secretary? i dunno, they'd taken my glasses so I couldn't even tell you what color hair this person had] for a while and flipped through some charts. He talks to me a little bit as he looks into my eyes, and then he asks the assistant-person to go and get [a new doctor, who is training with him]. "She should see this consult," he says, and basically explains that my eyes are so bad it will be a good learning experience for his new trainee doctor. Ugh. So I sit and blink into space while she arrives, and then they finally give me my glasses back, and there is some more HMMing.

And then he says, "No, you're not a candidate for PRK at all."

Okay, I say, slowly. But the other doctor told me I wasn't a candidate for custom LASIK either because my eyes were so bad, and said PRK would be better.

Technically, says, Dr D, PRK is better -- up to a point. But on a patient like you? On a patient with -11 myop? If we did PRK on you, you'd have halos and floaters for the rest of your life, you'd never fully recover from it. We'd have to take off too much, it's coming way too close, and even if it fixes your vision you're going to lose all your night vision and your sensitivity. I don't like it. I've done 37,000 surgeries, and I'm not going to do PRK on you.

Please note at that point that my eyes are actually too bad for both custom LASIK and PRK. I win?

But, says Dr D. That doesn't mean you don't have options. You have two options, and I want you to listen carefully, because one isn't what you're going to expect.

My first option is standard LASIK, the LASIK they did back in the 90s before it all became super automated plug-and-play - that's custom LASIK, and I can't have that. The thing is, says Dr D, custom LASIK and standard LASIK both operate taking a certain thickness of your cornea per myop of your eyesight. Custom takes a little more, standard a little less. For somebody who is a -3, the difference is maybe 15 microns? Not a lot. For someone who is a -11, the difference is more like 100 microns -- which is what rules out custom LASIK. My corneas aren't thick enough to handle the amount of correction my myopic script needs.

Standard LASIK, however, where Dr D would do it himself, is still an option. It's a little... not great of an option, though. He'd be pushing the LASIK to its limits, and if my eyes started to change as I aged, we wouldn't have a lot of options, because I wouldn't have a lot of cornea left to work with. I could do it, he says, I've done hundreds of patients with eyes just like that and it works fine. But I'm not thrilled by it.

Your other option, says Dr D, is an implantable contact lens.

Basically they make a biocompatible contact lens to my prescription and then surgically stick it in my eye, below my cornea but above my iris. And it stays there. The procedure is meant to be permanent but is technically reversible - if there are complications or changes, they can remove the lens and replace it, OR I'm only left with a couple tiny microscopic holes in my eye and glasses. It isn't permanent, like LASIK.

Of course it's more expensive - about $1K more per eye - and it's terrifying (does this make me a cyborg???). But the healing process is way better than PRK's 2-3 weeks / 6 months, and there are a lot of benefits.

The biggest benefit here, says Dr D, is that we can easily correct you -- this procedure can correct up to a -20 -- easily and permanently, and completely, to 20/20 or maybe better. And then, if your eyes change as you age... he says, let's say that as you age to 45, your eyes start to change and suddenly you're a -1.5. We could pull out your implant and give you a new one, but that's pretty intense - what we would do is just LASIK your eyes to fix the -1.5. You've got plenty of good cornea for a -1.5, and we could have you fixed up in 15 minutes.

He stops for a second, and then he says to me. [Sev.] If you were my daughter, almost 30 - actually, I have a kid who is 27, and if you were my kid, and I was going to be working on your eyes, and your eyes had this prescription and this thickness, what I would give you is an implantable contact lens.

He says, if you come to me and you say, I really do want LASIK, I will do it and I think you'll be happy with it. But if you're here for an eval, for my advice and my opinion, I think you should get implantable contacts.

So now I really do have a choice to make.

Here's the thing. I'm not going to pretend that money isn't an important factor here; it isn't like I can just casually plunk down these thousands of dollars without blinking (pun... maybe intended?), because I can't: even with my good paycheck I can't just throw around chunks of money that large. It's a big deal. However. I do not want to make this serious decision about my eyes and about my quality of daily life based on money. I want to choose what's actually best, and then make the money work around that. I don't want to get to be 50, 60, and be frustrated because I chose something for my eyes to save $2grand. I want to make the right choice for myself and my eyes, so I am trying to not consider the increased cost. My eyes are worth it.

Here's the other thing. I had been trying to decide, going into this eval, whether or not I actually wanted to do this -- this being, doing anything to correct my eyes. And... okay, I'm pretty incapable of making decisions, but I had pretty much decided that... I want this. I want to do this. I want to do something to get rid of this physical disability that bothers me every day of my life. I want to fix this. I'm a pretty conservative person and I don't take a lot of risks especially with my body, but... I thought about it, and I thought, you know what? The bulk of my best adult years have already fucking flown by; I've spent my entire 20s going to school and working to support my own ass and it's been fun but they're almost gone. Going into my 30s... I could do this, do something to make my quality of living so much better. We already have to do so much, give so much up at 20, at 30, to "save up" for when we're 60. Doing something for myself, for now, was attractive in a very solid way.

But now I've got two choices - no, three choices, really. I can spend the extra money and follow the doctor's advice and get an implanted lens. I can choose to get LASIK. Or I can choose to do nothing and stick with my glasses.

(On an unrelated side note, I have... apparently really been looking forward to the 2-3 weeks I would have to take off of work for the PRK surgery. Because one of the most depressing things about all of this is that I don't get that break. what does that say about my life? I don't think it's healthy.)

So that's that. And that's what's on my mind now.

WHAT YOU WOULD CHANGE ABOUT ACADEMIA.

Well, okay.

I am going to separate this out into two parts: some big, fundamental things that I think need discussing, and some smaller, within-the-system, more reasonable things I think are relevant.

It's going to become a ramble and I am sure there are a lot of things I am going to miss. I have definitely NOT said everything I have to say about academia; this came out being more about academia as a whole, and I could write another 8000 words on effing grad school. But I don't want to let this eat up 2 hours of my evening. Have a sampling.

( The big picture of academia... needs to change )

( But what can we do NOW? )



I told myself I'd stop writing this at 8:00 and it is already 8:05 so I am going to post but I KNOW I HAVEN'T SAID ALL I WANT TO SAY so uh feel free to give me some leading questions if you are so inclined etc etc seriously, this doesn't even get into the way I would GUT graduate school and START OVER in so many places so.... dammit Cendri way to give me a topic I could cover for a week >.>

This is part of my 30 Days of Posting meme - feel free to check out the schedule of posting! My month is full, but if any of the posts make you want to ask for something else, go ahead and leave a comment anyway! DW || LJ