The real update: "embrace your inner bitch"

I had my lunch with the potential mentor.

The highlight is that I got a lot of "do what I say not as I do to the extent that you can." Ok so on one hand it was useful -- sanity check wise, I know what ideally I should do. On the other hand -- I didn't get much on the shared experience how does one balance priorities in the non ideal situation.

Short term plan -- spend every weekday on the project that currently funds me.
Weekends I will split between the project that pays me and for conference and resubmitting the two papers I had already submitted with a nice letter- of the form "Dear Editor, This paper has gone through the process before, and here are the changes requested. I realize that this is way after the deadline I was given; however, the delay was due to serious health problems outside my control. If this cannot be continued from the previous position in the process, please consider this as a new submission."

I also have a better idea of how to broach the subject of the conference/continuation of this project.

I have a good idea on how to balance the projects given sufficient time. Sufficient time is about 12 months if the above papers have to start the submission process all over, and 9 months if they can pick up mid way through the process. Then I will rank all my side projects based to how long they will take to result in a paper. Then I will make a schedule assuming only weekend work on them, and send the schedule to all the other collaborators, with a note of "This is realistic schedule. If you don't like it, either offer to hire me or offer to do something that shortens the time to publication for me."

If there is not sufficient time, then I am screwed. I didn't get advice on what to do then. But I think I know what I will do. I will balance this project, which after all has been funding me through my treatment, and what I think would be the contributions that I care about the most. Everyone will get the "This is my schedule. This is what I think is important for me to accomplish (i.e. this is what I want my legacy to be) before I am out of science due to lack of funding. If you don't like it, either offer to hire me or do it yourself, while giving me credit for the work I have done."

In other words, no matter what the time, I have to embrace my inner bitch. At least I won't have to worry that I will be given the recommendation letter full of "she plays well with others" aka the communal qualities that seem to hurt women anyways.

Uncluttering the mind...

One of the issues with the health problem I had is a generic mind numbness and tiredness due to the illness as well as the medication taken to control it. As a result my desk as the rest of my life and work have been quietly getting piled up with important and unimportant stuff.

For me at least, the task of uncluttering everything is daunting. Every piece of paper was either something important that still needs doing or that I missed doing or didn't do as well(or fast as I could) or ... And lets be honest, on my list of things to do are several papers and projects that should have been done nine months ago, and are more important than figuring out how to unclutter.

A successful strategy for me is to leverage random outside events to get me to focus in a burst on one of those tasks, without expectations.

The random event: a garage sale/giveaway.
The random find: a desk that could work as a TV stand and matches our living room colour scheme.
The random mishap that helped: what was formerly our TV stand was a coupe of wood like shoe racks on top of each other, which I always worried would break and hence were filled with inaccessible books to turn it into a more solid rectangle of wood and paper. I t turns out that as we moved the tV onto the new desk/console, I got excited to use the shoe rack for my shoes -- and it didn't fit into our shoe and coat closet by less than an inch. Loathe to not use up the shoe shelves, and loathe to put my shoes in the bedroom closet where lets be honest I rarely would look for shoes, I had the idea to stack them on one of my desks and organize the papers on them.

The result: a very clean desk. I sorted my papers by shelves for project: code, set up notes, troubleshooting notes, papers on the science code, papers on the technique from a different field, etc.

All of a sudden what was left was a pile of papers that are not needed, which got trashed, and a very small pile of personal stuff to sort through. I made a space for pile of personal stuff to be sorted through, and voila my desk is clean.

But the mind is a funny thing -- it translated the order on my desk, as getting control of my life (finally). I wonder how long this feeling will last.

Anyways, it seems someone at the New York Times has spent some more time musing on the brain on metaphors, backed up by some curious scientific studies.