Thursday, October 09, 2008

night shift

There is no free lunch. Last week in Como, I had a lot of lunches that were very tasty and didn't cost me anything. I had been sent on a conference, and my boss paid with money from her grant. She also requested I bring something back to the rest of the lab.

Now, just a bit past midnight, I'm trying to piece together a presentation to edify my colleagues tomorrow. The situation is nothing new. At the last moment, with a steaming caffeinaceous (*) beverage by my side and a contently whizzing computer in front of me, I'm forcing memory and creativity. I'm reminded of the first year of graduate school when I had assignments to finish and the crazy last with a dissertation to prepare and proposals for fellowships to submit. In due frantic course, everything always got done.

It won't be any different tonight. The conference program and the notes I took guide me from slide to slide. The screen appears blurry sometimes because of the hour, but I'm soldering on. Most of the brain seems to function on auto-pilot. Sometimes I have to go back over a section to check what I've actually written. It is clearly time to sleep.

As I finish the last slide and save the presentation, I'm struck by how much a training in science prepares you for writing. Coping with deadlines and producing presentable copy are recurrent themes. With one last yawn and this post published, I'm finally done for the day. I hope the yerba that has kept me awake for the last two hours is also done acting on my brain and will let me sleep.


(*) Sadly, I'm not the first to come up with this word. Google finds it ten times on the web.

1 comment:

Dee said...

wish my computer would whiz contentedly
it's content to crawl