February 9, 2007
So I’m in Portland, OR for the INS Conference where I did my first poster presentation today. I’ll get to that in a minute, but I just got off of a webcam call with Jake, Noah, and Paul (who is now back East), and I’m so sad that I could cry. I’ve had a day and a half of doing generally whatever I want to, and that is a nice change from the marathon that my life typically is. But I’m never away from my boys, and when we hung up just now, I got such a raw emptiness in my stomach. I’ve barely been gone, and I’ll be home in 3 days, but I MISS them. And I’m so far away. I love being their mom ;-)
That said, my poster session was pretty exciting. I had no idea how many handouts to prepare, so I just made 25. And I ran out! So an additional 25 or so folks signed up to receive follow-up emails from me about my research. Very exciting! Many folks stopped by and indicated an interest in the direction of the research, and for a need to publish it. A journal editor gave me his card and suggested that I consider them for publishing my data. That I consider them!? Whoa…that’s pretty exciting, makes my stomach flutter a bit (I’m very visceral today, clearly). And I spoke to the TOVA people who also wanted to see my poster and want more information from me. All in all, made me reconsider my direction in my career. I really do like research, but I’ve always been afraid of it. I guess that’s one manifestation of my inferiority complex- that researchers are so brilliant and I can’t compare. I won’t lie, I know that part of this reluctance on my part is because I feel so statistically inept. Literally. But I got through my dissertation, and I actually understand what I was talking about. And I can think of a ton of things that I’d like to look at (scientific questions), but I just don’t have the resources to do that right now. Or do I? I need to talk to the director of my practice and see about running some data. Oh, the TOVA guy said that I could send him my TOVA outputs….ALL of them…and he would throw them into SPSS for me. How nuts is that? I have to say, while I enjoy the report writing (at my job), the testing (while at times, interesting), often times feels like manual labor. Just because I give the tests so frequently, that I can almost do it automatically. Can read the instructions, and go through the motions while not even thinking about it (like how when you attend mass every Sunday for your whole life, you get to the point where you can recite all of it, and stand up, sit down, kneel, stand up, kneel…without hearing a word that you, or anyone else is saying). It’s like when you’re driving on a road that you’ve driven a million times, and you forget where you are because you weren’t paying attention. Because you don’t have to. Yeah. It’s kind of like that. Anyway, maybe I want to publish more and teach. Maybe I want to do research. Maybe clinical work, at least in my current capacity, is quite numbing. Maybe.
And in closing:
If I hear one more word about Anna Nicole Smith, I'm going to engage in a self-injurious behavior.
