There's no crying in baseball.

Oh, but there are days when I want to cry.

Like today. And many other Fridays. I think this is because Fridays are a big disappointment; I look back on the week and try to determine what I have accomplished, and invariably it's not as much as I wanted, and sometimes it seems like I have hardly accomplished anything. Research progress is tricky that way, because it's so slow. It's hard to see the forward motion except looking back across a big distance. (Or, maybe I am doing it all wrong? Maybe other people make all kinds of progress day in & day out.)

Plus, my Fridays are usually full of meetings, so it's easy to feel like the whole day is just floating from one bit of (nonsense) to another. When you only have 15 minutes between one meeting and the next, you have just enough time to run back to your office and respond to emails, and then as you're walking to your next meeting you wonder what on earth you are doing with your life that you can spend a whole day this way. :(

But it's not just Fridays, it's just more frequently Fridays. The truth is, I spend a lot of days this way, not getting as much done as I want, and then also tossing in a little bit of "bad news" such as a rejected proposal or journal article, or a petulant undergrad, or a depressed grad student. I was thinking the other day that the one upside of this is that I'm in pretty good shape these days because I'm so frustrated. Usually, by 3 pm I'm feeling really agitated, and use this to power through the rest of the afternoon against the agitation, and by 5:30 or 6 I'm just good and pissed. So I let this all out at the gym, and my workouts are better on days that I've had a lot of negativity.

But, then, there are days like today, where instead of getting angry-frustrated, I get depressed-frustrated, and prefer to crawl under my desk as opposed to hitting the gym.

(I wish I were I were just using a figure of speech. There are days when I crawl under my desk. Sometimes I just need to spread out somewhere, close my eyes, take some deep breaths, and be still for a few minutes.)