All work...

"You still need to remember balance." Dr. Counselor advised when I was feeling so good at our last session. "All work and no play makes Katie..."

Instead of completing his sentence - something I try to avoid - I smiled and shook my head. "I can't see that ever being my problem - an obsession with work has just never kicked in for me."

And yet as I watched sports, flirted with Dave a bit more than I should have and tried to catch up on sleep, I found myself thinking of poor Project X. And how lame I was going to look when I had to postpone a meeting because I didn't have any results.

It wasn't that I hadn't made progress. It's a labor intensive little process and I've recreated it more times than I can count. I was working on this same dataset on the plane ride to Hawaii in May. It just won't die - keeps popping up with new questions and ideas and endless amounts of switching that number and rerunning code and calculating results and staring at spreadsheets - hoping something pops out and looks reasonable.

I finally decided on how I wanted to approach it - the final attempt at methods that have consumed a great deal of my time. But today was an abstract deadline in addition to sending Dave off after breakfast and stopping to pick up a few office supplies. So I returned to my laptop and started reading through text I was lucky enough not to write. I did a bit of editing on one abstract, then some reading.

"You used the same word 4 times in one sentence." I offered Steve in my reply to his email. "Other than that, you're good. I kept reading to try to find additional material, but you hit the important points. You're quite concise and informative. So while I always look at your papers and wonder where all the words are, I find the material I need is always in there."

He thanked me and asked what I'd been reading. Should he include it in his reference list?

"Did you think I was lying?" I asked out loud as I typed out the citations for him, along with my impression of the papers. "I really did read."

A brief email to Carrie told her to scoot my name back in her author list. I'd worked on a tiny piece of one particular project and it ended up being rather secondary to her hypothesis. A first authorship for yours truly was rather ridiculous. But she insisted and I was too sleepy to argue overly hard. I do feel badly about it though and had I submitted the abstract myself, I would have altered the order.

Friend was easily coaxed into joining me for dinner after I failed at taking a post-abstract nap. Dave and I didn't make it to one of my favored restaurants in our continuous quest for sports and beer (though I had no particular desire for either) and I was craving cheese biscuits. I made a quick call to my parents when I got home, then began work on X.

I finished around midnight, completely consumed and largely content (apart from a couple minor outbursts that contained few (if any) bad words) with my lists and code and graphs. I took breaks to read, but not to write. Since I have blog posts both drafted and planned, I was more than a little surprised.

When I found myself unable to sleep - brain overly active and wanting to think more thoughts - I came to do some literature searches. So apparently I am capable of obsessing pleasantly about work in addition to cheese biscuits and attractive men. In addition to a whole host of other topics that I won't take the time to list.

But if I'm going to be awake at 1:30 after 2 nights of being up later than normal, I wanted proof and credit for doing so. Especially as I wasn't emotionally distressed or sick or anything awful. I was working. It just seems my reward for doing so should be something other than insomnia.