running out of steam

I'm sitting in my beautiful apartment with all of the windows and the door open - it feels like I live on a screened-in porch when I do that, and I love it - and I am having a heck of a hard time forcing myself to work.  I am applying for a job at Penn State University which would probably start in January, and it has been incredibly stressful for many reasons.  Am I moving across the country in a few months?  Dunno.  Do I have to write an entire dissertation in 6 months?  Maybe.  Can I finish this dissertation chapter before I have to apply?  Definitely not, but I have to try anyway.  What in the hell is going on??  No idea.

So it turns out that getting divorced + the end of the semester + trying to write a dissertation chapter in two weeks + applying for a job = stomach ulcer, in case you were wondering.  I woke up with this awful searing pain in my stomach last Thursday, which went away after I ate some food, but it's been back periodically ever since then, and after doing some reading online, I'm pretty sure I have a stomach ulcer.  So that's interesting!  As long as I take some Pepto Bismol every once in a while, it's fine, but I'm anxious for my doctor's appointment to get here (it's on Tuesday) so I can get some antibiotics and nip this thing in the bud.  (Did you know that 70 - 90% of stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium that usually only gets a foothold when you have a compromised immune system due to stress?  I learned that this week!)

Anyway, things are mostly good, actually.  I've gotten a lot of work done in the past two weeks, and now I know exactly what my dissertation's going to be about, and I've even started writing it.  Crazy, right?  It's just that I'm in the home stretch of finishing up this chapter to send off with my application materials, and I have to finish up my 'statement of research interests', and I'm just... close enough to finishing that it's hard to motivate myself to just DO it, y'know?  I need to just do it.

Ok.  Self pep-talk over.  I'm gonna do it.  And then I'm gonna submit these things and wait to hear back about whether I have to write the rest of this thing and move to Pennsylvania in 6 months.  I have no idea what is going on, but I am excited and super anxious, in the good way and the bad way.

I leave you with some awesome pictures of my brain that I recently rediscovered.  I participated in a speech perception experiment at UCSF last fall, and they made MRIs of my brain, which I think are awesome and I'm going to frame them and put them in my office.

Look at that corpus callosum!  Look at that beautiful cerebellum!
And look at how huge the human tongue is!

Ghoooost faaace...  Ghooooost faaaaaaace...