A new Idea

It’s 2:30 a.m. and I’m trying to come up with an idea for a new project. I’ve been in a vacuum for the last week and a half, putting together and processing thoughts. Tomorrow I’m going to share those thoughts with my advisor, and he will judge themI spent the first day reading papers that I didn’t quite understand. I spent the second day reading my Thermodynamics book. Day three I went back to the papers I didn’t understand the first time. None of this led me any closer to an idea, I was getting the background ideas and models. I still don’t know if a good idea came of it, so it may all been a waste of time.

On the fourth day, I was reading papers that were closer to my area of interest. This lead me to day five, where I evaluated a whole bunch of systems to test my theory. The cycle started over, and I was back to my P-Chem text. Finally, I’ve got something to show for it. Honestly, spending this much time away from the lab is making me completely loopy. The thing is, I don’t have experiments to do until I have a new idea.

Tomorrow is the first test. It is my job to defend the things I came up with, and KK’s job is to try to shoot them down. KK needs to look for flaws because I don’t want to waste the next year or two figuring them out. I need to defend my idea, because if I don’t he won’t trust that I know what I’m talking about. That means he’s gotta look at all the papers I looked at and see if it makes sense.

It feels like I’m setting my mind on the table and asking him to stab it. This has been all me. That’s OK, I like the rush. (That ought to tell you just how exciting my life is.) Well, now it’s 3:11, so I’m just gonna toss my heart out on the internet for you to stab and get to sleep.