The Fabulous Feline is still out of a job. OldCompany, where he worked last summer and the summer before that, would like to hire him, but they came to this realization after the budget was closed (on June 30th) and now they struggle to gather enough money to be able to offer him higher wages than when he was an intern. CoolCompany, which had a job he would have loved, beautifully situated at that, was truly impressed by his achievements, thought he would be perfect for the job, told him so, and said they would contact him to tell him whether they wanted him as a regular employee or as a contractor; two days letter, they called back to say they had hired someone with more experience. CompanyNumberThree, which he quite liked, told him he would be a perfect fit for a Junior Employee, but they only have Senior Employee positions open right now. Shit.

I have been alone in the lab the whole week, saved for (1) Advisor's assistant a few hours a day and (2) one colleague for two hours on Wednesday. I desperately need to socialize.

I am going through a lot of doubts about what I want to do when I grow up. Academia is very appealing ‒ I love teaching, I love research, I love the labs atmospheres I have been through so far, but the idea that it pays a misery and that you have to devote every single one of your waking minutes to it is pretty disheartening. It looks a bit easier in Europe (still paid a misery, but you might be allowed to have a personal life on the side), but I'm still not quite sure this is the life I want.

Health-wise, after having decided that there was no way I could afford to attend them and still sleep at night rather than worry about being in debt, I have replaced my weekly physical therapy sessions with aquatic fitness (which is offered for free over the course of this summer and which I totally love despite the fact that it is considered to be an old people thing). I am not getting better but I am not getting worse either. And I have an appointment with my doctor at the end of the month, hoping that she will refer me to any specialist she might think of while I am waiting for September (the idea that I can afford to go see specialist doctors but not my physical therapist is infuriating but I have come to accept it. I think.)

My paper is starting to come out good. Science-wise, that is. Even though my co-author disagree with the way I discarded 0.3% of the data I could have kept in the study. My reasons were perfectly valid at the time and I even remember him agreeing with the course of action I chose, but I cannot find the e-mail in which I thought he stated it, and with the turn the study took, they could eventually have been included. I claim our results are still valid, he thinks the reviewers are going to reject our paper because of it, I positively refuse to rerun everything for a stupid 0.3% of the data, and Advisor is not around to settle it. Anyway, while the science is good, the structure perfectly sensible, the figures pretty and the conclusions appealing, the phrasing sucks. Really. And the fact that, while restructuring the paper, my co-author also butchered my carefully tended to sentences to transform them in grammatically correct but messy, messy bits of paragraphs is absolutely infuriating. He is the native speaker here! He is the one who writes English poetry and has been published! He should know to write sentences that are pleasant to read, paragraphs which each contain a main idea and purpose and are nicely chained with the preceding and following ones.

One of my former roommates was getting married today. I should rejoice, because even though I do not care much for marriages ‒ nor weddings ‒ myself, I know she'd always been dreaming of it (It seemed to be exactly the kind of marriage she wanted, too. Lots of guests, at church, and so on.) But I can't help feeling demoralized. "It is her first relationship," the voice in my head says. "I've never met him and I do not know anything about him or their relationship. I am afraid she is marrying him for the marriage more than for him," it develops. "You're a stupid brat," it responds to itself. "How can you condemn them without knowing?". I think maybe the fact that she is blissfully settling down for the kind of life she tried to sell me when I was 16 and found it horrifying, laughing at my objections and adding "You're still so young. You'll change your mind.", is making me feel ill-at-ease somehow. I have not changed. Why would I have?