September is my busiest month every year, and I forget that September is my busiest month every year – every year. My priorities are off this year (everything is top priority, all the time), and computer time is scarce, so I am constantly jumping windows and changing between apps. I don’t want to say how many tabs I currently have open, but here’s what their contents are mostly circling around:
The Cloud Book
My PhD thesis Head in the Cloud on the Alpine data center industry is going to be a book, and it is going to have a GREAT TITLE I can’t just yet trust the internet with, but before this GREAT TITLE is announced or published anywhere, I need to sit down and seriously rethink my life (okay: writing) choices. At around the time of my defense I participated in a book workshop where one of the instructors told us that we should take some time after finishing our thesis before even thinking about publishing, because time = anesthesia. You numb your attachment to your writing, slash away at it, and then, only then do you publish it in book form. I didn’t especially love this advice at the time (my idea was more along the lines of: publish fast, all attached, no regrets), but, well, look at me now. Sedating my writing self to cut all the limbs off my PhD thesis.
The Data Project
I am also working on what I want to be thinking about for the next, say, six years (if you’re reading this, you might also like to: hire me as your postdoctoral researcher?). I don’t want to see a data center again from the inside in the foreseeable future, but I do want to see what is actually inside them (as in: stored on their servers), so my late-night Google deep dives have been about data, shared European repositories, giant datafication projects, systems thinking in environmental science, digital twinning, and open science infrastructure. If you think I am being intentionally vague then you’re right. More on this later.
The Second Degree
There are around 60 ECTS standing between me and the end of my biology studies and if now isn’t the perfect time to get them out the way then I don’t know when is. I enthusiastically signed up for 30 credits this semester before even starting to consider that my working hours are already severely limited as is, and now I’m in too deep to back out of it. Bottom line, I am going to see this through, probably, very likely.
The Literature Thing
I cannot believe I am actually working on a fourth giant project but unfortunately past me decided that yes, this would be the case, so here we are. Surprisingly (?), this is the one that I find the hardest, and even though I’ve had plenty of encouragement and even got very nice funding to go through with this, I keep thinking that probably, I don’t even know how to write. How does this work?? No idea. My brain tells me I faked my way through all my past prizes and scholarships and it’s a huge mistake I even ended up here, so every time I open *the book document* I freeze. It’s very slow going, to say the least.
The Family Chronicle
As the ultimate side quest that took on more dimensions than I think I can handle at the moment I picked researching my family tree. This includes going through church records (which, here, are all digitized), learning the Gothic handwriting kurrent, expanding my Latin (and, as it turns out, Czech) vocabulary, buying the chronicles of small towns my ancestors lived in and then eagerly looking for photographs of houses and faces they might have owned, transcribing letters my great-great-granddad wrote to his summer fling who, in the end, would become my great-great-grandmother, and then fantasizing about arranging everything in a giant family chronicle. I already have layout ideas.
My to-do list keeps telling me there are tons of other tasks and smaller projects to work on, as well, let alone private projects and family things, so needless to say, the name of the game this season is prioritizing (and prioritizing well). Wish me luck, send me a message of encouragement, or make plans to go to the sauna with me for some decompression time. Either way, can’t wait to hear from you.
