fake empire

Posting is like reading books. The longer the abstinence, the greater the difficulty to resume. After a hard end of July and a great beginning of August, I find putting my thoughts in a post as hard as going back to work. Or perhaps even more, since this post comes almost a week after I came back from a great trip in Andalucia and with my "professionally-amateur" working obligations at full pace.

One might think that a long-awaited trip, with "long-time-no-seen" friends would bring back some strength to resume work. Especially somewhere between an empty flat and a half-empty lab. Well, at least I did thought so. But I was wrong.

Over the last week, I have worked my ass ("arse" Colin would have corrected me) off with the scarcest results and experienced days which achieved peaks of unprecedented futility (like last Friday's quest for a periodical pattern in some stupid cancer cells' nucleosomes, but I am sure none of you cares, why should you anyway?). The key however is not there. The key is in the fact that somehow I seem to have lost any joy in the way we (or I) work, or perhaps I am only realizing the fat that I am incapable of working as "we" and can only work as "I". It's not necessarily a bad thing, I just have to keep it as my little secret when future, "aspiring" employers of mine ask me whether I am prone to "work in a group".

The problem in this case is that this group work consists mostly of having to deal with sometimes superficial, often absurd and almost always frustratingly boring orders of my bosses, whose vision of science I start to realize that I am not sharing at all. I found myself, a distinguished citizen of a fake empire whose pillars I am responsible to built and maintain. Numbers don't add up, models fail, all orders of statistical moments have united against me, my plots' curves assume irritatingly mocking grins. On top of all that, I have to make them all look good. That is the very essence of the fake empire. Here, results are discussed before the experiment is designed, the papers written before the analysis. In the fake empire, there is no time to think. Science is like riding a bike, they say. If you stop moving, you fall.

And should my empire decline and fall, I shall fall within it. What really worries me though, is that the thought of it does not sadden me one little bit.