I went to bed last night with Grand Visions of what I would accomplish today. It’s after 4 already and I’ve accomplished maybe half of them. Maybe. If I count regular daily chores, like feeding the chickens. Now I’m sitting in the living room, watching the UF basketball game, drinking a glass of vinho verde from Portugal, and blogging. I don’t think the prospects for my being productive the rest of today are very good. I did, however, spend about two hours in the hammock this afternoon, reading Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek.

This was a disappointing week for me at work. My main project this week has been LMPCR. I’ve been working on this for a good month now without any success. This time, I had Jixiu watch me the entire time and still the experiment failed. I was incredibly down on Thursday, feeling like a complete failure and questioning my future in Science. I managed to talk myself out of the funk — well, somewhat — but am not brimming with confidence going into this next week.

What am I going to do if I don’t get this to work? Try something else? And if (when) that doesn’t work? I have this voice in my head — perhaps some of you are acquainted with him — who is almost deafening at times like these, when work isn’t going well. He’s my inner heckler, the voice who tells me that I’m a fraud, that I don’t deserve to be where I am. I’ve managed to fool everyone to this point, he says, and any moment now they’re going to realize it and kick me out. And what will I do then, he cruelly asks, how will I support myself? It’s not like I have any marketable skills. Yeah, I have a degree in microbiology, but I’m demonstrating clearly that I don’t belong in Science. Write? Who would want to read what I write? And why do I think I’m smart enough to write anything interesting? Start a company? But I don’t have any ideas. And how could I find any investors, fraud that I am? I’m not creative, I’m not clever, and I’m not even good-looking.

I know — I know — that what I wrote in the preceding paragraph isn’t true, but man…that voice of doubt has some lungs on him and he can scream pretty damned loud. Come Monday morning, I’m going to get back on my bike and pedal my ass back to the lab, so I can be frustrated all over again. And, who knows? Maybe the experiments will work.

And maybe pigs will fly.