Flashes of Panic

A few weeks ago—I forget the context—I used the phrase “short strokes” and then had to explain what I meant. (It’s a golf metaphor, apparently, and not in wide use; now I can’t figure out where I picked it up.) But now that’s the best way to describe the semester. There are two weeks to go, we’ve drawn up our checklists of what needs to be taught/programmed/completed/graded in that time, and we’re just trying to get to the end of it.

When a former roommate and I were toying with learning to play golf, we used to go to a local driving range once or twice a week. We never, to my recollection, ever actually played golf; we just went to the driving range. I don’t think he even owned a full set of clubs, just three big drivers. Putting is what’s fundamentally frustrating about golf; everything else is whaling the skin off a little white ball, which is satisfying if you don’t slice like I do. So we’d get a medium bucket of balls (each) and try to smack them out of sight until our shoulders were sore.

The presentation went off today, I was barely prepared and took my lumps for it. (The draft I handed in a week before has not yet come back; I expect to take some lumps there, too, but I’m hoping to at least have a final paper that stands on its own.) I have a slew of coding and lab-sheet-writing and re-experiment-running to do over the next two weeks; I have my checklist written, the list of due dates lined up like wood that needs splitting, but no map of when to split it. There is no driving left; it is all putting.

I’m not the only grad student scratching at putting together my data and making it work. Scott is gathering data for his research, too, and while you can’t help me gather data (unless you ran Boston last spring, in which case you already have, thanks,) you can help him, particularly if you have a weblog. Read, understand, and give him a hand; we can’t push the ball into the hole, but at least we can give him a good lie.

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