The recent contact from L was deeply upsetting. I was surprised, but I was also expecting it in a weird way. I was invited to be FB friends again and I cannot. It's too fraught, and unsafe for M. And a bad boundary right now. She had blocked me back in September and I told her I thought that was wise. I blocked her this time. I think she and I will be able to be friends someday but it's not possible now. As I've written about here, I'm still hacking my way through a lot of feelings about the entire situation. She is still radioactive for me. I am still healing. And I want to protect the new relationship in every way possible.
It's wild how many times I have realized clearly what a terrible mistake the entire affair was. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I have only recently begun to realize how deeply damaged I was by the whole experience. Well, you live and learn, and this learning has been extremely rough indeed. It'll be good to be even more clear about all of it as time goes on. When I get back from summer travels, I look forward to developing a relationship with a counselor/therapist. Definitely a lot to continue working through.
The contact was upsetting for M as well. It happened coincidentally with some difficult stuff up for M, and the timing was bad. We talked it through and I'm open to whatever more needs to be processed. The key thing is to show up for the real relationship I am actually having now and honor that above anything from the past.
I have been so intensely focused on finishing the revisions of the biogeography paper. It's really been almost al consuming the past month or so. I keep running into serious problems. Using RevBayes has been aggravating and challenging. I've learned a lot but it's been super slow and frustrating. The end is near, however, as I have rewritten the main text through most of the results section. I have to redo an entire key analysis because I realized a couple days ago that I calibrated it incorrectly. So it's running now. ETA: 214 hours. That's one of the wild things about using RevBayes. The analyses take *forever*. I mean, that's like 9 days. wild. And that is on a very fast computer.
Cochemiea grahamii
The intense focus has ruined my sleep, and made me feel disoriented and weird most of the time. I often do not even know what day it is. My teaching job has been so amorphous that it has facilitated this weird state. I keep waking up at 5 in the morning, realizing details that I had forgotten to attend to and thinking about a new way to analyze the data. One cool thing was figuring out how to do a binary ancestral state estimation. Fancy terminology for a statistical analysis that determines whether the emergence of a phenotypic trait coincides with increased (or decreased) rates of speciation for an evolutionary lineage. It turns out that there is a strong correlation between the hooked spines of one of the genera I am studying and almost double the speciation rate over time. No one even knows what function or advantage is conferred by hooked spines, but it's interesting that their emergence in this genus seems to have seriously increased diversification.
However, the intensity of the work has also gotten me really wanting to hit the road, see M, learn more about the two of us and how we spend time together, get to know her daughter better, hit the road again and go east for family time, and then really get my summer started. I'm feeling like I want to just burn down everything structured and logical and stepwise and contained and organized and crystal clear and just get into the non-verbal, non-analytical wildness.
The above was my office, only 16 months ago, working on revising the dissertation in the front seat of my car, computer plugged into the AC charger, 25 degrees outside at Wildrose campground in the Timbisha Shoshone homeland. Still trying to tie up the loose ends from the diss, even after two published articles. It'll be really something to do new research, answer new questions, find new things to think about.
Cochemiea grahamii
The intense focus has ruined my sleep, and made me feel disoriented and weird most of the time. I often do not even know what day it is. My teaching job has been so amorphous that it has facilitated this weird state. I keep waking up at 5 in the morning, realizing details that I had forgotten to attend to and thinking about a new way to analyze the data. One cool thing was figuring out how to do a binary ancestral state estimation. Fancy terminology for a statistical analysis that determines whether the emergence of a phenotypic trait coincides with increased (or decreased) rates of speciation for an evolutionary lineage. It turns out that there is a strong correlation between the hooked spines of one of the genera I am studying and almost double the speciation rate over time. No one even knows what function or advantage is conferred by hooked spines, but it's interesting that their emergence in this genus seems to have seriously increased diversification.
❤️