i'm losin it.

But it's only temporary. It happens to me once every quarter, usually. Actually it happens to everyone once a quarter, but everyone gets it at different times. Usually for me it's right in the middle of the quarter. Nothing seems to be going right, the pressure starts overwhelming me, I feel not smart enough and then...Crack. I break under the pressure. Tonight in my living room I'm listening to "the Flame" by Cheap Trick, and I just start bawling. At least when I used to crack as an undergrad I was in the math department, and I was an undergrad. I felt like I belonged over there. I have managed to find my niche here in the physics department but it definitely wasn't easy. Physicists are elitists, I mean, after all, we're usually smarter than everyone in the room. That goes to your head after a while. Now I've got the added pressure of being a grad student at a semi-inferior university, not knowing exactly where I want my career to go, all the while thinking I'm a fucking fraud, like I'm not smart enough or dedicated enough or any of the other things you need to be to hack it as a professional scientist. Not just that, but a professional PHYSICIST. You may have seen my myspace quote, but I'll tell you a little more about it: this man, Ernest Rutherford, was a physicist, but somehow, some way, he managed to win the nobel prize in CHEMISTRY. Well needless to say he was not happy about it, and apparently responded with the quote "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". What the fuck have I gotten myself into. Oh, and on top of everything, today one of my advisors let me know that if I wanted to get things done I need to be less loud, less aggressive. Hey by the way, could you please be a little less YOU. I would like to point out that he is from an eastern block country. Also, as another female scientist pointed out to me, he would never say that to me if I were a man.

Time to go put humpty dumpty back together again.