Facing Perfection by ~active-style on deviantART

Yesterday and today are as close to my definition of living fully as it gets without having the boyfriend around (he graduated recently and now lives a couple of states away but visits occasionally) and without any superexciting life-altering event happening.

Yesterday started with an extended work day in the lab, followed by some volunteer work as an ESL teacher in a nearby church. It was my third time teaching ESL, and it gets better/more fun/ more rewarding and educational every time. My students are amazing people, very smart, with an almost child-like honesty, openness and curiosity. They're already making progress in their vocabulary and the fluency of their speech, which makes me SO very proud. I have to add, though, teaching is the most exhausting thing I've done. I teach a two-hour session with about five students, all at different proficiency levels and different things they need to work on. One lady from Cambodia speaks very fluently but cannot read and write. A young Romanian woman is extremely smart and grasps all the grammar right away but needs more vocabulary. I try to integrate a lesson which is educational for everybody but also a fun thing to do for these people who go to work every day. I come back home drained of energy but happy.

ESL was followed by watching S*x and the city for a second day in a row and crying for a second day in a row at all the corny parts. Hormones much?

Today experiments at the lab were long but less tiring and the lab mates and I were unusually cheerful and chatty, so the hours flew by. I still feel energetic, so I'll cram in a run and some GRE studying later in the day. Maybe some working on my paper too? I can't believe how much motivation I have recently. Seriously! Maybe it's the summer sunny weather, maybe it's the summer lack of stress, but I'm getting ahead at full speed. Oh, and I have only two weeks till the boyfriend comes for a visit. Can't wait!

I woke up feeling a bit sluggish and had one of those lows where I don't feel bad per say but just lack motivation to do anything but lie in bed all day. So I went through my Sunday feeling like it was a wasted day of my life, but when I look back at it now, I actually did quite a bit. I studied some GRE words, cooked some healthy meals (nota bene: a scrambled egg and a salted instead of sweetened oatmeal are actually quite tasty and a good breakfast), ran around the lake (and even experienced the legendary runner's high), and worked a bit on my paper. All in all, I did a lot. Yes, I could've done more. I could've studied for six hours instead of two, ran farther and faster and skipped that frappucino I hat at Starbucks, but had I obsessed about not doing enough, the pressure would've made me do even less.

I'll allow myself to be all proud and smug tonight, and go to bed happy after reading some blogs.

A couple of hours I was in the bathroom of my tiny apartment, unsuccessfully trying to relax and float in a bathtub that was made to hold only about three quarters of me. Wet sheets of my research mentor's chapter on fluorescence theory and experimental techniques lay scattered on the floor. As it happens every now and then after coming back home from work, as soon as I found a place where I can be alone, my face was covered in tears. I wasn't sad; I had no reason to be. I find research an extremely rewarding, albeit energy-consuming, experience. Time flies when I'm in the lab. (How many people can say the same about their job? I'm crossing my fingers so that I don't jinx myself.) It is just that after finding out something new or learning a little about somebody else's discovery, I was once again reminded about how little I knew, how little anybody in the world was capable of knowing as compared to the abyss of unknowns, and even the vast array of collective knowledge that can never be mastered by a single person. Not knowing bothers me. I am constantly told that as a scientist I should get used to it if I want to work in a field where questions never ever have easy answers. Yet, admitting that I'll never find the answers to Everything makes me struggle against my personal demand for perfection.

Waking up, going to bed, and everything in between are about trying to improve anything and everything. I try to get better grades, a better appearance, better experimental results, more friends. I try to make everything perfect and please everybody, so you can imagine that in a less-than-perfect world I am seldom happy. (I won't say never, though. I have my moments of bliss.) It's a character trait that is impossible to live with in science, or should I say in any aspect of life? So here I am, trying to correct it by writing about it. Don't know why, but somehow confessing something that's bothering me helps me get over it, as if by sharing it with others it becomes less a part of me.

*Shouting at the silent blogosphere from my tiny corner:* If anyone is reading this, how does it relate to you. Do you find yourself striving for perfection or do you just take life as it is? And if you do strive for perfection, how do you reconcile that with reality?