well...

I am now more than 1/2 way to another one of those Target visa 10% coupon things.

I just registered for a summer conference I'm presenting at. More than 500 smackeroos, and that doesn't include the hotel I'm staying at.

It always amazes me how much it costs to "do business" in the sciences:

journal subscriptions can be over $200 (over $500 if you're a library; they really screw libraries)

Many journals levy "page charges" of up to $50 a page (more if you have colorful maps or photos you need to print)

you sign your copyright away to the journal when you publish (and that is the one that rankles me the most: after all, it was the sweat of my brow and the tears of my effort that GENERATED that paper). So when you want to reprint one of your articles (if you want to do it "legally") for a class or something, you have to pay copyright charges to the journals for something YOU wrote.

if you request a reprint directly from the journal of some article or other, that can run $20 or more.

BUT if you review/evaluate articles for journals (for whether or not they're fit to publish), you do that for free; it's considered "service to the profession"

(Part of me wants to say, "yeah? I got yer service right here")

And then, of course, there are the conferences. Some of which are, forgive my French, basically an extended circle-jerk by the cronies involved with the discipline. (I tend to avoid those. I'm hoping this one won't be one of those - it's the first one of this type I've gone to.)

And MOST people, any more, don't have expense accounts or generous travel budgets. I get PERHAPS $150 "free money" to travel a year (that is, if the university decides to budget it and no one else needs it more), anything over and above that I have to write an internal grant for (and maybe get turned down if there's not enough money, and also have to have receipts out the wazoo for everything. Oh, and make the plans six months in advance because we have to get prior OK if we're requesting travel funds to go out-of-state.)

The thing that really stinks is:

a. you kind of HAVE to publish and present at meetings if you plan on remaining an academic scientist

b. doing research is so much fun but trying to get it published, or trying to present it, well and truly sucks - the sheer logistics of it (I had to sweet talk ask one of my colleagues to teach for a week for me this summer because this meeting is scheduled smack-dab in the middle of summer semester) and then the whole "pay a toll at every step" part of the process. And the delays - the expectation is that when you're evaluating a paper, you'll have it done and back within three weeks, but there have been times when I've had papers out where I've waited SIX MONTHS for one of the reviewers to finish.

It's like, "how can we take something that's fun and exciting and that the profs really enjoy and make the back-end, the raison d'etre for it, be such a giant chore that they come to hate it?"

Darwin's quoted as saying: "A naturalist's life would be a happy one if he had only to observe and never to write." True, that.