cuss word, cuss word, cuss word.

(I have a friend who has young children at home, and because she doesn't want them picking up bad language from her, when she gets angry, she says "Cuss word! Cuss word! Cuss word!" over and over again. In fact, I think she's encouraged her oldest to do that when he's ticked).

I'm working on rewriting papers.

I HATE rewriting. I HATE the whole publishing scam. I HATE having to deal with co-authors.

But something happened today that is my own fault, and I can't do anything to fix it.

Cuss word.

I had done an extra analysis on some data. I had printed the analyses out, and used them in the last paper I got published (which was in January 2006 - too long ago really for comfort in the academic world). I tossed those analyses because, you know? Once a paper comes out you shouldn't need that stuff ever again.

I was also in the middle of a de-packrat program. I am a horrible, terrible packrat. I save everything. In my parents house there are notebooks from when I was in the seventh grade. Notebooks that were packed up and MOVED when my parents moved from the house where I grew up to where they live now. I had tried over the years to de-packrat myself: it's not healthy, it's not good, it's hanging on to a lot of useless stuff. I had used the justification of "But what if I need it someday?"

Fast forward to last summer. Cleaning my office which had gotten so bad it was a departmental joke. I KNOW I trashcanned those printouts; I can almost see a mental movie of me looking at them and going "I won't need these ever again, thank goodness."

Well, that came back to bite me nicely in the ass.

My co-author suggested I include one tiny, little detail from those printouts. The printouts which I do not have any longer. I don't really want to admit this to him because this is the same co-author who persuaded me to shitcan another article we were writing earlier this spring, and I'm afraid he's thinking I'm some kind of a ****-up now. (Oh, I know he's saying it to people. He said it to me about others: "She seemed so good at the time but now she's gotten lazy." "He seems to be kind of accident prone." And I know - I shouldn't care and it's really shabby that he does it. But you know? I do care. I want him to have a good opinion of me. And that includes not having lost the damned printouts.

So now I'm re-running the analysis program on the data. It's one of these complex situations where there are about eighty permutations of the different factors you can look at, and I DO NOT REMEMBER what combination of factors I used. So I'm going through methodically (and each analysis takes about 15 minutes) and running each one to see what combination of factors gives the same output that I have. (I do have the results; just not the printout of what I did. SO I'm generating a buttload of results and comparing them to see what combination gives the same outcome. If any combination does.)

I'm just so tired and fed up. I almost get the feeling that the co-author is doing a passive-aggressive, "I'll suggest so much crap in this rewrite that she'll eventually call me up and kill the project."

And I feel all "I suck" and I feel all like I'm never going to successfully publish again, and it's eighty eight degrees in my office and there is NO air, no air, and I can't breathe.

And part of me is so #*$U#ing stubborn that I want to go and FIND those results, I've dug through all my filing cabinets (no mean feat) just in case some angel stayed my hand and I actually filed them but no luck.

So I don't know. I hate publishing. I love collecting data. I love writing it up for the first time. But I hate the million-papercuts, being-pecked-to-death-by-ducks feeling of trying to rewrite a paper and make it pleasing to some anonymous reviewer who may or may not understand what you're trying to do.