A sunny and beautiful day! despite research woes

Yes! Today I get to break out my flip flops and waltz down the street not wearing socks or a jacket. It's sunny and warm and beautiful. I walked to work instead of biking to enjoy the outdoors. On days ands moods like this I feel dreamy again, like maybe I COULD be a novelist, a creative person. It's so lovely. And the only reason I'm going to work today is so I can use the printer to print out travel reservation confirmations. Traveling! It will make me broke. Next week will be Beppu, in Kyushu. The week after, Hiroshima. And now I'm planning the week after in Nara, for the cherry blossom season. If only I could get an affordable room...I don't know anybody in Nara and generally speaking I hate to impose on people...

As for the research woes. Last night I had to give a talk about my research. The only thing close to being done enough to talk about was my ROC BMI Metabolic Syndrome stuff. So that's what I put together. I tried really hard, honest! I tried to make my Japanese good. I practiced. I haven't tried this hard for a presentation in awhile. Maybe since working in the Sykes' lab. The foreign language thing was a twist, as I learned the Japanese words for things like cross-sectional and longitudinal study. Not to mention population attributable risk percentage.

And yet, it was horrifically awful. I wasn't prepared, and I didn't know what to expect. And I felt hung out to dry, as usual, by my advisor. So I didn't know exactly who the audience would be. I had the impression that it would be mostly other students of his. And given the quality of my advisor and his students, I wasn't especially worried or embarrassed by my work. It turns out that basically while I was in a room full of people, the only person who was really my audience was the new department chair of the public health department over at the medical school. Yikes. I met him and I felt the intellectual level in the room rise...a LOT. Apparently he considers as his mentor a Professor Czeisler of Sleep Medicine at Harvard--the very same awesome Professor Czeisler that I'd had for my circadian rhythms class. It's a small world after all!
*Sigh* So mainly, I didn't know what to expect or who I was talking to or the gravitas of the situation I guess? But I wouldn't have minded if this particular piece of research were something I was proud of. It's not. I've basically started from scratch this year, with nothing, nothing! nothing! about this field under my belt. Not even techniques (of the statistical sort). Just me and whatever I can get for free on Pubmed, a textbook and my critical thinking brain. Which is not too bad. But still, I know that this particular piece of research I presented isn't that important (the question has already been thoughtfully investigated in a number of other ways) and isn't particularly well executed (me! newbie! no idea what I'm doing!. I'm treating this thing as a learning exercise, to see what I can do and learn in a kind of hands-on way. And basically I couldn't count on my advisor at all. Maybe it's a good experience for me? I'm a bit used to having someone to count on to back me up in what I'm doing or saying to people like department chairs. You know, like an actual advisor. Yeah, no help coming from his corner.
On top of the embarrassing piece of research, the critiquing professor (who was pretty nice after all, when all's considered) often said things about my Japanese translation which was helpful, but I couldn't always understand. So then he resorted to English, which was quite humiliating for me, at least. He was like...well, did you adjust for these factors, did you calculate the odds ratios for multiple conditions together (which I did, and can't remember anything too interesting about it except that it wasn't spectacular, which was another embarrassing point since I didn't remember my own research!), and I couldn't always understand his explanations for why he was asking those things. grr
So yeah, I went home with that feeling like ouch! embarrassed myself in front of a super smart person. Yikes.
But there was a big dinner party later, and he took a few moments to talk about Matsuyama and how it was a good authentic experience for me, etc. He seems great. I'd love to see him around more often and work with him, except that he's far away on the med school campus that I have no idea how to get to. And I'm sure he's got his hands full with his new position, so...hate to impose. Yeah, those are lame excuses. I know.