What's In John's Freezer?

I’ve been reluctant to write this post as it meant confronting dark times that I continue to be immersed in with the rest of the world. When I last wrote an “annual” summary, it was exactly when I was leaving my office for “just a few weeks or months” of remote working away from the COVID-19 pandemic. Cue ironic laughter.

Stomach-Churning Rating: unclassifiable due to COVID-19 insanity

In terms of my normal blog-summarizing activities, my job here is easy: in >18 months I’ve managed 3 posts: 1 by a guest, on stylophoran echinoderms; and 2 about papers (dino leg muscle leverage; and predictive simulations using such) related to the DAWNDINOS project my team has been focusing on for 5 years now. But normal is dead and gone.

What I should write about is what the experience since March 2020 has been like for me. I can try, briefly. Much I am not willing to delve into publicly. I struggled, and suffered; not so directly but indirectly, and from personal issues unrelated to the pandemic, too. I didn’t deal well with the isolation, the boredom and profound ennui, the mass confusion, the under-exercise and over-snacking, the repetition, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the excessive screen time (Netflix! Zoom!), the retooling of teaching for “blended learning” online, the sometimes overly risk-averse bureaucracy that spiralled out of control, the horrifically ugly selfish underbelly of society laid so bare along with smirking racism and other forms of xenophobia (see: Brexit), the endless bad news, the fury I felt at government officials and other (cov)idiots, the feeling of being trapped in my home office and my body; and trapped in a world with political/social machinery that can feel hopelessly broken. I thrive off the novelty and excitement of travel, and without it I withered. These things wore me down to a numb husk and I’m not much better, but am trying to build my energy back so I can pick some battles to make improvements. On top of that, there were tragedies in my life (deaths of two beloved cats; one fairly swiftly from cancer at a young age, one very slowly from old age and related disease), and other awful personal things. I didn’t lose anyone close to me to COVID-19, but I knew lots of people who got infected. Especially in summer 2020 and winter 2020-21, it felt like the punches just kept coming. There’s no way I can describe it all adequately; neither in person nor on this blog. It seems like a lot of people feel that way, but each in our own private way.

I lost a friend in 2020: Prof. Jenny Clack FRS. I’ve not been able to really come to grips with that, even though there was fair warning. Processing grief is on a slow timetable. We had some great times ~2009-2020 working on fossil tetrapods together. I miss her big smiles and our talks about the latest fossil tetrapod news whenever I visited Cambridge. It is hard for me to write more than that right now; I am so drained by the past >18 months. We’ve been served a buffet of flavours of loss to lament.

There’s hope on the horizon, I think, so I cling to that. And we got two new kittens at home, who are simply a joy, and we’ve been clinging to each other. Many cuddles.

It feels very strange, and privileged, to say that work (even though stuck at home) has been a happier thing for me amidst it all. Even that hasn’t been easy, but it has sometimes been a welcome refuge or distraction. I’ve been able to do some real “hands-on” (computer-based) research for long periods, gained skills, and it felt great to be a “real scientist”; not just a manager of scientists; in that regard. I learned a lot about my team’s DAWNDINOS project… and how I’d do it all so differently if I could begin again. At least I have these lessons going forwards. A 5-year, sole-PI, £2.1M project will teach you much about project management. It was so far beyond anything I’d ever tried before. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved now, such as the paper linked above and what’s coming up as the project sadly draws to a close at the end of March 2022. I feel like we’ll be justified to thumb our noses at a few armchair critics, snide naysayers, and cynics, or at least feel personally satisfied even though we’ll never satisfy everyone with our project’s outcomes vs. what certainly were ambitious goals and risks. And I have plans to move on while keeping one foot firmly planted on the foundation we’ve built…

Other than that, I’ve barely touched a work-related freezer since March 2020 and have done no research-related dissections; only digital form and function for me, I’m afraid. That’s OK though. We are slowly migrating back to a bit of in-person working now, and there are some brief dissections and other hands-on work needed as undergrad/Masters research projects begin. I look forward to that.

I was interviewed for two articles about life in science that are meaningful to me: this one on disability pride month, and this one on “advice to my younger self“. Check them out if you haven’t yet?

And that’s all I can say for >18 months in which time has been such a slow grind, warped by the pandemic and the rest of my world.