exciting week!

my advisor gave me the go-ahead at the end of last week to email my committee this week to set up my dissertation defense. i sent out the email earlier today and am waiting on one more committee member to email me his schedule. its looking like my defense might fall on april fools day. mentally i will have to begin preparing myself for april fools jokes involving failing my defense.

the job search is going well otherwise. i've had a phone interview with one university about a postdoc and am heading out there to give the department seminar talk on march 11. i was contacted last week by another university and asked for permission to call my references. they said they would be in touch about a phone interview soon. that is for a tenure-track faculty position in a department of health and human performance. i'm leaving out details (such as university names) for now until i'm a bit farther along in the process. it is amazing how quickly being faced with real jobs will change your perspective or awareness of what you do. all of a sudden i need to be prepared to answer questions about how much money and space i would need too set up a lab. that's not really something you learn in graduate school, but are kind of expected to know to start your own lab.

i feel like i'm going to be giving lots of 45 min to 1 hour long talks about my research in march though between interviewing and being "voluntold" to give a talk in the kinesiology department movement science seminar here. practice for my actual defense is good! an abstract i submitted for a conference in late april also recently got expected for a talk as well. i was pretty happy about that as they had something like a 32% acceptance rate for talks (that's not very high) because they had so many submissions for the conference.

in running news, i finally went and got checked out by a pt. she's actually another phd student in the kines department here but her "real job" is being the director of physical therapy at the austin branch of a sports performance center. she thought it was cool that i did 50 mile races, which is a much appreciated clinician characteristic that i find rather infrequently. on a completely unrelated note, it was rather amusing when two of the other pts who worked there took one look at my legs and commented about how i must be a triathlete. after a week of not doing anything (and i mean anything) because of my knee (oddly, not doing anything made it feel worse) and feeling rather out of shape, their comments were appreciated. back to the injury assessment though, cp, the pt, started by asking what was wrong. i told her and then added that i had been reading a book about back pain and realized that a lot of what i might be experiencing in my leg might be psychosomatic (i.e. anxiety manifesting itself physically). after checking me for everything from arthritis to meniscal and labral tears to lack of muscle flexibility and i tested negative for everything. she then looked at me and said, i think you're right. she recommended someone to do a couple sessions of deep tissue massage to make some of my muscles stop tensing up and then warned me that it would probably make me cry. i'm waiting to hear back from the massage therapist about setting up a time. i ran last night and this morning though for a bit and felt great. so the bottom line is that i'm fine, just a little tense...possibly with the few other things that are going on in my life right now. go figure.

i think it is (more than) worth mentioning the book i talked about above. its called 'healing back pain' by dr. john sarno. i picked the book up because it was referenced in another book i was recently reading, and remembering the back pain i had in college, thought the book might be worth a read if only to tuck the knowledge away in my head for a rainy day. the book does talk about back pain, but more importantly it talks about the variety of ways anxiety and anger can "appear" in us physically when we choose to ignore them--back pain, headaches, stomach issues and various other muscle and tendon related afflictions--and how these manifestations tend to not respond long-term to treatment very well, namely because the treatment is for symptoms not cause. the book is about 185 pages and a very quick read. i would definitely recommend it in general and specifically to anyone who has weird muscle pain and can't figure out what's causing it. the ideas in the book will, at the very least, give you another aspect of wellness to consider when treating injuries.

i'm hoping for another snow day tomorrow, but i'm not sure that it will happen this time. either way, i hope everyone has a great friday!