Sorry for the rant which is about to follow, please bear in mind that I am unusually cranky, at the very least from being mentally exhausted, but also potentially from pms-ing. I just had a bad day with my project. Well, I had a bad twenty minutes with my supervisor, which basically made the whole day sort of bad.
So it's like I have been working on this project five days a week, eight hours a day for the past five weeks and it has basically gone nowhere. The equation that I have been using to analyze my data is not working. I thought maybe this due to some fault of my own, bad coding, or whatever. But no, a week and a half ago my mentor said that "something weird is happening" and he didn't know what. But for this whole past week and a half he has had me completely ignoring the fact that what this equation is doing is totally wrong, and still trying to figure some stuff out from it, but basically I have been working on other stuff.
All that is to say that my project is not going fantastically, and I am sort of generally frustrated at this point. So today I meet with my mentor to have a chat about what's going on. From the start, this goes badly. I have been trying to find the maximum value of this matrix, so I have two concerns. One, it seems by eyeball that this matrix has lots of maximums, although matlab is only giving me one. Two, the graph of the one point where the matrix should be maximum, is actually the minimum. Now, this is going to sound racist, and I totally don't mean it to be, it's just the best way of describing this situation. My mentor is an asian dude, and so since asian culture and our own is so different, plus there's a language barrier, asian people just come off as really rude sometimes, and it's a particular kind of rudeness that is just really condescending and off putting. I hope you guys know what I mean, not all asian people are like that, but it's just a type of rudeness that the asian to american translation is prone to. Anyways, my mentor was gone in July, and when he got back, I had to catch him up with what I've been doing. So anytime he didn't get what I was saying, he wouldn't say something like, "oh could you please explain that bit a little bit more" or something like that. He would say something like, "I think you should explain that differently, and when you are explaining something you should...." And maybe I am not the most cohesive explainer of things, but like I left parentheses out of an equation, and he said, "shouldn't that have parentheses" in that really condescending way. Or like today, he literally told me that I shouldn't name variables the things I had been naming them, in my own code for fucks sake. And like the other day we needed to look at some graphs, just to compare a couple things, so I went and printed them out. So these are the graphs I have been comparing stuff with, they don't have labels or titles or anything, all that takes way too much time, and we only need to look at them to compare a few things. Anyways, when I gave them to him he was all, "when you make graphs you need to have a grid, and a title, and labels, and make a script so that you can go back to it," and it just bothered me the way he said it. And one final example is like yesterday I was asking him about some statistics stuff. I had copied an equation from the wikipedia article describing this particular thing, and I was asking him about it, and the first thing he said was, "I think you need to read the line just before this." I mean, who says that? Here I am asking you to please explain something I am confused about, and you really feel the need to act like I haven't even tried to understand it.
So, anyways, he has this way of I dunno, irritating me is not the right word, and it doesn't make me mad, it just puts me off I guess. Makes me feel like he is patronizing me I suppose. And so when I am explaining something, and he is asking me questions, it's not like he wants me to give him more detail, it's like he is insinuating that I don't know what I am talking about. So back to that whole maximum value thing. We were in his office talking, and I was trying to explain my concerns to him, and he basically kept saying I was wrong, which would have been fine because I was basically asking him how to do something, but the way he kept saying it was like I had been being a moron and obviously I was wrong, and he totally didn't offer any explanation of the right answer. At some point he literally said, "I don't think you fully understand this." Which on the one hand, yes, that's why we are talking about it. On the other hand, all you have done is blanketly tell me that all that I have been working on for the past 3 hours is wrong, offered no useful explainations as to why it is wrong, and the way you have said it has made me feel like you think I am incapable of understanding simple things.
So then we go to my computer to look at what I have been doing. And so over the past couple days he has been saying stuff like, "I think you may have your axis inverted" and stuff like that. Which for one thing, in a 3d plot it doesn't matter if the x axis is pointing north and the y axis is pointing east, as long as you can tell them apart. So if that is not what he means by inverted axis, then he means that I can't tell them apart. Which means he must think I am an idiot, because one of the axis runs from .5 to 3, and the other from -20 to -18, only idiots can't tell -20 from .5. So he has said this on multiple occasions. Now at this point I have gotten fairly frustrated in general, he has been telling me that I don't understand this thing, and making me try to explain it over and over. And now we are looking at my data and he keeps saying that maybe my axis are backwards. So it starts with me giving a quick explanation of why they are not backwards. Then he keeps saying it. So we go through piece by piece. The matrix is indexed as i by j, so i is rows, and j is columns, and i corresponds to the -20 to -18 variable, and j corresponds to the .5 to 3 variable. Thus the fact that I have a brain in my head tells me that the rows go with the -20 to -18 variable, and the columns go with the .5 to 3 variable. Now I am getting the index for this maximum value, so I ask matlab for its index, which looks like [row,column] of the point where the maximum is, so it will tell me [i,j] of that max value. So we go though which is a row, and which is a column. Now, I have been working with this data for weeks now, so obviously I have the upper hand at intuitively understanding how the data is laid out, so I could see where he might be confued. But the way he is saying it is making me feel like he thinks I am confused. And so finally he basically keeps saying that he thinks I have confused in my head which variable is on the x axis, and which is on the y axis. He explains that he thinks I may be confused because the rows of a matrix are indexed vertically (like on the y axis) and the colums are indexed horizontally (like the x), so even though every matrix notation ever goes (rows, columns), I must be thinking (columns, rows) because I am a moron who thinks matrices are called by laying them down on a cartesian plot and giving the (x,y) of the data, like duh. And even then that has fuck all to do with what we are talking about, because we are talking about a graph. You can literally interchange the axis of a graph by rotating it through space, it has no fucking bearing on what the data is. So even though it makes no difference at fucking all, I am like OK, and I interchange which variable is plotted as x and which is y, and I guess I had just lost all sense of calm at this point because he said, "Kelsey, don't get worked up about this." Not in a nice, "I'm sorry for acting like you are a blathering baboon," sort of way, but in a, "Only blathering baboons get frustrated when you keep on and on asking them, "well are you sure you aren't an idiot? I'm worried you might be an idiot."" sort of way.
To which I have several objections. One, don't tell me what to do, and sure as shit don't use my first name when you do it, you aren't my mother. Two, what the fuck else do you want me to do, we have been sitting here for the past ten minutes going over the same goddamn thing with you basically calling me a moron the whole time. I'm pretty sure that is close to the definition of frustrating. So yeah, I was hella frustrated, you know, going red in the face, giving short curt answers, on the verge of crying because my face starts leaking when I feel cornered into something, and then he goes ahead and tells me not to be frustrated. Ugh, it just made me feel awful all day.
So, I know that was a massive novella of petty bullshit, but I really needed to get it out of my system. Thank you for listening (and telling me that, no I'm not crazy or a being a bitch?)
all of my love,
K.D.
