Night mare once I rode as across an ocean of knowledge she strode...

My father often tells me to 'get on my horse'. Of course I'm sure he does not intend to tell me this so that I can harness a directionless instinct and wander off to a destination that yields no benefit. Sometimes I feel that way about the experiences I had as a science student. My educational progress was beset by a curiosity that became increasingly less bounded by the pragmatism of publishing and efficiently utilizing funds. I found myself conjuring up hypotheses for experiments that I knew my boss would not support and also that were lacking essential basic experiments to support what I had in mind. The last time I remember very practical experimentation was during the protein crystallography days when the goal was quite obvious: crystallize a purified protein, and then deduce its three-dimensional structure. Even then I became maddeningly frustrated by the repetition and carefulness demanded by the work. I never worked regular hours as a researcher, and the irregularities in my performance spilled over to my personal life which was almost always a mess. This wasn't just the typical stuff, like clothes strewn about and such but rather behavioral patterns that disturb me to think about to this day. For example, not sleeping for days on end, dulling my half-conscious awake states with endless movie watching and lazing about, withdrawing from social activity, and more generally disregarding my personal interests. From high school I have tortured myself through science for 10 years and while I greatly value my scientific literacy I deeply regret my slow realization that I should have learned to adjust to its demands or withdrawn at the first sign of incompatibility...