The hoops! The jumping and the flames and the hoops!

You won't be surprised to hear that this, the title of my blog, is another Gilmore girls quote. They just keep mirroring my life. I'm trying to get this god-forsaken PhD and it's just so far out of my reach. So, I am going through the literature today, working on writing my own contribution and I just feel so disillusioned. Maybe it's my day and my total and complete exasperation when it comes to pleasing my gatekeeper/prison guard/advisor. He's very good but I just don't even agree with him on edits anymore but the only choice is to do as close to what he wants as possible. So, really, my job at this point is to read his mind and to bow to his every whim and to prostrate myself. It's so demoralizing.
And here's where it comes to the literature, and reading it--I'm trying to write something good and yet so much of publishing papers is just picking a hot topic. It's all sold in the introduction. It's about spin. It's like flipping a house. You make the deal on the front end. And I don't just mean asking a good question. There are some kick-ass scientists out there, and the thing that makes them hot, what allows them to make a real contribution, is the questions they ask. The problem is that if you pick global warming or HIV or breast cancer, you can just spew garbage and get it into these journals. Then the next schmo gets hosed because she can't re-do the crap that got the brush-off in the last manuscript. She has to pretend that those bozos contributed something and write them into her introduction. "Based on data by Idiot et al. (2004), the distribution of ho-hos in 7-elevens across the country correlates with slurpee machines. While it is possible that these correlations are based on the decisions of 7-eleven corporate, the authors conclude that this correlation is due to a symbiotic relationship between chocolate and cherries." We're making progress, right? I mean, science is moving forward I think. I just go through these papers and see myself and my own insecurity and so much of what I do when I'm pulling things together and blowing smoke and I have a hard time believing that any of it is real. I guess that you listen to the themes and just use what you have. I guess that every contribution adds to the pile. The natural world doesn't lend itself to easy answers. No single person's hypothesis is going to be exactly right. So then you try and address phenomena. Tell me, does anyone else get a very disappointed feeling upon reading a journal article? Is it just me or are they all the same? And, for those of you in this business, have you noticed that we are all, all the people that I know, working so much harder than these other people? Does every fucking title have to be so dramatically inflated to the point that you can only cry, upon reading what was actually done? I think that maybe looking at things on the small scale is the problem. Hopefully the sum is greater than its sad and disgruntled parts. I mean, look at all the progress we've made with global warming. Ugh. I'm going to manage a 7-eleven. I like slurpees...and ho hos.