Banana bread makes me happy

Woke up sad today because I realized how much work I had to do and how little motivation I had to do it.  For me, long-term stress turns into sadness, which turns into depression...so I guess the solution isn't to "become un-depressed and just do it" so much as learn to deal better with stress.  Or reduce the number of stressors in my life.  In any case, I'm not sure what this lack of motivation comes from - or when I lost it - but part of it has to be the fact that doing literature summaries won't catapault me into grad school, or into my dream job.  It won't give me any "skills" that I can use to catapault me into said goals.  And I get impatient.  And frustrated.  And then I end up staring at my computer all day because then I don't have to think about all this.

So.  Instead of thinking, this afternoon I decided to go bake some banana bread.  Not enough bananas and not sweet/buttery enough for my tastes.  But good enough.  Good enough to act as comfort food.  Good enough to make me suddenly realize that skill sets are built, not magically acquired.  And building takes time.  Sometimes you're going to hit your finger with the hammer.  So what do you do?  Patch it up, move on, get back out there.  Eventually, with enough help, there will be a building where once there were only materials and dirt.  So yeah, doing these literature reviews now may not be exactly what I want to do.  But I can learn how to read and analyze a journal article, to manage my time effectively, to meet deadlines, to wake up on time for meetings.  And we'll go from there.  15 hours and counting before my next deadline...maybe I'll have some banana bread tomorrow morning.