More fast updates:
- I applied for early access to the vaccine in NZ under the terminally ill parent criteria, so that I'm vaccinated prior to my next trip home in September to see my dad. This meant I had to ask my mom and dad to ask his doctors for a note stating his life expectancy. This was a horrible experience. It is one thing to know your loved one is very very ill, but quite another to see it in writing how sick and dire the situation is. It is all too clear when it is in black and white like that, and I've been having some mild panic attacks about how I'm spending his last days, in a foreign country away from him.
After all that, my application was declined. I'm really disappointed.
- My PhD stipend extension was granted by the University, to cover April - June. After June, however, my stipend will be covered by the research programme that I project manage -- my topic is definitely related so our funders should be OK with it. I have until December to hand in my thesis while getting paid. After that, I'm on my own.
- I had to reprimand one of our programme research assistants that I manage this week. The other RA's were threatening to quit because she has been so rude and bossy to them. This was the first time I have ever had to discipline an employee that I manage. It was horrible, and I feel terrible, but it was the right thing for the overall health of the programme and team. I think I could have approached the situation a little better, but live and learn, right? I'll know for next time.
- I'm weeks or months behind on every single task I have to do for my PhD. I only take breaks to go to the grocery store and do other errands, and do human things that keep me alive (shower, fix food, eat, brush teeth, toilet, sleep, etc), so it isn't that I'm not putting in the work. It is the way that I'm working (intense brain fog; I am constantly forgetting what I'm doing or where I am in a project and having to start over) and the fact that I have no clue what I'm doing, so flounder around. Every time I ask for specific advice on what to focus on or do next, my bad supervisor confuses me more or gives me "one more thing" to check within my dataset. Every "one more thing" takes months to resolve. I'm tired. No. I'm more than tired. I'm exhausted. I don't see a way to finish. The pathway is super cloudy because he is always diverting me to different pathways, and I don't know enough to know which pathways are actually taking me off course instead of getting me further towards my destination. It is intensely frustrating.
- A few weeks ago, my sister was catfished by someone who messaged her on Facebook. They claimed to be in Tennessee. She was quickly "engaged" to this stranger via FB message. I can't fathom how this happens. She is so desperate for love that she clings to any person paying her attention at all, no matter how sketchy or weird or creepy or clearly toxic they are. It is so sad and frustrating. Anyway, this behaviour of hers is not alarming because this is just how she operates. What was alarming was that about a week and a half after this person messaged her initially, and about a week after they became "engaged," this person asked my sister to take out a personal loan from the bank in the thousands of dollars, and wire it to them.
Alarm bells immediately went off when my sister said she had applied for a loan. A) she is terrible with money. Our dad jokes that her pockets must have holes because she runs through money so fast. b) she doesn't have a job or income, except her disability money which is used to pay for her housing and food and medical bills c) she lives at home and my parents take care of her needs, although she is always running off and signing contracts that require her to pay money to various people or companies or schools (one was to "develop her invention" which she thought she was going to make tons of money off of; another was an online school which has a bad rep for scamming students). Finally, she owes my parents (and me) tons of money already. I don't know why she insists on being in debt and spending money she absolutely doesn't have.
Anyway, I asked her why she needed the loan and the truth came out: the person she was "engaged" to had asked her. I asked her why and she said she didn't know, maybe the person was going to surprise her with a ring, use it to set up their life together, etc. I told her not to take out the loan or send the person the thousands of dollars they asked her to send, and to never talk to the person again. She said she would ask the person what they needed the money for, as she believed in them whole-heartedly. Meanwhile, I immediately checked this person out on FB and while their profile pic seemed legit, every single comment and like and organisation and band and friend that this person was affiliated with is based in Nigeria, which has a bad reputation for being the home of scammers. I notified my sister about it and she was in denial about it but said she would ask the person about all of it.
The person then wove some sob story about needing to feed his daughter and pay rent and begged her to send him money repeatedly. The person started being weird with her, and tricked her into giving them her social security number, address, bank account #, phone number, email and other passwords, and all the details that they could possibly need to steal her identity. Their reasoning was that if she gave them that info and they didn't use it against her, my sister could then know she could trust them. My sister is under a fog of a lot of strong psychotropic drugs, and, like I've mentioned, is desperate for love, so totally fell for this trick.
However, you can imagine my reaction when she told me that she had given out all her information. I spent days out of my already busy PhD and work schedule trying to put freezes and identity monitoring services on her credit, creating a new email address and accounts for her, giving her secure passwords, the works.
It took a while to convince my sister that this person was not real, but eventually she got it when the person kept begging for money and saying some aggressive things to my sister when she didn't comply. They even threatened to blackmail her by leaking some naked photos online that they had convinced my sister to send them. I guess the loss of positive attention caused my sister to finally believe they were not a good person to be hitched to, so she broke it off. The person then harassed her via phone and FB so much that she had to change her phone number.
My sis is now engaged again to her ex boyfriend, who she has broken up with and gotten engaged to literally hundreds of times now. All's well...???
