i intended to work at home all day, but the heat is intolerable in my apartment, so here i am in the other green line goofing off and reading the new yorker. the review paper proceeds at an impossibly slow pace. i read 3 papers in order to write 2 lines, and the whole thing feels like it's falling apart at the seams. i have decided that as soon as the advisor returns from amsterdam or wherever it is i'm going to call an emergency meeting and break down in tears in his office. this will certainly be the last review i agree to write until i'm at least midway through my 3rd year -- what i really should have done is turned this one down and planned to spend the summer hammering down the foundations of my knowledge, instead of slapping together this piece of work in my current uninformed state. in fact, i've been a year now without anyone telling me THIS IS HOW IT IS, and i really need some of that, someone to sit me down and be didactic. THIS IS WHAT WE KNOW; THIS IS WHAT WE DON'T. you get some of that at least while doing a phd, right? or do they just allow you to go off the rails and redo experiments that have been done and write reams of nonsense and then at the end of 5 years tell you that you can't grdauate?