No, this is not about you.

So first it was getting lost for 2 hours and a speeding ticket on top of it..

Then the end of Detroit vacation weird-o-thon...then having to rush everything at the last minute because of a winter storm and nearly crashing my car into the center fucking divider at flippy-car-into-opposite-highway speed.

And when I come back here, suddenly I'm Dr. Shrink to the masses and I have to deal with mounds of career crap on my vacation. Suddenly I'm the Salvation Army.

Then just last night some crazy vietnam vet starts giving me shit..who I got to see again today but thankfully doesn't remember me because post-traumatic stress disorder is a blessing on that count.

And for the topper to this pile of stress due to reasons I wish I could scream about right now, I get a not so great e-mail from my advisor today. He had questions about the procedure/protocol I'd submitted. These questions really turned out to be a "this isn't realistic, please revise because it will bankrupt me" e-mail.

Now, this is a great and wise man. I mean that with heart-felt sincerity. I was surprised when he seemed to have misunderstood some of the parameters of my design. It was the same main experiment I'd written up for two fellowships. He'd read it in detail several times to help me edit it. Why didn't he bring the issue of cost up before? When he'd remarked back in September that many first year projects cost 10,000 American dollars, I was surprised but remembered it.

So all of the sudden I had to do damage control. I got this e-mail at 1:30 or so at the D. Bros. cafe. I had a meeting with one of my research committee members at 3. I'd wanted to review things, make sure I had the speech down. Instead I spent the next hour replying to all of his points, explaining how some figures he'd mentioned didn't line up with what I'd proposed, stuff like that.

I then booked out at 2:30 and rushed to my department building. I met with L.A. and then talked about my project. It was the only good point in my whole day. She was very attentive, thoughtful, and got the gist really quickly. Apparently she was planning a human study that had the same ethos. It was completely unexpected but it cemented for me that she was definetely the right choice for the 3rd committee member. I had a lovely time talking and forgot about the e-mail.

When I got back, though, I got another one mentioning that we might have to majorly cut back on the project. At first I was crest-fallen and was going to be agreeable.

But something in me refused to budge. I was not going to abandon what I had spent months researching and creating. My work and the study was and are far too important to me to be compromised.

He'd written out some hypothetical budgetary constraints for the main project, said that he (and by extension I) needed to design something with those in mind. So I did just that. I took my experiment down to its bare-bones level, to get at the essence of the questions I need(ed) answers to. I even found out that, for technical reasons, part of that cost could go to doing one of the pilot studies.

It took me the better part of 3 hours to write a full cost analysis list and reasonably reply to his e-mail.

The total cost: between 2,500 to 3,000 dollars. That may or may not sound like a lot. Keep in mind that's at least 1/2 to 3/4's of a year of research.

I still need to do damage control on some other things he mentioned, but no more tonight. Tonight I'm going to pretend it's my vacation--because it is.

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