What the score was.

As long as I kept my momentum, I was okay. Most of the workday was a fine engaging rush forward, but whenever I hit a snag I got derailed. As my first post from yesterday shows.

Traffic slowed to a jam on I-95 as I drove into work, and it occurred to me that something might have happened. I felt trapped, exposed. Sirens and firetrucks on Pratt Street, several of them, and my heart leapt in a wild panic that was completely unreasonable for someone who works across the street from an ambulance bay.

I fantasized about joining a Red Cross disaster relief team the moment I get my license, really helping people next time instead of frantically spinning my wheels.

I was angry all out of proportion. At everything.

I don't want to hear saturation 9/11 coverage on Wednesday Night Baseball. Shut up and call the game. If you must talk about 9/11 nonstop, you are not then allowed to laud baseball as "an escape." (I wanted to avoid the media altogether, but at the gym you can either listen to the radio or TV. The game should've been safe.)

Church was good. I don't remember what they said in the sermon, but I felt understood, and found solace. I didn't know how to pray. Over the candle I lit I said silently, "Dona eis requiem. Grant them all rest, the living and the dead." That seemed to serve.

I composed at least six LJ posts in my head, and didn't make any of them.

I wasn't prostrate with grief. I wasn't paralyzed with anxiety. I was sad and irritable and restless and bothered by the nagging suspicion that I didn't have a right to feel that way. That I knew the feeling to be ridiculous just added more irritation to the mix.

I didn't know what to do with myself.

I'm glad the day is over.

Warning/opportunity: geekery ahead.

As I mentioned last week, Lydia and I are gearing up to write a Very Big Grant over the next month and a half. I'm excited about this project and my role in it - which is much more central than I've ever been before on a grant this size.

My sister had mentioned to me recently that she was baffled by the process of research - how to come up with an idea and a study design, and how to go through the process of convincing people to pay for it. I've decided to write about the process for her, as it unfolds, from vague idea to 100+ page submitted proposal with all the details nailed down. It'll also be interesting for me to have a record of my first major r01 grant proposal. (I've been more peripherally involved in helping out on others, but this will be different: I'll be right in the middle of things from the beginning.)

I thought I might post about it to LJ, but I don't want to do so in open entries. It's a paranoia thing - we haven't submitted or published these ideas as our own, and even though the odds are infintessimally small that some other band of HIV researchers will stumble across my journal, I just don't feel comfortable spelling everything out in a public place. Plus, there will be impossibly high levels of HIV geekiness involved, and not everyone is interested in that sort of thing.

If you'd like to be privy to the gory details of how a vague idea becomes a grant proposal, leave a comment (or e-mail me) and let me know. If you're not on my friends list, I'll almost certainly be willing to add you for this purpose. If you don't have a Live Journal account, I can offer you an account creation code... or e-mail you the entries, I suppose, if you have your own reasons for staying away from LJ.

If you wouldn't be interested, I won't be offended or hurt in the slightest. No one has to be a research geek to be my friend. *grin*