Fear and Loathing in Grant Writing (Part VI)

An uneasy energy had settled over the lab. Bad waves of paranoia. Fear and loathing. A thickness that made for labored breathing and sluggish thoughts. The days turned unproductive, the nights black and restless. All dreams had fled. We were a city abandoned after the battle line had passed through, nothing left behind but wind and torn sheets. Signs of a fierce struggle and "Ichabod" written above the gates. It was Berlin 1945, that brief May interlude when the Red Army had yet to pull the noose closed but the pointless bacchanalia had run its course.

I walked the place knowing our fate was sealed but saying nothing. Counterfeit smiles for the damned. Give them a few more days of happiness, I thought. My postdoc had begun bringing up the grad student. Tips for navigating his degree requirements. How to give a good journal club talk. The most likely hospital dumpsters to find discarded Luer locks. The cafeteria selections offering minimal risk of Hep C. I hadn't counted on this, finding my postdoc in some kind of preternatural courtship.

How long could I put on a good face? I wondered. How long this charade?

How long could I maintain?

Fear and Loathing in Grant Writing (Part V)

Few people understand the psychology of dealing with grant rejection. Your normal academic will panic and immediately set to addressing the shortcomings detailed in the white sheet. Subservient in every way.

This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the reviewer-heart. The thing to do when you have missed the payline by a full radian, when you see the tragic notification topping your inbox, what you want to do then is accelerate. Call the bastards on their bluff.

Begin by questioning their qualifications, individually and as a group. Ask if the study section was assembled from bus stop vagrants. Demand to see their credentials. Make them rue the day they listened to their guidance counselor when the topic of college admission was broached.

Lead them to believe you have punctured their thin veneer of protective anonymity, that you are on the first flight. Give them the mental image of you appearing unannounced with a bad look to you and rope. Engage them in licentious name-calling. Interrupt your narrative at random locations with meticulously detailed rantings about the gold standard or an enormous list of prime numbers. The goal is to make them question their sanity.

Remember, you have three attempts before your rejection is irrevocable. Swing for the fences. Playing it safe on the second pitch marks you unquestionably as a bush leaguer.

Fear and Loathing in Grant Writing (Part IV)

"For God's sake, don't lock eyes with it," I whispered to my postdoc. "These things can smell fear."

The Office of Contracts and Grants was bat country. It was housed in a Gothic fortress that had once served as the university's civil defense shelter. Gargoyles perched on the exterior surfaces, later discovered to be the remains of migrant workers who had been walled over when construction was complete. The place had the bad vibes of the Arctic floes where Inuits abandoned their elderly. The kind of enterprise that breeds vengeful ghosts.

Our presence was a breach of protocol of the worst kind. The only outsiders permitted here were workstudies. The drug mule of the academic world. Dark forces conspired to sever all other forms of communication with the rest of campus. OCG was the only structure in North America not wired for telegraph or teletype. Cell phone reception was nonexistent. Regular mail was impossible, as the building appeared on no map. Pneumatic tubing, semaphore flags, signal pyres. These had all failed. A program involving carrier pigeons was even attempted. It had to be abandoned when the creatures kept turning up headless and stripped of meat.

But there was no time for proper channels and so here we were. Strangers in a strange land. The immediate task was to negotiate the first floor cubicle maze and reach the stairs. Empty eyes peered from over the tops of the partitions. Reptilian Kilroys made flesh, the flesh spongiform and mottled. One wrong move and they would tear us to shreds. No choice but to crouch and press onward.

"Greetings" I said as we cautiously waded into their ranks. "I am a doctor of philosophy. We mean you no harm."

But it was not our wrath they feared. Lording over this farm of despair was a creature unspeakable and profane. A labyrinthian monarch more fearsome than any minotaur. Its presence was invisible, yet everywhere.

It was already watching us.

Fear and Loathing in Grant Writing (Part III)

Dawn crested harsh and sudden over campus, every furrow and sharp edge straked by long shadows that emerged like carnivorous animals rising for the hunt. The lawns and walkways were now dotted by spandex-clad joggers treading the broken dreams of graduate students making their way back to their hovels after another disappointing all nighter.

Early risers, these types. Always a bad omen.

Inside, my office resembled a particularly nasty suite wrecking. The kind Holiday Inn uses in its training videos. Suspicious ceiling stains. Overturned room service carts. Broken furniture. Dirty water covered the floor up to our ankles. A dangerous soup of empty clamshell packaging, office supplies, animal bones, stapled manuscripts, and 50 years of dissolved toxic chemical buildup. It was prudent to step carefully. Strike a spark and something dreadful would surely rise from this primordial ooze.

But it didn't matter. We had successfully translated two Ivy League educations and enough caffeinated beverage to stun a mule deer into a carefully formatted grant application. It was nothing less than a mission plan to save humanity. Sequencing the DNA of the American Dream. Now all it required was a budget. That would require a courier.

"Where is that grad student?" I asked. "What have you done with him, you sick bastard?"

My postdoc was sitting cross-legged on the bench dressed in a sarong he had fashioned from a lab coat. He was methodically converting a box of Kimwipes into an origami dinosaur army.

"I sent him to Kinkos," he said and swallowed.

"The twenty four hour Kinkos."

Fear and Loathing in Grant Writing (Part II)

It had all started innocently enough. A faculty brunch of ordinary proportions save for the invitation of the new students. An open bar guaranteed the competition would be fierce. My postdoc and I were seated at a table on the patio so we could observe from a safe distance, obscured by the fronds.

We dressed for the occasion. I had picked out fresh sweatpants and a short-sleeved Oxford, a row of pens in the pocket protector clearly marking me as an alpha male. My postdoc wore Birkenstocks and camo shorts, the cargo pockets bulging with fresh hors d'oeuvres. His t-shirt was emblazoned with the silhouette of an exotic dancer. Underneath, text read I only got a Ph.D. to impress chicks. The stress of early rising had exacerbated a chronic ptosis, lending a lecherous sheen to his countenance.

Workstudies had taken to giving us a wide berth, which was making drink renumeration problematic. We were falling victim to an unspoken prejudice of the worst kind. Legitimate film may paint university faculty as perverse beasts preying on the supple flesh of the undergraduate, but those of us working under the keen eye of human resources knew the nubile coed for what it truly is. Their fruit was not forbidden; it was unripened. Like violins, Scotch, or albacore, it could not match the pleasures proffered by a seasoned professional.

Fear and Loathing in Grant Writing (Part I)

We were somewhere around 24 hours away from the submission deadline when the drugs began to wear off. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should type..." when there was a terrible roar all around us and the lab was full of huge bats. Waving and flapping their paper wings stapled in the corner and violated in red pen. And a voice was screaming "Holy Jesus! Didn't I tell you I canceled office hours this week?"

Then it was quiet again. My postdoc had taken off his shirt and was pouring espresso on his chest to assist in the creative process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the ceiling. "Never mind," I said, turning the laptop toward him. "It's your turn to write." We had inverted the video. White on black. The illumination turned to 11. The display buzzed in some otherworldly language, threatening to burn our shadows into my office wall like the A bomb at Miyuki bridge.

No point in mentioning the undergrads, though. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.