working hard on the grant

had a committee meeting yesterday. my plan was to update everyone on the status of my nrsa application, then move right along to asking their opinions about the design of one of the experiments i'm planning.

as always happens in my committee meetings, when i'm faced with the brilliance of lila, i felt incredibly stupid and like i must've smoked a lot of crack to think i could ever succeed in a ph.d. program. sigh.

despite my feeling like george w. must feel every day of his life, i did get some valuable advice. for example, i had been under the (massively mistaken) impression that my nrsa (national research service award, if you haven't been paying attention. not that i really expect you to. really, i'm happy if you happen to turn your head in my direction as you speed through town) application would be evaluated by a group of psycholinguists. HA! apparently, if i get even one psycholinguist as a reader, i should waste no time buying a lottery ticket, because it will be my lucky day. the reality is that my readers will be assorted psychologists, audiologists, and medical doctors. so, i've basically got to trash what i've written already (all 4 single-spaced pages of it) and rewrite with bothersome explanations of why language processing is interesting, the scientific usefulness of temporary syntactic ambiguity, and why it matters that subject-verb-object is the canonical word order in russian (even though russian has a mightily rich case system and can therefore get away with putting words in all kinds of goofy orders. if you know latin (shout out to oddcellist) or any other case language, you know what i mean.).

so last night, i was typing away in the lab until nearly 11pm. today, upon second reading of last night's efforts, i realized that it needed massive reorganization. so i've spent the afternoon putting my paragraphs from yesterday into some sort of coherent order*.
*actual coherency to be determined by someone more qualified than me.

i also pledged $30 to jared for his AIDSride. if any of you would like to donate some money to what is legitimately a good cause, you can donate some money to jared online, by going to the website, and pledging with jared's rider number: 941. not only would the resulting jared freak-out (from receiving random pledges) amuse me, but it would provide fodder for this diary, which would (possibly) amuse you. anyway, whatever. lemme know if you do.

okay, gotta get back to work on the grant.