Irritating Requirements Before...

...You can collect your data.

The acronym doesn't actually mean this, but I_R_B_ does seem to stand for it often. I've been dealing with these folks directly and indirectly for years now and it is with this experience that I say the Irritating Requirements Before undertaking any research too often fail to address or even recognize the real potential areas of trouble in studies like the ones conducted by my peers and me, instead bogging down research with excruciating attention to details like the order of items on a consent form.

I've spent most of today reviewing and rewriting these wee details of a proposal I got back on Friday and yep, I may be bored out of my skull but I am about done with that shit. There's only so long I can try to patiently and ever so carefully phrase a comment that disclosing all the details of the experimental manipulations to the participant before they go through the experiment is not something anyone normally does, and that in all but some specific cases, it probably shouldn't count as "deception". I mean, if I extended the "puffy" sound on certain consonants that my subject will hear by 50% and then play them mixed in with consonants where the "puffy" part isn't extended, and I don't tell them, this is enough to count as a deception. I don't know what brand of crazy these people are smoking but they seriously needto consider cutting down. On the plus side, in my search to assuage the many irritating concerns the Irritators had with my proposal, I did find some neat freeware.

The other perk of having something I had to do but which could be done sitting on my ass at the computer is that I felt like hell today. Without the very structured revisions I had to do, I might have just floated in the murk of feeling like shit. While I feel like hell many days, today's feeling like hell was especially notable since I'm on my own for the next 11 or so days until A____ gets back.

I hate that this is how it is.

When I was a healthy person, I'd miss my partner when we were apart but the big time sucking "what do I do now?" type feelings didn't usually start to set in so quickly. Now that I am not a healthy person and my world is rather a bit more narrow, it set in about 24 hours after A___ left CT.

When I was a healthy person, I'd go through this "kid alone in the house" phase where I'd do all the things I like to do or which my own personal inertia (or is it entropy?) moves me to do but which I believe (rightly or wrongly) will annoy my partner or are not healthy to do around partners (like things which will put me in a mood where I will be unapproachable and odd).

What does healthy me do on a long weekend which is the first three days her partner is out of town and early enough in the semester to mean no grading? I stay up late without regard for what's a decent hour. I let myself get wrapped up in stupid and pointless internet activities like posting rants about local politicians and my university on the local newspaper forums.

I smoke and eat shitty and don't sleep well and let myself get a little strange. I write long rambling poems about ex boyfriends who suck, about ex advisors who suck, and about my parents, who clearly suck the most of all. I write and write and write. I go into school late and stay late, working until well past dark in the lab and enjoying evening cigarette breaks on a quietly busy school year evening. I go out for dinner with people and I drive home alone feeling all independent and grown up and shit.

I read two novels in one day.

I watch crap I wouldn't want to watch with someone else, like three episodes in a row of Ugly Betty, wishing it would get better but not caring too much that it doesn't. I cook. I even invite people over to watch movies with me and to eat the food I cook. They blow me off and I call up a friend and crab about how much grad school people suck, gloatingly eating whatever excellent thing it was I made. I go to a bookstore in another town and wander for hours. Or I buy underwear.

I pull out all my makeup and try different looks. They all end up looking more or less the same, except that I find it is true that only youngsters should wear frosty eyeshadow. I wax and bleach. I do my nails, usually several times.

I abandon half full mugs of coffee on surfaces at home for days and then, at some point when I realize how many of them are out and am totally disgusted with myself, I have a huge cleaning fit where I don't stop until every surface is dust and clutter free and as shiny as it can get. I might rearrange furniture. Today I was struck by an urge to paint the walls in the living room.

Few and little of these activities are options now, and without the outside or truly active activities to mix things up, I find I am less inclined towards sinking into just the ones I can do with little activity in my own apartment and by myself. Also, I simply can no longer stay up late and not eat right for days so as to get into that proper poetry-cleaning-working late then moving furniture around- frame of mind (no really, it's like a potato chip, caffeine, and nicotine induced trance or something). Instead, I partition out my time into little bits of "productive low energy stuff" and "nonproductive low energy stuff". "I could read for a while..." I think, then notice how slender the paperback I just got is. So I decide I'll work some first. "Then I could read after I work and then watch this movie." Except the movie turned out to be one where not one but three dogs die. Jeeesus. (btw, I don't recommend it)

Yesterday I had a day planned of work, local errands, dinner and reading or movie, work, movie or reading, and bed. I got to dinner and movie and then I got sick. When you're sick and alone and you know you'll be alone for the next 11 days without a hell of a lot to take your mind off either being sick or alone or both, you really feel it.

So it was with some sense of gusto that I approached the task of reviewing my proposal today. I was so engaged in it that I only realized just now that I've been doing it for the last 6 hours (with two short breaks to talk to A___ and to my sister). And I am still not done with it. Well, it beats the three dead dogs movie, and that's a start. I think I'm going to go curl up with a stats book now.