Won't You Be My Neighbor, Part II

So this morning I get an email from a friend of mine with the subject line, "Bullet-proof vest?" Apparently there was a shooting near my neighborhood last night, culminating in a high-speed chase down city streets and onto Highway 41 with a flipped-over squad car and everything. Color me oblivious! I guess living across the street from drug dealers for 2 years has really desensitized me to such commotion. But really, this is actually major headline news for my smallish city. In my neck of the woods, the big news is usually something like, "Shoppers Buy Hard-to-Find Items Online!" (This was a real newspaper headline in the city in which I work. You can't make this stuff up.) So, the faintest whiff of criminal activity sets the city abuzz with morbid excitement.

But I don't have time to think about this too much, because I've got to write the equivalent of twelve 50-page research papers (worth over $8 million bucks) between now and June 1st. Yes, this is my day job and I will be gibbering like a loon by Memorial Weekend. I will probably also look and smell like a homeless person, so if you see a filthy, wild-eyed woman talking to herself in the aisles of Target sometime this May, that's probably me. It's definitely me if there are puppy pee pads and bags of birdseed in the cart.

Grant writing is not for the faint of heart--I've known writers who ended up in the hospital with panic attacks during "deadline crunch time" (aka ALL BLOODY SPRING), and last year I had chest pains for FOUR FRICKING WEEKS STRAIGHT after working on a project with one of Satan's minions. He'll probably end up in a book someday. Which is the kind of vengeful, glee-filled thinking that makes dealing with chronic brownstars so much fun.

Tootles, cyberpals.