I’m sorry I don’t have any fascinating or hilarious personal anecdotes to kick off today’s blog post, unless you want to hear about the dang cat stealing my chair every time I leave the office for a couple minutes. Somehow, even if I only leave the room for 30 seconds, he still has enough time to jump up on the chair, curl up, and fall sound asleep before I get back. He’s so annoying.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I suppose it’s better than him plotting how he’s going to murder me in my sleep, which is what I assume he is doing whenever he’s awake.

Besides that important news, the primary goal of today’s post is to ask everyone who writes, edits, prepares, reads, reviews, analyzes, or has even a remote interest in grant proposals to please take a couple minutes to complete our Grant Anatomy 101 survey. Mike LoPresti, moderator for our 10 a.m. Grant Anatomy 101: Dissecting A Grant Proposal session, put together this survey in order to gather YOUR questions about grant proposals for our supporter panel to gain their feedback, insights, preferences, and dislikes.

Please provide any questions you may have around the typical sections of a proposal, which you will find grouped into key categories in the survey. Feel free to respond to as many or few sections as you like. Answers are anonymous and open-ended, so you are encouraged to speak your mind and not be afraid to share openly.

We will keep the survey open for 1 week, so you have until the end of the day on September 12 to respond. Thanks in advance to all who respond!

CLICK HERE FOR THE GRANT ANATOMY 101 SURVEY!

I have never thought of myself as a particularly organized person, nor do I think I am a slob. My clothes are usually hung up or folded on a shelf, though there is a bench in our bedroom that has a tendency to become strewn with random articles of clothing over time. Books are either organized on the bookshelf in alphabetical order or put in the giveaway box, but that’s usually not until after they have sat in the increasingly larger “read” book pile beside the bed for a few weeks/months. Sometimes, I forget to update my car registration until the day I have to take it in for state inspection. I’d categorize myself as moderately organized, with fluctuations depending on how busy my week is.

The one area where I give myself an organizational gold star is with email. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I am slightly obsessive about email organization. During work hours, my inbox is almost always at zero unread emails. The email apps on my phone look like this:

If they don’t, they will soon (side note: I have a friend, who shall remain nameless, who does not have this same obsessive behavior and will occasionally text me screenshots of her email app showing 10,000+ unread emails. I screamed the first time she did it. It makes me feel itchy just thinking about it.) This behavior stems from my reflexive need to be helpful. In order to be helpful, I need to promptly respond to any question I receive. I can’t respond to the question if I can’t find it in my email; ergo, I must keep my email organized so I can find the question I need to respond to so I can be helpful.

This almost pathological obsession with responding to email in order to be helpful corresponds closely to my mindset when I am having an in-person conversation with someone. If, during the conversation the person I am speaking with presents a challenge or problem they are experiencing, my instinct is to immediately try to solve the problem and share this advice with them (The Vanilla Ice lyric from Ice Ice Baby — If there was a problem, yo, I’ll solve it — comes to mind. Perhaps not the ideal person to gather conversation advice from.) This drives my wife crazy. It took me years to understand that sometimes when she is telling me about a problem, she’s not asking me to fix it. She just wants me to listen and sympathize with her. I’m getting better at that. (Note from Scott: I am rushing to show this to my wife right now so she knows I am not the only one with this issue. We have had this conversation sooo many times)

Last week, we took our youngest kid to D.C. to start her first year of college at George Washington University (Contrary to what you may have read recently, D.C. is still standing and is not overrun by hoodlums and scofflaws. Yes, we feel safe sending her there. Yes, we felt that way months ago when she made her decision. I’m getting angry again. Time to move on.) Incredibly, with both kids now away at college, I am an empty nester. My daughter had her first day of classes yesterday, and it took every ounce of willpower not to text her on an hourly basis to check in and see how she was doing. How are classes going? Is everything OK? Is there anything I can do to help?  (UPDATE: Classes are fine, everything is fine, my help is not needed. Sigh.)

So, what does a guy with an inherent need to be helpful do when his email inbox is at zero and his family has little interest in soliciting his advice? He reminds everyone else that the CMEpalooza Ask Us Anything hotline is open and waiting. Whether it’s questions about CME, email organization, or the name of the teen drama musical that Vanilla Ice starred in in 1991 (it’s Cool as Ice), we can help. Let us help you help us help you: If you have an issue (professional or personal) you want us to help with, you can click here to submit your question(s). 

Last Wednesday, Radiohead surprise released a new album (it isn’t really a new album, so to speak, but a new live album of old songs, which, as I always say, old Radiohead is better than no Radiohead) and gave me the great idea that I should surprise release a new CMEpalooza blog post to, you know, generate buzz, and guerilla marketing, and increase synergies, and whatnot, though it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to do a suprise CMEpalooza blog post if I told Scott about the surprise CMEpalooza blog post, so I had to figure out a way to write up a surprise CMEpalooza blog post without telling him I was doing that, which is a little bit tricky since I usually send him a heads-up whenever I have a draft of a new post, so he can edit all my typos, crazy punctuation, and run-on sentences, which he is much better at than I am (don’t tell him I said that), but I can’t send him a heads-up of a surprise CMEpalooza blog post because then the surprise would no longer be a surprise and that would ruin most of the fun of it, which is why I decided to write the surprise CMEpalooza blog post as one long run-on sentence, because then the only punctuation I need to worry about is commas and parentheses and I mostly know how to use commas and parentheses (it’s those dastardly semicolons and em dashes that always get me) and also then I don’t need to bother with all those annoying rules of paragraph formation, like only one idea per paragraph, blah, blah, blah, geez, give me a break, I mean, if that Norwegian guy Jon Fosse can write a 700-page novel as one long winding sentence and win the dang Nobel Prize for Literature, than surely I can do the same for one surprise CMEpalooza blog post, though I have to admit that I have discovered one flaw in my plan for a surprise CMEpalooza blog post, which is that I don’t really have any particularly urgent or new news to share that is worthy of a surprise CMEpalooza blog post, making this, uh, all a bit awkward, unless, let me check, yes, yes, we do have a few new updates to the CMEpalooza agenda that I can report, including new information about the 4 PM Afternoon Snack Session (sponsored by Medscape), and additional faculty added for a couple of the other sessions, so please be sure to check out the updated CMEpalooza agenda if you have not done so recently and thank you for reading my surprise CMEpalooza blog post.