Grant writing Memes

The eternal perception gap of scientific careers. Mom envisions me as Bill Nye, cheerfully explaining basic concepts. Friends assume I'm cooking meth like Walter White. Society pictures me torturing lab animals. My boss expects Beaker-level explosions daily. I imagine myself as Einstein revolutionizing physics, but the crushing reality is just pushing papers and filling out grant applications. The stack of administrative documents is the only experiment consistently yielding reproducible results in my lab.