Reminiscing

I am having a weekend of downtime. I have a list of things to do - some that need to be done, others that I want to indulge in. Some housework. Life admin. A bit of work on the old paper. Write a bit? Work on my Sambista hat project. Catch up with some faraway folks. 

So far today I've been more "festering" than pottering around doing stuff. I am getting bits and pieces done though! I must admit I am missing M already way more than I expected to - considering it's only been a couple of days! 

Anyway. One of the things on my downtime to-do list was "backup data", since my laptop is showing signs of being at the end of its lifespan. Of course when I dug out the old external drive, I couldn't resist having a flick through old files. But there was some stuff I was expecting to find that I couldn't! And then I remembered, that stuff is old enough that it's probably on my ancient lump of an external hard drive, the huge one that has to be plugged into the wall to work! So I found that one and plugged in in too and sure enough, there are the files I was thinking about. And a whole load more stuff I'd forgotten about too! Like lots of photos from when I was back in Leeds doing my PhD. I think sometimes that I have cut myself off from that part of my life because I was so sad to leave it, and because I'm still carrying around a sense of failure about the end of it. That part has eased off a bit now; it's not realistic to cherry-pick that aspect and use it to define the whole time or even myself with respect to that part of my life! I mean jeez, I did some good research while I was there! And worked bloody hard to earn that doctorate! I was a good scientist. It should've been ok to make mistakes at that stage, it's part of learning! I think I will learn to make my peace with it more as time goes on but I suspect it will be more like learning to live with it than getting over it. And I have been opening up a little to reconnecting with folks from that time recently, which is a very good thing! Like visiting M and K when we went to see Festival of the Spoken Nerd. That was a fun weekend!

Anyway, anyway! I'm rambling today. The picture above is contrived, designed to be a flavour of my reminiscing: scientist, the neuroscience book that B gave me as a gift when I passed my viva, the old photo of me from a long time ago that I was trying to work on as a photo-gift project for my Mum. One of the things I found today was a (poorly written!) blog post depicting our time at the Experimental Biology conference in Washington DC. It was my first international conference and my first time in the States. It was to this day, one of my favourite experiences since we all (the PhDs and PostDocs in the lab) shared the whole experience together like a close team, a little Science Family. I don't know if I've ever felt such a sense of belonging as I did then. Or let's say it's been rare. So here is the blog post below. Maybe later I will make a collage out of the pictures from that time!
----------------
DC in DC
So, 6 days of hard work, stress, alcohol, networking, food, fun, tourism & 2 of the longest days of my life travelling...
 
The mantra of the trip quickly became "Where's L?"
When we (eventually) arrived in Dulles, (which by the way looks nothing like on Die Hard II!), 32 hours since we'd all started the day and trawled through the passport/visa control, all we had to do was hand in our customs form and walk out, L was kidnapped! The customs people held her for over AN HOUR grilling her and entering her details of entry to the country in their computers (why the hell do they bother making people apply and be interviewed for visas?!) Thyey even asked her weight...?! We had no idea what was going on as she was snatched while she was just behind us, and so we walked out with all her luggage, money, phone etc...it was a fretful hour to wait for her, we thought we'd lost her! Then the trend unfortunately continued throughout the rest of the trip, they even gave her grief when she had to “sign out” of the country on the way home!
 
Anyway, that aside, its 10pm (for us) but a 32 hour day ain't hardcore enough so now in DC its 5pm...another couple of hours and finally we can all get a shower and go grab some food, nice little italian place (handily right round the corner from the hotel!) then its definitely bedtime! 41 hours in that day in the end! Phew!
 
Day 2, 8am we all get to the convention centre and man that was one HUGE building! We register and pick up our geek identifiers, and decided to go to some of the career talks that day...the joys! Lets learn about networking and interview skills, yay! In the afternoon we had some time to wander around a bit, see the Whitehouse (would you guess it, its WHITE!!!) I’m afraid we didn’t quite stretch to getting a pic of I. standing in front of it with a sign saying “What kindof twat lives here?” though… Also the various monuments in the city, like the WWII memorial by the reflecting pool, the Lincoln Memorial etc. By these there’s also a Vietnam memorial wall – all shiny marble with the names of all the people that died inscribed on it. All along it everyone was so silent, just people walking along looking and some with pieces of paper making pencil rubbings of family members on the wall. Unfortunately I appear to have a heart of stone and don’t really relate to these monuments as much as I used to or should, but everyone else thought it was really moving. I did like the reflecting pool though – it is the perfect size and shape to reflect the Washington monument but we see also the metaphorical meaning of this with it being by the war memorials etc.
 
Unfortunately this day did NOT have a good ending – there was a mixer social event organized that night for respiratory science people (i.e. not really us but related) which we’d received gentle prodding from SD to go to… so, one free drink and some fairly nice food, then AN HOUR AND A HALF of 5min hot topics talks in such a hot, sticky room OH MY GOD! I was soooooo thirsty but couldn’t move – and then, at the blissful end, they thought as a nice surprise they’d introduce as a nice treat for us, a speaker from the fecking national institute for health!! To talk science budget crap for a further HALF HOUR!! At the end that was it, all of us just wanted to go back to the hotel and go to bed, we couldn’t take anymore! And all this time, we missed the nightly 2-hour FREE BAR in the hotel!!! Poor J was worrying about us, thinking “Free beer and no students?! Oh no the must not have made it!!”
 
Ok so I’m not gonna bore you (any more) with the intimate details of every single day, suffice it to say the next couple of days were really busy with talks, talking to poster presenters and doing some first class networking in the process, poster presentations of our own which went really well! Bless J & SD's two boys, they seemed quite happy with books/toys sitting through the talks/poster sessions etc. Sometimes I could have used some of that myself to keep awake during some of the talks…!
 
It was still a really good experience, I met loads of the big names on the papers related to the work I do which was really cool. Even made a few new friends. Which was quite impressive I thought cos in the beginning, networking seemed really scary but by the end of the week when I was walking around that MASSIVE convention center I could recognize people I knew. Oh and speaking of famous people, we met Ho Chi Minh and, wait for it, SPIDERMAN! Ahem, ok not really, but two of the scientists were those people’s doppelgangers it was quite amusing! I wish I had some pics of them to do a lookalike for you! At one of the mixer social event things (more free alcohol) I told “Spiderman” that he looked like Toby Maguire and he said to me “Is that a good thing?” What was I gonna say to that then, “Well, he’s pretty fit, so yes I’d say it’s a good thing?!” Lol!  I might want to work for this guy one day! That night we went from that mixer to a young physiologists mixer, (yes you guessed it, more free alcohol!) Where we saw one of the funniest things ever (well, everyone but me as I was in the loo at the time) but apparently on one girl’s cue, the whole dancefloor suddenly spontaneously erupted into group dance! Ha! I wish I’d have seen it!
 
Over the next couple of nights when we went out for food we finally discovered some life in the city – that first day all we saw was the monuments and it seemed weird as down that way there are basically no shops, no bustle, no crowds, just lots of random memorial buildings. And the odd pretzel stand. But down from our hotel was Chinatown and there were a few nice restaurants etc down there – nice pizza place (which was the ONLY place in the entire trip that we didn’t all get ID’d!) Oh Sv, you’d have liked the beer selection in there. My fave was Ruby Tuesdays, was a typical American diner, and I really wanted to try something like that where I could have  a steak. I. and I both had steaks which were really pretty good, but dear God what an enormous portion – huge steak, massive pile of broccoli, slice of garlic bread and the most MASSIVE mutant baked potato I have ever seen in my life. Along with a measure of gin stronger than anything even Sv pours, twas like a shot of tonic with a glass of gin! Guys I’d challenge you to eat all that on a stomach already relatively full from the free bar earlier… :D
 
 
Lets see, what else? Not much really, on the final day and a half there wasn’t much left on that was relevant to us, so we spent the morning in talks and all copped off in the afternoon and went around the NASA museum (where I. and I managed not only to lose L, but also M and S too for a good hour!) When I saw the pod things that astronauts come back to earth in, with the now frazzled heat shield my reaction was “THAT THING went to space and back?! No way!”  They’re so small! Then we joined J, SD and the kids to the IMAX. I’ve never been to an IMAX before, but they are really cool! It was all about sharks and underwater life at one point there were masses of floating jellyfish coming straight at us, ARGHH! I know its not real but still really freaky being attacked by jellyfish and having them float into my mouth, eeeeww!
 
Finally it’s the day we’re leaving and now it feels like we’ve been there for a month! Went to one of the talks in the morning then joined I and we had a quick wander about the Natural history museum (well mostly the shop). The one in London is better I thought. Got some gifts etc and then had lunch in another typically American place – Pot Belly Sanwichworks, yum! where I got rather chatted up by the guy at the till, which was odd as I couldn’t have looked more ridiculous with bunches in my hair and wearing the touristy FBI baseball cap I had bought earlier! I think he was just amused at my blatant confusion at how to open the bottle caps that look like our beer caps but are actually screwtops…hmmm. Finally we joined S, L and M (who had stayed at a few more talks in the morning before going shopping, I. and I were the slackers) a bit later for one last beer before we had to head to the airport for the DELIGHTFUL journey back home. As a pleasurable end to the journey and the whole trip, after a really long and somehow uncomfortable flight, it took us as long to get from Heathrow back to Leeds as it did to fly from DC to Heathrow!
 

So overall impression of my first visit to the states and my first international conference? The people were either kinda rude and, well, “bolshy” or were the most ridiculously loud, dramatically, exciteable, happy people I’ve ever met. Well most of the scientists were actually relatively normal. Nice really. Not sure about living there though…well maybe for a little while! Who knows?