my supervisor and my job

I love my supervisor. She's amazingly smart but seems unaware of it. She doesn't use her job or her life as a way of proving how smart she is; she just is. She doesn't really care that she didn't pursue the education and career that her abilities would be associated with; she's happy. She's laid-back and outspoken; she swears freely. As scrupulous as she is with science, she lacks the neurotic and uptight tendencies that usually go along with that. She has reddish blondish brown curls that are typically tied up in a bundle and the fray curls wisp in every direction, and that along with her blue eyes and long face make her a frenetic unconventional beauty. She has an amazing work ethic, not in the sense that she works without breaks or comes in every weekend (she's very good at work/personal boundaries and making her own life hers) but she does everything with the care and accuracy that's required when you're doing something for the first time. Except she does it over and over, all the time, this way.

Her mother was diagnosed with leukemia awhile ago and passed away just a couple weeks after they found out. Being the only sibling in the area and also the only one with in depth knowledge of leukemia, my supervisor had to juggle taking care of her parents, talking to the doctors, researching new treatments, informing everyone in the family of what was going on, and making sure her own child was coping okay. I've been surprised to find out about my supervisor's family's hematological problems considering that's her field, and these problems arose after she'd chosen it. Her son has hemophilia, and then her mom gets leukemia. She was unsurprisingly devoted, practical and capable throughout it all, but not without feeling and sadness. That fragile/strong dichotomy gets me all the time.

We've been tracking the progress of leukemia patients pre and post-bone marrow transplant (which was not an option for my supervisor's mom who was too elderly and sick to survive an operation like that). My supervisor is very invested in these patients, even though she's not a physician and she's not directly taking care of them and in most cases she hasn't met them. She gets genuinely disappointed to see someone relapsing and sincerely wishes to see progress. She so easily makes the connection between paper results and real people. There is a particular woman who she's really pulling for, because she's been through so many different treatments. During the first difficult week when my supervisor's mom had been diagnosed and they knew she'd only have a little time left, my supervisor was tracking this woman's cancer. She always updates me, even though I'm not the one doing that part of the project. She told me the woman was negative for disease, and she looked so happy to be telling me. It wasn't an overt display of joy; it was there in the creases and corners.

I thought how rare it is to be so happy for another person's fortune when your own is dreary. I can't say that I'm always like that; I have jealous tendencies. But it made me very thankful that our work, as steeped in concepts and theories and the grind of experiments as it is, is based on real people.

I like my job. A huge part of that is my supervisor. Other parts of it have to do with jobs in general. I've learned so differently this year. School is linear and structured and designed to educate. I've got a handle on how to follow that; I'm good at routine and learning from books with clearcut purposes and narratives. Tossed into real life, you see that you learn things in scattered pieces, often without a story, and you have to put the effort into seeing how it works or realizing that it doesn't. This applies to the big picture as well as just figuring what the hell you're doing on a daily basis. Also, mistakes. Many of them. And it's hard to think of your job the way you would a curved organic chem test, where 60% correct is not that bad. But it's also what makes it satisfying.

There are frustrating times and wasted hours, but the good, productive moments compensate for the others. I'm not contributing anything that will be very important in anyone's life, not broadly or on an individual interaction basis the way teaching or other relationships are. But I can see different avenues of doing so in the future, and that view helps an enormous amount. I like the intellectual challenge of figuring things out, and explaining what goes on in your body. It's scary not to know, and in trying to just know, I think there's an element of what happens when you teach someone something and they get it and they feel better for it. Also, I don't think scientific inquiries are so different from other kinds. It strives for a more concrete, objective understanding, but at the end of the day, who really knows why it works like that, why things are made to function a certain way? Sure, it works because this causes that and it works well this way and you can see the beauty of a well-ochestrated pathway, but there are always other equally good ways. Why it's this way is a question of all disciplines.

What bothers me about a lot of work in general is that I can easily imagine someone else doing it in my place; I don't find that I bring anything uniquely valuable or that I'm doing it any better than someone else could. I think I did all my past jobs well enough but there was no real reason that it was me doing it; the same goes for my job now. Right now, I feel it's okay for the balance to be tipped in my favor--that because I'm still learning it's okay that I'm getting more out of this experience than I can give it. Because it contributes to a feeling that I've never had, one I'm still developing and don't quite have yet--the feeling that there does exist a path that I am specifically suited to. There is something that I'm not just adequate for, but that I'm meant and exactly fitted for. All the things along the way change your shape or make you see a nook you hadn't noticed so that you end up fitting something only you can fit into.

journals of steph and strangers

Reading Steph's med school blog (in retrospect) has been like discovering another person. Hi Steph! I've been reading snippets here and there, and while the things in each entry represent things I already know of her, there's always something new. Not new in that I didn't already know she hates the fog and hills and loves her classmates and oncology. New in that I hadn't heard it expressed in these specific words, on that particular day. She mentioned in an early entry about how she's not drawn to strangers' blogs, but maybe that's changed a bit because we've been talking recently about how we read strangers' blogs. I love reading blogs, people I know and strangers likewise. I love seeing what people choose to say, because there is a great deal of choice and weeding out. I love the dynamic of connection and separation that happens between bloggers and readers. I love seeing my own feelings articulated by someone else; that is so much of what I love about fiction and here it is in real people's lives.

I like strangers' blogs because the process of getting to know someone has so much novelty and a refreshing quality, and it does weird things to me. I once spent a few days reading a person's entire archives, not because it was particularly interesting but because a lot of the way he talked and things he referenced reminded me of West Point and I just wanted to figure out whether he actually went there (he rarely used any actual names). I eventually discovered that he went to the Naval Academy (close, right?). I had momentarily become obsessed with seeing if I could figure out a basic fact of his life through his more intangible online thoughts, and isn't that such a reverse way to get to know someone? It's like characters, except not. And it's always a treat to find the thoughtful, well-written, funny, bittersweet ones. And to read about people leading lives completely different from yours. I also develop dislike for people through their blogs, which I continue to read. It would suffice it to say that if I have a reaction to your writing, good or bad, I'll keep reading it. People can say so much in narcissistic writing that just can't be said in a two way conversation.

Anyway. Steph, I love your poems and your growing love of San Francisco and your thoughts on medicine and how even your thoughts on the misery of college make me miss it.

I've wanted to switch to blogspot for a long time because of the ease of posting photographs and also because it seems more conducive to regular entries. But I've been reluctant to abandon the history of my livejournal because 1) the history and 2) I don't know if I should really write more regularly. I'd like to, I'd like to write about my reaction to a movie soon after watching it instead of piling it into a larger entry about how lost I am or some recurring theme. In some ways I'm scared it'd replace a personal journal, but honestly I've been too tired to write in my own journal this past year. And there's too much piecing together of real life to try to piece together a livejournal entry, sometimes. Maybe it'd be nice to put the fragments out there, instead of collecting and sorting.

coachella

A delayed flight to LA, a two-hour drive to Indio, the wait for our keys to the condo, a trip to the grocery store, the 90 minute drive or more into Coachella (I think it normally takes 30 minutes but we missed a turn and sometimes there was traffic into the parking lot), the 20 minute walk from the car to the entrance (that was the damn longest part). The heat made the walk pretty miserable, and the first thing I wanted to do upon entering was get water and go to the bathroom. I needed another water bottle after the first show. The porter potties are stifling (though cleaner than I expected) and during the first half hour I honestly wondered whether I'd make it through the first day, much less all three days. But that first hour of the hot dry blindingly bright late afternoon was always the hardest each day, and once you get past it and know you'll be fine, it is glorious.

There are five stages: the huge Coachella Stage with screens and a long expanse of grass in front of it; next to it is the smaller but still large Outdoor Stage that has some bleachers way in the back; perpendicular to these are three tented stages in a row, aptly named the Sahara, Gobi and Mojave. There were SO MANY people. Families with little kids, groups of friends, college kids, couples, teenyboppers, hipsters, hippies...music lovers. Music has that ineffable quality of being intensified and better by sharing, more so than a lot of other beautiful things, because it can be so accessible to so many at once. I remember hearing a song I liked playing across the Yard from someone's dorm room, through their open window to mine, and thinking of connections between strangers. And it's amazing to be able to go from dancing to a semi-raunchy girl band packed in the middle of a crowd, to standing hushed in the front row listening to just a voice and acoustic guitar. And to see how everything contributes to making each show distinct: the time of day and the light and temperature that goes along with that, where you are in the crowd, whether you stand or sit, and so on.

There were so many highlights: the energy and passion of Arcade Fire and how much we moved to their music, Lily Allen's band playing their trumpets in sync, Damien's riffs, Air's atmosphere reaching us in the bleachers, Regina Spektor's distinctive piano and voice and pale skin with red lips, being so close to Jose's lovely quiet music, the Decemberists playing the entire eight minutes of the Mariner's Revenge Song. And all the dancing, to CSS and Rapture and anything with a beat really. I didn't expect to dance that much. I think we ended up seeing twenty artists, maybe fifteen of whom were full sets, which is pretty awesome.

The one singular highlight though was Bjork, headlining on Friday night. I didn't listen to much of her music before that, aside from Vespertine and Dancer in the Dark, which I love, but I wasn't a huge fan of her or anything. But I fell in love. Her voice is so beautiful, I have no words. It soars and it moves in a way that makes you feel each note. We were far back so I couldn't see her well but I could see her petite self move across the stage, and I was amazed at the sound that came out of her, she looked like a fairy or pixie but was so much more powerful than that. And she's so incredibly creative, all these strange sounds come together and you're surprised to find yourself immersed in them and loving them. Argh, I'm having that really frustrating moment of not doing something justice at all. Let's just say that if I had to choose fifty things that defined beauty for me, her music live would be one (fifty sounds like a lot, but it's not if you think about all the things you could name).

By the end of the each day, your lower back aches, there's dirt underneath your fingernails and dust in between your toes and blisters on the soles, your skin is a funky mixture of sweat and grass, your contacts feel like they have a little layer of fuzz atop them, and if you're me, your hair was messy to begin with. You feel like there's all this crap on you that you can't wait to shower off, but you're so happy because you've been filled up through your ears and feet and eyes with all this beautiful stuff.