Day and Night

Wow. Our short trip to New York was so much fun. Yesterday was post doc's 30th birthday, so we were in a celebratory mood all day. She wanted to do some cheesy things like visit Louis CK's comedy cellar and pizza place, so we did that. We also spent an hour after lunch wandering around the village and the meatpacking district. Lunch was at NYU's faculty club, which was ridiculously fancy for a midwestern yokel like me. (They gave me diet coke in a goblet.) Dinner was at a place called Jane, and it was pretty fabulous.

Neither of us slept much our first night for two reasons. One, it wasn't cold enough outside for the hotel heat to kick in, so our rooms were freezing. Two, our rooms must have been near the boiler room or something similar because all night long we were kept awake by continual clanking noises. However, being tired didn't really dissuade us at all. We were still happy to be there and excited about our meetings.

The other great thing about our trip is that our meeting was really productive. We have a new grant with colleagues at NYU, so this was our chance to lay out a game plan and get on the same page with next steps and theoretical ideas. I had been concerned about our collaborator because on the phone she is so talkative and such an interrupter that it's hard to get a word in edgewise. Because I was raised with the idea that interrupting is incredibly rude, I cannot make myself do it in normal conversation, and I find it offensive when others do it. Not explicitly -- I mean, I know that it's a more standard part of discourse in certain parts of the country and therefore not rude -- but implicitly it always makes me uncomfortable. However, it was much better in person. I left our day liking our collaborator a lot more, and feeling psyched about how we're pretty much on the same page with our ideas.

One silver lining of not having mentor be there is that I got to take the lead. When mentor is there, everybody else in the room automatically defers to him, and I am always relegated to #2. This isn't something he purposefully makes happen, and in fact he's actually good about deferring to me and promoting my ideas, but it's something that everybody else always does when he's around. And, frankly, when you're a senior person who is accustomed to everybody deferring to you and paying attention to you and looking to you for ideas, that's just your normal way of operating. Spending my whole career as second in command isn't something I really want to do. So setting up the tone for our grant moving forward on my own was actually a pretty nice opportunity. Later that night our collaborator said, "I noticed that never once during the day did you stop and say, 'I'll have to check with Mentor.'" Which is true, because we couldn't really avoid moving forward with making decisions, but now that I am back I'm trying to be careful to include him and ask for his input.

It's a good thing that I have my separate line of research apart from our joint stuff. My own line of research is my primary academic identity, by far, and I think it's good that our joint work is secondary.

At dinner we met up with our collaborator and her doctoral students and new professor and giant famous professor (also known as the guy who criticized my work after a talk in June, then read my paper this fall and kindly provided feedback, etc., etc.) It was a nice time and it was interesting to notice that giant famous professor seemed almost...shy? Just a little bit. Anyway, after dinner and drinks and going for a walk and snapping pictures and saying goodbye to folks, post doc and I wound up on our hotel steps. We looked at our watches and said, you know, it's only 10. Let's not go to bed yet! Let's just hop on the subway and go to Times Square! I know, again cheesy, but it was fun and bizarre and weird and fascinating to take that in. We walked all over the place, and rode the subway, and just enjoyed a sense of adventure on my post doc's birthday.

I could not resist taking photographs of Batman and Ironman because I knew the kids would be so freaked out to see them. Tonight, back home, I showed them the pictures and Nora said, "I can't believe you actually met the real Iron Man!"

Random disturbing event: Tonight, coming home from school, Milo asked if tomorrow is a home day. I said yes. Milo said, "Hah! Then Rosemary can't teach me a lesson tomorrow!" Turns out that his classmate, Rosemary, who is FOUR by the way, has told Milo that she's going to teach him a lesson.

WTF?!? I never know if stuff like this is normal 4-year old weirdness or genuinely disturbing evil bully behavior that should be communicated to their teacher. Milo doesn't seem all that worried about the lesson. He said, "If she is mean I'll just run away!"

It feels good to be home again, if only for 3 weeks. Sometimes I get a little bit stressed out about traveling but I have to say, what an awesome job that takes me to places like these and gives me the kinds of experiences and connections I get to have with people! It's pretty sweet.