The Odyssey, pt. 2

This took entirely too long.

Long Beach Biophysics All Stars, Days 4 + 5

Finally feeling something resembling alive after wandering in a waking-dead daze since last Monday. I don’t know where that godawful sickness came from. At least I was still able to leave my room, defend my poster, and pretend to listen to talks; apparently it got Lirong too, and she hadn't been able to leave her room from last Monday until when the meeting ended last Wednesday.

It was infuriating, being surrounded by all this amazing science, even if I didn’t understand over half of it, and being too scatterbrained from either the cold or the cold medicine—or both—to focus on any of it. I went to the Computational Methods poster sessions on Tuesday, which I had been looking forward to, and found I couldn’t even stay concentrated enough to finish reading an abstract. (I fared a little better at the Systems Biology and Bioinformatics sessions Wednesday, but then I ran out of time before the meeting ended.) I honestly didn’t feel like doing anything the past few days except curl up in bed and not think, but that was obviously not an option.

My poster defense on Tuesday went well enough, diseased respiratory tract and imploding brain notwithstanding; a few people came by and asked me questions over the course of about an hour, and a couple of them actually seemed specifically interested and inspired by my data. Pretty much everyone suggested I should run the experiment with peptides known to adopt barrel-stave pore structure in a membrane, such as alemethicin and melittin; I agree with this, though we do have data for gramicidin A already. As with the talks, there was a lot of accented English passing through: a tall Dutchman and a professor from Mexico were among the ones asking me questions about my poster. A German guy came by and grilled me on some details about the electrochemistry of the experiment, which was mostly Mikhail’s domain, so that caused some awkwardness. And then there was the Italian lady who tried to convince me our silicon substrate was leading to the formation of imperfect bilayers, and that we should try using a mercury substrate instead. She said all this in a spectacularly condescending tone and patted me on the shoulder before walking away. Later, Jesse and Edwin said I should have told her, “you’re not perfect either…have you looked in the mirror recently?” They then gave each other high-fives. I’m glad I didn’t have to co-defend with the two lab fratboys, even if one of them already has his Ph. D.

Tuesday night, Izzi and I took the metro up to Hollywood, passing by such notable musical landmarks as Compton and San Pedro (unsurprisingly, she didn’t know who Mike Watt was). She talked a lot about her cats, of which she had so many, after half an hour I decided she’d only had one cat which had lived about twenty different lives. We got off the metro at Hollywood and Vine and ventured into the cold to trace the Walk of the Stars: pretty much the only tourist-y thing I indulged in while in South California. Fun fact: Gene Autry is the only person to be honored in all five categories of the Walk, though I can’t remember now what those five categories are; the point is, we were puzzled from seeing Gene Autry stars repeatedly until a plaque next to the last one explained the seeming redundancy. Hollywood Boulevard is a strange strip; the décor seemed to transition from glamorous to gaudy to ghetto with every passing block, and there were an absurd number of sex shops and drug paraphernalia outlets. Izzi fawned over a glass bong in the shape of a pink elephant in a storefront window (it cost $120).

In a bizarre twist of events, we met up with Jill of Pretty Lush fame, and she took a stroll with us down the Walk of the Stars. Jill and I had been mutual blog-appreciators since long before the existence of Different Cities, or indeed of the term “blog” itself (“Opendiary” was the word); I was much more active with using blogs as correspondence back in those days. This was the first time I’d ever met in person someone I met via Internet writings, and it wasn’t until we recognized each other (admittedly with some difficulty) on a street corner across from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not with a giant plastic dinosaur on top that I realized what an awkward situation it would become if Izzi decided to ask how we knew each other; mercifully, she didn’t. I felt a little bad for making Jill drive out to do little more than meander, but she seemed cool with two Eastern scientist types going tourist on her hometown.

Wednesday wasn’t much to speak of. Went to a talk by the Sarah Rice lab, another by Hassane Mchaourab from Vanderbilt, lunch with the extended academic family of Professor Steve White, which includes all members of the Hristova lab, and then the poster sessions. Killed some time at the Aquarium of the Pacific, which has excellent exhibits of jellyfish and sea lions but also an abundance of small screeching children, with Mikhail. Finally, in the evening, Granger swung by again, and we set out toward Santa Monica after some persuasion on my part to visit Ben.

A little background is necessary here. Ben was a fellow resident of mine in Hamill House, and one of my best friends at Lawrenceville, a year above my own, until he was expelled three weeks into his senior year, and he was a rogue, he was a ringleader. Ben was the reason Hamill was cool in 2002; looking back, it seems as though he was a kind of face for the house as a whole, Head of State to Peter’s Chief Executive, an image reinforced in my mind by Baldwin’s favoring of him and frequent overlooking of his shenanigans. I was introduced to him by Patrick, himself a boarding school casualty, and he and his inner circle—Ben, Patrick, Karam, Eric, sometimes Peter, Ross, Marshall, and Mostoller, and later myself—defined what social interaction I had that first, bewildered, sophomore year. Much of the second half of the year found us gathered in Eric’s room, 314, chatting and listening to music, often after lights out. It was there I was first exposed to drugs and drink, though I never partook of any of it, and it was there that I took my first tentative sidesteps out of the mainstream boarding school culture, and mainstream cultures in general. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say Ben’s cordial invitation of me into his little group set me on the escape trajectory I’ve traveled on to this day. Say what you will about my idealism then (and now), but those stoned Hamillites huddled together on late nights were at the center of something; half of the Lawrenceville-affiliated people I interacted with after his expulsion (by someone who remains one of the most reprehensible faculty at the institution to this day, if indeed he is still there), including such key figures as Vladic, Granger, Emily, and Andrew, knew him either directly or indirectly, and his departure seemed to affect almost everyone on campus in some way. On the day Ben’s family came with a truck to take him and his belongings away, people I’d never met and would never speak a word with came from around the Circle to say their goodbyes to him. After that, I only saw him twice more, once near the end of my own high school tenure when he showed up in Upper randomly in the company of Karam and proceeded to sell drugs, and again for a few brief hours when I passed through New Jersey in January 2005.

Picture my utter surprise, then, when Granger and I stepped walked through a gated fence and front yard and into the one-story house he shared with his girlfriend Alyssa to find an impeccably tidy, if compact, living room, complete with preliminary Valentine’s Day décor, a workstation-style desk in the corner, small sofa with cushions intact, and a big friendly dog named Jolie. Ben had cooked baked ziti for dinner and gave me some red wine in a stemmed glass. A photograph of him and Alyssa was taped to the bathroom mirror. The only giveaway of his erstwhile life was a small glass pipe on the bookshelf; however, he told me he didn’t have any weed (after asking us whether we wanted any, which we didn’t anyway). I’d never once in the past six-plus years imagined I would ever find Ben in the center of a spitting image of domestic bliss, but there he was, sitting on one side of the sofa with Alyssa’s legs stretched across his lap as she reclined across the other side, Jolie climbing up and licking his stubbly face, in the dim glow of a standing lamp, empty glass and plate sitting on the coffee table, across which Granger and I sat and talked about a way-gone time in a way-gone place thousands of miles from southern California, and way-gone people, some of whom were ourselves. Later, as we were leaving, Ben bid us goodnight as Alyssa put everyone’s dishes in the dishwasher, excusing the early evening on his need to wake up at 5:30 to go to his job scanning documents for a shrimping company. They looked for all the world like they could be married by the end of the decade.

What, then, when kids who got straight A+’s all through college are swinging like monkeys through a jungle of professional connections and doing lines to stay awake, the kid who never got in trouble in high school is jetting across the country twice in two weeks wondering what the hell city he’ll live in next year, and the guy who got kicked out of boarding school for substance abuse has apparently uncovered a shard of the so-called American Dream in Santa Monica at age 24? Though admittedly not everyone who goes down his path could turn out as well; Ben told us Eric was up in San Francisco, giving rehab a second shot which will hopefully take.

Nashville Villain

Flew in to Nashville Thursday evening. The sickness was starting to lift by then, but somewhere in the decompression/recompression of taking off and landing the worst headache I have ever known set in. By the time I made it to the Holiday Inn room Vanderbilt had booked for me I was wincing in pain with every step I took and ready to crush my head under a window to make it go away. I went downstairs and bought a bottle of Advil to kill the pain. I never take pills; that's how bad it was. Apparently a bunch of high school athletes were staying in the same hotel; I heard a few of them partying in a room on the fifth floor when the elevator stopped there. I wonder how that turned out for them.

I woke up on Friday in silence, though I'd set the alarm clock the night before. With a chill in my spine I rolled over to see I had 15 minutes to get downstairs and catch the van to Vanderbilt campus with the rest of the interview group. I had never gotten so well-dressed so quickly. As a bonus, I discovered I could successfully tie a tie in about 30 seconds flat, though not very well.

The day began with a few presentations from professors in the Chemical and Physical Biology program; Mchaourab was there, as was Izzi's PI Al Beth, and Phoebe Stewart who specialized in cryo-electron microscopy. From there we were packed off individually for hour-long interviews that took me back and forth across the labyrinthine Vanderbilt campus. Compared with the grid-like layout of Johns Hopkins-Homewood, a walk through Vanderbilt, especially the densely-arranged medical campus, was like an expedition through a concrete-and-glass rainforest. New, shiny, hi-tech research buildings jammed up against older complexes cast in 1970s red-brick architecture, and in one case sprouted right up from the rooftop of one (MRB IV, on top of Light Hall) like a parasitic plant. In addition, the pathways wound in every direction but straight ahead and often made no sense whatsoever. Fortunately, this kind of maze-like architecture is just my thing; I'm a sucker for intriguing space.

They had me interview with four professors. First up was Philip Crooke, an older mathematician with no lab beyond an office and a computer, who specialized in collaborative efforts and the mathematical modeling of biological pathways. We talked a bit about the philosophical issues of making a living interpreting someone else's data. He seemed to like me enough to walk me to the next interview: Walter Chazin, director of the Center for Structural Biology, stationed in the glossy halls of MRB III. I didn't seem to connect with him very well, for whatever reason; maybe it was his complex-specific approach? But Jens Meiler, the first of my two afternoon interviews, clicked a lot better; and no wonder, he was a big-time computational biologist, not just in Vanderbilt but in the wider academic society. I liked the way his lab had many collaborative projects with labs doing all sorts of "wet" assays: x-ray, cryoEM, EPR, NMR, etc., the data from which can be incorporated into knowledge-based force fields. His German grad student Steffane, who was jointly employed by Meiler and Stewart and who was working on using cryEM density maps to refine computational models, talked with me a bit and showed me around the more scenic, less convoluted parts of campus. He then dropped me off at Alissa Weaver's lab in the cancer research building, where my final interview took place; however, Weaver had decided to interview four of us prospectives simultaneously, so the situation ended up being more one-sided than the others, with Weaver presenting to us some interesting projects on the modeling of tumor expansion.

There was a brief poster session, and after returning to the Holiday Inn to ditch our stuffy suits and pantsuits, the real fun began: a party at an assistant dean's manor-like home with the CPB and IGP interviewees, current students, and faculty. It was a literal wine-and-dine: there was good food, good beer, and plenty of professors to talk to. There was a membrane guy who referred to me as "the Hopkins guy," much to my dismay, who turned out to know my PI. A second attempt at conversing with Dr. Chazin fell on its face; I suppose some things were just never meant to be.

They talked about going out to a country music club after the end of the dinner party and the "official" itinerary, but by this point I was starting to get a little tired of seeing the same people and talking about the same things all day without pause. I decided to meet up with Izzi and go to an apartment party with some of her friends from med school. It was a bit of a crapshoot: partying with an apartment of people I don't know is usually not something that goes very well, but for what it was, it turned out alright.

Only thing was, they were like a bunch of fratboys. They smoked up and played Beirut, not necessarily in that order. If someone had told me I was in a frat party, I might have believed them. There was a lot of friendly heavy petting that, months down the line, will probably result in incestuous dating and massive group falling out (I confess to being cynical about group dynamics, as they were). I guess college takes longer to end for people who aren't as fastidious as I am. It was still a decent time, but after a long day and a few drinks I became tired and didn't want to speak to anyone anymore. We went home, and that was the last I saw of Izzi, after barely exchanging a word for three years and then seeing each other almost daily for nearly a week. I admit that I started to feel a big affectionate towards her at the end--that's what happens when she's the archetypal attractive TA--but it was hard to have a conversation that doesn't have anything to do with science or school, under the circumstances. Who knew common interests could become an obstacle? After I returned to my room, I scrolled through both the AM and FM bands of the Holiday Inn’s bedside clock radio to find a station to wake up to. Had one of those experiences where it seemed every single coherent sound fading out of the white noise seemed to speak to me personally, from the Eagles' "Desperado" to the call-in guy musing whether we'd all been cloned and seeded on an artificial planet by aliens from a dying planet, "like cattle." Settled on a bizarre evangelist talk show on a middle-of-nowhere frequency on the AM band, because there is no way I could possibly sleep through that.

Saturday was a tour of Vanderbilt campus and Nashville proper. Impressions: Vanderbilt and Nashville look nice. Very nice, especially when the weather was beautiful with a remarkably clear sky. Nashville's a fairly low-density city, unfolding in a loose, laid-back sprawl punctured by the occasional cluster of soaring skyscrapers, including a devil-horned AT&T/Bell South building the locals apparently have christened the "Batman building." Even the deep downtown area was very clean, and had the feel of a big town as much as that of a small city.

Here was my only issue with the Nashville aura: I didn't see any weirdness, nor any darkness. After nearly four years of living in Baltimore, I've come to expect every city to have an untold underbelly of teeming cultural fauna that isn't touched by the glossy media. This I consider to be the essential nugget of a city's experience. Maybe Vanderbilt simply chose to take us out on the scenic route, but in our drive, I didn't notice any spaces where such an essence might be found. Every part of town we passed was like the friendly part of town, and I found that somewhat unsatisfying.

Needless to say, when I found myself later that night back in Baltimore in the Floristree space with a couple hundred others watching Matmos perform electronic noise by processing the sounds of fresh roses being beaten against a table and an intrepid volunteer getting a real, live mohawk haircut from bandmember M. C. Schmidt, I felt like a beached whale getting hustled back into the ocean. I actually hopped around a little and clapped with glee when I got there; I'd missed the eccentricity of this city so much in the polish of Long Beach and the lightness of Nashville. I guess you just can't take the Baltimore out of the boy.