They Push and Shove and Won't Bend To Your Will

So, this week in lab--not the best. The semi-boss had his bitchpants back on today and that was, well, something. I didn't cry--not even close--but it was still frustrating. He frustrates me. Frustrates me.

But then, this afternoon, I got to see a Nobel laureate speak. He was so entirely down to earth and said so many truly beautiful things.

Like how science brings together people of all nationalities, politics and belief systems.

How important it is, in science, to be lucky. We don't all get to be lucky all the time, of course. But we do almost all get to be lucky some time.

And that we should celebrate the victories in science, because they don't come that often. Because we struggle against hardships and strain so much for what sometimes seems so little. But the small victories--they count. And they should make us happy. And proud.

His was the type of talk that can fall across the "hokey" line so quickly in the hands of the wrong person. But watching him speak, I knew that what he was saying wasn't hokey, if only for one reason--that he believed every word of it.

At the end, he put up the Mandarin characters that mean "crisis." Two characters. One means "a time of disaster." Every day, he said, is a day of crisis in our careers. A day of disaster, a day to struggle. The other character, "a time of opportunity." There's a lot of that too, I know.

But goddamn, sometimes it's nice to be reminded.