Last night was a girls night. Dinner and a movie with the girls I worked with and ate lunch with most often. I was excited. I miss them a lot, I miss our conversations a lot and frankly, I needed to leave my house for longer than the time it takes to run a few errands. I wasn't worried about awkwardness - no one blames me for having lost my position and I didn't leave angry.
I envisioned a nice dinner where we took our turns talking about whatever ails us. I would talk about going a little stir crazy and waiting to hear about my new job application. One girl (C) would tell us about waiting to hear if she gets to keep her job. The student from across the hall(T) would tell us about how her qualifying exam proposal is going and about how her boys are doing. And the student from my old lab(S) would tell me about her project and how the boss is driving her crazy and maybe she'd let me know a little bit more about what happened to my protein**
Of course nothing ever goes like you envision it. Don't get me wrong, the evening was very nice, just not exactly what I pictured.
The main "problem" (and I hesitate to call her a problem, she was very very nice) was the girl that I wasn't expecting to be there. She's a brand new addition to the department - her first day as a student was my last as a postdoc - and she was new to our girls nights. That's great. I like new people. The problem was that she's a talker - and by talker I mean went a hundred miles a minute and rarely took a breath. If one of us managed to get a sentence in she would latch on to that new topic and start again at a hundred miles a minute. And again, I hate to call her a problem because I think she had no idea that we weren't really having a conversation and she was just so excited about everything she was saying. Meanwhile, we did get to hear a bit about T's kids and C did tell us about how she'll find out this afternoon whether or not she gets to come into work tomorrow. They asked me about the new job application but as soon as I said I've reapplied we were being seated and by the time we got to the table new girl started talking about something else. And, a little bit disconcertingly S barely said 3 sentences all night. She never said hello to me and didn't really look and me and was quiet in general. She's generally very loud and the first to be complaining about work and the boss so I took this as a sign that her life in the lab isn't great at the moment and never asked what was going on in there and she never volunteered.
And then the conversation took the inevitable turn towards hard core science. Most gatherings of people all within the same field of work usually turn towards work. It's what everyone has in common and when you spend more of your time with the people you work with than with your friends and family the problem gets even worse. I knew it would happen and I wasn't worried about feeling excluded since I know everyone they're talking about and I know science, it would have been easy to participate. But I didn't. As they got deeper and deeper into how many experiments do you have left before working on a paper and don't take that class at the same time as preparing for your mock and EM gets sent away and someone else does it and this person shouldn't be training you on the scope because they can't focus and during lab meeting..............I just sat back and listened. I had a fantastic moment of realizing how nice it is to not be in that environment anymore. I almost felt a little embarrassed for all of them for this to be so important that it's all they could talk about even away from work at dinner with someone they hadn't seen in a month.
And I realize that just one month ago that was me too - but it's amazing what looking in from the outside does to perspective. I've been having a pretty tough time feeling ok with myself - that what I'm most qualified to do I refuse to do anymore. But after last night's dinner I was certainly well on my way back to remembering why I chose to stay home for a while.
**The saga of my protein is a blog for another time - and it's one of those that will probably never be written because I'd have to include far to much science and I will end up having a rant of exaggerated proportions which is never a good idea.
Excellent.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's nice to hear that, too. I was at a gathering last month with mostly people who work in the same lab and it was literally all they could talk about. It was really hard for the 2 of us who weren't involve in lab life to get a word in edgewise.
I think it's normal for people in the same field to talk about work, but for me it's really different because I don't actually work with adults day-to-day.