I Am My Own December

I went home the weekend before Thanksgiving, to celebrate Thanksgiving, a wedding, or the premier of Twilight (depending on who you ask).

I had interesting airplane conversations. The first leg, I was hopelessly trying to ignore an old woman sitting next to me. It's the first time I've used my occupation to intentionally be a douchebag. Then I thought about it. It's hard to talk to strangers about what I do without sounding like a douchebag. That's why I try not to.

"You're about the same age as my granddaughter. What do you do in college?"

"Microarray analysis to analyze small RNA differences in tissues as they develop with the ultimate goal of guiding the differentiation of stem cells along a specific developmental lineage.... I sound like a douche bag don't I?"

"I teach art in an elementary school, what do you do?"

"I um grow heart cells in a lab from stem cells and also from induced pluripotent cells, which are going to replace the need for stem cells and really clear up some of the red tape keeping us from killing babies......ooh. Fuck."

This old lady on the airplane though. I was on my laptop fighting with a Perl script, probably furrowing my eyebrows and mumbling a lot. She kept trying to strike up conversation like 15 times. I gave her clipped answers and was being openly rude to shut her up. But then I finally looked her in the face and I swear she looked just like my estranged... b i o l o g i c a l grandmother (that's for you Cam). It distracted me. I weighed the likelihood that she would think I was insane if I asked her very seriously, after an hour and a half of the trip, "Are you my grandmother?" I never asked her. But I decided she probably wasn't.

The next leg of the flight I talked to this guy. My immediate thought was "30 year old man, overly friendly, 280 pounds, chewing gum, baseball cap, proceed with caution". He started talking about his wife and kids, so I quickly recategorized him as non-hostile. He talked about his work, which was pretty interesting - designing wind turret fields for wind energy companies. Then he cleanly segued into a conversation about how people are electrochemical transmitters and receivers of brain waves. And static electricity improves the conductivity. He had written several hundred pages on the subject hoping to publish it. I asked him about the Schumann resonance and he said it was all rubbish..... huh.

He was pretty confident that the world was not going to end in 2012 too.

That's good to hear.