The Peanut Riders

For a week or so after I submit a grant, I'm not real with it.  I go through the motions - but at work I don't generally feel all that effective.  I just do what I can.  This week I had to jump right into something that I have affectionately called 'Ben-World' - editing my doctoral student Ben's dissertation proposal.  I haven't been at my best while editing, but I'm plugging along - there's another section that I need to get through tonight. 

Generally though, after a grant submission, I'm just plain loopy.  I find some things really funny, that perhaps are, and sometimes I find things that really aren't so funny as being hilariously funny.  For example...Funny Exhibit No. 1:  a photo of my friend Jeff's parents riding a peanut.  Yep, that's Rod and Lena, Peanut Riders.  Jeff emailed this to me today, and on the phone gave me a play-by-play of the day when he and his parents veered off the road because there was a peanut sign.  The reality is that this was not a first for Rod and Lena (or Jeff) - in fact, Lena looks like she's a peanut-riding pro - while I'm envisioning Rod's expression as Jeff tells him to 'show a little leg'.  Now - I'm making good fun of these Peanut Riders, when in reality I am forever in their debt because after Hurricane Gaston they showed up in my garden with two well-tuned chained saws and the kind of chain-saw experience that comes from a past spent in the wilds of Wisconsin -- and helped me take down several large trees that had been uprooted by a storm that caught many by surprise - including me, as I watched out my windows as a large tulip poplar started leaning over my car in the driveway.  These are good Peanut Riders - the kind that you can count on when there is trouble.

So, for Funny Exhibit No. 2:  I'm telling this story because I'm assuming that the new postdoctoral fellow that just started in the lab doesn't know about my blog, and that by the time he does - we will have teased him about this anyway, so no harm done.  So here we all are - sitting in the conference room for our weekly lab meeting.  It was the postdocs first lab meeting - and we're chatting and I'm talking about a new microarray chip that has microbial genes for bacterial diseases on it - and how they cost $800 each but boy would I love to get one and you know, science talk about the service contract on the mass spec and the UV lamp for the Millipore system and...you know, STUFF.  Katherine reads her poem (I'll get to that below) and then Maria talks about her revised metabonomics protocol and then somehow, and I'm forgetting how the conversation evolved, but somehow the postdoc starts talking...saying something like:

  'Yeah, at USC, students are given 12 hours of free therapy during their degree program.' and then he went onto describe how he was having trouble with his DGGE gels - how 'the back gel was always blurry', and then how the 'centrifuge was having problems'.  So he used this period of time, during the end of his doctoral research stint, to go to therapy -- where he learned that he had 'anger management issues' and was an 'asshole'.

Well, I must say that I just looked at him and smiled, and looked at Katherine and smiled - and well, looked at everybody and smiled, while inside I was laughing as hard as I could.  Now, in all of the rules of conduct for a new employee, I'm not sure that there is one single rule that covers how (when or where) you should bring up your anger management issues, and, well, your asshole-ish nature.  But I'm guessing, and it's a pretty educated guess - that it's not something you bring up during the first group meeting with your colleagues.  But the honesty of it all - the simplicity of it all - and the fact that he did it - make me laugh off-and-on for the rest of the afternoon.  When lab meeting started, I realized that I hadn't 'warned' him that we have a poetry reading during each lab meeting, and after his disclosure - I see that all rules have been tossed out of the lab windows anyway, and even so...what's a little poem when there's a blurry DGGE gel and a malfunctioning centrifuge?

So, about that poem.  Today was a real treat.  In honor of Mardi Gras, and in honor of a changed city, Katherine took an essay written by NPR's Andrei Codrescu and edited the essay into a poem.  A book of essays by Codrescu can be found here, all about his adopted city of New Orleans - and it seems appropriate during this season (albeit a few days late) to reflect on the devastation that still exists.  And isn't the world a funny place?  Just yesterday my friend and former colleague called me from New Orleans - someone I had been trying to find who finally re-surfaced.  His home had four feet of water in it from Katrina - but he and his spouse are repairing and remodeling and hope to finally move back in their home in a month or so.  They will be only the second home in their neighborhood to be re-occupied.  They have been living in an apartment - and Richard spent about six months not being able to work, and another six months working in other laboratories - but he's now back in his old lab.  It felt good to hear from him - and then the new postdoc (yeah, the one with anger management issues) told us about a trip he took to New Orleans for his prior position - and how whole areas were still devastated, how the 9th Ward didn't even have foundations of homes anymore, and how it was growing wild - and how the images that we see on the news don't even come close to showing the immensity of the devastation.  He told us about the large black X's on the homes - and how the numbers associated with the letter (depending on location) were the statistics for how many bodies were found inside.  One, eight, two...it went on and on. 

I couldn't help but thinking today, in that loopy-post-grant-submission-way, that perhaps, just perhaps - that we needed to send the Peanut Riders down that way - with their trusty chain saws and there own personal brand of peanut-riding exuberance in tow.  Rod and Lena, saving the world.  One peanut at a time.   

Katrina, originally written by Andrei Codrescu and edited/adapted by Katherine Williams

Each day has its own pictures:
bumper to bumper traffic two states long,
a frenzied mug in a domed prison,
rising water,
the hungry pushing carts out of looted stores,
roof tops in a lake as vast as the eye can see.
Dead city.
Silent city.
The survivors, the tribes.
Stadiums filled with refugees,
helicopters over a dead unlit city,
a ragged parade of decadents spitting defiance,
television cameras as numerous as marchers,
a can of tuna and a strand of beads.
Dead pets rotting away behind locked doors
the smell of putrefaction visible.
Muck.
Darkness.
Heat.
An eviscerated pigeon,
two dogs shot by a hired executioner.
A sea of horrible stories rising like swamp fever
from the foul mouth of dear ones,
from exile.
We are all working
in this pit of sorrow
to unfreeze time.

Louisiana isn't called the Dream State for nothing.
Katrina found us dreaming.
If our voluptuaries had been on guard
we might have saved the city.
We could have been preparing for this
for all the years we knew it was going to happen.
Instead we made libations to the gods of chaos.
Our politicians, like our citizens,
lived in the moment.
A beautiful,
fragrant,
delicious,
sexy
moment.

 

Comments

[Pat]

Usually when I read something as profound as Katherine's poem, I just click through because I can't think of anything appropriate to write. This time is no different, but I just have to say thanks for sharing such well-written - and touching - pieces.

[Pam]

Pat: It's been so nice having Katherine around, and having her expose us not only to her own poetry, but to poets that we've barely heard of (or haven't heard of at all). I've really enjoyed it too.