Ah.... you can have all the beer you want with anyone else, but there's nothing like having a beer (or 5) with your co-workers. After all, you spend most of your woken life at work... ah Vancouver, I am finally home, I think...
Today, also for the first time in Vancouver someone commented on my laugh. We have a white board and those old-school strong smell (I hope they are old school, I hope they make less chemically disturbing ordor pens these days) marker pens, the proverbial 'stoner pens'. My office mate and I were talking about beer of Vancouver, which inevitably calls for some mockery (Vancouver beer is certainly worse than Montréal beer and apparently worse than Colorado beer too) which made me laugh a bit. This professor walks in and says, 'say what you want about the markers, but she's always laughing...' And then when we were at the pub, Wolf and Hound, somebody said exasperatedly, "I don't want to go and rebuild the detector" which started this whole conversation of how they were in Japan, building it and how they were counting days to come back, suddenly this professor turns to me and says "oh, it is not that bad, just take some white-board pens"!!
So last night's earthquake in Japan, might have messed our detectors, we won't know until Monday. On the one hand it might be a good opportunity for me to see the inside works of the detector, specially the TPC's (which I have long range interest in) and get my hands on some electronics finally. But I must admit, I wasn't completely free of the thought that went, "omg, what have I done? I left my friends, a cool city, a working experiment, my own warm condo and came for this???". But like my mom always says, "everything happens for a reason" - well I am not sure about the "every" part, but this thing can have some serious learning experiences for me... So if the experiment is not broken, we'll publish this amazing delta_theta_12 and what not - but so what? How is this any different from what I have done before - it will be really nice for me to build a detector...
This night again, I sat through my landlord's incoherence. Knowing now that he must be on crack, I watched my words very carefully, trying not to throw him off the edge. It was hard though, specially when he said things like, after listening carefully to my description of neutrinos and my experiment, "so you are making this neutrino beam right? do you think this neutrino beam caused the earthquake?" and I really had to hold my right hand back from jumping up and slapping him across the face... but for those who know me, you know it was even harder for me to hold my sharp, mean words back. Calmly (as I can), I explained to him, how scientists are under heavy scrutiny all the time, how we can not even blink without filing a 25 page report and how in wall street, people just write up a 3 page report and get billions of dollars, and we should all be worried sick about these people. To which he responded by twisting all this information, like only hippies can, to conclude, wall street caused this earthquake. I shamelessly championed this idea - as long as we have the hippies off our backs... hee hee... wonder what my economist brother will have to say about my cleverness...
But this night, I truly grappled with the question, is he on crack, is he mentally sick or is he just misinformed? Because if it's either of the former, I should shut up - it is my social responsibility to, in the very least, not provoke his condition, but if it's the last, I need to stand up for my people and inform him, as best as I could about the truth, right? On the one hand my motherly instincts say 'well this is mental illness, it is not all pretty like in the movies, it is ugly and bitter and provoking... are you gonna walk out on this fellow human being just like that?". On the other hand it baffles my logical mind, everything I ever learned, my greatest passion in life, is blamed for everything, including this earthquake, and my pride suffers, my responsibility to my people, the people who made me, the people who are my friends beckons. He had taped some tsunami footage. He replayed them, he said he wanted to show me something. He pauses at a clip when the waves are rushing much into the inlands, with houses, vehicles and all sorts of debris, he points to a black blurb (yeah pick any of the 100's of black blurbs in that clip) and said "look at that, look at that... what *is* that?? That is some force of some sorts, some thing that shouldn't be there" as if though it was some invisible god-like manifestation. Oh, before, when I explained to him how neutrinos, of 3 flavours, are in fact a combination of 3 other mass states (sorry, I almost never say this part to the general public, but he asked me too many questions about oscillations), he said "that's so cool man... I mean think of these little 3 things combining to make 3 other things and then changing from time to time... you see so you are trying to decipher this right? harness this energy of the neutrino right? (No! I thought, but whatever) Don't do that... Don't mess with mother earth man... see... breathe in with me... look in my eyes here... "(so I breathe in and look in his eyes, ain't I a nice little puppy?, but of course this all has no effect on me cos my head has only 3 choices, you are on crack, you are sick or you are ignorant)... then he pauses for 30 seconds in awe and says 'oh man I see it... I see the energy in you... I think you have a gift'.
I am usually pretty good at not showing my boredom, I mean let's face it, 95% of the time people tell boring mundane stories, right... Talk me some music, talk me some politics, talk me some culture, talk me some physics, talk me some serious philosophy... just don't bore me with other crap... but I am usually pretty good, I can feign interest... but this hippy crap, I was really loosing it, I really couldn't keep my yawns from manifesting... After much debating in my head, I said "I am really sleepy, it must be the beer... I have to go to sleep." Ah... the burdens of social responsibility - sometimes I wish I was autistic (yeah, more than what I am) - society would have cut me all the slack for telling them what was really on my mind....
