Of course we always felt a little out of place being here in France, not knowing the language or culture, but recently I felt it more acutely, like I'm on the island of misfit toys. (I'll bet you were wondering when a blog entry like this was going to be written...)
What use after all does anyone have for a 40-ish graduate student? What can such a person accomplish in such a shortened career? Outside of work, who would such a person "hang with"? Anyone married with kids knows the answer to that question: it's the same person that butters both sides of his bread.
Finding a thesis topic has also felt like a game of musical chairs - the empty chairs seem to be disappearing rapidly - at least those that are positioned for near-term success (plenty of empty deck chairs on the slow boat to China!).
One thing I didn't anticipate finding in a scientific collaboration this size is the level of territorialism. Ostensibly we are supposed to be competing with ATLAS on the other side of the ring from us. But this competition is far in the background of our daily existence - for us peons, anyway. Far more in our faces is the competition against our own collaborators from other institutions. Winning the first competition may affect the funding levels of all institutions on CMS, whereas winning the second competition may shift the existing funding levels around between institutions, plus claim to bragging rights, more papers published, influential convener-ships to be had, greater ability to recruit fresh blood. Empire building. It can actually be very cutthroat. One wishes one had gotten used to playing Risk...
So while the collaboration leadership keeps lamenting the need for more bodies and attempts to foster the collaborative spirit, in reality an analysis team by and large will not willingly enter into a peer collaboration with another institution, and it's a particularly tough hoe for individuals. For this reason it's important to be associated with a team of people - strength in numbers, and the more senior the better - except there are only a few of my MN collaborators out here at CERN.
K has also felt out of place here, pretty much from the beginning of our stay here. The culture is quite closed here, so whereas K was accustomed to be able to approach and schmooze strangers with a smile and a gladhand (even if she knew the language), this is not the French way. The highest compliment you can pay a French person is apparently that he/she is "très serieux". They try not to make eye contact if at all possible.
The worst of it is of course that B, having Down Syndrome, is the ultimate misfit in this culture, who generally are expected to abort such children in the womb, or if born, have them cordonned off in institutions safely out of sight, and this has also contributed to K's sense of not fitting in. When she was pregnant with G, people would ask her if she was going to get "tested", even by people from our church. But aside from this people are rarely so blunt; simply the absence of people like B in the society is enough to highlight his sore thumb-ness.
The only person in our little troupe that could actually make a go of fitting in would be G - although already she sticks out by virtue of her hair coloring, and loud and spunky rambunctiousness. Kids at the park, total strangers, come up to her and reach out to stroke her hair.
So where's "Santa and Rudolph" in all of this? Ironically, even as these points are pressed home to us, very recently developments have already helped to ameliorate the sense of being out of place.
For me, it's finally the identification of a thesis topic, just this last week, and consequent association with an analysis group. If you click on the link you'll see that the principals are in Moscow (!). My adviser is signing me up, along with part of his time, part of his postdoc's time, and part of a junior student's time as well. So this should be interesting...
For K, it's coming to a series of important realizations about herself and about French culture, and how she can adapt. This is probably not the place to go into intimate detail, but just to say: a guy perks up and takes notice when his wife joins Facebook after swearing for years that she never would. Now that's sanctification!
For B, we're very excited to have finally identified a man-woman couple that practice "ABA therapy" for autistic children together. The woman has already spent her first six hours with B getting acquainted this last week and is confident she can potty-train him! Shoot, if she can do that by the time he turns 4, she'll be worth her weight in gold. She will also be teaching him other life skills in preparation for school, which hopefully can begin for B a couple mornings a week this fall. Plus he recently figured out on his own how best to scoop food onto his spoon, which was the last hurdle for him to be able to feed himself completely for most of his meals.
As for his other therapies, he graduated from PT in June, his ST is on vacation, and so is his OT, but the OT has another employee continuing with him twice a week over summer; she's been teaching him to go up and down stairs.
For her part, G has become our resident "wherving delvish":
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
And of course, the population on this island of misfit toys is quite a bit better than the one King Moonracer stewarded. Lots of misplaced people here from all over the world that "don't fit in" - and oddly, although the majority of my co-workers at CERN are American or work for American universities, at church we don't socialize much with the few other Americans there at all. Most of them work for a corporation, make lots of money and live in expensive homes in the Swiss burbs. The one exception is a gentleman who works with the WCC media outreach, who's a Mennonite by background from Pennsylvania. He and his family are quite easy to socialize with and he's got some great stories to tell.
The LHC has been chugging along since my last report. That 3 weeks of down time in early-mid June really paid off, and every week or two they ramp up the luminosity of the beams to another world record for 3.5TeV/beam. They've made the graphs of the chronological development, as recorded by the two major detectors, available to the public at these web sites: CMS, ATLAS. A nice summary of the last 3 years, with emphasis on this year's running, plus plans for the next 20 years, were also reported by the LHC Project Manager at the ICHEP conference in Paris at the end of July, if you're interested, here.
Each of the four major experiments also presented a summary of results achieved with the first set of data; CMS in particular released a press statement and PDFs in several languages for public consumption, here.
Recent reads (recommended - but both long):
Europe's Guilty Conscience by Pascal Bruckner, City Journal Summer 2010
The American Spectator: America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
Take care,
-PWBGD
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