Q. How can a WUSsie score a big bear hug from a random blonde girl on the street?

A. Apparently by almost getting murdered by a beige Nissan on Porter Street in broad daylight.

Seriously, strangers on Connecticut Avenue were crying and hugging me in the street.  They had all seen it coming, probably in slow motion, from their perfect vantage point on the other side of Porter Street.  They saw the beige sedan blow through the red left turn arrow coming south on Connecticut Avenue and swerve left onto Porter, probably above 40 mph, just as I was blithely trotting through the cross-walk with the walk signal in my favor.  The sedan was coming from behind me, so I never saw it until it was an inch from my right hip.  By the grace of the running gods and a couple crucial inches, the car swerved by without contacting me.

But it was so close.  The pedestrians on the opposite side of Porter stood agape.  I think the near-murder they had just witnessed had terrified them as much as me. When I staggered the rest of the way across Porter, a girl with long straight blonde hair and thick black eye make-up hugged my shaking body so hard I thought she would never let go.  She must have been so relieved that my brains were still in my head instead of splattered on the road.  For nearly half a block people continued to pat me on the shoulder and make sure I was alright.  I was in too much quivering shock to make any response beyond a short nod and ‘uh-huh’.  Being in shock feels like scuba diving, when all you can hear is your own deep breathing, with a blurry world going by in slow motion.

My only regret is that the car was speeding too fast for me to get a license plate number.  I made a police report, and an officer was dispatched to Porter Street speed camera to see if the suspected vehicle had been caught on film.  I told the officer I thought it was a beige sedan, possibly Nissan or Toyota make.

As Sean Andrish can tell you from our Wednesday night runs, I am a magnet for lunatic drivers.  Although today’s incident was by far the most harrowing, this is by no means the first time I’ve been side-swiped by a car while obeying pedestrian law.  We have long joked about this phenomenon, and my attempts to combat my curse by wear bright yellow reflective clothing.  At least I’m a cat lady and get nine lives, although I have probably used up most of them by now.  Today alone counted for at least four.

 

We’ve previously determined that since Aaron is already practically perfect, he gets a bye on having to make any New Year’s Resolutions [although I might nominate something along the lines of: Try not to get so annoyed with Martha when she does something (a) dumb, (b) messy, (c) dumb and messy].  But I, to use one of those match.com-overused colloquialisms, remain a work-in-progress, and I’ve got some big ticket items for 2013.  Looking ahead, if I can avoid crumpling in a corner, 2013 in going to be a monster year: I’ve got work travel to Italy, Ireland, Scotland, Thailand, Australia, Minnesota, and Iowa (and that’s just through July 2013).  Potential trips to Myanmar and France as well.  If I’m not totally exhausted/out of shape from all this travel, Aaron and I are tentatively thinking of joining the Blue Train in June to the Black Hills of South Dakota for my first 50 miler (Aaron and the rest of the gang can do the 100).  I’m also considering making a major career move back into academia as a tenure-track assistant professor (of Biology), although I’m still waffling on that one.

I know that a 50-miler seems like peanuts to most of the WUSsies.  But I, for reasons I have explored in previous blogs, have a Grand Canyon-sized gulf between self-perceived and actual capability (with the former being substantially lower than the latter).  This incongruity has become increasingly apparent in recent years, in large part because Aaron is there to continually point out to me how out of touch my self-perception is with reality.  And I’ve only recently begun to realize that this phenomenon is quite rare and particular to myself — that other people actually tend to experience the reverse effect, developing inflated self-perceptions.  Psychologists refer to this as the ‘better-than-average’ effect: the vast majority of people think they are better than average, when of course that statistically is impossible.  As the classic example, an impossible 93% of US respondents described themselves as better than average drivers.  A year ago I went to a talk by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Hallinan who described this phenomenon in depth.  Over-confidence is a plague of human existence, leading not only to traffic fatalities but also a plethora of high error rates in other categories — from the surgery table to identifying suspects from the police line-up.  Tragically, these error rates could be dramatically reduced if people didn’t way over-estimate their own capabilities and allowed for greater measures of uncertainty.  As I sat in the audience, I was amazed by how different it must be to experience life through the eyes of someone with over-confidence — to be the guy who hits on the woman way out of his league at the bar, or who dashes out in the lead of a road race only to consistently fall to the middle of the pack, or to be the med student with enough self-assurance to think Yes, I’ve totally got the stuff to be a brain surgeon, to CARVE INTO PEOPLE’S HEADS. 

I thought that the easiest way I could gain self-confidence would be to achieve things I previously considered to be impossible or greatly challenging, over time eroding my sense of self-limitation.  For example, when I climbed Mt Kilimanjaro in 2002, overcoming this challenge should have boosted my confidence in an area I had always perceived to be a great weakness: climbing up hills.  Instead, my sneaky brain decided it was way easier to change my perception of the outside world than of myself: rather than giving myself any credit for the climb, my mind switched it around and concluded that summitting Kili was actually a fairly trivial physical endeavor that anyone and their spunky grandma could do.  My mind did the same thing about getting a PhD (trivial!), running a sub-3 hour marathon (just don’t go out too fast), or anything else that at one point had seemed like an insurmountable challenge. Much easier to change my perception of the external world than myself.

Anyway, the reason I have been probing into this issue of self-confidence recently is because I need to understand how it factors into an upcoming major career move.  As I start to consider ramping up my professional intensity by joining the tenure-track rat race, I’m determined to make sure that my reservations about the move are only related to lifestyle trade-offs and my reluctance to leave a current research position at Fogarty I’m very content with, and don’t stem from my lagging self-confidence and doubt about my ability to cut it as a professor.  Because I should know by now that I’ll be fine, that I always think it will be much worse than it really is.  There might be golden opportunities ahead at Georgetown University and at other divisions of the NIH, where I could have my own lab and little post-docs to boss around and do my work for me — and all I have to do is beat down that self-doubt hard enough until it’s too late to turn back.

~                ~                  ~

There is much about oneself that cannot be pinned on parental influence, and many traits that are largely independent of upbringing.  But self-confidence is one domain where parents figure mightily into and are greatly responsible for cultivating in a developing child.  Recognizing the origins of low self-confidence is crucial for beginning to reconstruct a sense of belief in oneself.  The absolute key here is for parents to inculcate in children a frame of mind where failure is not a reflection of lack of self-worth.  You can’t always make your kid be the winner, but you can surely teach them how to lose in a way that the failure doesn’t weigh them down like a giant scarlet F hanging from their neck.  Now I can think of one area where my father was actually a  spectacular success in teaching me to accept failure as a part of learning: skiing.  In stark contrast to the reviled tennis court, the ski slope was this wild, free place where I have no recollections of my father ever being disappointed or overly critical.  There was no scoreboard, no lines, no winners and losers, just big wide open hills to bomb down and enjoy.  I had skis on as soon as my feet were big enough to fit into ski boots, and pretty soon I was going down black and double-black diamonds, absolutely fearless.  My father had a rule that I should fall three times every day I skied — otherwise I wasn’t pushing myself and taking risks.   Normally kids will make fun of others who fall or fail, but my ski school instructors always created an atmosphere where huge face plants were celebrated with cheers.  The healthiest life lessons of my childhood were surely on those slopes, where falling on your face was greeted with a high-five and an outstretched glove to pull you back up, brush the snow out of your ears, and send you back on your way.  If only all of childhood could have been like that.

 

In sum: 2013 resolutions

(1) Run a 50-miler.  Try not to barf.  Okay, if you do barf, try to cut yourself some slack.  Faceplant, baby!!

(2) Explore career options.   Try to talk yourself up a little during interviews, even if you think you’re over-selling yourself.  Try to use ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ when giving job talks, even if you consider the work to be a group effort.  If you decide to stay put at Fogarty, do it because you love taking off Thursday night to drive to Canaan Valley for snow adventures and don’t want to be tied to the lab, not because you think you’ll be Professor Suck Ass.

(3) Gain back your ‘god i’m so stressed over job applications!’ 4-5 pounds you lost.  Aaron’s totally going to trade you in for someone with a little meat.  Oh wait, Aaron doesn’t like meat.  But you do — so get yourself some T-bones, dammit!

 

 

 

Canaan Valley, WV

December 22-27, 2012

For several weeks leading up to our Christmas holiday in Canaan, Aaron had promised that There would be snow.  And how the Valley delivered!  Nearly 16 inches of fresh snowfall during our stay.  While there were many clear upsides to the snow in terms of winter sport adventure (see pictured, left), unfortunately the poor state of the roads interfered with the Operation Family Time that traditionally coincides with Christmas.  Aaron’s parents Dick and Rosemary could not come out for the ski weekend at Timberline they had planned with us for months.  And while my parents braved a harrowing drive to get to Canaan (my father had some strong comments about the quality of road plowing in various stretches of Virginia and West Virginia), the snow delayed their departure an additional day, stretching the limits of Nelson family harmonious co-habitation.

Most people are familiar with my wimpy princessy tendencies that preclude participation in events like Hellgate.  But when it comes to treacherous footing, I’m surprisingly game.  After getting our fill of snowshoeing, Aaron and I dropped the clunky footwear to take on the snow drifts with nothing but Nike, making it through the rocky Dolly Sodds with surprisingly good success (if you measure success by not falling on our butts rather than by miles covered).

Winter is so quiet when all the animals are gone.  Even the over-populated Canada goose population had long abandoned the nearby Spruce Island (‘Goose Poop’) Lake.   So when it’s cold and remote and you haven’t seen another person or even a squirrel for hours, the Eastern black-capped chickadee becomes a dearest of friends.  We spotted a few deer, a hawk, and some creepy flocks of giant wild turkeys during our adventures in the snow.  But the hardy little chickadee was the only consistent presence in those white woods, with its distinctive chick-a-dee-dee-dee call accompanying our travels throughout the day.  The xc ski area Whitegrass puts some birdseed out on benches that the daring chickadees dive in for even in our presence.  When new snowfall buried the seeds, I reached into my pocket for some peanut-butter crackers that our little friends deemed a very viable substitute.

D-day came on December 24th, with the storming of the Nelsons upon the gates of the Chophouse, along with the materials for the Christmas Eve Scandinavian smorgasbord, including Swedish meatballs, herring, pickled beets, and lingonberry sauce.  My father’s parents are from Finland and Sweden, so I grew up with Christmases that were steeped in Scandinavian traditions to a level verging on absurd.  For Christmas Eve we always produced an elaborate Scandinavian smorgasbord that included a number of foods I wouldn’t touch (like ‘veal jelly’, potato sausage, and pickled herring) and some foods I would nibble at (the meatballs and deviled eggs), while I mainly loaded up on a jello dish made by my grandma’s cousin Maiju.  If it weren’t for the rich rice pudding dessert we ate at the end, my caloric intake for Christmas Eve would have dipped below 250.  After dinner we would dance around the Christmas tree singing Finnish Christmas songs.  No one below the age of 60 knew any Finnish, but we knew all the songs by heart (or at least our Anglo-mangled versions of them) and when we were supposed to make bunny ears and tails with our fingers.  I clearly recall the semi-tormented facial expression and halfhearted staggering of my older teenage brother when made to take part in the Finnish bunny-dance songs.  Fortunately, Fred did not have to partake with me in the Santa Lucia pageant, in which I got dressed up in a white gown with tinsel wrapped around my head and waist and with a group of Scandinavian children performed traditional Swedish Christmas songs, including the Santa Lucia girl who wore a terrifying headdress of candles on her head.  I actually enjoyed the whole Santa Lucia thing, but I was always at a distinct disadvantage because I was the only child who did not actually speak Swedish.  I could stagger through a chorus or two of ‘Stilla Natt (Silent Night)’, but for the rest of the songs I had to scrawl their lyrics on the circular disk that kept the candle’s hot wax from dripping on my hand (except for the one Santa Lucia girl, the other girls just held single candles; the boys, who apparently couldn’t be trusted with flaming objects, were given wands shaped like stars to hold — and hit each other with).  I was able to read the lyrics off my candle holder for about half of the show (some of the other girls would lean over to read off my disk as well), but eventually the wax would drip and obscure my writing and we’d all have to count on the lone Santa Lucia to carry the show.

Christmas night it snowed even more, and my parents were unable to leave as planned the next day.  My father stayed home writing (apparently proving the existence of God, although not a Judeo-Christian we were told), but we, undeterred by the snowstorm, ventured off to Whitegrass for a long day of more adventure.  It even started to clear up at the end of the day, with a long rainbow stretching across the homestretch.

Magnus Gluteus Maximus Fat Ass 50k

December 15, 2012

Bull Run Park, Manassas, VA

 

In the days leading up to this year’s MGM, Sean was intent on getting me to run the Do Loop.  For the past couple years, I’ve always considered Fountainhead to be a very appropriate spot for turning my MGM Fun Run around, despite always returning to choruses of ‘What??  You didn’t do the Doooooo Loooooop?  You GOTTA do the Do Loop!’ when I got back to Hemlock.  For a while I imagined that the Do Loop had to be some beautiful scenic place with glorious views to warrant such emphatic endorsement.  So it came as a surprise when Aaron informed me that the Do Loop was nothing more than those craggy series of miserable climbs I ran in the early stages of the Women’s Half Marathon that went by that rusty junk-heap car.  I have less-than-fond memories of battling neck and neck with dear Eliza ‘still hasn’t returned my bladder’ O’Connor on that murderous stretch of trail back in 2011.

But when I got to Fountainhead this year, we were having such a good time — Sean, Keith, Aaron, Greg Z., Greg Z’s awesome ultra-running beagle-spaniel, and myself — that I continued on to the Do Loop without much cajoling, and ended up running the whole 50k.  Sean and I have been talking about doing a long run together for years now, and with the weather absolutely perfect and plenty of good cheer to go around (Greg Z. can TALK), I decided to strike while the iron was hot.  I particularly liked running the part of the course that overlapped with the Women’s Half Marathon — it was so pleasant to be able to relax and enjoy those stretches of trail, rather than race them with your heart pounding out of your chest.  I have a crazy crisp memory for what I was thinking about during any section of a race: I could recall the exact place in the race where my nose  twinged because I was so sad over my rapidly dying kitty, Waddle, who was diagnosed with feline leukemia on the day of the WHM.

But the take home lesson is: I’m not going to run long because people tell me I should, or because there’s some underwhelming view ahead, or because I’m training for anything specific, or because Sean whines a lot.  I’ll keep going as long as I’m having fun, as long as conversation keeps flowing and people keep laughing at my dumb jokes.  And there are lots of snacks along the way.

 

Dan Weinberger had delayed coming to WUS for as long as he possibly could.  For over two years he would entertain the idea and then concoct last-minute excuses that centered on his perceived lack of fitness.  Aaron and I had pretty much written him off.  But D-Day had come, and with only one day left in DC before moving his life to Yale University in Connecticut, Dr Weinberger came through in the clutch!  On Tuesday, December 18, 2012, Dan and his friend Adam arrived at Kerry’s house, ready to rumble with the Flashlight People.

Dan has been part of our Fogarty family at the NIH for over two years now.  We’ve had more than our share of work adventures in China, Nepal, Malta, and Peru (twice).  He fills a key niche at Fogarty: Dan studies bacteria while we do viruses, and, even more importantly,  Dan is often the sole representative of the male gender when we get together to have lunch on the patio or travel to places like Malta.  Dan’s low-key mellowness can be a vital antidote to our occasional estrogen overload, and his male perspective comes in handy during lunchtime banter.  If we have any beef with Dan, it’s that sometimes he’s too good — like when he refrains from a lunchtime escape to the nearby Indian buffet because he has too much work to do (but could we expect anything else from a Harvard boy?)

But that’s part of why it was so great to see Dan bust through that ole straightjacket of convention and come to WUS on Tuesday.  To sweeten the pot even more, he brought his high school friend Adam who COLLECTS MUSHROOMS!  Only a handful of WUSsies have any inkling how obsessed I am with mushrooms, but Aaron would be happy to recount the ordeals he has to endure in the name of my mushroom fancy.  (Most recently he had to watch a documentary called Know Your Mushrooms! which he didn’t find half as scintillating as I did.)  My love of mushrooms was acquired during my early 20s during travel to Italy, Russia, Japan, and other countries that revere their mushrooms with an intensity that Americans would associate with lunatics.  I won’t bore you with a long-winded Ode to Mushrooms explaining why they are divinity on Earth — partly because my fervor cannot be attributed purely to the physical properties of the mushroom and is more difficult to explain, much like my kinship with four-leaf clovers.

Adam and I proved that you can indeed find edible wild mushrooms in Rock Creek Park.  In winter.  In the dark.  We returned with a plateful of large oyster mushrooms that are still in my fridge waiting to see if I get the guts to try cooking one.  I can happily confirm that Dan and Adam relished their inaugural WUS experience.  Maybe when Dan visits from New Haven he’ll stop by again.  In the meantime, Adam and I will be out hunting for mushroom booty in his honor.