I am living in Nashville.
That's right. Living in Nashville. I would not have believed you had you told me I would be last summer when I interned at the Med Center. I would not have believed you even as of March of this very year--in fact, my opportunity to come back to this lab nearly happened overnight.
I called my former PI (principal investigator) from last summer sometime in early March with a proposition: I am graduating in less than two months, I will have my Biology degree and chemistry load, and will be in dire need of an outlet for some of this new found smarts.
That was the Setup.
The Con was that I somehow have found that throughout my life I have, yes, worked hard for the things I want, but have had an unwavering feeling of inadequacy--or at least a feeling of
'there's someone better suited for that job out there' and no, that is a horrible attitude. Yet, it wasn't that I conned someone into thinking I was worthy of a job, but rather that I convinced
myself that I was worthy.
Finally, I came down to Nashville after merely a week after graduating. I had spent that week, laying on the couch, trying to contemplate what it meant to be done with college, and the rest of the time in between I spent calling and emailing places for an apartment.
We loaded up the old band trailer and the explorer and also my car, and my parents droved behind me to my new home. I did not have a place to live yet, a sense of orientation, or a fluttering idea of what it meant to be an adult, but I had an opportunity and somehow that was enough motivation. I found a place after only looking at 5 or 6 apartments, moved in the next day now with my brother and sister-in-law's help and my parents.
They all left Sunday. Work started Monday.
Fast-forward a bit, I was in love with my job. I was a teacher/biologist/director of operations for a summer program for rural Arkansan high school students doing real world chemisty and biology (yes, biochemistry). The program spawned out of a few, well-placed, perfectly timed, insanely stacked series of events that led to my job.
Firstly, the lab was hoping to publish their big results in
Science magazine--one of the two most respected scientific publications in the world. In fact, it is the American analog to
Nature. To get into either of these is like winning the Super Bowl. Oh, you can read the article
here. (Yes, that is an article on the paper--much easier and more fun to read) and out of this paper which more important to the matter is the subject, a desire to delve deeper into these results was wanted by Dr. Hudson.
So here we have it: ground-breaking research, opportunity for huge project into data, biological premise, and former intern who is a biologist/chemist looking for a job calls you.
There you have it: a job starting off with the high school program looking at upwards of 20 animals to find this data in them as well--that data is a new protein bond, something that has disease, genetic and evolutionary-developmental implications.
The summer was spectacular: I fell in love with those students and I could not have asked for a better group. It's over now, but we found real data. Real results for high schoolers!? I NEVER had that opportunity when I was 16 and 17. Now I'm doing that research but on my own. It's much different than the summer--more independent, less bustling, less energy...but the feeling is still there. When I do a western blot on an animal tissue that has never been studied like this before and I see something in there that NO ONE on Earth has seen before--and I'm the first to see it? It feels something akin to being Neil Armstrong, Galileo, or Robert Hooke and his cell...OK, not that glamourous, but maybe to me it is.
I'm here for a while. At least until next spring. I've got a great apartment, a great workplace, the best family anyone could ever ask for, and the best thing that has come out of this summer is someone who has done something for me that no one ever has: made me happy in a way I've never known. Kayla is the greatest thing I've ever had the privilege of having.
It just shows you, that you really can never know where you can be in six months, a year, a couple weeks...
I moved to Nashville in early June with the only known thing that I was scared.
Out of it, I had the best experience of any summer research experience, I have a real job, and the best girlfriend of all time.
I'm in love with life.
And as it were; it was not--nor was it ever--a question of whom or really even how, but instead a completely unequivocal realization that none can equate the vague human needs for emotions as little more than a circumstantial equation of where and when.
