Sharp-Etched Laughter

In the first part of my day gig life, I worked in an obscure science and engineering field where some of us carry our arguments with us, quite literally, to our gravestones. There are some tragic stories there, and some funny ones.

One of the funnier ones, the punchline, pithy as it might first appear, deals with our views of what we do and how we're known for it. See, in this particular group of folks, we all know of each other's work, more or less.

We all have a reasonably good idea of what the others are doing from their articles, and then the occasional family meetings where someone gives a poster or a talk or just a conversation over beer. That's the close-held view.

Some of us do better than others at making connections to the broader world. They're the folks who have institutes and big continuing grants or industrial collaborations or whatever. These are the folks to which the awards tend to go, the kind of headlines that outsiders are interested in.

Inside though, recognition comes in much different ways. One of them is when someone retires, and there's occasion for the community to get together and celebrate the life and times of one of our peers.

One of my mentors in this world was a very gentle soul; the only time I saw them get thoroughly and completely pissed off was when they got left off an invitation to travel to a celebratory get together for a colleague who was stepping away from the day-to-day grind.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are those of us who would have been pissed off because we were "important". In this case, though, what chapped my mentor was that they weren't going to get the chance to celebrate our friend.

See, for these sorts of things, what you're being invited to do is dive into our colleague's work, re-discover that element that you connect with, and then come up with a project that incorporates that thread into your own work. Sure, you can just cite a few papers and call it a day, but if you're really looking for a challenge, here's your chance to pick up the ball and run with it, and show how much our colleague's work means to us.

How much they did to make this all possible, and how important they are to what it is we do every day.

It's an ideal, sure, but whenever I've had the honor of an invitation to participate in such celebrations, I've done my damndest to live up to the ideal.

So this morning, I stumbled into looking up old friends via the internet. How are they doing, that sort of thing. Some personal, some professional. In the course of it all, I stumbled into a memorial journal issue, a career celebration for a person who I almost went to work with a fair few years ago, until funding and circumstances intervened.

Oh, cool, thought I. And one of the guest editors was another close connection. But when I started reading the table of contents... oh shit. What kind of everloving clusterfuck is this? Really? You couldn't get off your ass and invite them and them and that one over there? What kind of bullshit...

Reader, it was an accident of how the publisher in question had organized their website. Fortunately, I kept digging, and eventually recovered the full issue, and saw that they really had done the thing properly. Righteously pissed off the whole time, mind, until I finally did get the whole TOC firmly in hand and could calm down on seeing the names I expected to see.

The science-family members who've long followed, competed with, admired and argued over what our colleague and friend has done in their work. That it means something, to us and them and to the many other problems that folks inside and outside our little world are going to be interested in long after we've had our own chance to grind our arguments with each other into granite.

Today, I've moved to a part of the field where publications don't come into it. Still doing the work, and even in the same areas, just definitely in an applications and engineering focus rather than the developmental side. Accidentally, but also because I've never had the kind of social skills needed to build the networks necessary to thrive on the other side of it.

Looking back on my old mentor's hurt from this perspective, these days I think that what I should have done is said, look, the host is a monumental asshole, granted. But let's go anyway. Crash the party. Everyone we care about will get the point.

If I understand correctly, even the monumental asshole would have gotten the joke. See, at that point, they'd gone through some personal challenges that, hear tell, had led them to take a good hard look at life and try a different approach.

Something tells me that they re-read the jokes on the tombstones and realized that the punchline had a different meaning for family than it did for outsiders.