Awkward, awkwarder, awkwardest

Working with a bunch of scientists, I get to experience a higher than average amount of awkward exchanges. I know from experience that when your brain is full of numbers and genes and amplification plots and DNA primers that you sometimes forget to say, “Hi, how are you?” But sometimes the awkwardness goes way beyond forgetting to say hello.

My boss often plays the radio while we’re both working at our desks. Usually it’s music from the ’70s, which is apparently considered oldies now, but lately it’s been music from the ’90s. So one day, while staring at a behemoth spreadsheet, I wondered what we were all smoking to make Sugar Ray so rich. Then, just as I was about to ask my boss a question, I heard the familiar percussion intro to Closer by Nine Inch Nails. Apparently my boss was less familiar with the most explicit song of the ’90s because he kept the radio on while Trent Reznor sang about his super intense feelings toward his girlfriend. I grew increasingly uncomfortable until Trent sang “I wanna [bleep] you like an animal” and my boss hit mute on his computer. If there’s any way to make a Closer situation more awkward, it’s that.

Later that day, I was sitting with my boss and his friend at lunch when a few other scientists in the group joined us. As an older man who I’d spoken to twice before sat down, I said hello and he responded by introducing himself. For whatever reason, instead of pointing out to him that we’d already met, I introduced myself. Then someone asked me about Chicago, and this man said, “Oh, you’re moving to Chicago? I used to live there.” For the rest of lunch this man and I had the same conversation about Chicago that we’d had once before in front of all the other people who’d been there the first time we had this conversation. At the time I felt like an idiot that I hadn’t corrected him when he’d introduced himself, but as the conversation progressed and the extent of his memory problem became clearer, I was relieved I hadn’t.

Another day, I was eating a quick lunch by myself when I heard someone say, “Psst!” I looked up and a man at the table next to mine pointed behind me. I turned around and saw that another man had fallen asleep face first into his plate of food. I turned back to the first man and he cracked up and pointed out the sleeping man to everyone around us. Another, nicer man came by and woke up the sleeping man, who muttered, “Oh man, I can’t believe I did that!” over and over again before falling asleep face first into his plate of food again. At that point, listening to Closer with my boss and having the same conversation twice with an old man didn’t seem so awkward anymore.

The problem with speaking French

In college I decided I would not be a pretentious person. I’d been becoming more and more pretentious ever since I discovered the indie movie theater in Houston and started seeing movies like "In the Company of Men" and "The Business of Strangers." These movies weren’t all that indie, considering one starred the guy who’d later be the new Two-Face and the other starred Rizzo from "Grease," but they met one important criteria for pretentious indie movies: they weren’t any fun to watch. I also saw fun, silly, stupid movies like "Independence Day" and "Bring It On," but I was more likely to talk about Neil LaBute’s misogyny than I was President Bill Pullman’s inspiring speech.

Then I went to college and became more and more pretentious (but then, isn’t that what college is for?). I watched actual indie movies with actors who had never been costars with John Travolta. I wrote a paper about "Rashomon" that I was very proud of. I joined a movie club led by a film major and even though I rolled my eyes when people expounded on the symbolism in "Videodrome," I still sat there and listened to it.

But that all changed when I watched "Pollock," directed by and starring Ed Harris. It was so bad I ranted about it for days. That horrible movie set me straight. Instead of trying to figure out what Cronenberg was trying to get across when James Woods’s chest turned into a vaginal VCR player, I just laughed at it. I started getting annoyed when people referred to movies as films, especially when they said stuff like "The films of Jerry Bruckheimer." My anti-pretentiousness hunt extended from movies to other areas like art. I had a really hard time when we studied ’60s performance art in my art class. Seriously? Some weirdo is crucified on a VW Beetle and I have to write about it 40 years later?

But then I went to Africa and learned French, the most pretentious language of them all. It’s even considered pretentious in Francophone West Africa, where only the richest and most well-educated Africans speak it. Everyone else speaks their local languages. Now that I’m back in America my knowledge of French has poisoned my speech so that I’m unable to pronounce French words "properly" anymore. I pronounced "connoisseur" "connoi-sewer" instead of the American-style "connoi-sir" and my own mom made fun of me for it. My coworkers ask me questions about French to help them fill out their New York Times crossword puzzles, and I feel so ashamed of myself as I spell out the words.

Old Jill would have made fun of New Jill when she calls crêpes "crehps" instead of "crayps" (and puts the little hat over the "e"), but I can’t help it. So maybe instead of making fun of film school students and performance artists I should feel sorry for them and their pretentiousness. But I’ll never feel sorry for Ed Harris. That guy’s a pretentious jerk.

You can't spell "ignorant" without I!

When I was a kid, I took great pride in how well-traveled I was. I’d been everywhere--from Vermont to Arizona to California to Florida. I considered myself a sophisticated traveler who knew just about everything there was to know about America. But then I started traveling outside the U.S. and realized that traveling from Texas to New Mexico’s a pretty big deal for a fourth grader, but wouldn’t impress a European who’s used to traveling by something called a train, whatever that is.

Even more humbling, in planning to move to Chicago, I realize that I know almost nothing about the midwest. I know the south, the southwest, the northwest, and the east coast, but somehow I missed the great swath of land in the middle (and apparently The Onion did too). I know a little bit about Chicago, having grown up watching Ferris Bueller and Da Bears sketches on SNL, but what about all the square-shaped states that surround it? What’s the difference between Iowa and Missouri? Which one’s Nebraska again? Wisconsin’s the mitten state, right? I’m hoping that after my year somewhere in the middle of the country, I’ll have filled in the gaps in my knowledge about America. At the very least I’ll figure out what the heck an Indiana is.

Living the dream

Very early in our relationship, Markus and I were going to a party with a group of friends and I said something about how excited I was about drinking beer (to paraphrase my mom, everyone is an alcoholic in college). Markus turned to a friend and said, “My girlfriend drinks beer. You see why I like her?” Over time our relationship has grown to include love, trust, shared experiences, blah blah blah. But I think it’s safe to say that at the most fundamental level, our relationship is based on our mutual appreciation for beer. Markus brews it, I drink it, we’re both happy.

And now we have a keg right in the fridge!

Sure, we had to sacrifice all our shelves, and we’ll never be able to fit a leftover Thanksgiving turkey in there, but it’s worth it when I open the fridge, beer glass in hand, and pour myself a delicious beer, straight from the tap. Markus has been brewing beer for years, and he’s always been able to make decent amber ales, IPAs, stouts, and other standard types of beer, but lately he’s been making great beers, especially the Belgian wheat I’m drinking now. Good thing, too, since in order to support Markus’s beer brewing habit, we’ve decided to give up normal beer. Or maybe Markus is just putting his business degree to work and creating a beer monopoly here at home.

Nerds vs. experts

At what point do you go from being a nerd to an expert? People tend to assume that PhDs are smart, but really they're just people who are obsessed with a specific thing like DNA or bees or brains. One of the researchers I work for is a chemist who's obsessed with cholesterol. You wouldn't think it, but if you're determined, you can find a lot of things about cholesterol to talk about. All you have to do is find a rapt audience in the form of an underpaid lab assistant. The other researcher I work for is obsessed with gall bladders. Mouse gall bladders, dog gall bladders, frozen gall bladders, gall bladder slides. If it's got "gall bladder" in the name, he's obsessed with it. Sub-obsessions include bile, livers, stomachs, and, surprisingly, flowers.

But what if you're a bit obsessive but don't have a fancy degree to show for it? Then you're just lumped into the nerd category along with Comic Book Guy, Trekkies, and Harry Potter fan fiction writers. Experts aren't necessarily smarter than nerds. They're just so obsessed with something that they're willing to devote years of their lives learning about that one, precious thing. And once they've achieved expert status, only their fellow experts can actually tell if they're smart or not. The rest of us just know that they're talking about cholesterol using words we've never heard before like 2-oxy-5-iso-acetic acid.

Since I'm obsessed with brains in a smart sense and in a dumb sense, I'm hoping I can help bridge the gap between nerds and experts. Once I'm through with grad school, I hope I'll be able to effortlessly switch between talking about how great that part with the helicopter was in 28 Weeks Later and then explain to anyone curious how the particular physiology of the zombie brain differs from the human brain and why head shots are necessary to kill a zombie. That'll surely prove to anyone listening that although all nerds aren't experts, all experts are definitely nerds.

Markus and I do everything wrong

About five years ago, Markus and I were eating some tapas at a restaurant in Houston when I told him that I was going into the Peace Corps and wanted him to join me but in order to do so, we'd have to get married. He agreed. Several months later, we honeymooned in the middle of Africa. Then we remembered that we'd never gotten around to legally hyphenating our names, so we finally did that last week after four and a half years of marriage. And last Thursday, Markus finally proposed to me and slid an engagement ring on my finger right over my well-traveled wedding ring. While we're catching up on our marriage to do's, we might as well have a wedding five years after the fact. I just hope we don't continue to do things backwards or else we'll only get around to naming our kids when they're going off to college. I apologize in advance, future kids.

Secret handshake with a snap

My entire family went to Rice University--parents, both sisters, even my aunt and uncle. Rice grads in Texas have a bit of a superiority complex since Rice is the most highly ranked school in the state, as well as an inferiority complex since Rice has some of the worst college sports teams in the state. So when two Rice grads meet, they run through a pretty standard set of questions: What year were you, what dorm did you live in, how much do you dislike UT's and A&M's football teams?

Last week, right before my sister's wedding ceremony started, the wedding party scrambled to make sure everyone knew what to do when. I looked around the room, looking for any last minute tasks, when I saw my other sister talking to a guy who'd volunteered to open the chapel doors. Even though it was game time and we could hear the wedding guests milling about outside, when my sister and the door-opener found out they were both Rice grads, they ran through the Rice grad script. I watched impatiently while the two of them bonded over having lived in the same dorm. Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor a hundred wedding guests eager to get out of the heat and into the chapel will prevent two Rice grads from bonding over Rice.

Later, at the reception, the DJ asked for all the Rice grads to line up for a group photo. I watched as a quarter of the guests gathered together on the dance floor and made wiggly Rice Owl fingers for the photographer. But I didn't feel too left out because my cousin, who's a few years younger than me, told me that when she'd been rejected from Rice, she'd looked up to me since I'd also been rejected from Rice. The rest of them can have their silly hand gesture. My cousin and I will start our own club for Rice University rejectees who are happy they were rejected.

I'm not just defined by the groups I don't belong to, of course. The previous night at the rehearsal dinner, Markus and I chatted with a guy who'd studied in Ghana. People near us looked slightly puzzled while the three of us rambled off all the hard to pronounce West African cities we'd visited, the obscure tourist sites we'd vacationed at, and the disgusting-sounding food we still craved. It doesn't happen often, but whenever I meet someone who knows about Burkina Faso, I'm as happy as a Rice grad who's just met another Rice grad. It's like a secret handshake, but with an African-style snap at the end.