Back in Barcelona...

anonymous log entry...Barcelona June 2007

As the sun goes down behind the last line of waves in the Mediterranean, I am only waking up. The first blow of the late evening breeze hits me directly as I stand on the terrace of the lab, dizzy and tired after a day of incredibly stupid ideas, sloppy programming and unavoidably dissapointing results. The night falls, the horizon dresses in orange and purple and my mood throws down its blue gown. The 24 hour day is still young. I ride my bike by the sea shore, Arcade Fire pounding on my mp3 player, thoughts become clearer, scientific issues seem to resolve themselves miraculously and the heavy veil of dizziness is suddenly lifted. "How come I havent thought about it before?" This idea deserves a beer! As I skillfully avoid crashing against a bus and hitting an old lady crossing Passeig Joan de Borbo I have already set the date through a network of expanding sms. I arrive at the Rambla de Raval sweaty and starving, half of the people are already here and the feast of spicy, indian masala, catalan beer and conversations in five different languages begins. As the Greeks and the French realize that we share 90% of the jokes, the Spanish and the Germans that they are more alike than their complexions might have implied, the Portuguese make fun of the way the Brazilians speak and vice versa, we find ourselves lost in the small streets of Raval and then on the other side of la Rambla in the Gotico. We bearly escape a storm of water falling from the sky only to understand the residents are aiming at our precious heads, so full of worl-changing ideas, yet equipped with overwhelmingly loud vocal chords. We decide to keep it down as we enter "13" bar and the noise resumes as soon as the first round of mojitos arrives. It must be past midnight but who cares? Scientists never stop working, so no guilt about connecting simulation models to football strategies, or calculating the conditional probability of picking up the girls at the other side of the bar. As the probability increases asymptotically with the number of mojitos, we only realize the night is getting old. The dawn finds us on Passeig Maritim, the sun is going up behind the distant buildings in Forum and we are already on our way to the lab. The day is only beginning in Barcelona. Someone else may tell you how it is going to be, but my guess would be at least interesting.

...

Oh what did you see my darling young one?

So it is official! After a month and a half on the other side of the Atlantic, this different, fascinating world, full of marvels and contradictions, I am back in good old Europe.

These last six weeks have been intense to say the least, providing food for thought on many levels apart from real, good-friend, traditional fun, especially during the last days. But on these last days, spent in Yellowstone Park, I'll try to come back soon. For now I can only bid farewell to the USA and since six weeks is too much time to allow me to go into detail, I will just try to put everything plainly but at the same time lyrically in the style of the great Bob Dylan, trying to condensate images, sounds and thoughts in a handful of verses.

So let's go...

...[
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've ridden a steel bird all over the ocean
I've stood on the shore of the opposite side
I've strolled all along in the yards of old legends
I've walked all the way to get out of their shadow
I've drifted away where the time is forgotten
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw an old man forced down by his name
I saw a blind mob hurraying in the vacuum
I saw the big city lights, they were glowing for no one
I saw people running, with nowhere to go to
I saw people standing, wishing they could fly away
I saw the great wide open, it looked like it was narrowing
I saw the steep canyons and they looked to be widening
I saw ten million travelers and they were all taking photographs
I saw ten million photographs and they all looked the same
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard "hello" and "goodbye" and they both had not meaning
I heard "Godspeed" and "farewell" and they both sound real
I heard the "welcome" at last and it made me wonder
I heard the clapping of hands echoing nothingness
I heard ten thousand cars all honking their horns
I heard ten thousand horns instead of ten thousand screams
I heard the radio shouting and the TV mumbling
I heard the people's silence, so sad and so lonely
I heard the sound of the thunder again and again
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a living legend and he let me down
I met ordinary people and they lifted me up
I met an elderly woman, she was crying at the bus stop
I met an old guy worrying and people thought he was crazy
I met a young, crazy girl and she was worried about nothing
I met a working-class girl, looking outside the window
I met Asians and Arabs and Greeks and Americans
And they were all going around as if nothing was happening
But it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out before the rain starts a-fallin',
I 'll walk through the streets of an old, forgotten continent
I 'll swim across all the seas of my ancient country
Where the people each talk their own different language
Where the sick and the healthy are still liking each other
Where the blacks and the whites still work next to each other
Where the sun may still shine while the clouds are a-gathering
Where they all are somebody but they want to be nobody
Where they all want to be someone they are not
Where the world rules the money but it's starting to change
And I'll see it and think it and speak it and laugh at it
And I'll watch over the shore as the ships will be leaving
Like the old times when people still had a dream and a hope
And I 'll stay there until the ships start a-coming
And the people with dreams come back with their hopes
And the people with hope come back with the dreams
'Cause we need them and their dreams and their hopes and their coming

'Cause it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
]...

get the original song's lyrics here

BostonBios - is this not America?

Paraphrasing David Bowie the day begins as the working week is ending. I start walking on Brighton Avenue with Beth Orton singing "Comfort of strangers", as I am still as much of a stranger as I feel strange after a whole month in the US. The streetcar slowly slides on Commonwealth on our way to Boston University, the sun is making its shy appearance behind New England's thin but almost permanent cloud layer. Boston University Central, I am starting to think about work and no comfort is to be found in any song. Over the past few days I have gone from worrying that work is not going well, through doubting about my aptness in it, to finally realizing that something is going wrong. Still hanging on through one of the, seldom, self-esteem panic attacks that took me over two days ago, I pump up the volume of the Rolling Stones as the streetcar approaches Blanford Station. "All down the line", this is where I get off.

As I sit myself at the desk, getting my laptop out of my backpack, I am still thinking. Is this what I was hoping for in the US? Tough call. A great city, some of the finest minds of science strolling on the same sidewalks, ambitious students trying to cope with inspiring professors, all seems to be here but something is still missing. Is it me that is not fit for this or am I still having trouble to conciliate with the nature of research? Is something really going wrong or have I just lost my calm, placid, philosophical approach to scientific work? And if it is so, what is wrong with me? Have I lost it?

I see all these people constantly talking about science, perpetually overwhelmed by their ideas or struck by the lack of them, astounded or frustrated by their results. Distraught in their small, isolated worlds, where a protein may be more important than summer coming, or a plot more meaningful that the full moon. It suddenly hits me. Where has the fun gone? I check my e-mails and amazingly feel homesick for a place, where I have only lived and worked for less than a year and a half. I watch the video of my colleagues back in Barcelona, celebrating the first anniversary of the new institute building and there I realize that fun somehow is an endemic species of the Mediterranean.

The day goes on, void of serious thoughts, with unimportant results filling the vacuum. Around five I am the only one left in the lab, alone in front of the screen with John Coltrane's sax and Eric Dolphy' s flute, keeping me the kind of company you can only appreciate when lonely. I am still having trouble believing how everybody is gone so early. I always had the idea that people in the US work crazy hours. But on second thought and given that I haven't heard a single joke (let alone a laughter) in the lab over these three weeks, I can understand why everyone is so eager to leave early. This is a strictly working place. We take positions early in the morning, make it through our shift with our headphones on and head on home with relief as soon as possible.

Gandhi once said that "what we do is not important, but it is important that we do it". I just hoped one of the things for which Gandhi died would be that some of us - maybe still a few but hopefully soon to be more - would also be able to enjoy part of what we are doing. If not, at least try to make it this way, mixing everyday work with the real life, the laughters, the irony, the feeling that you are sharing the desk with other people and not just "scientists", with whom you can also talk about football, rugby, women (or maybe men), music instead of just "false positive rates". Coming from a country that does not deserve any merit in science and research for the last two millenia, I find it hard to believe that I ended up even reminiscing my lab days in Greece, where we had no subscriptions to journals, fast internet or air-condition that actually worked. At least there, you would walk down the hall and people would say. There you would take your breaks talking about sports or politics to the people next door.

I shut down my computer, lock the door and make for the elevator. On my way I say "goodbye" to the cleaning-guy who looks surprised. He has still not been used to me being the only person on the floor talking to him. But then again, I still find it hard to see people looking the other way when I say "hi" upon meeting them on the corridor.

This is not me complaining. It's just me realizing.
Realizing that I have a great job and realizing that it is great not because of its nature but because me and my colleagues have fortunately decided it should be made in one specific way. That is the Mediterranean way, the fun way.

BostonBios - Fog Warning

It is not only lately that my mood is highly correlated with the weather. But these last days have been something else. We somehow passed from warm, humid (in the absolutely literal sense)Saturday night to wake up on a chilly Sunday morning to go through a melancholic Sunday afternoon pouring with rain. And today I woke up in a hurry to get to the lab meeting to find myself lost inside the fog in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. The air was so stuffy and humid, that although it was not raining I was actually walking through droplet of water and there appeared to be rain falling horizontally, if not floating in the air.

I just decide it was one of these Monday mornings, that they can also happen on this side of the Atlantic and that this foul, morning mood, combined with the bad weather and the beginning of a working week, signified a rite of passage for me eventually realizing that after some weeks even being 3000 miles away from the office can still mean working routine.

Apart from all that maybe it is better that this weather continues. The summer is only starting and all I can think of is sunny days, the sound of waves and the taste of salt mixed with white wine on my lips. And it is funny how sometimes we realize that we need unpleasant atmosphere to bring us back on the ground. The New England fog and the horizontal rain saved the day, putting my butt on the desk.

Apart from all that, life in Boston is evolving somehow in parallel with reality. Ever since I got here I have left behind a number of everyday activities such as reading the papers or following the news in general. My only connection with what is going on in this country has been watching the next to last Eastern Conference NBA semifinal at a bar in Allston last Thursday. In fact I have no idea of what is happening in the USA, or to put it better what are the issues that are concering the people here. This lack of information has not disturbed me yet although maybe just checking the weather forecast sometimes might save me the trouble of waking up surprised to a foggy day.

BostonBios - Memorial Day

A lot of things have been said and written about memory and I hold myself capable of reciting quite a lot of them. Perhaps because I am a sucker for history or just because I am growing old, memory and memories are becoming increasingly important for my small universe. And just maybe it should be this way, it should be that people try to remember or at least not forget -which is not always exactly the same-.

Yesterday people in the US celebrated Memorial Day, a day dedicated to the fallen of all wars, which for this young nation may just have been too many already. Maybe this makes the necessity of a Memorial Day even bigger but then again why don't European nations have one as well?

Regardless of what might be said (or written) by others (and myself) about the Americans and their lack of historical thinking, there are some things that they cherish and value more than other people. It may be also true that to a foreigner, especially a European who has read about the near-destruction of his continent as a consequence of non-negotiated nationalisms, the over-abundance of USA flags all over the place and the constant talk about a strong, willing nation (in addition blessed by God) may look a bit repelling. But we are living "interesting times" and this forces us to try to think a bit more like the others instead of judging them on our own grounds, or to cut a long story short...sometimes it's better to try finding excuses than always looking for the blame.

And I 'll be honest. I liked Memorial Day. I liked the fact that the fallen get to be remembered once a year, even if it is a bank holiday. Wars may sometimes be just or -most of the times- unjust, worthy or -almost always- unworthy. But the life of a young man is always worthy and his death is always unjust.

Yesterday we strolled up and down Boston's North End, visited cemeteries full of flags and memorial grounds full of flowers. The day before we came across this pair of boots next to a small flag in Backbay Fens. Friends or relatives of soldiers that died in battle tend to leave their boots next to a flag as a sort of dedication. For me it stands as both a memorial of the fallen and a protest against the stupidity of war.

I just hope Memorial Day serves for the same purpose.

BostonBios - life at the porch

I spent my first days in Boston, looking at the rain outside the window, worrying that the clothes I have brought with me would not suffice for the cold and that I won't see all the things I want to see because of the bad weather.

But the weather proved me wrong and since yesterday it has been so warm I can only compare it with Barcelona at its most humid. And apart from the fact that it gets a bit hard to work without air-condition, I am really enjoying it. Summer is here at last.

Over the last days I have been questioning my work and my ability to carry it out. I am having more than the usual doubts about what I am doing and the usual about how well I am doing it
. A lot of parallel projects, none of which is working out exactly perfectly plus a paper review that puts my kindness in conflict with my scientific good practice.

My salvation has been the company of my good friend Kostas, some californian wine and his porch, at which we spent some nice, long hours last evening, talking about things that really matter. I am just hoping my visit in Boston has more of this and less of the work-related frustration.

let's go with the first series of Boston-Tracks...

sound-track (top 5 in my mp3 player)
1. Stone Roses - I am the resurrection (back to my basics after a nice party at a bar in Allston)
2. Arctic Monkeys - Leave before the lights come on (we caught them live in Avalon Club near Fenway Park and really enjoyed it)
3. Bob Dylan - I will be free (among a lot of other songs of his while getting in really US musical mood)
4. Van Morisson - Linden Arden stole the highlights
5. The Bathers - Kelvingrove baby (old but good, especially out on the porch)

word-track (books I have read or am still reading...)
1. William Faulkner - As I lay dying. the more you read the classics the more you realize there are few things that remain to be written. As the Greek philosopher Kornilios Kastoriades once said "nobody is going to go farther than Aeschylos or Kafka". And after this first reading of Faulkner I would agree. The book builds up slowly but reaches moments of greatness when you least expect it. Faulkner's ability to put universal truths in the mouths of the most simple people resembles that of Shakespeare.
2. William Faulkner - The sound and the Fury. Just started this one, it looks even better than as I lay dying. The language is a bit difficult but once you get the hang of it it works out fine.

film-track (films I saw lately)
1. Borat. My firend Kostas made me watch it when I first came here. Really enjoyed it, it was funny although it does not escape some cliches about "deep" USA, which are scary enough exactly because they are so cliches.

waiting-for-track
1. Visiting the Boston Museum of Fine Arts tomorrow
2. that work gets on some right track and results make sense at last

Everything for dummies

Yesterday on the train from New York to Boston, I noticed a weird poster at one of the intermediate station's platform. It advertised the "For dummies" series of books. To those unaware of the aforementioned "encyclopedia of the ignorants" a simple Amazon search will suffice to enlighten them on the topic.

The US should actually be considered as the inventor of "easy-everything", meaning this kind of culture under which everything should have a light, easy, user-friendly version and whose products and outcomes range from fast-food to google-scholar. But I admit that a book entitled "Sex for dummies" was something of a surprise even for a suspicious observer like myself. And what about "The Islam for dummies"? This is yet another demonstration of wrong hierarchy of priorities. I mean if you know all you want to know about sex (and would not dare ask) what would you need knowing about Islam or the war in Iraq?

Seriously now, "everything for dummies" comes as an additional proof of americans not taking themselves seriously. Admiting they are "dummies" by buying such a book (or in order not to be too judgy a book with such a title) is one thing. Not moving on to a next level by trying to learn something more, buying another book, with less punchlines and more bibliography, or even buying a newspaper twice a week instead of "Cosmo" and "Men's health" would have saved them the trouble to have to keep up with the latest about history, politics or maybe even sexual trends (although I guess Cosmopolitan might be up to date on this last one). The issue here, goes far beyond book reading or being informed. It has to do with the commercial establishment of "chewing gum for the eyes" culture, with books that make you look smart overnight, music that makes you feel trendy for a fortnight and films whose impact on your stomach is just a little bit stronger than the one you got from the pop-corn-pepsi giant combo you had at the multiplex.

We get used to having everything easy, we don't read because we look everything up in the internet, we don't think because TV star-analysts do it for us, we don't care because there is nothing to care about. It's just like Steinbeck's Lennie, the retarded hero from "Of mice and men" who imagined he would "live off the fat o' the land", only that we are convinced we are actually doing it, and this makes us -oh yes- real dummies. And as long as we don't do something about it, we might as well as start looking for a book called "Switching back to being clever... for dummies".

New York Bios...God bless America...

This is a strange land to say the least. At least this is what it looks like in the eyes of a European, that in addition deeply appreciates everything that is European. Yesterday I found myself at the closing dinner of a US-dominated science meeting in Cold Spring Harbor and have to say that I found the overload of what I have always considered fundamentally "american" quite overwhelming.

What do I find "american"? The tendency of excess in everything, the complete absence of measure and the overconsumption in all levels, starting from the amounts of food we were fed by the meeting organizers to the absurdity of keeping the temperature of the auditorium at 14 degrees in early May. The avidity to make money out of everything, to demystify everything and to mock your own living legends, which was manifest yesterday, first in having James Watson giving a small talk about his own genome (!!! comments about this in an upcoming post) and then putting on sale at the Institute's gift shop (its existence alone stands out as obvious "americanism") an advertising poster for Apple computers, picturing James Watson and signed by himself at the rediculous price of $2000!!!

The closing dinner, found me lost in such thoughts and seeking refuge in the company of my "fellow" catalans, my witty boss (shifted towards the wittier with a little bit of wine) and an old colleague from France, named France. After the dinner, we had the honour and the privilege to testify that geeky scientists, are not necessarily geeky all day long, and even if they like to talk about work all the time, they still can have their own special moments. So I witnessed a great part of the meeting participants having a bowl at the concert of "Ethidium Spill" (a group constituted by meeting attendees in itself), which involved crazy dancing, a lot of drinks and even the transient formation of some couples right there at the aftermath of four days of talks, posters and pretending-to-care-about-genomes.

What stroke me though was neither the brief and spontaneous transition of top-notch scientists to party animals (which was expected) nor the proneness of them scientists to get drank at the end of the conference (which was even more anticipated). It was the all-american repertoire of the band, to which I paid special attention not because it was really worth it but merely out of my supposed inherent interest in music, and the frenetic response of the audience to tunes I had always considered as the epitomy of US "college-surf-drive-in-burger" culture. I had only suddenly realized I was in the US.

Moreover, little by little, just by observing the people's reactions, their cheer and enthusiasm, their defiance of any constraint for "comme-il-faut" behaviour, in the end their convenience in not taking themselves at all seriously, I ended up in admiring them. They had spent an entire five days in trying to prove (with very moderate results) that they are in the process of changing the world, they enjoyed each and every moment adulating each other, being flattered by one another and then there they were acting like as they were back in college, naively thinking they still remain the high school kids they once have been, reminiscing their youth to the sounds of what they consider the greatest songs ever, arrogantly believing they live in the greatest country of them all.

And then it occurred to me equally suddenly as clearly. That this is this country's ultimate power. The lack of any constraint, the absence of proper behaviour, the obvious, self-evident right to go on your way, with no obligation to look behind since there is nothing back there for you to look up to. In fact, I think that what we Europeans consider to be the Americans's greatest defect, namely their lack of history and intellectual pillars to stand on, is at the same time their greatest advantage. America has no Socrates or Feidias, Virgilius or Cicero, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Flaubert, Beethoven or Dostoyevski, no Pericles, Leonidas, Julius Cesar, Charlemagne. They share no history that goes back to thousands of years and therefore they feel no shadow being cast upon them by the giants of a glorious past. Americans have every right to invent themselves and in fact they keep doing it with great ease and efficiency. They have actually re-invented USA more than once and I think that Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin, Elias Cazan, John Steinbeck, Richard Feynman, John Coltrane, Woody Allen, Martin Scorcese and Curt Cobain would agree with me.

Constantly re-inventing one's identity is, naturally, quite easy if your sense of historicity is exhausted in overpricing Nobel Prize laureate' s autographs, but then again this is probably part of the system that allows our fellow Americans, not to ever get attached to the past and keep moving forward with no sense of continuum whatsoever. The lack of origins should never preclude the trajectory and although the destination might not be the desirable one, it is the journey that matters.

Long Island Bios

Here I am then, after months of thinking about it, weeks of worrying about it and, a few days of getting stressed about it and 20 straight hours actually doing it I arrived in Cold Spring harbor Long Island, NY, US of A!

The truth is that you don't need that much of fuss even if a business trip is to last the month and a half mine is going to but my usual anxiety, combined with a working load and a growing nostalgia which has become dual, making me miss Greece and Barcelona at the same time, all reached a combined peak two days before I rode the plane and it all became a bit depressing.

Luckily, this soon turned into yet another demonstration that home is where your hat is...or to put it less prosaically wherever you lay down to sleep. Especially if you are a Greek bearing something from Ulysses' genes. You just pack clothes, books and music, your best memories from the place you are leaving, your greatest expectations for the place you are going, then invite your friends for a nice dinner and some wine and the next morning you take off.

Cold Spring Harbor Bios is better than I expected, long walks by the sea under the thin shadow of the oaks and the slightly thicker one giants of science, who overlook you from their portraits in the auditorium, dining rooms and meeting halls. I have to admit that I am enjoying meeting people that are supposed to be great scientists of today, but my well-established tendency to like everything classic and taciturn against anything new make me doubt a lot about where science is going today, few new ideas with a lot of technology, too much searching for stuff, without much imagination about what to look for...

But maybe it's just me, in fact who am I to judge these people. In fact they are the ones entitled to talk about work. All I really want to do here in the US, is reading Faulkner's "As I lay dying", which I find much more exciting than nucleosomes, listen to jazz that sounds much more appealing than talks about SNPs (narcoleptic crisis ahead) and hang around with friends I have not seen for a while, while having drinks on the lawn...

Maybe it's just me, but Cold Spring Harbor Bios is much more fun the way it is not supposed to be.

Election day

Jokes over. Today, unless some great surprise happens, Nicolas Sarkozy will get elected president of France and a new era will begin...

OK, we said jokes over. No new era, just a follow-up of the current one, which is already bad enough. Nicolas "the great" (according to the Economist) or Nicolas "the fearsome" (according to common sense) will bring few new things to French and European policy, apart from a stronger and more honest-with-no-soft-words-rhetorics. I guess he just means to carry on, what has been going on for the last 15 years, which is right-wing politics prevail against socialists which are actually conservative, company-subsidized fakes.

I think it was Freud who once said that people need two things to be happy: Good sex and choices. Although sometimes I doubt about the second one, I totally agree when it comes to politics. We need choices. And the fact that we do not have them pisses me off.

And looking at the cartoon above just makes me depressed.