Callum and I went to Happy Hour with Neel's lab last night. It was the one of those evenings where the last thing I wanted to do was go to Happy Hour, but where everything ended up being so fun and fascinating that I could have stayed forever, and all I kept thinking was that I wanted to come home and write it all down.

It's been a long week. Callum was in camp last week and now this, and in the middle we took a little trip to DC (pictures definitely coming). I had a new boss start this week, and while that's not a bad thing, there's some ensuant stress and Ps and Qs being minded, of course! One of Callum's best buds has been at camp with him this week and commuting with us, but by yesterday they'd spent a lot of time together. Traffic was miserable yesterday morning. There was a water main break in one of the main bridge/tunnel routes in town (and in this town if you block a bridge/tunnel, everything comes to a halt), and while we don't travel over water, everything is affected. Callum and his friend argued so much in the car, all that noise coming at the back of my head, that I declared Silent Ride for the last five minutes of the trip. By the time we left at the end of the day, traffic was still hopelessly snarled from that same water main break, now with more closed roads (!), and it took us twice as long to get home (no arguing though!). And here's Neel, cheerfully hoping we'll come and join them. How can we not?

The thing I love about being around scientists is that they're so dorky! No, not really. What I really love is the international community that crops up around medical and graduate schools. Neel's worked with Russians, Hungarians, Italians, Indians, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, French, Germans, Swedes, Greeks, seriously, you name it, we've met it. Last night, two of the people we had drinks with had immigrated to the US as small children, one from China and one from Iraq.

The guy, a Kurd from Iraq, was introduced to me as Mike, not because it's easier but because he worked for PF Changs for eight years ("too long") and liked to use different names based on the nationality of the people at the table he was waiting on. I'm not sure I ever got his real name, but I did get a sense of immigration experience. Maybe it's part of the Kurdish national character, but storytelling seems to be key. The Coming to America stories flew across the table. Jenny, a Chinese woman in Neel's lab, came to the US when she was six. Mike told of living in a refugee camp in Guam, where the Kurdish boys beat the American Air Force at soccer but lost at basketball, and how since his family didn't have a sponsor in the US, INS randomly chose to send them to Albuquerque, NM. We figured it was because of the hot air balloons.

His life in Iraq interested me the most. As a child, his father fought in the Iran-Iraq war, and they thought he'd been killed. Funeral and everything. His mom was three months pregnant at the time. Since he was no longer a soldier in Saddam's army, his family was kicked out of government housing, until three years later they received a letter from his dad. His dad was in prison for six years. Fast forward to Mike's young adulthood, as an undergrad and the start of our Iraq involvement. The FBI calls him up and wants to meet with him. They did with every Iraqi-American. He chooses a public location, where the first question he's asked is, "Are you a terrorist?" He and his dad were finally cleared, and he says to this day his dad is the calmest person he's ever met.

Jenny, the woman in Neel's lab, says the same about her grand dad. He survived twenty-one years in one of Mao's prisions. Can you even believe that? He fought in the wars and as a thank you was thrown in prison for twenty-one years. She says whenever things seem to be going crazy in China she calls her grand dad, and if he says, "not so bad," she knows it's really "not so bad."

I could have listened all night.

I've led a pedestrian life, and I like it that way. I like the forward progress of my existence, humble though it may be. But occasionally I'm touched by greatness, the wide world out there, and for that I'm terribly grateful.