Maudlin meanderings

Remember when you were in fourth grade, and some well-meaning, but obviously clueless visitor would ask, "And what do you want to do when you grow up, dear?" Honestly. What in hell were you supposed to say to that? My brother always said he wanted to be a truck driver, and I believe his ultimate goal was to own a Kenworth. I haven't a clue what I said, but I know the only profession ever to raise my curiosity was what I later discovered was called an NFL statistician. I was always amazed, when a quarterback trotted onto the field, that a huge array of numbers could be cited immediately: "This is the fourteenth time Bradshaw has thrown a screen pass during a Sunday afternoon game played east of the Mississippi." Where did they GET this shit? I was hooked. But I never would have known it was a career.

Try to recall what you said when you were asked that totally unanswerable question. Was it remotely related to your current job? Did you even know your current job existed? Do you think Einstein would have said he wanted to be a patent clerk, or a theoretical physicist?

I bring this up because of the dozens of AIDS researchers and advocates on the flight to Melbourne, Australia, the flight that was shot down by some person who believed that killing a plane load of people was somehow an acceptable act of war. I bet that not one of the people on that plane, when they were asked as children, "What will you be when you're older?" would have said, "I'm gonna work on AIDS."  How were they to know this disease existed? How could they guess what kind of world-distortions this one little virus could cause? They probably said they wanted to be astronauts, or doctors, or whatever their parents were. Chefs. Fashion designers. Who knows?

So how did they get there? Some of them were there because of a personal passion, an experience that shoved them to the forefront of a historical crisis. Have you ever watched a loved one die in pain? Maybe you have; it's not so rare as we wish. Have you watched that person die in pain while suffering the indignity of prejudice, ignorance, fear, and hatred? Assuming you survive that experience with any vestiges of your sanity intact, it could very well turn your ass into an advocate. Or a policy wonk, a field worker, a treatment coordinator.

Some of the passengers were there because they wanted to work internationally, to bring health care to places where it wasn't, to change policies to make AIDS work easier. Some wanted to create new treatments, cures, vaccines, systems for preventing disease. A lot of them were idealists, a term that unfortunately gets swept away into a bin between "dreamer" and "zealot."

But then there are those who, like me, ended up in this strange little niche of the working world through a series of utterly unremarkable events. I often wonder how many different places I could have ended up, had I gone down any of the roads not taken, but I don't ponder this with any regret or wistfulness. I like my strange, twisty road and all the characters along it.  And I'm thinking a lot about it, thanks to those passengers who are no longer here. So here is my little tale:

I knew from a very young age that I wouldn't take on certain jobs, because I'm half blind. I would never go into the military, or fly, or do anything requiring decent depth perception. It never occurred to me to regret any missed opportunities; they just weren't there.

I was always one of the smart kids in school, easily finishing my own work and half the teacher's grading in plenty of time to disrupt the class and irritate the hell out of people, cracking jokes. I was too good at school, really; I never learned to work at it, which would bite me in the ass later. I did everything I was assigned, did it well, and never gave it a lot of thought.

The smart kids were all supposed to answer the career question with high-paying career options like doctors, lawyers, presidents, astronauts. No one ever said they wanted to be a tax attorney or own a chain of paint stores. No one wanted to manage a software team or train people to give speeches. Nothing that real people ever did.  So somehow, I became the person who wanted to be a doctor. Was there ever a bigger cliche?

I got to college and was rudely awakened: some kids knew how to study. Apparently that involved opening a textbook and reading it. I always thought textbooks were things you flipped through, looking for the answers to hopelessly easy questions. A weed-out chemistry course ended my pre-med career, and nearly ended my scholarship. I was horrified that I could possibly suck at something so much, and for years I considered by subsequent change of major to be a cop-out. It never occurred to me that psychology grabbed my interest enough to make me want to read a textbook for the first time in my life, and maybe that was a valid reason to major in something.

All along this path, the other topic that consistently amused me was math. I loved math, everything about it, but especially the fact that you could work a problem, figure out the answer, check it, and go to the next one. I loved the instant gratification of getting a problem right. And I adored the fact that other girls hated math; what fun to be good at something that all the pretty and popular girls feared! Had I been born a great beauty, would I have cared about math? I don't know, but I loved being good at something that other people feared so much.

The psychology majors were pretty typical math-haters. They all wanted to "help people." I must have heard a hundred people yammer away in class about how much they loved to listen to people's problems, how they really felt they could help, how they wanted to heal minds...it was like listening to eight-year-old girls talk about the princes they would marry, and the unicorn that would fly them on their honeymoon. Revolting. I doubted I could help, because for the most part, I had noticed that no one ever listened to a piece of advice, no matter how sincerely they had begged for help and guidance from the offeror. I was totally disinterested in healing people's disordered thoughts.

Luckily, this was college, and the greatest thing about college was finding paths that you never knew existed. I could combine math and psychology, it turned out, in the field of psychometrics: literally, measuring the mind. Measuring height, or weight, or speed is easy; measuring anger or intelligence or happiness, not so much. Now that sounded like fun.

So I went to graduate school, and worked with wonderful people to learn all kinds of things I don't remember at all, but mostly I learned how to think. I learned about science, which is merely a structured way to ask questions and not a method of undermining family values after all, and I learned amazing ways of exploring the world of the mind with mathematical models. Part of this I learned in classes, but another chunk was learned while interacting with hundreds of other smart people: weird, quirky, poorly dressed, pizza-eating, cheap-beer, hilarious people. My kind of people.

I did a brief stint in academics, and I adored my job, but I never would have succeeded, ultimately, because I really didn't want to write esoteric papers about small-sample properties of statistical models. I just wanted to go play with numbers, and get answers to questions, and then get some more questions to answer. I was still the kid who loved getting the right answer, and having lots of numbers to cite. And it was Greg's turn to go tenure-track, so I followed him onto the job market, and landed at CDC.

The Division of STD Prevention was the first job offer I received at CDC, and I thought it would be the only one, because I didn't know the hiring process. Once I took the job, I felt I couldn't back out, and I should stay at least a few years to avoid looking like a job-hopper.

And I never left. I just can't. It's the same thing all over again: it's a topic like my high school math, something no one enjoys, no one likes to discuss, something that makes polite society desperately uneasy, and yet it's so common. So universal. How can I resist a chance to study a topic that disgusts people? My fantastically subversive nature is totally drawn to this. But more than that, the people who work in STDs are in many ways the same as I am: a sick sense of humor, a real joy in understanding things that people would rather keep hidden, and -- yeah, we can admit it now -- a desire to help somehow, even if it isn't by listening to people's problems.

And why would researchers want to study HIV? Because every scientist loves to find the problems that no one else has solved. Partly it's because you have to work, to publish, and have a field of research. You need to distinguish yourself somehow; but more than that, HIV represents a world of unsolved questions, and nothing is more  exciting to a researcher than a new question. I realize this is ignoring the human side of AIDS, and I don't mean that scientists devalue the humanity. In fact, some of the scientists approached this topic specifically because they cared about the human face of the problem. Some landed in this field because they are simply drawn to interesting problems of any kind.

I should probably point out, parenthetically, that I'm not a scientist in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. I'm in STDs, which for many reasons is a different Division at CDC. But HIV is the best-known and most-publicized of any STD, and we all work on the same basic problems.

But this brings me back to how people can end up on a plane to Melbourne, Australia, and what kind of people are now gone from here because of those jackasses with missiles. The tragedy isn't a tragedy simply because they are AIDS conference attendees; it would be the same tragedy if they were veterinarians, or botanists. But the field of AIDS work is a niche that I understand, to some degree, and I wanted to explain how the fourth-grader with no answer to the career question could end up in this crazy corner of the working world. This corner is a lot less bright now.

I know I'm memorializing them by babbling about myself, which is both narcissistic and ridiculous. But I did not know them personally. I just know that they were all devoted to this fight, and I wondered how they all got here, to this field. And why they're gone.