When the Homily is about Immunology

Oh what a beautiful morning

Pulling out of Eagle Harbor, the mostly clear skies revealed the glory of western Washington. Outside my ferry window the snow capped Olympic mountains are alight with the red-orange of the rising sun. The move to Kitsap has made them the more dominant natural feature for us now, with the Cascades largely unseen, save its patriarch.

Reaching Puget Sound proper we turn more westward and Mount Rainier in all of its dangerous wonder stands partially obscured by passing clouds. It always seems to me to be watching over the region. Fog hangs over the waters, south of Bainbridge Island, and I watch as the Bremerton Ferry M/V Hayak vanishes into it.

It is a lousy day to be going to work indoors. The temptation to get off in Seattle and then immediately get back on the very same ferry and head home is great...this is a day for stretching fence, harvesting trees, renovating the barn, or digging fence holes, not analyzing Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reactions.

You know, I find myself growing less and less interested in my work. Don't get me wrong, I do not dislike my job and it pays well, but I certainly do not have any grand ambitions associated with it. People who run around the lab desperate to see their name on published papers or clamoring to see that they have the proper amount of desk or bench space in accord with their perceived rank seem insane to me. Scientific ambition is a shoulder shrugging venture to me more now than it ever has been.

It's not complete apathy. I live for the knowledge that the work I do does in fact help people - even if at a great distance. I think I just realize that this ferry ride is leading me back into the city: the place where even in the academic scientific world people are ultimately striving for their own advancement and achievement as much as they do in the world of business and politics. It sometimes feels like an old rerun of "Melrose Place" with all of its stupid personally political drama.

For me, I find more satisfaction in splitting logs and building fences for goats these days. Which is why the ferry trip home feels so much like an escape...even if it is an escape to more labor. Who knows what the future holds?