Ramblemuse Touch Points

A week after becoming “roadkill” in LLNL’s involuntary separation process, life goes on. During the past week, I’ve filed a fictitious business name under which to do technical consulting, and rounded up the required two sponsors and sent in my membership application to the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). The latter is a delayed follow-up to taking the Santa Fe Science Writers Workshop in 2007.

I’ve also updated my to reflect my new freelance and consulting orientation and used LinkedIn as a means of collecting contact information on colleagues: those still at LLNL, those leaving under the ISP, those who left earlier, and those in other places and professions. I’d already been doing this, but now, since leaving Lawrence Livermore National Lab, I’m a lot more conscious and thorough about keeping contacts potentially useful to myself or my connections. In short, I’m extending my existing tendency to be an information hub. I also dropped by Media Bistro, the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA), and the INC, One-Person Business page. I’ve now got at least an approximate handle on what I’ll need to charge for technical consulting. I still haven’t a clue on how this will all work out, but I’m on my way to becoming the “Roadkill Warrior”.

During the week, the theme of “Roadkill & Resurrection” caught the inspiration of my older son. Normally a trumpet player in the high school band, he’s been spending some time at our digital piano figuring out a musical theme for what he refers to as “The Armadillo Song”. Last night, he decided that it had three movements: “The Crash”, “Ascension”, and “Life Starts Over”.

For others in transition, I can recommend a couple of resources. The first is Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. At the minimum, read the “12 Rules of Survival”. The second is “The Way of Transition” by William Bridges. Both of these are also listed in the Trauma, Stress & Survival Section of an annotated bibliography I maintain. Deep survival had been recommended to me several years back by my colleague Maureen Manley, who used to be my sports and deep tissue massage teaching partner at the McKinnon Institute. I’d also run into William Bridges books several years back, notably for his book “Job Shift”.

I’d long ago realized that, even at a national laboratory, one has to be prepared to be one’s own entrepreneur. As I’ve been funded by or working for several divisions over the years, I’ve taken on the attitude of being a “hired gun”. That attitude of preparation and self-responsibility has helped a lot in this latest transition out of the lab. I’d seen the problems coming and prepared for them. I stayed as long as I did, because I enjoyed the mental challenges and some really great colleagues, realizing that the organization had long been losing any trappings of being primarily in service to the pursuit of science.

Science and scientific vision have become secondary to avoidance of risk at the lab. It’s not that some good science isn’t done, but that it’s done as much despite the infrastructure as because of it. There’s simply too much sand in the gears to now consider it a place to have a career as a scientist. This orientation, however, starts at levels well above the laboratory itself; the lab is just a reflection of a greater national dysfunction. I may be lucky to be thrown clear with all limbs intact, even with some very deep cumulative fatigue. Changes at the lab have reminded me for far too long of the story of the Boiling Frog.

“The boiling frog story states that a frog can be boiled alive if the water is heated slowly enough — it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out. The story is generally told in a figurative context, with the upshot being that people should make themselves aware of gradual change lest they suffer a catastrophic loss.” — Wikipedia