Dr. Shellie

I do martial arts. This continues to surprise me, for I am not the type. You know– I never took Chinese or Japanese in college. I didn’t have a bonzai tree in my dorm room, and there weren’t any calligraphic scrolls hanging on my walls. Nope, I got into martial arts purely for self defense, when I started learning jiu-jitsu. The type of jiu-jitsu I did was a very practical, street-fighting style. That meant learning to kick, punch, and break people’s joints, with a little wrestling thrown in.

Jiu-jitsu required to me to totally change my mindset. Every class exercise begins with this phrase: "Suppose someone attacks you like this…" (a punch, a kick, an arm grab). "What do you do?" At first, I had a hard time even imagining the response to this question. Would I really fight back? Why would I want to hurt anyone? But slowly it sank in– if someone attacks you, you defend yourself– why not? And even in a very bad, seemingly hopeless situation, there is often something you can do. Attacker has your arms pinned? OK, kick him in the knees. Your legs are immobilized? OK, yell in his ear or poke him in the eye. Of course, sometimes there really is nothing you can do, and then you are in trouble. But often there is a reponse.

An important concept in jiu-jitsu is that your response should be appropriate. If an acquaintance takes a hold of your arm, you don’t want to flip him onto the ground and kick him in the head. You can just twist your arm in a way that makes him let go. But if you are stuck in a corner with a strung-out, crazy person trying to hit you in the face, well then… you need to fight until they are incapacitated enough for you to run away and call the police.

In everyday life, we are far more often verbally attacked or undermined than physically assaulted. Verbal attacks often come from people we know and will have to deal with in the future, not random strangers. So fighting back until they are incapacitated is usually ill-advised. But I like the concept of appropriate response, nevertheless, even if you tone it down for your office colleagues, or choose more "non-defensive" strategies.

With each new paper you write, an unavoidable occurrence: that moment of panic when you run across a journal article you have never seen before, and realize that someone else has already published your results. And then after panicking, you read their article carefully, and realize it is not the same after all… and you are happy once more. 

Two of my female friends are grad students in big labs where all the experiments are done in groups. Whenever the head professor is in the lab, the graduate students act professional and courteous and go out of their way to be helpful. Then, the moment he steps out, all hell breaks loose. The guys start jockeying for power– picking on the weakest grad student, insulting one another, and posting pornographic photos on the screensavers. Meanwhile, the most senior grad student yells at people when he’s in a bad mood.

Meanwhile, the professor has no idea that any of this is going on (after all, when he’s around, everyone is well behaved) until the environment gets so toxic that someone threatens to quit.