ellipses

today was punctuated by moments of unhappiness which were fairly intense but dissipated quickly enough. maybe it's because i was looking forward to seeing friends i haven't seen for awhile at Jordan's but didn't get to. or maybe it's just the internet.

i hate that little nagging voice that you get in your head. it's hard to shut up sometimes. but everyone has down days and they go away i guess.

i don't know.

but i did think of a happiness. in fact, i took a picture of it. i went on a nice night run and took my phone because after getting yelled at by the car which i think almost hit me, it's probably good to be able to call in emergencies.

11/6 & 11/7

11/6/12
this: https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/266031293945503744/photo/1
and everything it entails that came from everyone...

...doing that

11/7/12

no pic taken but lunch at steenbock's -- so much tasty fries! as well as buttery fresh veggie sandwich
also, "it's just synaptic pruning" and philosophy studying

why great literature is great + a few pics

just finished rereading the great gatsby. i remember why i loved this book so much. sometimes i read a sentence or passage in some book or other and get that fluttery feeling in my stomach just from the sheer beauty of the words, before the meaning or any of the meanings have settled in yet. i think something subconscious recognizes the power of what was written down.

one of my favorite quotations from the book goes: "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. It's vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

the beauty of that passage is chilling, almost. it's melancholy too, as powerful things so often are. what is the most powerful emotion? maybe melancholy, for how pervasive it is and how long it lasts. but anyway, while mankind's encounter with an unadulterated america can't be recaptured, strictly factually speaking we encounter wildernesses and frontiers all the time. that's what's so beautiful about this. it may talk specifically of the first settlers but what it captures are the feelings that we repeat again and again, generation after generation. we were never the first to experience an emotion and we will never be the last. over and over, we seek thrilling, mysterious, vast unknowns and over and over, we lose them.

what is it that is sad about "last and greatest?" it's Ideological and Romantic in capitalized senses of both words. also, when was the last time an emotion compelled us, without our consent? finally, i strongly disagree with the end of the last sentence, but at the same time, i think it has perhaps the greatest weight out of all that passage. sure, life has to be realistic and it has to contain midterms, cold coffee, recycling that piles up, long boring work days; but life can be so much more meaningful if it also contains cardinal ideals which we think of every now and then. and how more meaningful can it get than to spend our days seeking or experiencing something commensurate to our capacity for wonder.

that being said, i wish i had a brownie to eat

11/4

Still 11/4 cheating but too pretty

umm 11/1?

10/31

what i want

i want to laugh and make other people laugh for always

we are all granted power to induce feelings in others. does that knowledge come with the responsibility to do so? i'm not sure, because it would be impossible to live always thinking about how you make others feel. but i do think that knowledge should come at least with awareness, every now and then. today i am aware that i want to spend my life inducing feelings that are good and joyful and laughing in the people that i love and care about. which is not to say that you should be an actor playing a specific part in order to create a reaction in the audience around you, but rather that the desire to induce these emotions in others teaches you what to demand and grow for yourself.
and as you cultivate who you are, slowly, what is good in you can diffuse to your environment.

i've still been keeping up with the daily happinesses, just not posting them here. maybe tomorrow i wil put up pictures.

10/30/12

 today- potato car

and i actually have that picture from saturday:
10/27/12

ketchup

oops so much for my posting one happiness a day thing...i wish the reason for not doing so was because i didn't use my computer for the past however many days (hooray! and: no the hell way!).

friday was becca's birthday & we all went out to the icon and logan's? i saw a banana, a dracula, a parrot, a pirate, an evil queen, a flapper, abe lincoln, an angel, a light-up balloon man, two ghosts, many slutty your-noun-of-choice_'s, and a partridge in a pear tree. just kidding. i saw more but i can't remember.

i love the middle ages! speaking of a partridge in a pear tree. they were probably a terrible time to live in with regards to the black death (we once watched a movie about that in third grade after which they served mac & cheese at lunch and i couldn't eat it ), childbirth, even more soulless 1%, wars, famine, etc. but they're so cool to read about. i read a lot of historical fiction when i was younger, including king arthur and his knights with all its heavy handed christian themes and thee's and thou's. british literature of that age is especially interesting because it mixes myth with fact in a way that you find in really early literature of say, china (the feats of the first emperor is not wholly factual) or in the bible (i.e. mythical feats of the real man jesus, if you're an atheist like me). i love mysterious things that exist in the realm of reality too, like stonehenge. plus, you see the appropriation of older mythic arcs from people like the picts or the celts into anglo-saxon stories which then do plenty of their own evolving to come down to our modern day. it's fascinating. i'd love to take a myths class, because i'm almost certain that there are mythical trends borrowed between cultures or repeated amongst cultures that weren't close enough to borrow.

here's something i want to think about: evolution of non-biological things, especially things that aren't tangible bc it's too easy to map the evolution of, say, a toaster. actually i guess that's cool too because it's a litmus test for the evolution of ideas.

um. happinesses. i did think of them during the days i missed:

10/26 -- those delicious tapas at the icon. spanish tortilla, stuffed flatbreads, and the calamari! wooooow.
10/27 -- when scott and i were walking back from the farmer's market, i looked up and noticed an actual tree growing up out of an apartment building balcony many stories up. the sky was completely blue, the building of golden brick lit up with sunlight, and from the really dramatic angle from the ground put sky, building, and unexpected tree in perfect juxtaposition.
10/28 -- cocoa the rabbit on her back being completely still
10/29 -- kelly's face at dinner

as good a time as any

My friend Juliette has this thing where she posts on facebook a picture of one thing per day, even if it's just a small thing, that made her a little bit happy that day. Even if the rest of the day sucked. I'm going to do that too, starting today.

Today I didn't take any pictures but there were many things that I can choose from. I'll choose this one: meeting the wonderful old man at the L&S dinner function, who told me stories of his life experiences. Together we bashed the education system and the healthcare system; he recommended me a book to read (Healing America: followed by many words after a semicolon, by T. R. Reid) that looks at our healthcare policy here in the US. He went to UW-Madison back when tuition was $275 a semester ( with the intent of going to medical school but in his last year at UW, he discovered a passion for American history, catalyzed by having one amazing professor, and crammed in a history major. Off he went to medical school for one semester, before realizing that really wasn't his calling and he changed to journalism, going to Berkeley for his MA in journalism. But it was the 60s then, and he was drafted into the navy for some time before finally returning to academics to do postdoctoral work at Stanford. He's definitely very retired now (he spends time in Hawaii too) but before he retired he worked for the Milwaukee Journal, traveling all over the world as a journalist. Also, he was a little bit deaf. But adorable, and as I looked at him I could almost see the shadow in his face of the young man he used to be--whenever I look at old people, I imagine them young and fit and still having the experiences that they're reminiscing about now, as if I can visually peel away layers of skin and layers of years to find what's still there at the core.

Okay I have to mention another thing, which has to do with the happiness of my tastebuds:  tender buttery beef, pureed potatoes and mushrooms in sweet wine sauce creme brulee in a spoon, tiny brownie & tiny fruit tart eeeeeeeeee i was so happy. Those were my happinesses for today, what were yours?

Habits and other things

Yesterday I ran out of floss. Today, after I brushed my teeth, I still automatically reached up into the medicine cabinet and tried to take out my trusty floss holder, then felt bewildered and just sort of off for not being able to floss. I'm not saying this because I'm some sort of floss freak, but because that made me realize the simple power of habits. And subsequently made me think about the power of subconscious habits, whether they're mental or physical. I think forming good habits is incredibly important. I think this makes me sound like everyone's mom. But there's merit to that! Floss. Run. Get shit done. Maybe more importantly, mental habits like not immediately writing people or things off, asking positive questions throughout the day, focusing on the proactive.

I feel like you have to dedicate yourself wholly to what's being prescribed (positivity) or run the risk of feeling "oh I failed at asking positive questions, it's so hard, I just want to sit and eat and wallow! Wallowallowalllow." Or maybe what i mean is, what's the difference between momentarily not being positive because it actually is hard to sustain, and being negative? Habits are hard to cultivate, too, without turning into a robot, or feeling prisoner to the obligation. There are definitely times where I just want to say, fuck it I am so tired why can't I just let myself fall into bed and go to sleep. But then I end up  in the bathroom flossing, grudgingly. At that point, maybe a truly advanced human being (I bet Siddhartha Gautma had excellent personal hygiene, or maybe he just would've been unnaturally clean bc he was enlightened and had transcended cavities) could say, "here is the habit and here is me flouting it this once, for the sake of the greater good of my body i.e. sleep." Maybe a truly advanced human being never feels obligated to perform habitual actions but instead does them willingly, joyfully. The snots. As I'm not a truly advanced human being yet or ever, I don't know if my habits (even good ones) rule me or I them. I don't have that many obvious habits, I don't think.

What's that Wisconsin law firm commercial? Habush, Habush, and Rottier. Habit, habit...

So yoga's actually quite difficult. For one thing, I never pay attention to the Sanskrit name of the asana we're doing, which means I'm usually lost until she says the English name or I sneak a look at my better attention paying classmates. And for another thing, the big thing, it requires a lot of energy/flexibility/strength. Downward facing dog my ass, downward facing all the blood in your body rushes to your head and it feels like it's going to explode more like it. I really don't like downward facing dog or mukshasnfjasasana or something like that. What I do like about yoga though is making a tree pose or warrior pose and I can pretend I'm rooted strongly to the ground while my arms point cleanly through the air. It feels like I'm drawing up power from the ground and my limbs are long magnets. But as I was telling Becca, I think I'd rather sleep in than become yogically enlightened.

It's weird because this semester, I don't really have enough classes to feel like I need to work. We got off Neuro 629 on Thursday for Obama, because Peter the professor feels "Seems to me that seeing a President is a pretty big deal (after all, we've only had 44 in our whole history!) and even tho it is a campaign, a President is special here..like him or not.  So, feel free to go without missing class." That pretty much sums up that class. Peter's the type to mutter dry comments to himself as he lectures, and though the material is ridonk, we don't even really have tests. My two neuro seminars are just interesting, interesting, interesting, o and pizza! There will be pizza on Thursday this week. Pizza and basically no work, just musing write-ups. That leaves ochem and ethics, one of which I've taken before and actually discover I like, and the other which I haven't gone to that much...ethically ambiguous.

Um. Tomorrow I have a busy day--class, class, lab, lunch with Albert if there's time, then off to St. Mary's to shadow. Slow Food Cafe is having breakfast this week!! Homemade nutella stuffed french toast was on the menu, so we're gonna go to that I think. Why is breakfast the savoriest meal of the day? I love potato latkes and potato anythings. I'm tired now bc I had yoga, biked back and forth six times, then went for a run. It was a perfect run. I can't use words to really explain the feeling, but it had to do with the cool air and the pure sky, faintly pink and faintly darkening as the sun set over Lake Wingra, the trees flaming different colors, the still waters reflecting sky and leaves and everything being so quiet. Quiet, and wide, and darkening. I love the repetitive sound of feet on gravel or ground, over and over, eating up distance like a patient monster. 

I think the only times I really feel peaceful & my head is quiet are when I'm outside doing something physical. It returns me to myself, to what is really important. It's like I afterwards, I stand on a mountain instead of overwhelmed in a valley where I can't even see the sky. I think I'd probably be depressed if I didn't have that, so I wonder, what do other people have? What are the serenity sources that other people have to draw upon and are they as constant, as renewable, as mine? 

RIP

my dearly beloved ipod,

this is a eulogy for you. in the event that you do not fix yourself, magically, as what happened to rachel's speakers much to the angry disbelief of our friend abi. if you, however, fix yourself you will not be greeted with angry disbelief or any negative emotion. instead you will be cradled in a postive psychological field of reinforcement and approval, to the sounds of my ecstatic "THANK YOU STEVE JOBS." but in fact, the Most Illustrious Jobs was not involved in your life or creation but probably i should be thanking Hua Luoyin the replaceable factory worker who brought you into being seven thousand miles away in a shitty plant in Shenzhen China.

oops. i'm sorry. that was a digression away from the positive emotions you should be experiencing. back on track now. dearest ipod (i named you vivaci, in a sophomoric fit of drama and musical appropriateness), you literally died by chocolate. it's a much spoken of dream, amongst us humans, to die by chocolate. in fact we have numerous desserts which capture our hopes of a passing as delicious as that, but no one that i know of has done so yet. you are the first; you are not a human but you are a pioneer! the first, the last, the best. no death by washing machine is good enough for you (followed by emergency resuscitation in rice), no final free fall from the depths of a safe pocket, no everyday act of god that is not covered by apple's warranty.

"it died in chocolate," i mournfully told my friend over internet chat.

"u tried to eat your ipod?" he replied. he knows me so well. indeed, i am that greedy. i poured chocolate over you and tried to eat you.

HELL NO. i would sooner eat my arm. probably because it's actually marginally edible, which brings me to the second thing i talk about much more than is normal, namely, cannibalism. but i digress again. you were just an innocent bystander to the deceptively non-threatening lindt truffle ball (irish cream--it wasn't even that good but it was going to be my lunch on the bus ride back from minnesota) which proceeded to explode itself all over my bag. i would make a horribly non-politically correct comparison to terrorist bombings but i am much too good for that. even the truffle isn't all to blame: i also blame OPEC for producing the oil that allowed me to go to minnesota in the first place. expect a lawsuit.

cherished electronic, we have been together for...um. hold up a sec. ah yes, five years, back when i was still a foolish youth entering the life changing and beautiful experience of high school. we flew to china together, dropped you and dented your left corner, did forensics, pumped up before tennis games, moved out, went to college, walked to class, tagged and tailed mice, met new people who became friends, made explosives and founded sigma aldrich. the last one i made up. if that were true i could buy a lot more of you and be like haha i broke one of my twenty three ipods. actually i can't remember what we really did together nor do i really feel all that much nostalgic emotion associated with your little silver body. i just know that i miss you like i'd miss my left nostril (when you need you really really need it otherwise you forget it's there).

otherwise, the apple store will fix you for a cool $129. you better fix yourself you little shit.

lovingly,
your Person Connie

I was working in the garden and saw this little guy: it's the tendril of a long bean plant that grew away from the main plant and managed to find a tiny, bug-made hole in our nearby rhubarb. The picture doesn't do it justice because the rhubarb is huge and the bean tendrils are so small. Such precision! How the hell did the runner find that small hole and grow into it? It couldn't have covered all the underside of the rhubarb leaf, it would've expended too much energy. There's something awe- inspiring about how such a seemingly delicate thing can unerringly find its way through the obstacles around it, ending up exactly where it needs to go. 

Every day has so much beauty and happiness if you notice it. But I think you have to actively notice it, call it out from the background of the mundane that it weaves its way into. Luckily, there are so many small riches you can find in the everyday that it makes the act of searching worthwhile, because then you have an inexhaustible supply of happiness. And it's one that belongs entirely to you, grounded in the interactions you have with the world, so it's reliable as well.

I love sitting here, listening to bird chirps and bug noises, looking out at the growing things.  I'm kind of going to miss living by myself at home when my family comes back from China. One thing I've learned more and more is that all things pass. Everything. What happened yesterday suddenly becomes something that happened two days ago, four days ago, a week, a month. To be honest, when I was in China I sometimes counted the days until I could come back to America--in the moments when even my heels hurt from the weight of my feet resting on them because the bed was so damn hard, when everyone was nagging like it was an Olympic sport and they were all going to win gold...of course, I didn't spend all my time thinking like that or even much of it but there were moments. And I'd be like, oh my god there's still x amount of days until I can get a good night's sleep again. But now, suddenly, I'm in America and it's been almost two weeks since I came back. Which just goes to show--why not enjoy some unique things of that stretch of time while you can? Even if it's not something you expected to enjoy, it'll probably never happen again. Even if it's something like the absence of someone, or silence, etc. Be happy!

Aaaaand here's a granola recipe, randomly. It's so easy to make and so tasty for snacking or pouring some kefir over it or eating with yogurt or eating as cereal or using as confetti haha no:

HEALTHY HIPPIE GRANOLA GREATNESS 

3-4 cups of grain. Oats will be the major grain, usually, but you can also include things like flax seed, rolled barley, other such edible grainy/seedy things. Using rolled oats will be better than using steel cut oats. 

Eyeball amount of nuts. I tend to use the kind that you can buy in bulk which has almonds, cashews, walnuts. You can add sunflower seeds, peanuts (if you are into that kind of thing, being, boringness), sesame seeds--go crazy, you're a granola making hipster now! If you want a rough measurement, anywhere from 1-2 cups. Chop up the larger nuts. You can also include accessories like shredded coconut. 

~1 tsp salt. If you used unsalted nuts, add some salt for taste.

Cinnamon. Eyeball, or apply liberally.

Roughly 3/4 cups of goo. You can use straight-up maple syrup (although this is very expensive, especially if you use actual pure maple syrup which I'd definitely recommend--Aunt Jemima should stay out of this) or make a mixture out of melted butter, brown sugar, honey, and/or some sort of vegetable oil. You can also add maple syrup to that for some maple taste. Just estimate how much of everything you'll need, the point is to create a sticky sauce that will clump together your grains. Oh, but you'll definitely use more oil and honey than melted butter, I only use about 1/2 stick.

Mix the grains, nuts, cinnamon & salt together, while making the goo in a saucepan. Once that's done, pour it over the dry stuff and mix in evenly. Spread the granola mix over a large baking pan. Bake at 325 degrees for anywhere from 15-35 minutes. Every ten minutes or so, use a spoon to turn the granola so the bottom layer doesn't get burnt. If you spread it out in a thin layer, it will only take 15 minutes but will require two batches. Once the granola is a golden brown color, remove from oven and let cool--the longer you let it cool, the crispier granola will be. 

Once cooled, mix in your favorite dried fruits and/or chocolate. 

Enjoy, too often probably.

Kelly is a tiger-sister

Hi Connie, this is an email reminding you to FOLD MY BLANKET when you get to the U.S. Please do so immedietly when you get back! (and don't chicken out if there are bugs! Please if possible send me a picture of my room too, if you have time. Oh and I would like you to check my phone, to see if Sally called back. If she did, please tell me what she said on the message, if there is one. Thanks! Heres a list to make it easier.

1. Fold My Blanket

2. Send Me Picture Of My Room

3. Check On Phone (It should be on my desk in the playroom or in my room) and tell me if Sally called and what she said in the message if there is one.

That's right, boss me around child (I folded her blanket)

old post that i wrote somewhere else

Yesterday, Scott and I walked down by the lake and sat on the steps for a little while. Not too far from us a guy was playing guitar, quite well I may add; two men stopped to listen and talked to him a little bit. Then, to my complete delight, Guitar Guy passed his guitar to one of the strangers who began to pick out what sounded like a piece that you’d normally play on a classical guitar. I felt unreasonably happy at the exchange. What are the odds that someone walking by can play guitar too? Or more pertinently, I was marveling at the fact that someone walking by could have hidden in them knowledge that connected you to them—in this case, the knowledge of guitar. People can be such props and extras in our lives. Just shift the frame and it’s a completely different story though: they walk by, you walk by, you run past them sitting at the union, they watch you go. You’re an extra in someone else’s story too.

Which is why I thought it was so cool that randomly, momentarily, people passed a guitar around, sat down, and played some music. I watched Neil deGrasse Tyson’s video about “The Most Astounding Fact” on youtube (set to music and sights of space that bludgeoned you over the head with the sheer gravity and size of his message) after he came to talk on campus (where in the world is…), and he says “that’s really what you want in life isn’t it—you want to feel connected.” Because suddenly, that person stopped being an extra. Suddenly, you made a connection. No matter how brief or how long.

Unique in each way you can see

Lately I've gotten into making things on your own, from things that you have. Or simple life hacks like turning all your hangars to face the opposite direction that they normally do, then as you wear an article of clothing, turn it the normal way. At the end of the year you'll see which clothes in your closet you actually wear and which are simply part of the "crap we accumulate," and get rid of them accordingly (donate/sell/store).  The internet is this amazing treasure trove of ideas if you can sift out the shit from the win.

Also, I'll admit it: I have a pinterest account and it is great. Like any tool it can be used for good (blackberry cheesecake in jars) or evil (Feminst Ryan Gosling). Actually, I tend to 6-degrees-of-connections my internet hopping, instead of browsing through pinterest itself. If there's a blog that's creative and catches my attention, I'll click through which ones it links to since as in real life, communities aggregate on the internet along lines of similarity.

So there's my statement of affection for crafty/diy/idea sharing blogs. Now let me get to the observation that made me want to write a post. If you ever click through these blogs you'll notice they're all written by the same person. She (invariably) has a fairly recent husband who wears a fedora/hipster glasses/stubble/a beard/A Beard; her blog layout is white and/or full of Artsy Photo Links plus curly script; it features Instagram/crazily expensive camera photos with lots of negative space and one artfully arranged succulent plant. She ends every post with xoxo/love. She shops at farmer's markets, likes j.crew and looks exactly the same whether or not she is blond/a redhead/resembles a monkey. It's like the internet coughed up a real life trope.

This is probably offensive to anyone who has a style or craft blog and yeah, no one's making me look at these blogs. I like them. On the whole. It's just that when I look at them it feels like a completely different part of my brain gets activated in contrast to what lights up when I'm enragedly shouting at thinking about politics, or studying for the mcat, or reading a scientific paper. I don't meant to say that one is > than the other but I think it highlights some points:

1) The rich get richer is a saying in neuroscience as well as economics, which describes how if you exercise a synapse you make it stronger. Using only certain "parts" of your brain and neglecting others surely leads to brain specialization. Specialization may be necessary for civilization but the thought of specialization in the brain is somewhat scary to me; after all, that's how we perceive the world, form connections, and seek out information.

1.5) Is anyone really a well-balanced individual or is that just some great myth College Board seeks to impose on our earth. 

2) How can people be so similar to each other? Why do we, when given 7 billion flavors of human, still choose to follow certain typsets, whether it's consciously or unconsciously? I'm sure I'm no exception. Does being a certain type of person predispose you to liking certain things/engaging in certain activities? It's kind of cool when you come across someone who seems to be one way but has a passion, or quirk, that seems to be completely out of their character. Here's to you quiet, insanely smart, well-read girl who fucking loves lamborghini. We're all snowflakes distinct among snowflakes!

3) Crafting seems to exist in a vaccuum. When the Wisconsin recall election was going on and the UN is being turned away from Syrian villages, the crafting world presents cardboard cameras, felted flower headbands, and "electronically knitted spam poetry." Sometimes I can't help but feel disgusted at how trivial it can seem...but the benefit of a doubt: when you're only asking for one thing, you'll only get that one thing, I guess.

4) Will this be the first era of the hipster grandpa and gradma. Since what else can married couples like the owners of this house turn into?

Since this is all so trivial in itself, here's a really interesting TED talk about happiness, self-worth, and vulnerability:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o

and a scary article about how we are all going to become Winston circa 1984 thanks to the kinect.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/microsoft-wants-to-serve-you-ads-based-on-what-you-do-in-your-living-room/258351/

Remembering

What are the sounds that evoke emotions the most strongly for you?

Whenever I hear crickets, I get immediately and viscerally thrown into a certain mood that's connected strongly with certain memories. But it's not quite the same as hearing crickets and thinking of, say, camping one summer: it's more like the sound recalls an amalgamation of multiple memories and the emotions associated with all of them, blurred together into something equally composed of campfires, melancholy, darkness, solitude and perfect companionship at the same time.

Memories are complex, beautiful things. As a neurobio major, I get a lot of exposure to the functional side of memories - cases that proved the different types of memory, where those memories are "stored". At the broadest level, we have two categories of memories: implicit and explicit. Implicit memories can't be expressed verbally and include procedural memories, like how to ride a bike, as well as memories we associate with classical conditioning. Explicit memories can be communicated and are either semantic (facts) or episodic (tales of our lives). I wonder, though, where these visceral/emotional memories fall in this system. Maybe it's more accurate to call them them sensory memories.

I think there is a certain type of memory which you can describe, with difficulty, that stems from sensory stimuli, but doesn't match with a specific event or episodic story in your life. This type of memory is almost affect to affect matching, as in what you feel now maps to how you felt before, but maybe in multiple occasions. The smell of your elementary school. The sound of snowplows going by. A feeling-memory floods through your body and makes throws you into a different feeling. Many of my memories are like the synopsis of a book, or movie: "remember that time when..." and you recreate the scene, you see the people moving through it, you watch it play out. In comparison to the sensory memories, it's like describing a scene rather than experiencing it.

That ties into something I've wanted to convey for a very long time, but haven't attempted to because I don't think I can communicate it. But here goes. You're walking down a street in a city on a rainy day. You can experience this in two ways:

1. You think to yourself, "I am walking down this street on this rainy day."
2. You do not think, you simply walk down the street in the rain.

One is meta thinking, one is not. The first is oratory, descriptive, analytical and the second is experiential, sensory. To do the first requires distancing yourself from yourself but to do the second is to be yourself. People probably do not march down streets during rainstorms actively thinking about what they are doing but the principle can be extrapolated.

(Oh what you don't make pedantic and obscure lists about meta analysis for fun?)  Now I can't think of a way to return to a more concrete blog post. Curtain down! No transition!

Sensory/visceral memories are extremely fleeting and strangely, often sad for me. Are they for you? What stimuli send you into actually feeling what you have felt before?

what's this connie? two posts consecutively and not a full day apart? well, don't get excited yet because this is all trivial. a fart into cyberspace, if you will.

i'm so tired of studying half-heartedly for my final, and i have a cold that prevents the usage of my nose. noses, wouldn't you know, are kind of important for biological function. they're so under-appreciated, until they go. then you're stuck wondering okay body, what if my mouth were suddenly incapacitated and i could no longer breathe through it? would my nose unclog itself? or would i just suffocate to death because my body part is too stupid to realize that it's working against the rest of the organism, and let me go gasping to my death while merrily producing mucus, like someone very carefully locking their bike up while a horde of unwashed huns and every dictator that ever lived armed with nuclear bombs is approaching over the hill. never mind the goddamn bike!!! (answer: it would not unclog itself. i ran the experiment by holding my breath).

this is not an honorable post and now i shall exile myself to my notebooks.  

sidenote: i always forget that tahini is ground sesame seeds, because it sounds like a hawaiian fish. but i looked up a recipe for hummus and it has tahini in it. yummy.

ETA--
this morning, i had a dream i was playing soccer with a soccer team. we were playing a really good team but we were winning against expectation! the score was 5-3. it was a very realistic dream, with none of those weird pauses or interludes, strange scenery switches or physics-defying happenings. so we were playing and one of their forwards managed to break past the defenders and charged towards the goal--it was one of those goals where only the goalie could stop it but couldn't decide whether to run forward to take the ball while the person was dribbling or whether to wait and block the shot. our goalie kind of flopped between the two, so the ball went in, and the score was 5-4 and everyone was so charged AND THEN I WOKE UP. it was like watching the world cup and right when the game got tense, potentially close, all the power went out. this might not convey how frustrated i was to wake up. i tried to go to sleep and change back to that dream channel but alas. now i can't ever find out what happened.

still bothered

Ain't got no education

One of my favorite young adult novel authors, John Green, makes youtube videos with his brother Hank Green, in a channel called CrashCourse.  John Green's videos are about world history and Hank Green's are on biology (he has degrees in biochemistry and environmental studies). I just watched one on DNA structure and replication because I think I get nostalgic for intro level science. And/or probably would forget what the basics are if I didn't constantly refresh it. 

When I google things for classes that lead to videos, the videos are followed by comments along the lines of "man thanks for doing this, that was so much easier to follow than my professor!" For the good ones I mean, not the ones with 386 dislikes and 5 likes, made by a drunk college student with a Sharpie of knowledge. I feel like in classes/textbooks/most traditional sources of knowledge, you unwittingly enter into a contract that on the part of the professor goes: "thou shalt not disseminate this knowledge in an easy, digestible, interesting manner." It's understandably difficult to teach introductory material to a large number of generally disinterested students who are mostly there against their will but I still get the nagging feeling that a lot of what we're taught is taught in a specifically esoteric way. 

Why can a thirteen minute youtube clip cover the same main points as one chapter, two lectures worth of material in a traditional classroom style? What is the most succinct way to teach something without turning it into simply spitting out facts? The way I see it, knowledge acquisition consists of pretty much two parts: 

Semantic information + the glue, the connections, that make such information meaningful

If all you have is the semantic information, you just have a bunch of facts floating around in your head. I'm saying that because I guess that could be one criticism of non-traditional methods of teaching, like online videos. But while I was watching that DNA one, it covered everything that I remembered or gleaned from the analogous unit in AP Bio. I don't know if that's because my memory's bad, I didn't get enough glue in between the concepts, or if maybe a lot of what ends up being useful information can be distilled into just that much. 

This Don't Teach In An Accessible Way contract continues beyond introductory material. Have you ever read a scientific paper? It's like reading Charles Dickens/Jane Austen--a page long paragraph to tell you that yes, she thought the soup was cold. People are impressed by lengthy scientific sounding sentences and while that isn't the only motivation for writing like that, I wonder if it's at least a portion.

I got off topic. I meant to write, since these new non-traditional ways of teaching seem to be quite effective, to what extend should they replace or be used with the traditional ways. What if your professor is terrible but you can watch Yale's Open Courses and learn physics that way? Does a virtual school that allows you to select teachers based on how good they are, wherever they are, have merit over one where you're forced to get whatever arbitrary professor you get? Or is there still something about being in a physical classroom that trumps however good a virtual teacher is.

Actually this is all pointless wonderings because this website exists: http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/02/100-incredible-lectures-from-the-worlds-top-scholars/

I miss my friends who are abroad right now. Come home soon you guys. 

I really hate how I'm so non-confrontational. But actually, I have no problem getting into arguments with my family probably because they're the only people that I know will be there no matter what. Poor family.  I'm pretty sure that I don't argue with other people because there's nothing, ultimately, tying us together that isn't ephemeral. It could end at any point in time, so I don't shake the boat--I guess in my brain, the boat always sinks. Is that sad? I don't know. 

There was a tremendously beautiful sunset today. It permeated even through my shitty mood. Here, have some pictures. 

Hello hello

Hello internets. It's been awhile since I posted anything, mostly because I've lost the drive and time to sit down and write out what I think. Especially since, as jack and I talked about awhile back, writing in itself can be a way to explore thoughts so too often what I start out with branches into numerous other things and I end up spending too much time on the blog. 

Over spring break I went to Detroit to volunteer at an urban farm, which was a truly great experience. Here's a link to the blog about that, which I wrote for altbreaks (the program) in my assigned capacity as blogger: http://uwalternativebreaks.wordpress.com/spring-break-trips-2012/detroit-michigan-spring-break-2012/. It even has pictures! Now this blog is like an onion. Because it has a blog inside of it. 

What else? I read this essay from The Atlantic which is yet another internet response to the internet's effects, namely those of facebook, but this one stands out because of a) its sheer length and b) how in depth it goes. It's a commitment but if you're willing to make it, you'll get a lot of interesting thoughts out of it. Interestingly, I recently deleted my facebook in no connection to this article but for some of the reasons that it mentions. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

Check out this band! http://delicatesteve.bandcamp.com/album/wondervisions. If you'll forgive me, I'll put on a Pitchfork/Stereogum hat (or is that too un-hipster? A raw organic straw woven fedora) for a moment and describe them as: instrumental, irreverent, crisp, quirky and unafraid to mix up gorgeous plucked guitar melody with space sounding synth, to have no discernible time signature, to make a track thirty seconds long. It's like walking into a rainforest of candy canes and psychedelic colors. I love music that's rich and complex and THIS BAND ROCKS OMG YAY. </fedora>

I'm reading this book called For The Love of Physics, by an acclaimed MIT professor. It's about physics. But it's physics in a digestible, even tasty, form. This guy's enthusiasm comes out so strongly that it can't help but influence you. While reading it, I thought these things (i wrote them in a word file so it's imported):

1) Reading about parallax, and the often cited example of parallax using your eyes and your finger; I had the urge to actually measure the ratio between parallax distance and distance to my finger, so I could come up with the proportional constant. It’s so entirely different when you passively take in ideas, be it from a book or from a lecture, as when you create it from your own interest. Take physics lab for example; when I went to physics lab, it was to do something that the “other” (curriculum) had set out for me to do and hopefully gain insight from. What if, instead, I was very intrigued by parallax and went to lab to measure how effective parallax is at short distances from long? It’s bottom up rather than extracting information and it FEELS ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. Think about it. You come up with the idea, you are interested, you set the parameters, you consider what might go wrong and how to address it…every little thing that you hear not to do in lab or you must remember not to, etc, is already accounted for in your organic setup instead of memorizing what your ta says. Creation, creation, creation.

2) The truly great aren’t just talented, they are passionate. Learning doesn’t stop once you leave the classroom. Walter Lewin being constantly astounded by the wonderful beauty of nature, but mathematically not only purely appreciatively. Dr. Lokuta and figuring out how a semilunar valve works while he was drying his daughter’s hair and getting her ready for school. Pondering “in a quiet contemplative moment” is very real! Only the vast majority of people don’t and that’s why you get the standouts. Because they do.

So. Otherwise, life has been pretty good. I ran past my and Becca's (why is that the most awkward configuration in grammar ever? is that even right?) future apartment on my run today. Soooo excited to live in the Monroe St neighborhood and be in a less crunk environment than Langdon! Peace :) 

bleheheheheh

Two Gems From Tonight:


1) "You mean the one next to Sharpoko?" with no disrespect meant to this lady, I didn't realize that a chinese accent could translate into written speech


2) "nards...the store for retards!" where they sell alligator safety scissors.
my sister and i get along really well. 

dananaNAAnana

Whoo boy physiology is insane. What can I say? No can do no moah...for five minutes.

Dinesh my lab mentor leaves for India on Friday so I have to take over caring for the mouse colony (colony, as if they are some offshoot of the great mouse empire) earlier than I would've thought. Or wished, really, since it's all very confusing mendelian genetics and backcrossing and crossbreeding and genotyping. Choosing how to maintain a mouse colony with the least number of cages while not necessarily knowing what genotypes the mice are is like one of those optimization calc problems, minus the calculus. I don't envy being the one to start a colony. In fact, being a post-doc appears to be incredibly time-consuming and brain space consuming-- Dinesh was telling me how he hasn't seen full daylight in the past four days or so and wasn't aware the trees had budded. 

Speaking of which! I biked past allen centennial gardens to get to soil sci this morning and saw that the magnolia tree by Kronshage was in full bloom! The tulips by the gardens have not only budded but are similarly blooming. All along lakeshore the trees are unfurling green tips which are fast turning into pre-leaves. While this is all very beautiful and life-affirming, it has given me the most godawful allergies I would like to say that are known to mankind. They only briefly abated in our lab room deep beneath MSC. Curses upon you, pollen!! For turning me into what seems like a plague vehicle! Or more accurately, curses upon you, overactive mast cells. Also, it is worrisome because these flowers/plants should not be at this stage of their life in March, on the day after the first day of spring. This whole month has been an exercise in what is wonderful to experience (80 degrees) but disturbing in what it implies about our climate and ecosystem. The lakewater is really low this year. I think it's due to the sparse snowfall we had, so we didn't get a lot of meltwater in the spring. That's pretty worrisome. Also the fact that we had warm temperatures which melted the snow away but didn't necessarily melt the frozen water held in the soil at that time is worrisome as well, since it means that we might not have recharged our water reservoir in the soil. 

After studying with Athavi and Emily for four hours in Grainger I accepted that I needed to take a break or my brain would expel information out of both ears like a physiological teakettle. I took my dinner to the lake and sat on the steps there. It was pretty much fully dark out by then. Side note: I'm gaining an alarming fondness for ducks. I used to think they were so common just like squirrels. But now I fixate on them when I'm by the lake and observe things such as how they list to one side when they stand on one foot, or how their feet must be paddling very fast to move them quickly across the water, how they sometimes do this weird head-bobbing thing from side to side that looks quite deliberate...yeah. See. It may just be because they lend themselves to observation well, being the only animals on the lake most of the time and often the only animals we people can observe continuously without them running away. I saw the muskrat very close again tonight. Hello Grandmother Muskrat. 

I think it would be cool to have a kind of teach-for-your-friends thing, where you have a group of people get together and teach each other stuff you learn in class, or life, or what have you. When I notice all the random things I've learned, like micropore recharge, I wonder what things other people have learned in class. Stuff like that doesn't really come up in day to day conversation, and so we never really know what others know. Everyone is such a wealth of information, I just wish we could access it. Instead of a book club, an ideas club, or a discussion club...Ben Fox would join. That's such a fantastic name. Ben Wolf! In my imaginary world, Ben Fox and Ben Wolf would meet each other and Chris Han and Crystal Han would get married. And there would be trees that grew cereal and libraries would have all the books in the world. 

our endless numbered days

+ bon iver + sitting on the steps = peacefulness ^ contentment

(+ ducks = funny)

lyfe

I just read an article on Thought Catalog about, if I understood it correctly, things in your youth having profound influence in your later years when you have experienced more and lived longer so that its true meaning can be revealed. Like you're baking a cake and you assembled all the ingredients, mixed them together, stuck it in the oven, and seventeen years later it finally got baked. Maybe all the things we experience now are really just the mixings of the cake and we won't have the full, meaningful product until we're much older and have experienced much more. 

Anyway, creation. I've wanted to ramble on about this for awhile now and this is as good a time as any. And what exactly is living a fulfilling life? Also, what is the difference between 'happiness' and 'contentment'? 

First off, I don't mean to sound like a pompous know it all. I think these are true, but they are my truths, not necessarily the truths of the world. And that's really all we can ever definitively say. 

Actually I will start out with living a fulfilling life. 

1) Living a fulfilled life is NOT making yourself so busy that you go from thing to thing, filling up your hours...that is distraction. But what is it distracting from?

So I'm not sure how absolute this one is and probably people would disagree with me on this. I believe that despite how good it feels to wake up in the morning and start going, going, going from responsibility to responsibility, doing it well and getting things done, such a life runs the danger of not being actually as fulfilling as it seems. It strikes me as almost a distraction; as if being busy is a way of distracting the mind. But what is the mind being distracted from? If it's being distracted from petty thoughts, then doing a million constructive activities would appear to lead to a more fulfilling life. But thinking can also be one of the greatest forms of personal growth and to me, a fulfilling life is one in which you strive to grow yourself--as opposed to a life in which you do things you have to and then just hedonistically take in what you find pleasurable on your down time.

Life is defined by struggle but struggle doesn't necessarily have to have a negative connotation. Struggle is what makes achievement meaningful. Without struggle, you can't achieve or grow, you would simply do (maybe a better word to use than struggle would be effort). A life of just passively taking in what's pleasurable requires no mental effort. If effort is what makes achievement meaningful, then a life of passively taking in what's pleasurable is not meaningful. Conversely then, a meaningful life requires expenditure of mental effort. And if personal growth is an expenditure of mental effort, then it is part of a meaningful life. Therefore if being busy is a way of distracting the mind, the danger lies in not devoting enough time to growth, thus not having a wholly meaningful life. 

wtf I hate proofs. I didn't intend to wander into one and there's probably a big ass logical loophole in there somewhere, but I'm just trying to analyze why it seems so obvious to me that you have to devote time to thinking, wondering, reading, discovering what things are meaningful to you, finding out what you want to achieve and questioning your motives for why you want to achieve those things in order to live a meaningful, fulfilled life (sorry oxford comma, I pulled a Vampire Weekend on you in that last sentence). 

And all of that takes time. So you can't just be bustling around, going from thing to thing, feeling great and checking off boxes. In no way does that mean you shouldn't be doing that, i mean that you can't only be doing that.

And so this doesn't turn into a very long post, I'll post about separately about:

2) creation as a necessity in life

3) Happiness vs. contentment

ooooo 

the one thing we have in common

i just went to the dls lecture and I wanted to jot down my thoughts about it, so I can think about it more in the future before I forget (90 seconds!).

The Thought-Provoking Things

- appreciation for the cells that we are composed of: everyday we wake up because our cells (well, actually and sunlight and blue light) correctly take action and wake us up

- we are circuitry--everything we feel is a choice we make. we can choose which circuits we run, whether those are circuits for happiness, jealousy, anger, fear, etc. fundamentally, our bodies respond to stimuli but we choose how much attention we pay to those stimuli and what meaning we extract from it. 

- emotional experiencing. one of the paradoxes of emotion that i often struggle with is given the transitory nature of all emotional feeling, how much should we invest in that emotion? when i get angry at people, i don't stay angry for long; which is why if there's legitimate cause for that anger, i have to capitalize on the window of time i can sustain it for in order to bring things up. i'm tempted to say "well in x amount of time i won't care about this anymore so what's the point" but that's ultimately not constructive. anyway, dr. bolte taylor had a unique perspective on emotional experience because when she suffered her stroke, her left hemisphere lost function and she lived entirely in her right hemisphere, which is the portion of the brain that can only experience the moment--she had no cncept of what happened before and what would happen after, and it was a pleasant experience. so coming out of it, she stressed to us that we should embrace all emotions and feel them deeply and fully, but them let them go. it's not exactly like the buddhist concept (or how i understand the buddhist concept) of not immersing yourself in emotion because you should relinquish control to your feelings as far as it's not destructive, but the key thing is to know its impermanence. 

so if i were to apply that to my life i would say: when i am angry, if it is justifiable, experience all of that anger and take action based upon it but then after constructively addressing it, move the fuck on. 

actually, antonio and i had a nice discussion when we were walking back from the lecture concerning somewhat of the same thing but also involving objectivism. internets, don't hold me to this but objectivism as a personal ethic (and not its mirror political system of libertarianism) is becoming clearer to me and some of its points are not that ludicrous. i've discovered that i hold some of its beliefs with the semantics changed. anyway, objectivism as applied to emotion seems to only say that we should think about the causes of our emotion and if it's petty or ridiculous, try to feel otherwise. i guess that kind of goes against what i just wrote about dr. taylor's perspective. in fact it very definitively does. well, i'll have to think about that more but my instinct is to strike a balance between the two. somehow. 

- we are machines. we are made up of vibrating membranes and electrical wiring but emergent properties make us human beings and that is so, so profoundly fundamentally goddamn awesome that i can't get over it. and okay, maybe i'm an odd one out in that i want to spend at least a portion of my day completely aware and appreciative of that thought and thoughts like it but that's who i am.

- when dr. taylor had her stroke, she literally lost her ability to distinguish herself from the rest of the universe. i know, it sounds new age stone chakra i was once a piece of moss-y and she puts it a lot better in her book/lecture/ted talk but what i took away from it was when she said she always felt positively connected to others and since she also couldn't hold onto experiences she'd forget being angry or anything negative, so she existed in a state of warm connectedness. why can't we exist like that without having suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke? i don't know.

there's more but i have to actually look at the pituitary gland diagram i've been "looking at" for the past fifty minutes although what with how dark it is in ehall (why is that?!!) i can't actually see much anyway. overall, i found her talk a little too fervent for me (she said we were made up of fifty trillion little geniuses i.e. cells) but at the same time there were moments where she said such profound things i felt shivers up my back. it was almost as if she'd had the scientific mirror of a religious experience. in no way am i belittling her actual experience of suffering a terrible stroke and regaining, after fifteen years, incredible function. it took her four years to understand math. she was described as a body in a bed the day after her stroke, when the day before she'd been a harvard neuroscientist. it would be really interesting to compare her personality before and after the stroke and see how much she'd changed, although i'm sure that the simple experience of losing herself would change someone's personality even without actual anatomical damage. that's why neuroscience is so interesting: it's the crux between emotional things like personality, behavior, beliefs, ideals, and the concrete anatomy, physiology, circuitry behind those. 

all in all that was an amazing, thought-provoking lecture. 

i went on a run earlier and now for some reason, i can't stop shivering and feel ill. consequently, had to miss the fh king meeting :( please god i will sacrifice you a lamb if i do not get sick. and by lamb i mean something easily sacrifice-able, such as a piece of cheese. 

today started out gloriously nice. i drank seven cups of tea. in physiology discussion we learned that when your ta talks about action potentials, the best way to not get confused is to stop listening and instead think about how fat your backpack looks. 

not really sure why i'm writing this or what i'm writing. 

no title for this

i'm almost done reading gabriel garcia marquez's book the general in his labyrinth, which is about the death and life of simon bolivar. it's interesting before the book even really begins, actually, because marquez starts writing about simon bolivar as simon bolivar starts dying. i maybe read into these sort of things a little too much because my brain starts analyzing it as:

- beginnings in ends and ends in beginnings, circles, loops

- is someone's end a way to encapsulate everything they were or just a period at the end of their sentence 

-what is the difference between telling the story of someone's "death" versus the story of someone's "life"

anyway it's a gorgeous book but so populated with general jose's and general jose maria's and general jose maria montilla's as well as historical references specific to simon bolivar's quest for south american independence/unification that sometimes it's hard to sink into the plot itself. but i think that might be the point. marquez, who is famous for magical realism, writes with a prose that feels like he's draping gauze over you and weaving you into the sense, if not the complete understanding, of the story. 

what else have i thought lately?

#1 i think jack brought up a really good point about motivation yesterday and how our motivation for what we do is oftentimes more important than what we did. last semester i skipped a lot of class and while it didn't affect my academics, i think it highlights that point: i wasn't motivated to go to class for the right reasons, thus the opportunity cost of going to class was higher than the perceived benefits of not going to class. although immunology which was a flying saucer of a joke and i am satisfied with never having attended it, bar twice. this semester, unless i'm feeling like shit i've started to wake up excited for class (at 8:48 pretty much on the dot the days that i naturally wake up, like some demented cuckoo bird). i love my classes. in neurobio yesterday we actually did a class activity with a lecture of probably at least 300 people that illustrated the principle of hierarchical organization in the visual processing system. you know that moment when suddenly you understand something that was maybe a little hazy at first? BAM my god why did i not see the elephant before it's huge! just like that. and in soil science i learned to truly appreciate the necessity of a water cycle because without water and its characteristic latent heat, we don't have a way to transfer solar energy that falls unevenly across the curved earth. the motivation is to go into class and be constantly astounded. constantly engaging, asking questions, drawing branches off of what the professor presents in class to new ideas or old ideas--that's what learning is. i believe that very often a question is worth much more than an answer. 

think #2 i think any relationship is a really important stretch of time from which to learn lessons for yourself if nothing else and thus there's no such thing as "well if it's not going to go anywhere, it's a waste." maybe that philosophy will change if i am 68 and decrepitly alone (fuck that i'd start a zoo) but for now that is what i believe. i've also learned that the saying, you have to love yourself before anyone can love you, is terribly true. but actually what i meant to write about was this: you have to be completely honest with yourself and the important people you have relationships with. you have to think "goddamn it i'm going to say how i feel about this" (provided, of course, that this is a semi-reasonable thought about something and you are not just pooping out of your mouth) and if it aggravates the person you're talking to, then they're not the ligand to your channel anyway. this is true for all the close relationships that you have--because you have to trust that we self-select for the important things. 

think #3 "temporary does not mean being unimportant or meaningless"

think #4 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/15/angela-zhang-high-school-_n_1207177.html

she found what looks like a cure for cancer! as a high schooler! 

also this: http://blog.tedmed.com/?tag=the-end-of-illness

 and finally, maybe my mother is right: your cat's parasite is controlling your brain !!!! (from The Atlantic, not like, Crackpot Theories From Crackheads, Ltd) 

Conversations with the small one pt 3 (+mother)

regarding pretzel-training--

Connie: It’s like babysitting a baby.

Kelly: Except you can’t spray babies with water

Mama: They had advertisements saying, asian carp, so delicious!

Kelly: Asian people, so delicious!

Kelly: and then instead of giving him the normal badge, he gave him the Elly badge, which was the grape soda one!

Kelly, in a wobbly voice: it was so touching. 

on the road back from minnesota----

Kelly, singing: Gander Mountain, Gander Mountain, Gander Mountain, Gander Mountain etc

Connie: You sound like a monk intoning something.

Kelly: haha! What’s Mama?

Mama (trying to sleep in the car, mumbles sleepily): I’m an alligator. Don’t bother me.

Kelly: haha! What’s Connie?

Connie: I’m a majestic lion. Roar.

Kelly: My favorite smurf was the narrator one. 

Kelly: I EAT MY WORDS!! They taste like beef jerky. 

Connie: So I can’t schedule an eye appointment until after February this year.

Mama: Okay. Do you need more insulation?

Connie: Insulation?

Mama: Yes.

Connie: You mean contacts?

(the building people were at my house)

Kelly: …and then Connie used it

(prancing in the hallway)

Kelly: And then the mice used it.

Connie in room, to self: what the fuck? 

Kelly: But maybe it will be all high tech by then.

Kelly: Because I plan to live a millennia.

Kelly: Are newspapers recyclable?

Connie: Yes

Kelly: GOOD JOB

Kelly: Are newspapers made from recyclable paper?

Connie: Yes

Kelly: GOOD JOB

Kellyisms: 

"his name is mr texas instrument"

"I just looked it up on google maps. I’m a miracle."

"I want to eat a large smelly boot"

"Tall people are awkward. It's because they have to go, where should i put my head?"

"he was so fat he had a beard!"

Experiences in the Transparent Eyeball

I succumbed to that most pleasant of poor decisions (see: drinking three cups of black tea post-dinner. in my defense...I don't have one! I gave in to the lure of new tea! guilty. guiltea...harhar) and so it's 1:15 in the morning but i'm wired. And yarned, I guess, since I've been knitting. It's oddly meditative and feels like a monkish activity that serves the same purpose as prayer beads. Once upon a time I read an article or heard something about how someone (or some sect of someones) found divinity by pouring grains of rice from their hand, scooping them up, and repeating, over and over. Something about repetition provokes the divine or at least the transcendent, perhaps. But checkers or factory workers probably beg to differ--one man's divinity is another's dull purgatory.

Sometime tonight, maybe around now, the snowstorm is supposed to hit and we'll wake up to a world completely changed. Maybe living in the north induces some quality in the people, some belief in the impermanence of things, with each transformation of our surroundings. But since it was such a beautiful day, I went on an amble through Owen Woods. Here is some of the wealth I took away, through sight or touch:

1. A stump, hollow underneath, open on the sides, and arched from the ground like a woody cathedral (It's no Cheeseburger in Paradise but) Something small could worship there.

2. Another stump, rooted solidly and traditionally in the ground but with the inside rotten away into crumbly bark, one step from humus, so there was a hole in the stump that extended down past where it grew into the ground on the outside. Imagine a pot buried up past its base in the dirt, hollow to its base. There was ice inside.

3. I gathered some of the tall golden prairie grass that had been cut down in the fall sometime and peeled away the outer thin layer. The golden grass stalks were thin like straws, but hard and very smooth. They have joints, like bamboo, and I like breaking them into their natural segments. I collected these when I was little, from when I made nests in the prairie grass where I'd play recorder like some out of tune loon. Loony tune. 

5. A piece of tree bark, rough wood on the outside but cut sheer on the inside as if done so by a very small chainsaw. 

6. A black feather. Have you ever stroked a feather and noticed how your fingers preen the individual fibers (?) together by spreading oil from the feather or your hand? You can make different groups but the feather remains smooth and sleek. This feather had fuzzies at the bottom which I think is the down underneath. How cool would it be to molt, instead of shedding hairs. 

7. An aspen sapling, with very smooth white bark. Surrounded by brown trees, straight and alone. 

*Apparently I like smoothness.

8. The whirling chirp of a red-headed woodpecker and his frantic tree hops.

Moving away from the list...there were so many people in the park today. Many of them were older folks. I said hi to an elderly couple--the man hobbling down the slope with a cane--and another old woman who emerged from the prairie with a camera in hand. I feel like older people tend to appreciate/go out into nature more than their younger counterparts. Except for the very young (fig. Overgeneralization Chart ---->) 
Children love nature innocently and selfishly, for what it provides them in the immediate sense: immediate tools (ex: bark to make fairy houses), or fodder for grander imaginations (meltwater rivers and leaf boats). As you get older, you connect with nature in a different way; you love it for what it means, the things it stands for, the emotions it brings. I can imagine being an old man in a park walking through not just grass but memories. 

In fact, there were so many people in the park that I felt like I couldn't escape them to be in the nature. You could hear strident voices carrying: women talking about their exercise habits, a child shrieking, men saying something I didn't catch. This brings me to another thing I was thinking about, and often think about: do you experience nature best in solitude? For me, its kind of a catch-22. In nature, I feel the most of everything when I'm alone (freedom! wide open skies! human silence! beauty!) but like Pandora's Box with one thing that doesn't belong, I also feel like I want to share this cacophony of feelings with people I love, the person I love. Or people I care deeply about and whom I know would find something of worth in the experience too. But if they were there, I couldn't feel the very emotions I'd want to share. Thus, nature is lonely and reaches its full splendor alone. I think I understand Thoreau and his Walden. Or Walden and its Thoreau, if you think we belong to places as much as they belong to us. Did John Muir and Emerson wander alone too? Not that I'm comparing myself to them, merely wondering if this is a universal experience. 

The closest thing to religion for me is being outside. In fact, something interesting happened recently. I was running and my heart was beating too strongly but I was looking up at the dark purple sky and the bright round moon and I quite literally thought "I could die right now and it would be okay, if this were my last sight." Disclaimer: NOT DEPRESSED. It's morbid, I know; but it's also freeing to know there's something not attached to humans or the vagaries of human actions that can be so powerful. 
Anyway, I walked up and down the paths in Owen Woods, breathing in the damp earthy smell you often get in the spring, with all that light pouring from all that sky. Then I thought about the storm forecast for the next day and thought, oh fuck, winter and got sad momentarily. But the thing is, it will be like that again. It will be spring and there will be days when new things are growing, when the air smells damp, when the sky is clear (for some reason, I'm picturing John Nolan Dr. in my mind, along the lakeshore path there and looking out over the lake water towards Monona Terrace). That's a constant, like nothing else in life is constant. There will be beautiful days. Given. Fact. Truth. There will be beautiful days until the end of days, and that may be the most certain guarantor of happiness I know. 

I sat on a bench overlooking the upper grounds of the park for awhile and semi took a nap. It was warm. After a bit, I opened my eyes and waited for something to happen. It really felt like something would--a deer would step out of somewhere, or a turkey, or a dinosaur. But I was still shocked when it did: there was a huge flash of wings in the distance, white wings, and something that looked like an enormous owl burst up into a tree. Not an owl, since it was daytime, but maybe a particularly large cooper's hawk. Then I got up and walked away with a stupid grin on my face.