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.