514. Though I'm Not Religious... There Are "Angels" in My Life....

"Wendy the Angel." An essay that I wrote when I was 17 years old, applying for the Regents Fellowship program at UC Davis.

Just this last Thursday, I believe had encountered another "angel" in my life. It's quite shocking, and I'm not sure if I'm really processing it yet. The question is, how to define an "angel." Especially if you are a secular person, or "graduated" from religion, like myself. I had this conversation with my Question Reality manuscript mentor, Hugh Marsh, over lunch at a very nice hotel called the Upham, in downtown Santa Barbara.

Hugh and I came to some form of agreement that an "angel" is someone who helps you, gives you hope, and transforms you in an anomalous way that you would have not otherwise been transformed or helped otherwise. He stated that given all my talents, I will ultimately one day meet an angel--a moral and financial angel--who will be willing to help foster my artwork and creative projects and let it grow, inside and outside--but I haven't met that angel yet. I was shocked he said that.

Hugh Marsh himself has been an angel in my life. A moral angel, a cheerleader of the long haul. He was the first (and for a while, only) person to encourage me to write my Question Reality book when my main advisor Armand discouraged it, when I was mostly discouraged otherwise. He saw me to the end of it... and now new outgrowths... attempting to translate my old works into novelties that is easy for society to mentally consume.

I have a parade of other angels in my life as well. Wendy the Nurse was my first and most prominent one. The nurse who served as a role model for me when I hit the bottom of bottomlessness of anorexia, and needed to find a way out. And she was a living proof. A case of survival and health. She battled anorexia as a kid. All Wendy had to do was be there, and she didn't have to do much, but just be there, and show herself and her life as a long-term solution to my black hole problem.

I have my academic angels as well. The College of Creative Studies clan, Armand, Bruce, now Barry.... As an anonymous undergrad, Armand rescued me from drowning in the cow herd of university bureaucracy. I felt he pulled me out of this lifeless black hole torrent and set me aside with a few others to go re-investigate the world and run around the university as if it were a play ground, a garden maze, rather than a set of prison doors strapped in red tape rules and regulations. Once you have a few people who believe in you outside of your family, your confidence starts to pick up, and slowly you pick up a new family, a new intellectual, academic family, a family that is somewhat closer to you than your actual family, because in the vast ocean of human flesh, suddenly you are treated like a unique, stand-out person, a story, to someone else's eyes.

I also feel a few folks at the Bren School are like angels. They are giving me a third stab at graduate school, things are going well... or at least I'm surviving. Maybe I can officially call them "angels" after I graduate... but as for now... I'm under the gun. So, they are my authoritative support group, I'd say. I do say I was shocked that Bren provided a one-quarter grant in the Fall of 2009 for me (see Blog 477); that was most certainly angelic! Even some more financial support in the winter, drastically eliminating costs of tuition.... I've been expecting nothing from no one. I have received financial support from National Science Foundation, but it's a massive administration, and I haven't been able to pin down a face, a personality, a singularity of humanity within NSF, to exactly say thanks for the help.

Then just this past Thurday, out of the blue, another angelic sweep knocked my mind out of place. My dentist, Dr. Dart, has been very concerned about the patchwork, piecemealed dental work of my mouth over the years (my mouth is the perfect analogy to fragmentation of law and management of the global oceans, perfect analogy), plus added decay, and he is extremely concerned about the long haul of my mouth, something I do not have a solid grasp on in my mind. But of course, Dr. Dart has been around the block much longer than I have... and he knows and has probably experienced "the long haul." He proposed that I spend some time next quarter in his downtown office to help me with my dental work... but with relief of financial burdens. I'm honestly speechless about such an offer. As my dad says, "I don't know. It sounds too good to be true." And I don't know, I don't understand. The generosity is... overwhelming.

It's like I'm living through a happy moment in a movie, you know? Of course I'm crying. I'm crying because in this world I'm trained to expect nothing from nobody... and then this brutal null hypothesis is rarely overrided by the alternative... I'm shocked that someone else out of the pool of six plus billion singles you out--this time me--and stretches out a hand of help, waves a wand of hope and generosity, sees you as a human, like takes you under your wing as family.

I left the dental office stunned. I didn't understand. I was numb and dizzy. So was Dr. Dart, the dizzy side. I didn't even get a chance to give him a hug of thanks. I didn't know what to say. I just stumbled out into the main office, paid $200 for some fillings, and bumbled to the car as if I just drank a six pack of beer. My mind numb, from the numbness in my mouth, the heavy brick.

Well, so far, it's just an informal verbal agreement. We'll see what happens. We exchanged information. I was trying to figure out what to do. What to do? How to say thanks?

Well, I figured right now the first step, in this act of hope, the first step is to email him a thank you, and draw Dr. Dart a dentistry cartoon, which I did.

This is what I plan to write in my email:

Dear Dr. Dart,
I guess I can say the only state of mind I'm in right now is shellshock. It's been three or more days, and I still am shocked, awed. The least I can do is draw a cartoon of appreciation--see attached! Usually I don't draw toothy smiles on my characters (who keep my sanity through graduate school), so it's amazing for Terra the Biogeek to bust out a full smile! I will be out in the desert March 18 to 24 or so, but I will be on the lookout for your email and plan of action. Down deep I feel like a hypocrite--in some ways, how can I be so well trained to see the long run of landscape change, whether ocean or terrestrial, when I can't even see any form of long run for my own health? Thank you for helping me see the seriousness of the long run. I hope you have a great spring break! (Do you get a spring break, I hope?!) See you soon, Victoria

513. Revisiting Theme of Winter Quarter: Is Life, Space, and Time a Cyclical or a Spiral? A Belljar or an Hourglass? Vic's Crusade to Break Repetition

Oh dear, here we go again... Victoria getting all "deep" on people.... Oh dear, but oh it's what she does.... So, yes, what is the nature of reality? Space and time? Past, present and future?

Is it a circle or a spiral?
Like the Third Law of Dialectics?
Is it a Closed or Open System?
Is it Linear or Non-linear?
Is it a Myth of Sisyphus
Part 1 or Part 2?
B roll or A roll?
Is it endlessly repetitive
or patterns with outgrowths
of novelty and innovation?
As a fisherman says,
"Everyday's different,
and today's no different.
It's a variation of
similar themes."
Couldn't life just be
a nonlinear ferris wheel?

This theme keeps coming back to haunt me, and I'm just trying to let all these random data points of experience in my life just aggregate right here.

Take for example, a conversation with a UC Irvine computer science major, Matt Olsowski (mispelled?). He argued that everything in the universe is to some degree pre-determined given that we have a fixed amount of materials--A FIXED PALATE--at hand as to which the universe was made of. But the question is, do we actually have a finite set of materials? A finite, fixed periodic table of elements with fixed properties? A fixed set of laws of physics? A fixed compendium of organisms on planet Earth? Uh, NO! We are still discovering the elements of the PALATE that would allow humans to paint and repaint an individual and collective reality. Given the unknown and open-endedness of things, pre-destination is not a possible view of life.

I started off my Winter Quarter in lively conversation with Dr. Art Sylvester (Geologist at UC Santa Barbara), and we ended up discussing issues in science communication. He told me that every day he checks out the news headlines and 90-something percent of the time he is not surprised or amused.... The topics are redundant, repetitive.... If people had any form of long-term memory, they would know that the new news is recycling old news. But every once in a while, Dr. Sylvester finds an article that is unexpected and unusual. He showed me some really cool articles on (1) why students in grade school are no longer learning cursive and nice hand writing and (2) an unusual study showing how hospitals that don't overuse antibiotics have less incidents of the staff bacteria when more sanitized hospitals have higher incidents of staff. Which is weird to wrap my head around, as it seems to be some form of arms race between the bacterial and the presence of medicine. Staffilococus is a bacteria that we are always exposed to and the body is most of the time able to keep under complete control, and every once in a while, especially when the patient's immune system is really low, then a bloom of staff may happen in your body, and my friend Ben survived being a month in the hospital because staff actually got into his heart. It's amazing to see he is alive! Shannon and Ben are going to Mammoth this weekend! How fun!

I then told Dr. Sylvester how I received a tour from my friend Oscar Flores of the KEYT newsroom and underground workflow operation and I was personally shocked by two elements (1) the incredible speed and deadline-oriented environment of live broadcasted news and (2) how most of the room was filled with B-roll and a small fragment of the tapes was A-roll. I moaned to Dr. Sylvester, "It's so horrible! Does life mostly consist of repetition, with only slight sprits and slivers of true novelty?" He ended up laughing.... But no, I'm serious. I became very depressed... thinking that this might be the case. At least 2/3 of my life is repetitive and 1/3 is open to novelty (a rough estimate of course).

The circle and the spiral also became a crucial topic in my Environmental History course with Dr. Peter Alagona. In retrospect, I was addicted to the environmental history course. I said in the end of the class, "This course was great because it's nice to find citations for a bunch of things that I already thought about in my own terms. Now I can cite my independently evolved head." It's true that our class had the opportunity to discuss issues that I usually fancied over with a few existentialist buddies over the years, philosophisizing over beer and coffee or something... but to think that now this was front-table discussion in a class? Yes, it's a dream!

The first book we read Something New Under the Sun started with a biblical quote (and this is the second time I am using a quote from the Bible or from a religious source, taken to be applied in secular meaning, the first quote being the Serenity Prayer):

What has been is what will be,
and what is done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
"See, this is new?"
It has been already in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to happen.
(Ecclestiastes 1:9-11)

This quote assumes there's NOTHING new under the sun and that people will endlessly repeat their mistakes because they have forgotten their history (hence, an appreciation for the SHIFTING BASELINE SYNDROME in BIBLICAL TIMES), but the author argued in his book that the novelty of today is the SCALE-MAGNITUDE of HUMAN IMPACT on BIOTIC and ABIOTIC SPHERES of Planet Earth. This quote above also made me think of one of the lyrics of Nick Drake in his song "Things Behind the Sun." At one point, Drake makes us wonder whether it's worth singing or doing anything because everything's already been done, everything's already been said. My father was appalled by the idea--it's depressing, but overall partly TRUE. As I griped to him for two weeks how I was pissed off writing my scholarly paper on marine environmental history because in order to get to my three new ideas I have to recycle 99 other ideas about "what everyone else already said." Which is partly unfulfilling, because now I think scholarly writing is largely a game of he-said-she-said-and-you-have-to-honor-what-they-said-to-join-the-club-unless-the-dude-you-cite-is-dead. Scholarly work is a cross-generational gossip mill, attempting to find your own twist to it.

Here's a segment of Nick Drake's Things Behind the Sun:

Open up the broken cup
Let goodly sin and sunshine in
Yes that's today.
And open wide the hymns you hide
Youn find reknown while people frown
At the things you say
But say what you'll say
About the farmers and the fun
And the things behind the sun
And the people round your head
Who say everything's been said
And the movement in your brain
Send you out into the rain.

In the context of environmental history, upon reading Cronon's 1993 article on the role of narrative in environmental history, the question came up: "What is history? An endless cycle of repetitive themes, or novel variations of existing themes? Novelty feeding off of repetitive, staple, biological material?"

Of course, history is nonlinear with backbones of similar themes. My father at one point claimed that ecology was endlessly spinning in a fashion show of ideas. After reading Worster's Economy of Nature (1994), I had come to realize that the fashion parade is not exactly true. Granted there are cycles of reductionism and synthesis, but each round, new ideas come up and there is a higher resolution of knowledge and understanding, which fades out mythos, religion, into more secular views of the environment.

In the middle of the quarter, I had a civil debate with my roomie Jay about the concept of repetition and novelty in life, presenting the case with my friend Oscar's extensive collection of editorial B-roll. Jay was being a devil's advocate with me, stating most of life was repetitive, after all "humans are creatures of habit," but those repetitive elements are driven forward through innovation. I told Jay I can't work at Del Taco for longer than a month unless I want to kill myself. Repetition can kill me, mentally and physically. I told him after these initial McDonald's hamburger flipping jobs, whether Del Taco or the Ivory Towers, that my whole crusade in life was to avoid, escape, and break all seemingly endless patterns of repetition, always escape and expand the box that I am presently in. Because if I don't, I'm bound to self-destruct.

What is Stravinski's Rite of Spring all about anyway? How does he tell a dramatic story through music? It's all about establishing patterns, in beat and melody, and then breaking them, establishing new patterns, and breaking those... then more patterns, but it's the cumulative making breaking and remaking of patterns that generates the dramatic build up of a Rite of Spring story!

Jay and I elaborated on the job as editorial for a television news crew. I said I couldn't do it because the pace of workflow would not allow me to dig deep to any story in particular, and see the uniqueness of a story, and that life would be one repetitive, homogenous blur of the same headlines that Dr. Art Sylvester was complaining about. Same thing when you have a job where you fly all over the world doing jobs, the whole world may seem like a blur through this repetitive motion. I am trying to prevent that from happening to me. I need to experience life in a state of consciousness. On the other hand, Jay said it would be a challenging job.... Yes, it would be a challenging job for a while... but once the learning curve is over... then... my brain starts to go crazy... because I took control of that rock... and then after that... the rock started to take control over me.... Jay was a good devil's advocate, but I don't buy his point of view. The internal wiring of my mind doesn't allow it. Allow repetition... I already know I'm very prone to OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder.

And so now... I'm in the business of drawing cartoons... the quest of Terra and Buz to always escape repetition, run with themselves by running away from themselves....

I'm sure I'll find more metaphors for this circle-spiral perception....

512. Jokesteriology: Strategies Toward Generating Humor, Laughter (And How Scientists and Other Brainiacs Can Survive the Colbert Show Hot Seat)

My friend Maria recommended me to watch the Malcolm Gladwell TED Talk, in which I just did... and now that I have watched two Malcolm Gladwell talks in two days, I am already starting to see emerging strategies of his narrative. And I must say, Malcolm Gladwell is one of the very FEW people in the world who is able to get away with just being on stage and telling a story without needing any powerpoint or visual aid. His fro, lean physique, combined with his humorously absurd narratives in varying tones of voices can render him not exactly a "comedian" but a "humorous lecturer, humorous enough to compliment entertainment with education... a skill beyond the drabby university lecturer, but not Saturday Night Live, though... I bet Malcolm COULD function in Saturday night live."

Actually, I take that back. He BARELY survived nearly every iteration of the Colbert Show, except for one round I could say he left without bad taste. Malcolm is more methodical, logical, and his arguments are more complex to be rapid-paced, quick-witted humor. His answers are more long-winded and he seems annoyed every time he is interrupted.... It's natural but I think he need to learn how to adapt to the Climate of Colbert. Speaking of last night's talk "failure of experts... failing to adapt to the environment you are in." But then again, Gladwell's pop theories and stories are more complex narratives, layered phenomena behind the surface of things... so I'm not sure if quick-witted humor of the Colbert Show can match his efforts. I sympathize, though I think if Steven Pinker can gracefully survive the Colbert hot seat, then so can Malcolm Gladwell, if he changes his strategies.

And then I started to think about the General Theories of Humor and decided that I have reached a tipping point in my knowledge, that I will presently attempt to classify the Theories and/or Strategies of Jokesteriology, from very elemental to complex. (P.S. I have been doing such an immense amount of literature review the last three weeks, though it was on marine environmental history, and NOT on Theories of Saturday Night Live, I bet there are a few thousand books on Joksteriology, and I decided not to look them up. I reconciled to figure out how my mind is synthesizing various disparate experiences in my own life, before I am forced by the academic intellectual firing squad to find other people's work and cite them because their ideas are compatible with my own personal logic structures... such is the cycle... independent synthesis... find references retroactively as a necessary academic pill...).

First of all, laughter or humor or amusement is generated when one element is unexpectedly associated with another element, or suites of elements, and that this unexpected association does not directly harm you (hence you be the butt of a joke, or experiencing a very devastating, ironic event). Most humor strategies end up being very "light" (benign) whereas some other humor strategies are much more intense, because emergent humor comes from telling the truth, rather than distorting the truth. Humor comes from a certain degree of "lying" or distortion from reality, or reality unexpectingly associating to construct a realistic distortion of unexpectedness.

0. Visual humor: contorted bodies, contorted and silly faces. Extremely gestureful. Unusual imagery-backdrop-props. (Jimmy Carrey and Colbert Show as classic examples)

1. Linguistic humor: simple play on words. Words with double meaning. Words said in the same way but different spelling or different meanings. Words used out of context. Inventing new words that you can understand the meaning based on context. (Jules sometimes)

2. The Usual Hollywood Tee-Hee 15-year-old-boy Jokes: Sexual body parts. Burping, farting, peeing, pooping. Anything otherwise is standard socially embarrassing in American culture, at least. (A good chunk of standup comedy, Ali G)

3. The Usual Hollywood Like-Whatever 15-year-old-girl Gossil Jokes, Which Can End Up Being Distortion of Knowledge Through the Telephone Game Mixup: He said, she said. He looks like that. She looks like this. He did that. She did this. (Chick Flick Movies) (Jay Leno and other your-nightly-news-in-humor-show embody rules 2 and 3).

4. Street-Smart Wise-Guy Asking Idiotic Questions to "Intelligent" Yet Highly Specialized, Well-Paid Experts, Demonstrating How Idiotic and Unwise Many Experts Actually Are. (Most prominent in the Ali G show).

5. Fast-paced Interruptive, Out-of-Place and Often-times Counterintuitive Insanity aka The HOT SEAT. Rapid-firing ADHD countering and/or complimenting interrupting everything that you say, attempting to put the person out of place of their comfort zones or arguments, unexpected persepectives. Placing interviewees in the "hot seat." Sell yourself in 10 second or less or then I will interrupt you with an off-the-wall (1) complimenting re-interation of what the interviewer just said (2) self-referential complimenting, or associating with a current news affair (3) fast-paced countering-disagreeing. Colbert will inevitably interrupt you after 10 seconds of straight talking just to maintain conversation and not a monologue. It keeps the show and footage and facial expressions very lively and interesting and very fast paced, but makes the interviewee oftentimes uncomfortable and awkward... except Steven Pinker! Ira Flatow (NPR's Science Friday) in humor is a D and Colbert in humor is an A+ though they do have common guests on their shows. Ira Flatow's hosting is more comprehensible on first shot, but not necessarily memorable... but Colbert is more memorable, though incomprehensible, which may increase comprehensibility in the longer term. Science has a lot to learn from Colbert. Colbert is a genius, not only he is a Faux Republican, he is a Faux Religious Case and Counter-any-Science-Scholar-Argument just for kicks and giggles!

6. Telling the Truth in Vast Space and Time, Revealing Irony, Unexpectedness, Counter-intuitiveness in reality, simply because in cross-generational phenomenon and people forget... and don't connect the dots. And such is the case for human history and environmental history... and Biologically Incorrect. It's humor you have to dig out from the tortures of academia. Invention of true, novel humor. There should be a Joksteriology Department, I do say. Example or irony and contraction that may be told humorously... I just spoke with Peter. You invent laws for predator control. Then too many predators are killed to a point of endangered species. Then you let the predators proliferate, and then the predators become out of control, then predators attack other endangered species. Predator control programs in contradiction with the endangered species act. Contradictory laws. Though science and governance somewhat co-evolve, they seem to be often times out of step with each other. Environmental history = emergent humor in human behavior. I see humor in human behavior all the time since I learned about myself through the eyes of non-human organisms. My knowledge is biologically rooted, projecting into human behavior. This humor is very slow to accumulate, sadly. Complex stories are not quick fixes to acquire and craft.

Just watched a Colbert Report series with Malcolm Gladwell over time. His style of writing is exploratory, an adventure in ideas, emerging trends in anecdotal, sometimes quirky stories (TED X Prize, the story of the dude who diversified mass-produced spaghetti sauce in Prego and Ragu). Malcolm's goal is similar to my own: extracting esoteric ideas from the university and translating them into fun adventures for everyone to engage. Encouraging people to examine their worlds, and the world beyond their own immediate worlds. He's not interested in converting people, more so interested in my similar pursuits "if to laugh, then to think." Dude, he is so flipping left handed. His major pop theories are (1) the tipping point, thresholds in nonlinear systems, whether social or natural (2) blink, thinking without thinking, or the notion of thinking with various different layers, whether your guts, your gonads, your heart and your head, but some layers are conscious to certain people and unconscious to others, some people are not in tune with their emotional, visceral, or sexual brains (for example, Colbert lays everything out on the table, what you see is what you get "I don't even dream!"), education and experience versus making decisions with gut instincts (e.g. with how food industries wanted to seek universals on the bell curve rather than diversity of taste preferences of Prego, hybridizing synthesis and diversity, it's disgusting because economic efficiency demands you produce the same product, imagine you went to a buffet that had all the same food in every section of the buffet, what's the point? corporate SOBs to even think that way! e.g. open niche spaces that are visceral, not rational) (3) outliers, how people are anomalies, and how they got to be anomalies were highly circumstantial e.g. Bill Gates in 1969 had access to a computer portal in middle school, very lucky to have access at such an early age, e.g. Albert Einstein born in an African tribe probably would have not discovered the theories of relativity (4) an article coming out on how the IQ test does not measure intelligence but measures how well you take the test. Well, ALL tests are like that. People used to classify items based on utility (potato with knife) when now people classify based on similarity in shape, size, structure, phylogenetic tree characteristics, origins rather than utility). That demonstrates a different value system regime, not right or wrong, intelligence from idiot.

Just watched Richard Dawkins and Colbert, Steven Pinker and Colbert. Steven Pinker was SLICK. He did the best out of all the people I watched, outperformed Gladwell and Dawkins. He's more adaptive and knows how to boil things down to simple ideas in short phrases. Example. "Explain the brain in five or less words." "Neurons fire in patterns." Patterned firing --> ideas --> thoughts --> actions, etcetera. I'm impressed. Colbert made an insult "pompous Harvard professor" at the beginning, but Pinker rolled that off. Colbert at one point had a 1.5 second pause that left him in this stump that I had never seen him in. Pinker won.... Colbert does the best when it's easy to COUNTER the guest speaker. For Dawkins, it's God. Dawkins failed miserably stating that "natural selection" was a purpose. Even the process of natural selection as a SIEVE is an ACCIDENT that happens to construct order... RETROSPECTIVELY. Overall, Dawkins is trying to convert people by insulting the people he's trying to convert: religious folk. For Malcolm Gladwell, Colbert was a bit more interruptive to Gladwell's methodical thinking. With Pinker, Colbert was more HUMOROUSLY COMPLIMENTARY. Cool experiments performing magic tricks with kids... including Colbert himself. If Colbert knew a little more about evolutionary psychology, assuming that the human mind is more hardwired than softwired, I bet Colbert would have been a better Steven Pinker counter-puncher.

511. Full Blown Song Entitled "Old Coat" Featuring Metaphorical Landscapes as Clothes, Music Video Planned

You can find the PDF of "Old Coat" at http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/oldcoat1.pdf.

I invented the song after indulging "Nature's Metropolis" by Dr. William Cronon (a new academic idol I have, may I add), post being exposed to "G" music video idol, and while driving down to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Conference down in San Diego. It's a very very simple song with a profound metaphor: wearing landscapes as you are wearing various forms of clothing. This metaphor can be extended... I mean most people's clothing wardrobes are quite extensive, but here I focused on an old coat (suit and tie and collar), a thin-worn t-shirt, and nakedness. The "old coat" embodies the notion of being in this formalized-anonymous-suit-and-tie city environment, worn out and disconnected from the landscape and oneself. The "t-shirt" was directly inspired by Cronon's accounts for connections and increasing disconnect between Chicago and its surrounding "hinterlands" that made the Chicago become what it became. There was a level of expansion and domination of Chicago, and then there were negative repercussions of this expansive, resource-draining behavior, and then some behavior modifications became apparent in order to better "manage" or "manicure" Chicago and its surrounding countryside... so, that's why though the t-shirt is highly used and abused, there is still some need to keep it in once piece due to its excessive utility. And of course, the last stanza is about the desire to escape all forms of humanity into more "naked lands" like the ocean (San Diego), and the desert (Bahia de Los Angeles).

The odd part about this song is I hear the music and I see the music video, and it's just wildly exciting to me. The music is voice, chorus, hand-clapping, best-case scenario drum kit, piano, pipe dream would be electric guitar (a la Chris Lods). But since I am limited in resources, I will have to rely on my own body as an instrument as much as possible. The voice is most certaintly some arpeggiating and very jazzy sounding. It's a piece of music that is up-beat and can most definitely be jogged to... it's so important for me to be able to jog (and dance to) the music I create. No point in making music otherwise.... I'm emotionally utilitarian, you see.

As for the music video, if I had special effects, I would use overlay of imagery on a white coat and white t-shirt, but I don't have that, so I will have to do cheap-o things, like simple box metaphorical overlays with landscapes, clothes, and the mind. The image sequences are not completely flushed out, but I plan on capitalizing the imagery to our trip to Baja California over spring break. Some random thoughts: Jules and I walking opposite directions brick wall, Jules walking across the camera in three or four different environments, in the same kind of similar clothes or myself, first part city scenes, old coat, suit and tie, excessive collar, the collar becomes a dog collar with spikes, choking around the neck, the office cubicle, the countryside would be in Baja California, some crops, Jules interacting with people, there could be imagery (could be shadowed) of swaying like a chimpanzee-gorilla, simultaneously clapping hands, stomping feet to the beats of the music, could also be Jules garden, there can be some time lapse in the city, time lapse a day in the garden... and then the bare naked land, Jules laying out in the desert, by the cactus, and Jules out on the boat in the middle of the ocean, doing his fishing, Jules crossing his fingers antagonizing Point Loma at a distance, scuffing it away. The ending is us driving and walking, in these different landscapes, walking stripping, taking off our clothes and being barren as with the barren land. Some slapstick, clapping, little kids playing So, just some sketch ideas... for now.... More ideas here to come. The most important thing is to identify the visual layers: (1) sterile environment, us trying on and taking off the different types of clothes, close ups and at a distance (2) the sterile, controlled environment, swaying around like apes, clapping and stomping (3) the different types of environments (a) cityscapes, urban, people from corporate buildings (b) suburban, the garden, the boat-dock, crops ag-land (c) naked land, out in the ocean, out in the desert in the middle of nowhere (4) any form of gaps can be simple lines, cartoon linear overlay.

508. "Climate" The Lacuna of My Life.... Learning Through Cartoons ::: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny!

I have learned a lot of very cool stuff over the years... but one thing my father is a bit disgruntled about is that I'm pathetic with weather and climate. Well... I think it's partly my laziness because... well, my dad knows so much about climate I just ask him stuff all the time and he knows everything... and now I have all these fishermen buddies and they know a LOT about climate simply because it's a matter of choosing to go to work or not the next day, and planning ahead for the week (they have a very detailed regional climactic knowledge whereas my dad is a bit more broad-scale in his analyses, you need BOTH scales though).... So, I'm surrounded by weather nuts, terrestrial and marine... and I myself am The Climate Patheticist. Until... now... through the venues of my CARTOONS!

I started grasping some sense of climate by learning the HISTORY of climate. I started realizing that learning science makes a LOT more sense to me when I learn it through the LENS OF HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT. Not only in biology, but in terms of the history of accumulated human knowledge the following goes: ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY.

Back to cartoons, my father had been wanting me to make a cartoon for a while about the history of climate. But the current cartoon had several holes in time. We settled for this timeline.
The narrative thread through the cartoon was "If Terra and Buz saw the same cloud every single time, how would they perceive the cloud given the scientific state of understanding in a given time period?" This sort of narrative thread could be used multiple times in reconstructing a history of perception / paradigm shifts in whatever fields... ranging from geology to ecology to medicine, like for example, Terra and Buz enter the doctors office due to some illness Terra had and different points in time, the doctor would respond differently in diagnosis and treatment.

1777. If someone saw a cloud, they would think about lightning and electricity. (Benjamin Franklin discovery of electricity).

1867. If someone saw a cloud, they would think of tradewinds. (My father recommended drawing Terra and Buz on a boat, common knowledge of British sailors, Columbus, transportation, old world to new world in low latitudes relied on trade winds, new world to old world in upper latitudes relied on westerlies) (Most people's knowledge was very localized, and there was no instant communication across distant regions. Ever since the invention of the telegraph and rapid communication of ideas, then observations from disparate regions were beginning to associate. Cross-scale-connecting the dots from local to regional to national, gaining a collective picture from multiple disparate localized observations, "collective perception of climate") (connecting the dots in space)

1897. If someone saw a cloud, they would maybe think of water vapor. (Nuts and bolts)

1907. If someone saw a cloud, they might associate it with cyclones (Swedish research, Swedish folk had lots of incentive to study storms especially since they were bombarded with stormy weather all the time)

1957. If someone saw a cloud, they would maybe think of the jetstream. (During World War II, people from all over the world started to position weather balloons all over the place, before people's perception of weather was GROUND weather (SURFACE PATTERNS) and not UPPER ELEVATION DYNAMICS, ground weather was very localized but upper elevation dynamics, pressure, temperature, humidity provided clues to broader-scale, global weather patterns) (connecting the dots in space)

1970s. Including satellite imagery, didn't drastically enhance understanding, but provided better imagery of broader-scale patterns.

1977. If someone saw a cloud, they would think of global cooling. Milankovitch cycles and such, and Paul Ehrlich's loud mouth, population bomb etcetera blah blah blah.

1997. If someone saw a cloud, they would think of El Nino. (When El Nino became popular culture, though my father said that he met the scientist who worked on El Nino cycles back in the 1950s and 1960s; the concept had been around for a while, this is a time in which scientists started discovering annual and multi-year cycles, for example the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Northern Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), besides annual El Ninos and La Ninas) (connecting the dots in time)

2007. If someone saw a cloud, they would think of Global Warming. (Post Al-Gore-Inconvenient-Truth film, which I critiqued the shxt out of that film, every single flippin' second of it, funny, though I critiqued the film... I still don't know jack shxt about climate).

2010. If someone saw a cloud, they would probably imitate a Global Warming Joke from last night's Jay Leno show. They would also blame ("attribute") their melted ice scream, excessive nose boogers, flat tire, and weight gain to global warming. Ultimate Blame-All. Blame-a-cea!

2010. Now I understand why my father can't stand modern "incomplete models" of climate, which are very short-sighted. There needs to be more roleplay and factoring in of paleo-climate (ice cores and other proxy data), the role of the geologic record in climate, and the coupling of climate with ocean dynamics. This is the next frontier.

I am 3 years old (28), and this is the first time I could say that my "cognitive map" of climate and history of climate has expanded... since... perhaps the Al Gore paper I wrote back in 2007. Sad situation, I do say. My being the Climate Idiot around very well-versed Climaticists (ha ha) is encouraging me to expand my knowledge....

NOTE: DIFFERENTIAL HISTORY TIME SINCE SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY VERSUS TIME SINCE CONCEPT BECOMES POPULAR CULTURE OR "MEDIA HYPED," LINGO, FOR EXAMPLE... EL NINO CONCEPTS EXISTED BACK IN 1950S, BECAME POPULAR CULTURE OR MEDIA LINGO IN 1990S

506. Scarring Childhood Memory Department... A Sketch.... Maybe a Poem Someday: The Greatest Love is the Greatest Sting (Live Twice!)

Today is the first day of mental recuperation from about a week... no... about a month of self-exploration of internal landscapes... in order to truly figure out where I was at before my intellectual-life-or-death-committee-meeting (which ended up being not that bad after all... more later!).

I found myself waking up to a horrible nightmare I had around 7am this morning... pertaining to my mother who messed up my room... as she did when I was around 11-12 year old, when me and my sister were bad girls... for whatever reasons.... I also found my mother upset because I was taking out student loans... that's where the argument laid... nevertheless, modern problems were overlaid with traumatic childhood experiences.

I called my mother around 9am at work and said, "I had a bad dream and it was about you messing my room when I was a child. And I wanted to say I love you because hey, I can laugh this off, and many other children were physically beaten, but you were very good at indirect psychological drama. So, thanks." My mother told me that when she was a teenager, she was slapped by her mother for no apparent reason--she was trying to help her mother, but her mother misinterpreted as back-stabbing of sorts--and my mother was permanently scarred, so when she was angry and frustrated with me and my sister, she really tried very hard to minimize her impact on us. Hence the Psychological Trauma Department of Mother-Hurricane's-Children's-Room! So, when I sing, "It takes one rock to make me, one rock to make me, one rock to take me, far far away. The very rock that holds me, can be the rock that harms me, the very rock that leads me, back on my way," this song is devoted to my mother primarily, and a couple of other individuals in my life who have been the same. The greatest, most visceral, instinctive love of mother and child... can also and ultimately be the greatest sting.

I had a conversation with a fisherman about subliminal childhood memories... and we had discussed childhood abuse.... Why? Well, because apparently he was at this shopping mall and there was this little girl who was shrieking and screaming and yelping so loud that you could hear her across a parking lot the size of 5-6 football fields (it's funny how the "football field" is the standard metaphorical SI unit of scale for Joe American). Her bawling wailed across the entirety of IKEA. That child was a mess-up, a failed biological art project. The mother had no control over the kid. The fisherman suggested a good smack for reinforcement. It was so loud, I would probably suggest the same. Duct tape as well? One way or another, that child was a nuisance to about 10,000 people at a shopping mall all at once. That kid was no good news to society... and the sad thing is that she was only 4 year old.

Many children have to deal with physical beatings, and that leaves detrimental, permanent scars for life. I told him about what my mother did to me and my sister. I only remember my mom spanking my sister once in our entire childhood (I think I was around 4 or 5 year old)... not much to speak of.... I remember my father whippin' my face once at a tennis tournament when I was ten years old... I wouldn't stop crying... but I don't blame him... my mother was this fanatic tennis mother who created this entire familial tension such that all of our weekends for about 4 years were filled with tennis tournaments, subliminal arguments, and overt family fights.

One of the most horrifying memories was the early morning (winter-time, it was dark outside) argument behind closed doors between my mother and father. I was outside the door in the dark hallway, crying, listening as to what was happening inside. My father had the most threatening tone-of-voice I had ever heard in my life, and my mother was shrieking. I heard bangs and shoves... I felt so helpless.

The worst part is that they were arguing over me. That's the very worst part. I was preparing for some STUPID exam on World History for my second grade class with 6'4" Ms. Christoffers and history was something I wasn't very good at remembering the facts, and so I had written in tiny words on my hand the answers to the questions (which actually helped me remember what I was supposed to learn!), and so my mother was testing me during breakfast, and she found out that I had written the answers on my hand... and she started excessively scolding me for cheating... it was so excessive that it became abusive and that's when my father intervened... and then the whole shebang of the dark hallway-behind-closed-doors-drama. I went to school that day partly in tears, and so my surprise my mother came to visit me around 1pm in the afternoon and she gave me a very big hug and said sorry, sorry, sorry. I was worried about my mother and father staying together... and of course they stayed together... but man... the beauty of emotions are that sometimes they just blow up out of no-where... accumulated suppression... but after a while... the emotions ware off.... about three days for me.... They say "wounds" heal with time... I do agree.... but there are permanent scars in memory.... This was one of my most vivid childhood memories... and it was negative.... The positive ones, I'm sure I'm full of those... but thankfully my "Collecting Bin of Negative Childhood Memories" is very small, finite, and quite containable....

I don't know how I got into this whole Obama-America-Helpless-Mother-Screaming-Child-metaphor, but here it goes....

I'm writing this and come to understand how stressful it is to raise a child... and I honestly don't know what people are thinking when they choose to have a kid in such a society as today. Raising a kid or running the United States of America? The problems of governance are equally as bad. I feel so horrible for Obama. I think the system right now is so massive and so inert that Obama is more so a puppet to the system, than a player. Just like that mother and that screaming child. America is the screaming child, and Obama is the helpless mother who can't rear or control the child, no matter how hard he tries. Obama didn't create the problems.... He inherited them. That screaming child embodies the rapid inheritance of a suite of American problems. The cart is running the horse... the horse has no control of the cart. I am not an anarchist, but I am a disastrologist. I am a perpetrator of the Phoenix; it's stage right now is that it needs to collapse into ashes. I feel that renewal in this global system will come bottom up, through disaster. Disaster speaks louder than dollar bills (thankfully the Supreme Court doesn't have to write that in the laws). It's just a matter of when, where, and how. Earthquakes and volcanoes are my friends... even though they may have the risk of taking my life... they will be good for society. Enough of my Jesxs Chrxst-kill-myself-save-society mentality.... It's not very evolutionarily... common.

Back on topic here... so my mother was the Master of Indirect Psychological Trauma. She didn't destroy and bruise our physical bodies, but she did destroy our "bowers," hence that being our "array of toys and clothes and tools" in our rooms. If my sister and I were bad for some reason... like for example, I was 12-years-old, I delt with my "friends" Marie and Jyoti who were making fun of me because I was probably the only person in class being nice (respectful) to this geeky dude with excessively huge glasses named "Andrew Wannemaker" in my middle school Algebra 2 math class. I came home crying to my mother, who told me to get a life and focus on "real" problems, which was superb advice, but at the same time, I was being abused by my miscro-cosmal suite of "friends," and so through the mechanism of psychological displacement, I would have these subliminal agendas around the household, like "dump unwanted toys in my sister's room without her knowing" and "putting water in the salt shaker to make all the salt sticky-stuck." And I would call my sister bad names for no reason (poor Jen Jen, she was such a cute wittle girl I wished I could have recognized what a cute little kid she was, I wouldn't have been so mean to her, I might devote a cartoon to Jen Jen to make up for all of my misbehaviors). So, if my mother was fed up with me or my sister, she would go into our rooms and be "Madame Hurricane:" she would tear a part our rooms, throw around everything until nearly ever element of the room was misplaced, and then she would command us, as we watched her devastation in horror, to clean up our rooms that day... which was a multi-hour ordeal. For one stretch of time, my mother threatened us that she would rip up some of our dolls or stuffed animals in to pieces. And then one time she did. She ripped my sister's Rosa Doll in two, and all this cottonish polyester fell our of the middle, and both of us were shrieking horrified, because our stuffed animals were our lives.... We would spend hours upon hours animating these stuff-teed animals and create fantasy worlds in our minds about how they interacted with each other... and for one of them to be ripped in two and see her insides? What was polyester to everyone else was our soulful, emotional blood and guts spewing on the floor.... I think after that super-angry moment, my mother was even appalled with herself, just as we were in shell-shock... talk about childhood shock doctrine. That afternoon my mother took the Rosa Doll and sewed her up very good, and said sorry to me and Jenny, and Rosa was back in business in our self-constructed stuffed-animal-ecosystem. I kind of wished real-life surgery were that simple, one day you get split in two by an act of violence, and then you get sewed up back together again... maybe grafting for plants... but not us megacorporate multicellular organisms of bloody, intricate interdependence of our bodily ecosystems.

The worst case situation of my mother tearing up our rooms is when I evolved such a lowly sense of self-worth that I ended up ripping all of my 6-year accumulation of awards and accomplishements in school (not to mention stamps and smelly-stickers of approval), from kindergarten to 5th grade, all in a few minutes... and now it's recycled, dispersed as whatever materials somewhere and everywhere in the world.... Three days later my mother had been very nice to me and my fickle confidence restored. I was sad that my trash can was emptied... I regretted that I ripped up my awards, and I wished I had kept them to this day... not because they were awards... but because they were memories of school, accumulated 6 years destroyed in 3 minutes....

More evidence of my mother being a master of psychological trauma.... She was very, very good at making me (and my sister, but more so me) feel guilty into continuing to play tennis even though I was philosophically resisting the game from the very start (the first time I ever played a tournament at age 9, I was crying non-stop for 1.5 hours; I felt bad for winning, I felt bad for losing, I am a win-win person and not a win-lose person, I had no incentive to beat people). My mother would threaten us not to going fun places... and she thought that getting sponsorships and tickets to Disneyland was going to convince us to perform... I think not. She threatened us to quitting but never gave us any other options... like volleyball or soccer or track or swimming or whatever sport.... Tunneling us into tennis without providing options. It was a classic situation in which my mother was trying to live her dreams through her puppet children. I sometimes call my mother the Stern Dictator of the Household (the need for regimentality) and my father the Gentle Advisor... he exposed me and my sister to stuff and made everything fun. He gave us options but no pressure to go one direction or another. He expected us to skin our knees and learn from our mistakes, but he would always be there for a hug and a wiping of tears. Obviously this characterization of my parents is different: my mother no longer holds this "Dictatorship" role, more so now a Gentle Advisor as well... but nevertheless the psychological turmoil was intense, and placed my mind in a Box of Good Child Obedience.

The external trauma of the household toned down toward the end of high school when around 16 I started to subconsciously impose trauma on myself during my studies... throwing away food... not eating... excessive OCD-type behaviors with exercising in my room... banging my head against the wall... on the floor.... Inside it was that horrible cannibalistic collectively-induced manslaughter when people passed through the Event Horizon (remember that film?). That was my interior for a while... suppressed interior for a while... only revealed ONCE through my teenage years... in art class... as "The Mask." (refer to Blogs "The Mask" and key words "Live Twice").

Well, what can I say? This is great material for an eventual poem. Woohoo! I had started a poem a while ago entitled "Scars to the Mind" referring to these past childhood memories... but somehow this bad dream I had this morning made this narrative thread of childhood traumas come to full life in emotional landscapes. I might as well capture it as it's fresh. I'm lucky to say that my childhood was benign, and nearly all negativity quarantined. Like I mentioned before, I'm called my mother to say "I love you, and thank you for only messing up my room, because I'm only laughing now."

505. Beginning of a New Poem / Song... Finding All These Metaphors for My Buried Freudian Anorexic Past....

The last week I have been doing some Freudian [deep] mental scrubbing, coming to realize that I am re-connecting my shoved-back past, connecting dots in new ways... continuing the Anorexic Academic theme here from Blog 229... Santa Barbara Writer's Conference.... I'm not sure whether to call this song/poem "Ghost" because I already have another Ghost poem dealing with broader issues in space and time. I am remembering how this one memoirist (some dude who likes to write about his gay life and his dog in New York, of course) said one sage piece of advice for sure... "As you keep living the present, your relationship with the past constantly changes, shifts." I am endlessly a shifting baseline syndrome. *Sigh.*

underneath these frothe layers,
false prestige of academics,
lays a wild vicious creature,
desperate and anorexic.

underneath these stable layers
of an hourglass dynamic,
lurks the darkness of a belljar [chaos]
caving in to a walking stick.

oh, somehow, second chance in mind
gave new shell to a decayed life--

ghost.

as a ghost.

oooh.oooh.oooh.

[exist as]
as a ghost,
could not let go
of her demons ago,
could not escape,
northern lights
to create
another day
in her way-
coming her way,
so she haunts
like a ghost,
haunting
her very world,
universe of
her self,
like a ghost,
second chance
as a ghost,
second life
second chance,
as a ghost,
living ghost...
creating a ghost...
haunting a ghost...

like a ghost--

is her ailment
mental or enviro-
mental, interactive
both.
oooh.oooh.oooh, both.
oooh.oooh.oooh, both.

504. Poem / Song Just Made Up in the Car "Contingency: Stokastika"

I had always envisioned to make some kind of epic funky geek song... and maybe this is it. For the last month, I have been consciously desiring to write some simple poem entitled "Contingency," and while I was driving to Ventura this evening, some melodies happened to go along with the words! And the evolution of this ditty kept me awake on the drive, though I was extremely exhausted. Lucky me sometimes music can pour out like that. I'll write out the lyrics, and head back to work. This Monday is my First Academic Judgment Day, and I really feel like I am facing some form of Philosophical Death or Suicide of sorts. Won't write anymore here... I may get "depressed".... (I have an early "primordial" poem entitled "Stokastika" I may eventually include here, largely defining the properties of space and time, but then again... it's very simple, overly simple, early-early-early-single-celled-organism-simple kind of poem... though it ends with the question... "What will you do when you're in the flow?")

Contingency:
Stokastika

An' so they say
Great dis-coveries
Occur sim-ply
By Cha-a-a-ance.

But this strange game
Of chance seems to
Favor those few
Prepared Mi-i-i-inds.

Oh dear lady,
It was merely
By chance you had a
Prepared Mi-i-i-ind.

Oh,
Don't (Do) tell me--
Ima con-tingency.
A proba-bility,
Undis-orderly
Retrospect-ive-ly
A blank slate-before me
An' somewhere-inside me
An' somehow-outside me
Lays a dis-covery
A great dis-covery
Lays a dis-covery
A great dis-covery--

Stoka-stika.
AStoka-stika.
Stoka-stika.
AStoka-stika.
[Background
Chants]
now... now... now... now
... now... now... now... now...