Biologically Incorrect

I'm Alive!

2012-05-11T18:51:00.000-07:00

Hi there y'all on cyberspace!

The last week I got 5 emails from people wondering if I was still alive. Just to let you know... I'm still alive. I'm doing O-K. I don't want to think too much about it, but at least I'm not panicking at this moment.

Thanks for caring. You wonder sometimes.... I miss you all, and I hope one day I can come out of a curled ball.

546. Biologically Incorrect REVAMPING!

2011-08-26T15:22:00.001-07:00

Dear Family and Friends and Acquaintances and Kind Strangers who are so gracious to lend an ear to such an eccentric Homo sapiens as myself:::

As you can see, I have not posted anything since the beginning of 2011.... There are many reasons why: (1) I went on leave of absence (2) due to mental and physical health issues and (3) I'm trying to regain traction into self awareness and self-inquiry of my potential place and relationship with this universe (which may or may not exist, and all may be a construction in my mind) (4) while simultaneously meditating on how to drastically revamp and re-organize and tremendously improve this website (5) while imagining how I will be designing a Biologically Incorrect webcomic environmental media project--in which comics, a combination of the visual language and written word, can be used to explore socio-ecological systems (humans and their environments... and all the problems that humans love to create in relations to their environments)... (6) all in the attempts to try to lead a very present and diverse, yet quiet, off-line life, such that I can have a solid game plan when I return to being plugged into the on-line World's Wild Web and hopefully the University Universe itself, (7) but I am still having problems with anxiety and panic attacks, (8) but I have learned I don't deserve to suffer like this, so... (9) if you give me a paper and a pencil and tell me to draw a cartoon, you generally tend to put my mind in a happy place... (10) so the best possible thing I can do right now is just stay in this happy place until I'm ready to face the cold, harsh wilderness that's just a hairline underneath my nose. Scary, huh?

So, I hope you all out there can be patient and I hope one day to be able to create something that you all may be proud of and excited about, and especially to think that I have made one person in this universe laugh (ha!)--perhaps you may even more proud of than myself :-). Thanks everyone in my life for supporting me... emotionally, mentally, and viscerally. It really sucks to turn 20 10; life's re-assessment is not so hot.

543. Uh-oh, Vic's Brain Dumping::: Philosophisizing on My Return to Blogging, Autonomous and On Leave of Absence

2011-01-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

I cannot believe that I have reached this point. This blog is the first blog I have written in ... perhaps 7 months. It is frightening (and traumatizing) to think about what has happened these past 7 months, but I can say that... this is the first blog I am writing on "leave of absence" from the Bren School at UCSB, so perhaps I may be writing with some new layers of consciousness, or maybe with some new sense of freedom--I am writing, and this is my voice, in absence of the 800 pound gorilla of academia clenching to my back. I am temporarily on break from the school that studies the "environ-mental" and now I have to engage in self-medicating my "mental."

It is also funny though, in these last few months of leave of absence, I have been approached by five or so people in my social sphere, and they were all wondering how I was because I was no longer writing any blogs. They encouraged me to continue writing, and they very much enjoyed my entries (strange! I know I am Victoria Anonymous, someone out in the world of 7 billion people wanting to read my blog! Ha ha ha). Perhaps my writing blogs is being enjoyed by friends and family who equally enjoy my *live* company--oh, there's that girl who endlessly rambles on about funny things, all the way from photographic composition to fisheries adventures to the California state budget to school committee drama to her dental work to the strange dream she had last night to the next cartoon she wants to draw. One way or another, I feel thankful that these individuals approached me and stated that they appreciated my blogs, and hope that I resume my "streams of consciousness." (I just learned a few days ago that "stream of consciousness" types of writing are actually acceptable in the literary world--consider Ulysses and The Invisible Man and even kind of All the Pretty Horses [at least the setting descriptions)]. I suppose this whole return to blogging is a re-focusing process, as well as a confidence problem... or also an artistic dilemma.

The more and more I have learned about the cartoon world and comics industry, the more I have come to realize that the sole expression of the Self through words placed in a linear-line-by-line format on a page, page after page after page... is very limited. Everyone uses words all the time, and so the combination of words placed line by line on a page now apppears to me to be equally cliche. I am starting to no longer view language, solely written stories, as art forms, but merely text messages or emails that anyone can write to anyone else (I told my advisor Oran that in this world where everyone text messages, from 5-year-olds to 80-year-olds, anyone on the street thinks they can become the next great writer... so I myself have given up on the idea of being a "writer" or one morally and financially supported by society, because practically everyone now is in the "competition pool" for this position (and the competition pool is so fierce that even people PAY literary agents to read their writing or pitch a story for merely a few minutes! And how could a literary agent have any sense of authority or command of such a spectrum of fields related to the environment?! I am in serious doubt of the sense of authority and expertism that literary agents portray, given their position of power in determining who becomes the "next great writer" and who doesn't), and plus when someone says they are a "writer" I laugh and say, "You just told me that you let your mind breathe; I would be disturbed if you didn't write otherwise").

I am starting to realize that the more combinatory the story becomes--e.g. combining words with pictures with music, etc, in which these elements occur in simultaneity, the more original, the more unique the artistic piece can become. And also, increasing combinations in complex simultaneity can eliminate a vast majority of the "writers" and now the pool of "talented multi-media storytellers" is actually, very small. So now, I no longer consider my written language as an attempt toward art, but merely a form of self-therapy, behavioral therapy, so that I can help understand myself, my thoughts... so that I can engage in stream of consciouness... and perhaps I can communicate a few ideas to a known group of trusted people out in the world. But writing now is psychological therapy toward self understanding. My most favoritist creative writing professor, Barry Spacks, would disagree with me--he tends to perceive writing as an art form, and so he will always perceive my work as art form though I perceive it as therapy. The reason why I am on leave of absence right now is that I had been perceiving my writing as an attempt toward art and scholarly-scientific work rather than treating it as therapy form. Now? I'm paying the price with my health. Yet if I layer my stories anymore, perhaps I can say I am attempting to hybridize self-therapy with a valiant reach toward creating art that can be appreciated beyond my family and friends. But, right now, I have given up on creating "art" all together. Everything I do for the next few months... up to a year (whether writing or visual or musical forms or motions)... are strictly for self-understanding, self-organization, and self-therapy.

Man, I have become repetitious, and yes, I have become a selfish bastard with my work (or is it "bastardette"?), but I have to: it's a matter of mental health and survival. It's a matter of desperation. Dr. Steve Ino at UCSB told me last quarter at UCSB's Counseling Center: whatever you do with your writing and drawings, never consider it to be selfish--it's called "self-care." So, I'm learning. One time I told Sarah, a science journalist in Riverside, the first time I write or create anything, the first audience is only myself, and then through rounds of advice and editing, the audience expands otherwise--to the appropriate individuals or groups the story is intended for. Sarah said that this mentality of interacting with a perceived audience is very healthy. So, first round, it's a one-man band (errr, one lady show), but then again, I consider my single mind to be an ecosystem of motivations, desires, voices, organisms with unique characteristics and behavioral traits. So even though it may seem like the first round of my "talking" to myself may be a one-person audience, I feel like I'm speaking simultaneously to an internal disjunct chorus that is trying to coordinate itself. I was trying to make a cartoon for my friend Julie R. last quarter: "Grad School: Ecosystem-Based Mental Management!"

Enough said. Much more to explore on this issue. Maybe I should leave these thoughts for the shrinks. But then again, my most wonderfulest of my friends and family are my "shrinks;" they're just not all that "official."

I can also say the last 7 months, I have learned a lot about several political issues in the marine and terrestrial world, not only the politics of the environmental issues themselves, not just the endless politics of academia (which I sincerely need a break from::: UNPLUG ME!), but even the politics of "generating stories" about these environmental issues, or any issue in particular. The politics of how literary folks, cartoonists, journalists, academics, film crews function, so-to-speak, in which the more I know, the more I realize that I want to work with a very small group of people with whatever stories I tell. Minimizing bureaucracy entails more self-responsibility and labor, but also constructs more self-control and overall efficiency. I would rather work much harder on a project knowing that I had more control rather than someone controlling me. As I have said a bazillion times to myself: "I'd rather be a slave to my own ideas than the slave of others."

So, I'm continuing to learn about myself. The more I learn about political issues (that affect people that I personally know), the more I feel a bit scared to talk or write about what I know, or the more I doubt what is appropriate to include or not included in a blog. Which is probably one major reason I have not been blogging lately--I suppose I had to confront this issue myself. I think this self-censorship process has been happening since my initial participation in the south coast Marine Life Protection Act Initiative (MLPAI) process. I will just say that the whole arena of stakeholders involved in marine environmental issues is much more connected and incestuous than I thought--and perhaps a little bit in a disturbing way (when a single funding source pours in money into the entire spectrum of professions--from scientific research to education/entertainment to policy and politics, in order to better choreograph these often-time disjunct, autonomous universes, I would become a little bit worried). Well, it's not that I'm being "censored" by anyone in particular, but whatever I say, I have to be VERY careful and very ARTICULATE about what I say. But would that be necessary? Would it be necessary to have a "Fisheries WikiLeaks" because many things going on in the marine world is so "under-the-radar" to the public? Even under the radar among pertinent stakeholders who are directly affected?

An example of "under the radar." About a week ago I spoke over the phone with my Cousin Mike, who wanted to know all about the MLPA process I have been in tune with (as if I had a fetish following a particular athletic team, except it's a political process, not sports, what's the difference?); and after explaining to him the nuts and bolts of this public-private partnership, the stakeholders involved, the outcomes, and the current state of the process, Mike was appalled that he did not know that any of this was happening. He also didn't know that public-private partnerships could exist and be held unaccountable to the public vote. That California Citizens did not vote for this political process to occur, or be okay with. Mike was thinking about maybe he could invent some new cool gadget like an iRobot or iPhone5 or something and then he could earn gobs of money and then he had nothing else to do than meddle with the California State Government and re-wire the bureaucracy as to however he saw fit, as long as he was a private individual dumped a bunch of money on the state, demanding its reform. And no, my cousin Mike has no ties whatsoever to environmentalism. He's just a wickedly smart dude who keeps me on my toes, and I'm extremely proud to admit we are related (family acquisition through a marriage!).

But then again, what should I be scared of talking about? First amendment rights, right? Maybe I should just call things out "as they are." Tell the "truth," like what a scientist is supposed to do. Observes the world, and states his/her findings. Except I have found out there are frequently multiple versions of "truths" or "truthy-isms" and it's better that I just consider stories as merely stories (whether scientific or not) and not observable realities held by nearly all citizens, and just say okay, "Here's my story, dot, dot, dot. And it's just another of 101 stories on the same topic, so why in the hxll would anyone listen to me anyway?" There is so much information transmission in the world today that whatever stories I tell will be drowned out by information overload anyway.

I do say it's quite funny. The other day I had a discussion with my quasi-religious mother (religion, fate, spirituality, what's the difference?!), and she questioned me about a particular "end of the world" issue as a "scientist," and I told my mother flat out, in a very instinctive, impulsive way, as if I went through a very long, quasi-subconscious internal discussion with myself the last few months that rendered an autonomic response, "I am NOT a scientist." I can practice some scientific forms of thinking (left-brain linearities), and I have been raised by my scientist Dr. Bubsy (ha ha, my dad), but given arbitrarily constructed cultural and bureaucratic definitions, restrictions, boundaries of what a "typical" scientist is, and that my right brain gravitates toward reflexive, multi-layered, visual, synthetic, contextual thinking rather than strictly rational, computative, linear reasoning that denies the presence of self-perception and socioecological context that can influence anyone's research agenda, hence I am NOT a scientist. I do not think that "scientists" would survive to well in the world outside academia, which requires a sense of multi-dimensional, intuitive thinking that goes far beyond gaining knowledge by reading the bottomless pit or accumulated coral reef of "scholarly literature" and being a tweaker with a particular, specialized research project. So, as you can see, I am so bitter, I really need a leave of absence. I can't even call myself a "scientist" anymore, even though I know all about scientists and know how they think, and I interact with them a lot. And sometimes they drive me nuts.

Well, I'm beyond that box. It's funny to even say that "scientific thinking" is actually a very restrictive form of thinking, even though supposedly science is to "expand knowledge," only very limited forms of knowledge. Even my fisherman friend Bob stated that if scientists continue to perceive environmental problems strictly as "scientific problems" and not "human/social/perception" problems--err, multiple problems in simultaneity--then scientists won't get anywhere with their goals and agendas. They will continue to hit intellectual walls and roadblocks, and their audiences will not be all-inclusive.

So, then, if I'm not a scientist, then what am I? What should I call myself? Besides, "Victoria Anonymous" and "Victoria, Fud. The more you become an expert at one particular thing, the more and more you become an idiot with everything else." Yes, yes, besides that, let's just say I'm a "multi-media storyteller" who has academic strings attached, trying to bring out the best of academia in my stories and really get to see what theories actually do map out onto a physical reality we can all agree upon. Though we all know that much of the narratives in the university seem to be abstract, esoteric blobs that cannot take concrete shape or function when letting them run loose outside the academisphere. But I have discovered many jewels in the haystack....

Oh, I know it's horrible for me to "talk about myself,"--I am having a moment of self-consciousness here--but that is partially why I am on leave of absence. I have the CRICs disease: the Chronically shifting Relativistic Identity Crisis, and part of the goal for the leave of absence is to better understand this disease I have, and the shrinks say it's for "self-care." Identity exploration, like what humanities people seem to do. Except in this case, the notion of identity relative to the "environment." I should be okay. Since all my writing has a basis for psychological therapy, I should be open and willing and accepting that my own Self is a part of the picture of all the things I write. It's a necessity for me to plug in and stay tuned to myself. *Sigh*

I guess so far in this post, I have discovered two new Laws of Lacunacea (and of course, every new rules has exceptions). (1) The more I know about political issues that directly affect people I personally know, the less willing I am to be open and express the ideal form of freedom of speech. Maybe it just reflects that my own social sphere and social consciousness is changing. And the second law I have picked up by observing and dealing with harsh encounters within the abrasive perimeters of Hollywood (why do I feel the film industry is like some form of intellectual war zone? Well, perhaps it's the only landscape on this planet where ideas can be valued at millions of dollars, and everywhere else, each new idea we have is worth close to zero). So, the second law is: (2) The more money you get paid, the more you lose your freedom of speech. This is a general truth, unless someone provides funding to an independent individual (not an individual embedded within any corporate bureaucracy) that is completely "no strings attached" or "We give you money because we love you for who you are, and we want you to continue being who you are."

I guess the final question here in this blog is: What does it mean to go on leave of absence? (And to shamefully state, for the THIRD time, once from UCLA, once from UCR, and once from UCSB). First of all, a problem is a problem when you perceive it to be a problem. What I perceive to be a "problem" is not necessarily what other people perceive to be a "problem." Many problems in the world exist as "distant chatterboxing characters on televisions or computers" to most people, but I have faced four "systems" of problems that were either by birthrite, partially acquired, or took a level of sophistication to perceive: (1) my birthrite, inherited problem of wildfire ecology, in relation to my father's (the scientist's) research (2) my quasi-acquired, quasi-biological problem of anorexia and attempting to understand the relationships between mental disorder and "environ-"mental disorder, (3) the somewhat problem of understanding the university as a "landscape," in which every one of us was promised that the university would teach us about the "universe" and our place in it, but when any particular student attempts to go "department hopping," each specialized discipline is perceived more so as a historical accumulation of intellectual trash largely dictated by power structures, that renders no coherent, composite picture of the world we live in and try to interact with, and how was I going to sort through all this intellectual trash to find the necessary tools in order to find a way to contain, define, and solve any particular "environmental problem" in the world, first with my own health, second with my father, and third with California fisheries... (and now the state's broke, who really knows if anyone is getting their money's worth at the university?) and (4) my "matured state" problem in which I had to develop a level of perceptual accuity to see and comprehend, is all things related to California fisheries, evolution of ecosystems and social systems through time, particularly the Marine Life Protection Act process. Four massive suites of problems in my life that may be perceived as "distant" issues in most people's lives but have come to occupy intimate, personal spaces in my mind.

I guess the whole goal here is the individual and collective pursuit of exploring and manufacturing the "truth" (though we all know even truth changes all the time, because systems change). Truth being some form of universal perception of understanding of our contextual existence. So, first I started with science. I thought that scientists were the smart dudes and babes who were to discover the "truth." But I soon discovered, scientists--among many other intellectuals, such as Malcolm Gladwell (his disclosure statement here) and Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature) and The Gonzo Scientist series--worried about the notion of "objectivity:" that potentially it was possible to explore the system of study for what it truly was, independent of human perception of the system, or independent of human value and motivation, and independent of the context of the system. The only "legal" mode of objective thinking was complete left-brain, linear "logicality," and through this venue was the discovery of "truth." And then, I started to realize this goal of "truth" was a total joke (only rendering a limited, partial truth) as I started to feel mentally restricted, trapped, essentially--all these layers and spheres started to form around me, the humanly perceiver of any particular system of study, and the actual inter-related context of the system of study in space and time. I didn't know it at the time, but my mind was trying to find an alternative view (or views) of exploring "the truth"--and alternatively more complicated--and instead of blocking out all the layers and spheres and variables--as all these modern scientists do nowadays--that the more inclusive that I tried to perceive myself and my relationship to a particular system of study, the closer I was toward achieving a level of truth, though this truth is now much more personalized, it is an acknowledgment of personalization embedded in an a mapping exercise of the universal/collectivism. These layers and spheres and "acquired lenses or points of view" evolved more coherently through my continued education of science, social science, and humanities courses, trying to find a conceptual configuration--trying to find internal conceptual places for every thought that came from every possible discipline I encountered. Truth in my mind led to INCLUSIVITY, REFLEXIVITY ("Gonzo science"), CONTEXTUALIZATION, NARRATIVE, QUALITATIVE MATRIX VIEWS, BRIDGING KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION, and SYNTHESIS rather than EXCLUSIVITY, EXTERNALITY, REDUCTIONISM, NARROWING, SPECIALIZATION, QUANTIFICATION, LINEARITY, etc. One of my first cartoons has Terra screaming, "Don't shove me in a box! I'll create my own box!" or even with cartoons: "Don't shove ideas in a fixed-sized box. Let the ideas define and shape and size the box." Because all science was doing to her was trying to narrow her into a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of a system. Oh, what other lovely words I could place here? I'm asking the same simple questions here: What do people know? How and why do they know it? And how does this knowledge influence their actions? All related to human-environmental relationships. And supposedly these simple questions mean that I'm epistemologizing and that I worry about ethics. Ecopistemologist, to be corrected. I'm the first one, because I invented the word anyway, and I am very proud of that. And besides my suffering a sense of constant information overload, being overwhelmed with chronic change, not having the ability to freeze or slow down time, breeding a sense of panic, stress, paranoia, sleep deprivation, poor eating, teeth pain, etc--physical manifestationS of psychological distress--and besides all this, I came to realize, that given today--that the pursuit of science is embedded in a massive bureaucratic context (whether in the university or industry), where my dad told me, "Science is 50% people, 50% politics, and something you do in your spare time," I was wondering whether any scientist or any individual drowning in some massive bureaucracy would really have a sense of autonomy, individuality, and develop a sense of truth, independent of the "invisible academic 800 pound gorilla" that lives on every researcher's back, exists in every professor's mind?"

So, besides pure stress and panic and physical pain experienced through and induced by my desperate, primordial, reptilian brain , I actually have a philosophical underpinning for leave of absence: the attempt to see a truth merely through the politics of my own mind, independent of an 800 pound academic gorilla on my back. And I have up to a year to figure this out. I was thinking, perhaps I was doing the "Thoreau-Into-the-Woods" thing, like what Michael Pollan was trying to do, which is kind of difficult when you were born and raised and currently live in southern California (but northern California is ONLY a few hundred miles away, so I have no excuse to go chum up with black bears in the Sierra Nevada), so the closest I can be to becoming an enlightened hunter and gatherer around this part of the planet is to be something like a gypsy freeganist type, and continue hanging out with fishermen! The goal this year is to experience my mind and my life and my environment by maximally unplugging myself from the system, from "The Matrix" of information and resources (except I'm not doing any bullshxt daredevil "Into the Wild" or "127 Hours" or "Deadliest Catch" crxp, which I think is totally sensationalizingly dumb, my being a female and conservative adventurist and acknowledging it is very important to venture into humanly unpopulated landscapes with at least a buddy system, whether scuba diving or boat-riding or mountain hiking. And I still feel entitled to being jacked up by Starbucks coffee, my staple luxury that is only financially affordable given that every cup of coffee I purchase must be accompanied with at least tw0 50-cent refills. But 85% of all my clothes are old, full of holes, and came from Goodwill or the Old Navy end-of-the-year sale where everything was around 75% off original price, making brand new clothes equal in monetary value to that of used Goodwill clothes. Funny how those things work out.

I have come to realize it's better to explore the truth through the mere politics of my brain--explore personal truths--an investigation not highly accepted in Objective Academia where the Personal and the Self don't have much of a Place, especially in the realm of science. Just me and my mental ecosystem. Woohoo! Now I need to re-configure my inner wirings with the outer world.

Last week I had a talk with my advisor Oran about the leave of absence. I told him that when I was in high school, I thought I was stupid because I would be very slow in finishing my homework and completing my exams and writing my essays, and I'm still a bit slow to this day. It took me about five years after high school to start realizing that I wasn't "stupid" or "dumb" or "slow," but I was processing the world differently. I wasn't trying to memorize or computationally, linear process information. I was trying to visualize the world, visualize knowledge, all this time. I was trying to grow a virtual "tree" in my head. That knowledge did not exist in mere words and numbers, but knowledge had a sense of place, relativistic location. That there was a place, a space and a time for every thought. And here I am now. I have been overtaken the last few years, blasted with information--frantically foraging across several disciplines--and not everything is processed the way how I need it to be processed: visually, cognitive maps. Not only visually, but also through written words, through sounds, through the generation of personal stories. I need time, time to slow down, so I can slowly, deliberately process all this information to let it have conceptual meaning within me. It sounds strange, but visualizing the world is my healing process. It transforms intellectual trash into landscapes of meaning. So, it's funny, my road of environmental media, though I'm fighting for it to be an academic discipline, and I will fight a long road ahead of me, that multi-media production also needs to be welcomed as an academic endeavor, perhaps even with a "peer review" process--not a Hollywood industry or journalistic endeavor--though I'm fighting this road as an academic discipline, this road has psychological roots, to my being right brained, toward my core mannerisms of processing information, toward my personal routes of coping and healing and self-therapy. I walk a dangerous road, where the personal and academic are severely intertwined--and it's more so dangerous for me because, here I am again, turmoiled, in pain mentally and physically, and again... on leave of absence. *Sigh* I wonder how I will ever be able to function "normally" in the world. I have to work so gxdxmn hard to channel my positive energy into the positive, desirable places. It's been so hard to find these spaces, but it has been worth the fight. I don't have much else of a choice.

My friend Hector tried to console me yesterday. He explained to me that "Back in the day, like in the 1960s, when the University of California wasn't in a financial pinch... or slump... students used to go on 'leaves of absence' all the time, either for breaks or for saving money while trying to get their degrees. But now the university has added intense layers of bureaucracy to make it difficult to go on leave of absence." I said, "Ya, like I had to have evidence that I am partly a nutcase in order to go on leave--I REALLY need to go on leave though. If I were back in the 1960s, I would have been on leave of absence since April of 2010!" Hector agreed that a leave was necessary because I couldn't function otherwise, if I had stayed. But nevertheless, he consoled me, but I still don't feel so hot about myself right now. Like yesterday, I was trying to write a simple blog, and I ended up barfing out 20 pages single spaced on how I got into this whole "marine, fishing" thing in the first place. I couldn't believe I never had a personal discussion with myself about this... until now... on leave... where I finally sense my own autonomy and independence of thinking from university bureaucracy (I was just thinking that science funding sources give researchers money for testing hypotheses, not asking questions, meaning you have to have an existing agenda before asking for money, rather than leaving the process an open-ended inquiry. I come to trust Dr. William Cronon's viewpoints more and more every single day). I feel like now I can think and talk about things that probably are not good to talk about while being in the U--now I can be free and uncensored like the main character is the "Turko Files" of KUSI News in San Diego, who calls out bullshxt when he sees it: "That ain't right! You can't do that! That's not fair!" Turko is very good at getting people involved in solving multiple problems around the city of San Diego.

And now that my cartoon characters Terra and Buz of Biologically Incorrect feel my sense of freedom from being on leave of absence, they both have the license to cite Cartman from Southpark: "I say what I wanh! I say what I wanh! I say what I wanh! What-evah! What-evah!" and "Myanh, myanh. Myanh. Myannhh. Screw you guys, I'm going home!" "What-evah!" Happy ending to ending my blog hiatus. Happy endings to new beginnings of mental barfing on blogs! Woohoo hoo hooo! :-)

Key Words: blogging, storytelling, limits to writing, leave of absence, stream of consciousness, writing as therapy, censorship, Fisheries Wikileaks, information overload, science versus storyteller, define science, CRICs disease, identity exploration, exploring truth, truthy-ism, 800 pound invisible gorilla, 101-legged squid, environmental media as an academic pursuit

542. Annals of the Bad Day Syndrome ::: Good Riddance of the Subaru Station Wagon, Six-Year-Self-Fragmentation (and Police Officer Drama)

2010-08-18T08:15:00.001-07:00

New Universal Theory of the Bad Day Syndrome =

Bad Days Make Great Stories. Period.

An Official Bad Day of Thanksgiving 2009 (Bad Day, but Many Heroic Actions) ~ On July 27, 2010, I engaged in some unpersonal interactions with a man who works for a towing company in Santa Paula, and was contracted to pick up my car--a beige Subaru Legacy 1993--from our rental house on Hillview Dr, Goleta. I didn't feel much sentiment or state of reflection (just dulled, suppressed, internal panic) when he started to move and tow the car. I rescued the car seats as my last desperate move, because I'm sure they could be valuable for my Toyota Tercel (1995), in which the current $3-from-a-yard-sale car seats are falling apart after five years of wear and tear (speaking of which, I need to duct tape my car seats, to its entirety!). Colleen, my next door neighbor, and her three young, rambunxious sons, came out to see what all the hub-bub was about, and I explained to her the pros and cons of having a second car and getting rid of a second car. I purchased the Subaru Legacy in 2006 for $2000 from an African-American man in Isla Vista (with the help of Talei; his name was Vern Hunt, and the previous owner was Scott Barrett, a drum-player, and before that, the car was sitting in Scott's grandmother's driveway for several years, Scott apparently moved to Arizona).

The reason for buying a new car, this Subaru in the first place? I just spent a year learning about geology and that I thought that I deserved a car of optimal size, which is getting the most for the least: a car in which I could carry surf boards, giant rocks, and I could sleep in. I cannot exactly sleep in my Toyota Tercel... I get quite scrunched up and my body complains after a night of crampedness. From a more abstract, idealistic perspective, I think that since the Subaru embodied the notion of "freedom," or "freedom from being stuck in Riverside, Black Hole, California." I was also trying to seek freedom from myself.... I was really "mentally stuck" at that point in my life. So, freedom from myself, escaping across external landscapes because I was struggling to venture into "internal landscapes" is then otherwise called "escapism." Poor me... was I in denial? Or was I mentally stuck? I don't think I was in denial, I was trying to unstuck my mind in space and time. And that required lots of internal and external "soul-searching" and resolution.

I thought I would have a Subaru and then I could get rid of the Toyota Tercel. It turned out that I kept hold of both cars, because the Toyota never let me down (in unexpected ways) since high school (in 1999!), whereas the Subaru had water pump problems, radiator problems, oil leak problems, and plus it was a drain in terms of oil changes, gas mileage (20 miles per gallon is unacceptable to me), and having two cars for insurance and registration. Owning two cars had become cumbersome, like an extra tumor of maintenance, and the last year I even had to deal with major Toyota Tercel repairs (especially after the Roadtrip Nation trip), including clutch replacement, break pad replacements, battery replacements (Txriel, stranded in Isla Vista Fall 2008), car tire changes, radiator-fluid changes, and now car-starter changes. Plus, my Toyota survived several treks and close calls, including a minor accident-turned-into-major-because-the-car-in-front-of-me-was-a-massive-white-truck-with-huge-wheels-and-my-little-car-went-under-at-5-mph-and-the-truck-zoomed-away-without-a-care-though-it-scrumpled-up-my-hood-yet-it-was-my-fault-because-I-fell-asleep-on-the-road-for-split-second-as-I-parked-at-the-Vons-11pm-at-night the day before Thanksgiving in 2000 (off Rose Avenue, Oxnard), a treacherous dirt-road trip in the boonies of Nevada (geology field trip with Seth and Joe in November of 2004), a car tire blow up on the 405 freeway going south toward Orange County, and a minor fender-bender on the 405 going north around the UCLA area, where I was sandwiched because some Bxtch in an Infinity car rammed into me when the traffic drastically slowed down (my car slightly bumped this blue Nissan in front of me, which housed some young Idiot Asian Female, in which the Bxtch and I both pleaded to her "Please DO NOT call car insurance! It's cheaper to take care of damage ourselves!" (I ended up preferring to talk to the Infinity Bxtch than the Idiot Asian when it came to resolving the collision. We were hassled by several angry drivers around us, Road Rage Deluxe!).

George from Bob's Auto Service in Riverside stated that if the Toyota Tercel now has 200,000 miles, these types of major repairs should be expected.... So the question is, which car to invest in? I am so emotionally attached to my little Toyota Tercel (which is probably as fuel efficient as a Toyota Prius hybrid fuel-electric) that I decided I was going to ware this car down to its death (hopefully 20 years from now). The Toyota Tercel has been with me since high school in 1999 (graduation gift from parents).... When the Tercel dies, I will cry... just like I cry for the passing of my relatives, especially for my grandfather, even when I was upset that I lost my stuffed Bugsy, Sparky, and the Bean. So, when the anonymous man towed away my car in the name of Kars for Kids (which is a very LAME non-profit organization, because all the money goes to charities catered to strictly Jewish kids in between ages 8-16 who have supposed teenage and other crises... I thought it would be for cancer patients or starving African children... whatever, and the worst part is that the Kars for Kids website does not make this strict "Jewish Donation" an upfront statement, you have to scrounge through the website a bit before you realize you're NOT helping poor, needy, unhealthy kids in a generic sense; but believe me, I have NOTHING against Jews (no doubt, they went through a lot of disturbing history; I'm not sure why they have been picked on so much!); I'm just pissed that the donation is for JUST JEWS, and not other ethnic or religious or cultural groups; nevertheless I set up the time for towing, and since Kars4Kids is efficient with the towing process, I just told myself to "nevermindthis" and just get the towing process done, no more delaying, since I anticipated on getting rid of this car for the last 2 years).

My friend Kamal was fascinated by the life cycle of cars and the the end-product landscape of junk yards, and I'm sure he would be interested, as I thought it would be interesting to take photographs of such a dismantled car in a neglected landscape. Given my limited timeline and stresses of school, I donated the car, essentially for FREE. But if I had MORE TIME and thoughtfulness, I would have taken the car to Riverside and gotten $300 from a company called Pick-a-Part, or I would have successfully sold a car for $500 on Craigslist, upfront. But no, my father said, "Do me a favor. Get rid of the car and you will do me and the family a service. I'm tired of lying to your mother saying that this is 'Talei's car.'" I think aunt Jean and Uncle Chuck were tired of that little fib as well. I get rid of the car and my father stops "lying" and my aunt and uncle are no longer "holding a secret."

The option of getting rid of this car was on the plate of my entire "family" of housemates. Kyle, the Climate-Energy-Policy grad student (did he finish his Ph.D.?) had been pressuring me to eliminate this car for quite a while, but then he got married and moved out of the house and didn't care anymore. Jay had also been pressuring me to eliminate the car, but then he moved out and didn't care anymore. And then Gwaz, who most recently got a badxss job toward the Thousand Oaks area (internet advertising, I think), started to pressure me to eliminate the car from the driveway. He asked to me to place a deadline and notify everyone in the household, which I did. And then Gwaz moved out... and perhaps he doesn't care anymore, like all the other housemates. Teena said she didn't mind the car, but I was at a point in which it was an embarrassment to occupy the driveway with a dead car (bad alternator, couldn't start on its own, needed a jump start), and not paying any extra rent for occupying this extra space beyond my room. So, out of generic guilt, despite the heightened sensitivity-followed-by-apathy of my former housemates who pressured me... I eliminated the car, though I do wish that I made an extra effort to get $200-$300 for the parts, or $500 sold on Craigslist for whole.

What made this circumstance different? Why did I get rid of the car this time? For one, it was summer, and I had time to deal with the issue. Secondly, cumulative build up of pressure from housemates. On a third level, out of all my housemates, I have much, much respect for Gwaz, and whatever he tells me, I listen, and it sinks down in me. We had a few lengthy "existential conversations" over the time he was at Hillview (since March 2009), and even though the quarter system mowed me over, and I did not have much time to reflect on all the cool ideas we batted toward each other, back and forth... I still have his thoughts, his ideas, his ambitions in my head. He's intelligence + experience + humbleness + enthusiasm, and someone with such diverse experience that I look up to him. I am thankful for Gwaz' humbleness, because as I have learned, most "environmentalists, at least hard core ones," are judgmental, pretentious pricks... just as bad as religious people who are so willing to make judgments about your life (and supposed afterlife).

Gwaz provided great advice on some of my cartoons. In a certain way, I wish Gwaz weren't my housemate (which he isn't anymore), because you can tell that we are both very intense people with lots of ideas, and the house at Hillview is the only place for quiet, private space and time. And it's hard for two people with super intense thought processes to live right next to each other and try to maintain a sense of quiet privacy, when all we would engage in is very lengthy conversation. Gwaz would be a great person to go and visit, and I hope that one day I can follow through and visit him in Los Angeles. He's such an outpour of great ideas, I cannot stop not talking to him!

So, I was using the Subaru Legacy as storage space, practically for the last two years of graduate school at UCSB (for the bullshxt of academia kept piling into my brain! with no time to sort it out). In order to get rid of this car, I went through the pains of moving all these papers, these bags of trash, these memories, these times of intense informational input, eliminating a lot of paperwork back in early July, which essentially, placed my mind in an extreme panic: that the last two years of my life had been an accumulation of trash, chaos. I was standing upon a pile of rubble, and I did not even know what was happening in my own life... like I am living and not knowing that I'm living... I was letting my life slip, hold no control....

I was panicking in mid-July but just set the panic aside, denied it, until it flared up in a $60/night Motel 6 in Escondido in late July (or Ex-con-dido or Mexican-dido)--in which I was alone, with a massive head ache, yes, I could classify it as a migraine--in which I was forced to delay my written exams. Jules reminded me that "I didn't have real problems." I had a discussion with Oran, and things are settled for early October. That's fine. It was the first time that I was forced to seriously look at the state of my life and realize that "If I'm in school and that my life is becoming more chaotic than orderly, then school is not performing its desired function, and therefore I need a break and get out of here... go catch fish or something for a few months." I refuse to stand on my own pile of rubble. If there is faith and loyalty to anything and anyone in this world... it will have to be to myself. And right now, mentally, emotionally, physically--if I stay in school--I will be in trouble. I can't do it anymore, for now....

Well, even though I stalled on eliminating the Subaru Legacy (which was threatened on being towed one time, last August of 2009; I had to hire a company to tow my car from Evergreen to Hector's driveway on Padova), which was about 1/2 to 3/4 of a mile away. The tow cost $50, I was stuck in San Diego, and was not interested in driving up from San Diego to Santa Barbara, just to move a dxmn car 1/2 of a mile. On its own, that was $50 of gas and 10 hours of driving life. Not fun! )... So, even though I was stalled on eliminating the Subaru Legacy (or should I call this car an "unnecessary tumor of responsibility" from my life (funny how my mind seems to meander in streamline form), I have one more heroic tale to tell about this car. And why I am glad that I kept this car just one more year after I should have gotten rid of it.

And just yesterday, when I was pressing hard down on the clutch to make it to the top of the Camarillo Grade on the 101, all the memories of this bizarre experience of Heroism of ancient technologies, kind roommates, and friendly strangers just flared up, and I realized that every time I passed by on the Camarillo Grade, this memory will keep flaring up, and that it's time that I should just write it down, pass it out of my Mental Space and onto Blogger space, so that my mind is freed up for more new memories. This "Annals of the Bad Day Syndrome" is a major symbol of how my mind had "runned over" by academic information overload from last year, with absolutely no time to myself, absolutely no time to reflect, no time to account for my existence and for my relational interactions with the context of my existence... until now... a random day in the late summer where I'm revolting and saying "F-You University!" I can't cater to your arbitrary bureaucratic needs when my own psychological needs need some tending to.

Even Teena and I had a little discussion about this story with Gwaz a couple of nights ago. I'm tired of holding this Heroic Story in my Head. So, here's a brain fart, a brain dump... about 8 months since its passing (of course, it won't be so dramatic this time, because all the immediate emotions and details have passed out of my system, and now they are just memories of reminiscence, skeletal memories, though I have a few details stored in the papers of my massive pile of rubble).

I had always dreamt of missing one Thanksgiving in my life. I have had perfect attendance to Thanksgiving functions since my birth, which in part, I think is worrisome, because it's important to break habits once in a while in order to appreciate them. Heck, even my sister missed a Thanksgiving, potentially in 2004 or 2005, because she was charged to work with her autistic patients that day. She was crying on the phone all day because she was missing all the family. My sister is a living proof that "absence makes the heart grow fonder." It's important to go in absence of elements of your life that you have come to take for granted from mundane, ritualistic routine.

I had also become more appalled by the commercialized aspects of nearly all Holidays in America, long-traditioned holidays... now even more popularized occasions like Quinceneras.... The commercialized element is so meaningless, so plastificated, but when you're with family, then all the plastic crxp sold on advertisements and stores sheds, and you come to feel quite happy in being with your intellectual and genetic kin. That is how I felt at the Thanksgiving of 2008. Grandpa Ray didn't make it, but he almost did... he was off by two weeks or so. So close... so close.... I even showed up a little bit late to aunt Jean's house that year, but I didn't miss Thanksgiving all together.

I thought I was going to leave for Thanksgiving (in San Diego this year with Aunt Judy) on Wednesday evening (which I am sooo relieved that I didn't do that), and finally I let go of my pursuit of ideas and hit the road around 8 or 9 am Thanksgiving morning, hoping that I would arrive in San Diego around noon or one. So, here I was, driving the Toyota Tercel up the Camarillo Grade, and I found myself pushing the gas pedal very, very hard and then when I was about 3/4 up the grade I found myself pushing the gas pedal all the way down, and I started to silently panic as my car started to slow down from 60 mph-50mph-40mph; I was on one of the middle lanes and the closest "open area" I could go to (where there were no cars) was the the extra shoulder lane in the middle of the freeway next to a thin wall that divided the speedy cars on the left versus on the right side of the freeway. My car just slowed and slowed and slowed to a halt, and I'm like "Great. Oh shxt. Perfect location. Spending my Thanksgiving stalled, about one foot away from speedy cars going up and down the Camarillo Grade. What a PERFECT location." Funny in retrospect, but frightening in situ. It was such an appalling point of view, I regret that I did not take pictures from my camera phone about the whole ordeal! I mean, really, of all places I would not want to be in my life, stuck in the middle of the Camarillo grade during Thanksgiving?! Well, thankfully there were not too many cars on the road, which most certainly helps. I remember being extremely panicky, thinking about how all objects I am next to are volatile and could kill me in no time. I was in tears by the time I called AAA auto service. The lady kept me calm and asked me... then stated that she would also send out a police officer to help me out (besides a tow truck, of course). I was just sitting there and at that time my sister Jenny was pissed off at me, and so that delayed a lot of interaction between Mumsy, Bubsy, and me (plus my sister's cell phone was dying), and so I called several times, and the phone was not answered at first, but then once they arrived at Judy's house, I was able to talk to Bubsy several times, but that was way after my time of frightened panic and aloneness....

While the car was shaking and rattling every time that a car zoomed by a couple of feet away from me, I was surprised to find a police officer from Thousand Oaks come by my car (coming from the opposite side, going downhill on the 101). I remember him being very cheerful, helpful, and caring--which was surprising to me, because the last few time I have delt with cops, I have found them to be uncaring and apathetic.

A Series of Largely Unfortunate Interactions with Police Officers

(Trial 1: police officer doesn't care about my stolen i-pod shuffle, $129 at the FedEx Office in Ventura, labeled as "petty theft," though the African-American man in suit and tie was caught on tape at Fedex Office taking my ipod, and they even had his credit card transactions available from that day, the officer didn't do anything that day though he said he would, and Fedex was even willing to work with the officer... and then a month later I didn't hear anything from the police, so I asked for a report, which they made me pay $16 for, and then they told me afterwards that the officer didn't do anything about my "petty theft" because the officer was transferred to a different district (aka he "moved," and no one notified me, because no one at the police department in Ventura cared). Things slip... no one really cares in the end....

(Trial 2: police officer and detective did not care that some Bxtch Lady stole my $1450 for a used MacBookPro with several layers of installed software, February 2009, through a Craigslist ad and cell phone interactions; that's why I'm an idiot, I can't make good decisions in the middle of an academic quarter system, especially since I was desperate; the assistant manager at Bank of America didn't care either, even an hour after the transaction... I told him to void the transaction, but he said he couldn't do that, unless a police officer showed up, and the officer did not show up, as the lady gave me a fake FedEx shipping number, and canceled her Sprint phone account... apparently this lady had a track record of fake sales and poor transactions... the officer said that he could not place a "warrant" unless he knew that the warrant would lead to catching the thief, the detective said that this form of Craigslist theft is common and uncontrollable and too frequent for them to do anything... it could be a spammer from Nigeria creating fake accounts... what bullshxt... from this time I realized (1) there's a lot more theft and crime and violence than can be contained by police officers (2) the police choose what battles to fight and not fight and take care of or deal with, it's a random draw of the hat if you yourself receive any level of "justice" for any crime involved (3) true justice is not accomplished unless if you have a lot of money and can hire a bunch of "lawyers" and other "justice people" to do the work on the crime, otherwise... no one cares... (4) it's much easier to become a criminal than I thought (5) it's the law of mass numbers, collective action problems, the lack of containment of crime... (6) I might consider practicing "criminal thinking," like those mastermind characters in Ocean's 11. A crimininal takes chances in not being caught in his crime because (1) the police are under-staffed and under-funded (2) the police don't care and have other things to do (3) the law of mass numbers are on your side. Anonymity is an advantage)

Trial 3: Two "speeding tickets" within four months, with two rounds of traffic school on line (one school called Cheap Fast Fun, and the other driving school called Comedy Traffic School (with two free tickets to see an Improv comedy show!), because I was going 75-80 miles per hour. The two cop dudes didn't really care who I was. I cried the first time, I was too tired the second time. The first time I was sleepy on the road and didn't see the officer behind me in Carpinteria. That young, buff officer was fresh meat, like this was his first day on the job, and I was his first ever ticket. And he was all happy and cheerful about it. Well, what about me?! I wanted to challenge the police officer: why do you give me a ticket when I drive down in Orange County and San Diego, cars honk at me and flash at me when I'm going 75 miles per hour--I'm going too slow? This is bullshxt.

The second time I was driving from Oregon, back to aunt Jeri Lyn's house in the dark, around Yreka, Weed County, and I was the first car in a crop of cars going on the freeway, and this dxmn cop radar-gunned me from the front of the pack of cars and no one else, even though everyone else was going the same speed I was, and so the officer was so adamant about stopping ME, and no one else! I received a speeding ticket but was too tired to care. Jules gave me advice and told me, "Cops are hunters. It's lions and the gazelles. The best thing to do is stay obscure in the middle of the pack. Cops go after those in the front or the back. They're easier to pick out and pin down." I am convinced the officer gave me a speeding ticket because he needed to raise money for his county. Hxck, they can't even bust all the weed growers in the hills! I met a few of them just stopping at a gas station!

Trial 4: Two police officers who just finished their lunch in Isla Vista, decided, just for kicks and giggles, to stop me and give me a ticket for wearing these flimsy $5 dollar head phones listening to Bjork in order to calm myself down, when I was going to visit Oran in concern of my potential for attending graduate school this upcoming fall. I was so stressed out. I learned that police officers only stop you when they really truly have a SEARCH IMAGE, focusing on YOU (as if they're predators and you're ZOOMED-IN BAIT), and that they FEEL LIKE MAKING THE EFFORT to stop you. Otherwise, you can be as free and illegal as possible, and no one will give a shxt. For example, just in my parents neighborhood in Riverside, a house was busted for being a major weed farm.... It's probably been there for over ten years, and no one knew about it. Being illegal seems to be quite easy nowadays.

Trivial Trials With Cops: I had several cops stop me at night for several random, trivial reasons. In northern California, it seems that cops have nothing much to do than stop people for not much an apparent reason. One time I was driving in the town of Winters (15 miles from Davis, California) for about 2 seconds, and a cop stopped me because I didn't have my lights on right away when I was driving. He thought my driving as "suspicious." Bullshxt. And one time I was getting ice scream but the officer was upset that I was driving 2am in the morning (welcome to UC Davis, where cops have nothing better to do than stop little girls from getting ice scream at the 24-7 grocery store 2am in the morning). Another time, the bulbs illuminating my driver's license plate burnt out, and the officer in Irvine gave me a courtesy notice, recommending me to replace the bulbs. Well, I do admit, the police officer was a very young and HOT blond dude, I was actually on a high of hormones from that experience. Ya, cute cop stops me for a very trivial "burnt-out light bulb" scenario. In that case, he was kind to me.

Much more recently, after visiting Shannon in Oceanside, apparently I made a u-turn in an area in which I wasn't supposed to (I was trying to find the local community college in the area, without much success). A police officer saw me do this, and then he followed me, flaring his lights. I was trying to find a safe place to pull over, and at that time, I was such a nervous wreck because I was pissed off about my Roadtrip Nation experience, being reminded by being in Oceanside, and then Comic-con was coming, and I was very lost in the new town I did not know at all. I finally pulled over at a Home Depot parking lot, and the police officer was an older man, and surprisingly he was very kind to me. He asked to see my license... but at that point I was sooo upset, I burst into tears... because I just went through two other occasions of unnecessarily venturing through traffic school because of speeding tickets (Milton Love said that I should expect a speeding ticket about once every five years, it's more so a phenomenon of the lottery than your actual wrong-doing), and I couldn't deal with this drama of being stopped by a cop ONCE AGAIN!, also just because I went through a Microsoft Office 2010 computer fiasco at a FedEx Office in Oceanside just this morning, that psychologically destroyed me to pieces (I was talking to a dude in India and this guy made me do things to my computer I didn't know about, I am seriously doubting the services and products of Microsoft after this experience!), and as the officer saw me as a nervous wreck, in tears, he felt a level of sympathy. He asked me what I was up to in general--that I was a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, and that I had paint on my car because my friend and I were making a film about careers at the intersection of science and art, and the officer was impressed because most paint on cars was very negative graffiti. In the end, the officer gave me a courtesy notice and was very fatherly, guiding me to the community college, for directions, and said that he didn't want to add anymore drama to my bad day of being lost and frazzled about life in general.

So, presently I have a mixed relationship with police officers, mostly bad interactions, but a few good ones. Experience is largely contingent upon the individual properties of each officer.

By the time, this young police officer approached my fragile vulnerable car and soul on the Camarillo Grade on a Thanksgiving, I was just sooo relieved and elated to see him. The scenario was so dangerous and absurd that the officer didn't even bother to check my driver's license. The officer was there within five minutes and we were discussing what to do next before the Tow Truck Dude from AAA would come and tow my car. I was trying to take my unused, ivy-overgrown blue bike (from Sportsmart) down to San Diego, but it turned out that the police officer wanted to push my car from the middle of the freeway to the right side, where no doubt, I would be much safter. As soon as we took the bike off my trunk-strapped fold-out-metal-bike-holder, the tow truck came. I don't remember what exact procedures were performed, but the tow truck dude quickly latched my car up to his truck, and the bike was thrown in the back of the tow truck. The police officer soon left as soon as he knew that I was safe with the tow trucker, in which he and I discussed what to do with the car. At that point, I made some internal decision to upgrade to AAA plus (so that I could have had my car towed back to Santa Barbara, not to this stupid 76 gas station, repair shop off of Moorpark in Thousand Oaks where they would have charged me $800 to replace the clutch!).

The Indian man at the gas station let me keep the car there over the Thanksgiving weekend, as I gave him my car key. I was trying to figure out how to get myself back to Santa Barbara with the utmost reduced cost (Santa Barbara is about 70 miles away), and at first I called Hector and Katia to see if they could give me a ride, but it turned out that they were in a rush to get to Los Angeles for their family's Thanksgiving celebration, and they could not provide a ride. It was tragic I did not have anyone else I could call. I tried calling Oscar, but he did not respond till 3 or 4 hours later. My housemate Gwaz was gone with his family, Jay was gone... I even tried calling Jay, but I received a "wrong number" from him. Teena just recently lost her cell phone, so she was not accessible, and I didn't have the 207 Hillview house number on me. I did call a taxi cab service, but was doubting that I was going to use it, because I was expecting a $200 cost to get back to Santa Barbara.

Oh ya, so WHY GO BACK TO SANTA BARBARA?! Well, I had this idea that I could use my spare dud Subaru Legacy to get me to San Diego instead. I started walking down the street, attempting to call my parents again, when a taxi cab pulled up right by me. Inside was a rather young guy, with blondish brown hair, who asked me if I needed a ride. He was wearing one of those trendy taxi driver caps. His car was quite clean and new-looking. I said ya, but I'm a student, and I don't think I could afford getting back to Santa Barbara. He then asked, "Well, how much CAN you afford?!" I said, "How much would it cost to get there? He ballparked around $120 with no traffic or unexpected stalls. I said, "I am a student, I can only afford maximum $80"... and then he said he would do it. Wow! What goodwill on a Thanksgiving Day! So, I hopped in, and it turned out that the taxi driver was a very spunky guy who had a horrible driving record in the past, but found this taxi job on Craigslist, and has $1,000,000 insurance on the car and the people in it, through the taxi company, and that it's a sweet job because he drives everywhere in this car.... And over time he accumulated clients over time who are basically "rich people who some how fxcked up with driving but still need to get from Point A to Point B, which is usually Santa Barbara to San Francisco." He gets sweet gigs on the side transporting wealthy people around, and so monetarily it has been working well for him. I think it must also be stimulating in a certain way if you actually get interesting customers... after all the car is a wonderful place to really get to know another human being very well in a short amount of time, it's a small enclosed space, so a lot of intense, focused conversation can occur in a short amount of time.

Which is what happened between me and this guy. It turns out that he is very interested in zombie horror fiction and was thinking about writing a book/story about zombies, with the whole story set in San Francisco. I gave him some writing advice that I could provide. I mostly was probing him about the structure of the story: basic themes, motives, plot, setting, characters, to see how well developed his thoughts were. I think he was elated to have me ask these questions, because it challenged him and forced him to critically think about his story. Along the way home, in which I was a nervous wreck (and I was depressed too, impatient, feeling stuck), there was a slow-down on the 101, around the 15 mile scenic stretch in between Ventura and Carpinteria. It was a severe slowdown, and by the time we passed by the La Conchita landslide area, the taxi cab charge box read some hideous numbers, like $140 dollars, and so the cab driver was kind enough to turn off the box and turn on his good will. He was looking up his i-phone to figure out why there was such bad traffic for about a half-hour, and there was some stupid report on the internet saying there were "two dead dogs on the freeway," but it turned out to be regular tourist traffic. People simply slow down in the area simply, simply, simply to admire the ocean. Possibly the best possible reason for a traffic jam--no accidents, no deaths, just beautiful landscapes to stare at since most people have been largely deprived of these landscapes.

Toward the end, I very much felt like that this guy did half-service, did half-something as a friend. I wished I remembered his name... but I bet I can retrieve it once I look through my pile of rubble in the garage in Santa Barbara. I wished I gave him this bizarre book in our house, which is a compilation of existential quotes from taxi cab drivers in New York (published by Chronicle Books), and Teena said I should have given this book to him, out of gratitude... but I didn't know whether that was appropriate at the time... give away my housemate's book to a generous stranger. In the end, since this guy gave me a half-off discount on the taxi ride and went out of his way on Thanksgiving to help him, I was willing to give him $100 instead of $80. We parted by exchanging emails... one day I might find him on facebook, or he may be writing the next best-seller zombie book, sooo... I'll just see him give a speech at some prestigious writer's conference! I could say this taxi driver is a half-hero; he was a humanitarian today... but I still lost $100.

By the time I returned to Santa Barbara, I startled my housemate Teena, who was working diligently toward making 3 or 4 pumpkin pies from scrap in the kitchen! She was alone at the moment, but was preparing for a feast in the afternoon! I was glad to see her and rambled about what happened to me. I rushed out to try to start the Subaru Legacy, but as I feared the car did not start... and even my car salesman neighbor (Colleen's hubby, why do I not know his name, who ended up working with Teena at a car sales place in Goleta) said that my car probably has a bad alternator. Teena went out of her way to rush to her friend's house to get a pair of spark plug charger wire thing-a-ma-jigs and she spend a half-hour helping me trying to start my car. She hooked up her nice white Dodge to my dusty beige Subaru, and we got the car working. We left the car running Teena said she was sad she couldn't help me get back from Thousand Oaks. Teena was also concerned about the long-term running of the Subaru... that it may stall... so she accompanied me to the 7-11 Citgo gas station off of Calle Real off of Storke Road, as I filled up the tank and was able to miraculously re-start the car without the need of any spark plugs. We both then ventured back to Hillview Drive, and I thanked Teena so much. What kindness! She has been so kind to help me, I told her that I would write a blog about all these acts of heroism and kindness to help me make it through a disasterous day on Thanksgiving and make an attempt to still see my family on this day, though it was probably around 12:30 pm by the time I left Santa Barbara for the second time! And it's so sad... it has taken me about a year to finally account for this unfatefully fateful day, to feel that humans have the ability to reach out and help out someone in troubled need on a random, spur of the moment. I am truly grateful for such humanity... and one day, when circumstances of space and time align, I can help to do the same.

(Interruption, just left Starbucks, went to pick up Bubsy, we went to the house, I discovered my driver's license picture, I looked good though my cheeks looked burnt, placed mail on bed, left the house, went to B of A, deposited check, took out cash for George, went to Bob's Auto Service, picked up car, George also replaced the air filter, cool, paid cash, got 1 dollar back, Bubsy took the Tercel, I drove the Camry, felt less repressed driving the Camry, less baggage, will take to Monterey, deposited one more check at B of A, chewed on my nails, went home, talked with Mumsy and Bubsy about Monterey, dropped off Bubsy, picked up suppplies, went back to Starbucks, here I am, talk about a mundane to-do list!)

By that time I remember driving down to San Diego being extremely depressed and having suicidal thoughts comforting me all the way down. It is a 4.5 hour drive after all (given no traffic, but it was probably more so like 6 hours). I could have stopped for a jog in Lake Forest before venturing down. The sun was setting quite early. My mind was blank... I remember though passing by the Camarillo Grade the second time. I was nervous and started sweating, hoping that my Subaru would not jinx the Toyota Tercel, and low and behold, it made it past this steep grade. I bet my brain was fried from the quarter system process, so I didn't think much of anything.

I made it to San Diego just after dark, and I had to frantically call aunt Judy about 3-4 times, let alone change my clothes in the dark by a gas station, my other clothes were soaked with stink and sweat! Judy forced me to take the 8 freeway and pass by Cal State San Diego. It was quite a trek to reach Judy's place from this route. But I found out afterwards that she lived only 1-2 miles away from Jules' house, which is in Lemon Grove. And I wondered why Judy did not guide us to her house through the 94 freeway? Maybe because of the negative stigmas of the 94 freeway? Or Lemon Grove, and that whole area? Who knows. I reached Judy's place around 6, it was dark, and everyone already split. I was very glad to see her--at least one person in the family for Thanksgiving!--We ended up talking frantically and quickly catching up as much as we could--as now I remember talking with Jean and Chuck over the phone, and I was adamant that we MUST have a Christmas get-together, now that I missed out on 99% of the Thanksgiving event!!! Both Judy and Jean retired this year, but Judy was off to romp around the world again, I think for Peace Corps? Or one of the Corps, for a year or two to China? Or some country in Europe to teach English, or do some foreign language education elsewhere. Judy was very excited and told me that I could come by her place anytime whenever I'm in San Diego. The question is, why haven't I? Well, I need to reflect and write ideas down before I am able to alter my thought process and my behavior! Maybe I'll try to visit Judy, or Andy or Robin, next time I'm down in San Diego!

Judy encouraged me to take some stuffing, some caramel popcorn (which I'm sure made me gain five pounds, it's so sugary and buttery, Jenny took the other half), and some chocolate fudge, which was so richly sweet, that I couldn't eat any of it, nor Jules. I threw away an entire tray of sugar and fat and chocolate. By the time I greeted Jules, he was stuffed from very good food at Grandma Viola's house. I stopped by quickly at their festivities, and everyone was about done with the feast of food, working on deserts. I met about 10 people in less than 10 minutes, so I don't really remember anyone I met. I do remember some nice cupcakes!

I updated Jules with the whole car clutch fiasco (I kept him out of the loop in the morning, he doesn't need anymore drama, he himself had a peaceful day out in the ocean catching lobsters). The next day I had to plan out what to do in order to orchestrate both cars' return to Santa Barbara. I called the 76 gas station, and the Arabic mechanic who worked there said it would cost $800 to replace the clutch. I panicked and said to myself, "Well, I have gotten cheap auto body repair in Oxnard before, so let me see if there's an auto mechanic in Oxnard to replace my clutch for less than $800?" I called George as well, and he said the average cost of clutch replacement would be $400-$500.

The first place I found on Google Maps was Tierra del Sol auto mechanic. I called in, and the guy on the phone said in broken English that he would be willing to replace the clutch for $300. I asked him if I could bring him the car on Monday, and he said, "Yes! We're ready!" Now the issue is, how to get my car from the 76 station in Woodland Hills to down-the-Camarillo-grade-Oxnard?! I called "Bob's Towing" from a random hit on Google, and by chance, I happened to talk to the owner of the operation. He said he was willing to do the tow for $60. Man, what a deal! I thought it would be $150-$200 to get the tow done! The owner asked me to call in early Monday morning, mention that we talked, and I would get my deal rate.

So all of this anticipated car-maneuvering drama was at first mentally and orally orchestrated from San Diego, the safety of Jules' house, and then had to be executed on Monday, in which I left San Diego early, early, early Monday morning such that I could dodge Los Angeles traffic. I think I left around 4am, actually! Jules woke up around that time to prep for work as well, or so I think. I managed to have a smooth drive all the way through Los Angeles, and actually arrived early to Moorpark Road, Thousand Oaks area. I think that morning I was waiting around a little bit, and went exploring, in which I jogged by the hills, and when I stopped to take a number two in the bushes off the side of a road that was very nicely landscaped (actually), I ended up finding my first ever plant fossil! Amazing! I still have to show Dr. Bruce Tiffney my fossil find! I have come to realize that fertilizing bushes does have its incidental benefits. Coming to think of it, who in the hxll knows what I did on Saturday and Sunday... Probably in disillusionment of automechanic chaos either working hard or having fun with Jules.

I managed to snap some photographs of the tow-trucker helping move my car from the 76 station down to Oxnard. Locked by metal and chains, placing two metal-attached lights on top of my caravan I caravanned behind him, and I was guided to Tierra del Sol, which happened to be way off the 1 freeway, Oxnard Blvd., at the end of this obscure Citrus street that seemed to have come from a fictional tale of a movie: A run down complex sprawled with tools, functional cars, scrap metal, of open-spaced buildings that were divded into small teams of independent auto-mechanic teams, who each specialized in certain forms of repair (e.g. oil change, general mechanics, auto body, electric, etcetera), but all coordinated and collaborated, such that as a whole, if you had any problem with your car, you could go down this street, and one of the teams would be able to help you with your car problem. In essence, it was an "organically constructed" "Costco" of auto-repair, except in a much more rudimentary, beat-up form, more similar to shops in Tijuana, than America.

No complaints though, the two guys who helped me repair my car did a great job (my clutch is in great shape), and also ended up giving me a bunch of business cards to pass out to my friends at UCSB (coming to think, it's ironic that if someone needed to perform major car repair, it would be cheaper for a student to tow her is her car to Oxnard than it is to do repair down the street in Santa Barbara; goes to show how upscale the town is in general).

When I was waiting for my car to be repaired, I was driving around Oxnard, and happened to find a FedEx Office and a Starbucks near by, a couple of blocks away, but I had to drive, and I had a police officer follow me on a vacant road. I was so nervous, because I was pissed off to drive this dxmn Subaru--I had not renewed the license because the car had to pass smog (which is a whole other fiasco I engaged in during Christmas break, ending in a general failure). Thankfully, the officer did not stop me because of my out of date blue-colored 2009 sticker on my registration. Amen!

Hector was sooo kind to drive me out in the dark to pick up my finished Tercel, as we caravanned back to Santa Barbara. I ended up buying Hector a giant frappucino (and me, a cheapo tea, cut costs) for all of his efforts! I'm quite thankful for the help! And by that time, I believe all has stabilized, and my already shattered lifestyle had consolidated back into one shattered piece. Car drama with the clutch had temporarily settled. This whole ordeal was sooo mind-numbing, I remember talking to Hector about Nothingness of Nothingness. Nothing in my head was processing into any meaning, everything in my head was empty and shallow. Technically, I had suicidal thoughts, but being around people prevented me from dwelling too deeply. I had to find a way to make my brain operate as if I were pacified by psychiatric pills. This whole ordeal would have been a lot more meaningful if I actually learned about car repair and I learned how to replace my clutch and solve my problems, but no, I paid someone else to do it, and chattered my mind away with other meaningless work. Jules knows a lot about car repair, simply because he's forced several times to repair his boat.

During my Christmas Break of 2009 (or early January 2010), I went through another Subaru Massive Fiasco. Despite my expired Registration Sticker, I took the Subaru down to San Diego, because Jules' brother might be able to buy the car from me for $500, and then he refurbishes it to sell for $1000 or more. One day, as a "minor errand," I took the Subaru to some Xsshole Asian at the "end" of Broadway, underneath the intersection of the 94 freeway and the 125, by Lemon Grove. The Asian Bastard took $50 of my dollars when my car didn't pass smog. Most smog-test-only places actually don't charge any money if the car doesn't pass! It's not that the Subaru was a polluter, it was just that there was a "functional" problem: I had this "engine light sensor" chronically in the "on" position, stating that there was something wrong.... I remember wasting practically an entire stretch of four days attempting to contact someone, anybody, who could get this light sensor to switch off for once! Jules helped me tremendously by driving me around and caravanning, and even at one point, I called George to see what he had to say; he had turned off the light sensor one time, four or five years ago, and he said that he himself would have to check out the situation; it's hard to say over the phone. One dude that the tire shop off of Broadway knew said that he would most likely be able to turn off the sensor and get me to pass smog, but I would have to wait till Monday... but I had to return to school at UCSB. Jules said that I have to stop making investments in this car, and just get rid of it... it's already costing too much time and money and unnecessary drama.

Even though my car was still not "legal" to drive, I drove it over to Carmax on a half-cloudy, half-sunny, half-rainy Sunday afternoon. I was extremely nervous driving in these circumstances, superparanoid about the presence of cops. The Carmax was up on the 805 freeway I believe, near by the Fry's Electronics. I could say that the employees of Carmax were very kind and professional, but I felt a sense of uneasiness, as soon as I entered this place. Maybe because I have some pre-conceived notion that auto sales places are all about trying to maximize personal gain, ripping off the customers. Everyone working there was very smiling and professional, almost too a fault--such that it reminded me that I was surrounded by a bunch of very "loyal, perfect, Christians" who were trying to live through Jesus' word, but surrounding this limited lens of existence, they were boiling in chaos... like they all were holding dirty little secrets of sin and shame. Phony, happy people... used cars? I also think they reminded me of real estate agents: image is everything, but there's lots of dirt hiding all around them, you just have to dig... just a little bit.

So some Happy Dude Used Car Quote Guy talked with me about my car, and some other tall Happy Perfect Dude Inspector drove the car around with me and talked with me about the general conditions of the car. The rain and the wet streets and the setting sun amidst the clouds made me more and more anxious about this "test drive." Soon enough, the Happy Perfect Dude and I returned and with much anticipation, I was hoping that the car value may be at least $500, but Carmax valued the car at $200, in which I was pissed, but then I learned later that this car has no value except for its parts, not as a whole entity (by the way, that is Jules' philosophy of females, they don't have to be a "perfect" package deal, but if you have certain key parts that are super-extra-special, like Jules said he likes my eyes, because they are very eager and open and hungry). Maybe I could have gotten $300 from Pick-a-Part in Riverside, but that's the most. Besides, the oil leak is such a horrendous repair on its own! Who would want to do that? If I could, I would have gotten rid of the car on the spot, but I had too much junk in the Subaru that needed to be cleared out, and how would I be able to get back to Santa Barbara anyway?

I found out retroactively that I could have gone to the DMV and received a waiver stating that I could operate the vehicle, even though the engine light sensor would not go off.... If something is not very easily repairable, the DMV offers waivers. And of course, the Asian Bastard who smogged my car would never tell me that, because he, of course wants my $45 without any consideration of the customer's needs and conditions.

So, I drove the car back to Santa Barbara, and let it sit in the Hillview driveway, for at at least 7 months, without even touching that dxmn car that has constructed such unnecessary grief. The Subaru has acquired faded stickers all over it, three of them being posts of potentially selling the car for $2500, in which the penned font all faded from black to a very light red-orange. An abnoxious orange "threaten-to-tow-away-sticker" was coated with my sloppy layer of black duct tape, because the sticker couldn't even entirely peel off the car. A handful of spiders moved into the car space, such that cobwebs were unavoidable to destroy every time I stuck my hand in any space within the car. It transformed into quasi-mobile storage, where papers accumulated from two years of a trashed life that was going just a bit too fast for my own good.

So here, I have paid homage to the 1993 beige Subaru Legacy, which has backed up my xss one more time on the fateful day of Thanksgiving 2009, in a time of clutch catastrophe with the Toyota Tercel. I admit that though this car has transformed into an "annoying tumor" that symbolized my own escapism from myself, my own sense of fragmentation of pursuits, disconnect from myself and my surroundings, my desire for freedom though I felt mentally stuck, in chains... I am glad that I kept that car long enough, just so it could allow my to transport from Santa Barbara to San Diego, such that I could be with my family during a holiday.... Otherwise, I would have cried in grave depression, for the entire weekend.

It's funny, I don't really have many distinct memories of experience with the Subaru Legacy, just a symbol of a fragmented, torn-up phase in my life. I vaguely remembering my escaping Riverside heat, camping and sleeping in the car in various spots near by UC Irvine, with the various unsorted tumors in my mind, even in Ventura and Santa Barbara. I remember transporting a mattress at one point, I think it was to Momma's house in Orange County. I also suppose that the Subaru Legacy not only represents an escapism from myself, but also an escape and detachment from my friends, especially Talei (who I deeply miss, I don't know how to get a hold of her!). I also remembering Talei and I trying to plot how to escape Riverside--move to Irvine? or Santa Barbara? We were both feeling frustrated in the stuffy, black hole Riverside ambiance. Talei tremendously helped me purchase this Subaru Legacy in the first place. In the summer of 2006, I was hunting down a used station wagon on Craigslist, and ironically I found no station wagons in the Riverside or Orange County or Los Angeles area. Though, there were 3 or 4 station wagons advertised in the Santa Barbara region. I found out later on that there was a Subaru manufacturer/showroom in the Thousand Oaks area, so there was a much higher frequency of station wagons in that region.

My budget was $2000 and I happened to come across a Craiglist Advertisement for a beige Subaru Legacy for $2200. I contacted a man named Vern Hunt, and then I made a huge effort to meet this guy and check out the car in Santa Barbara. We started off discussion at the USA gas station off of Carrillo. First off, I made sure that I could fit and sleep in the back. Vern explained to me that recently there was a case of vandalism, and that the two switches for the lights and wind-shield wipers were damaged (both of them broke entirely later), so he showed me how to operate those switches in a damaged mode. I was willing to deal with the vandalism.

We had a long discussion about the car and cars in general and life, and he drove me around. I learned that Vern had some difficulties in his life--a lady he was with that seemed like a tormenting relationship, and an unexpected, young child--and he was strapped for cash--and that was why he was selling the car. Not that the car had any particular problems... supposedly.... At one point I even think I met the child! Vern lived in Isla Vista, and I think he did a lot of house maintenance jobs, based on looking at his massive, dark-blue van full of supplies. We both went to the DMV in order to figure out the process of exchanging ownership of the vehicle.

Vern asked for $2000 in cash. So, within a few days, I went to the bank to get $2000 in cash, and I convinced Talei to come with me so that we could pick up the car, and I would pay for her gas and buy her dinner. I remember having a crazy, fun time, driving frantically through the streets to get all these errands done such as to change ownership. I even remember a smog check done near by Carrillo, and the man who checked the car passed the smog, but he warned me, "Your car is leaking some oil." So, premonition, somehow I was denying the premonitions for later larger problems... like for example... my car making a horrible clicking noise on the 405 freeway by Irvine late at night, and the oil leak had become so severe that it had to be repaired... by a very nice Persian man near by Momma's house in Mission Viejo (A-something Auto Service). I also learned something key: when transferring ownership, state that the car was a "gift" because otherwise you have to pay taxes on the car to the DMV. I had to pay an extra $200 as a result, because Vern reported that I was paying him $2000. Dxmmit. I also remember having Chuck and Jean check out my car: Chuck checked out the generic mechanics of the Subaru while Jean was excited to do a massive "detailing" of the car. One would mistake Jean as a "field biologist" for her epic ability to diagnose stains inside cars. "And this stain is child barf, and that stain was child poo, and this stain was an oil stain, and this stain was spilled food, and this area is generic foot traffic...." And I asked Jean in awe, "How do you know this stuff?!" and she responded, "Plenty of experience." Whoa... Both Jean and Chuck found it amusing to keep a secret from my mom, and tell the story about "Talei's Car." I also faintly remember my parents being pissed off that I kept the Subaru in Riverside for a while. They asked me to transport the car up to Santa Barbara, which started the whole pestering of "get rid of my car" by my housemates. My parents said that a street-cleaning guy placed a notice on my Subaru stating that it will be towed if I don't move it sooner than later.

If there was ONE positive result from this whole Subaru Legacy car purchase in 2006, I ended up convincing my entire family to switch to AAA Auto Club for car insurance. Both of my cars were insured for around $500 a year (killer deal!), and my mother was appalled that I was paying so little, and she and Bubsy were paying so much for their two Toyotas... and my sister's car! So, my mother went to see the same lady, Wendy, at AAA Auto Club in Riverside, and they switched auto insurance, saving over $1000 per year!!! My Gxdzeeks! So, I may have paid extra up front for this tumorous Subaru Legacy, but it resulted a collective auto insurance benefit for my entire family. No complaints there. Lack of knowledge in one dimension, gained knowledge in another dimension. Thanks AAA! (Actually, right after I had the Subaru towed away, I ventured to the AAA in Santa Barbara and notified them that I donated the car to Kars for Kids, and my insurance only went down by $100... sigh).

Cars... *sigh* modern existential drama that's not real drama. This blog is the final indicator telling me that I do need to take a month off of my life and take autoshop. My fragmented consumer experiences of repairing cars is just appallingly embarrassing. I just went to Comic-con and met a bunch of New Yorkers. If any New Yorker took their time to read this blog about Californian Car Drama, I bet they would be laughing right now. Praise public transportation systems! Bless the subways! Except, subways are nice places for terrorists to place bombs... uh-huh, I see.

I announced to Jules that I towed away my car, and that I was not too emotional about it. I was consciously blank as the tow truck dragged the car out of the driveway, placed it on the truck, made me scribble my signature on a few forms, and then off the car was to a auto junk yard in Santa Paula (about an hour away). It's funny to say to Jules, "The car just represents how fragmented my mind and my life has been for the last five years. And somehow you are helping me put myself back together again. I've eliminated the Subaru, and now I have you!" And of course Jules misread that, "Oh, so you traded in a car for me?" I said, "NO! I didn't mean that! I just mean that piece-by-piece, my mind is coming together, through your friendship, and that I don't need any extra items in my life to remind me that I'm free (or at least my mind is). You remind me of that, all the time!" And then he said, "Of Course! I knew that!"

541. Annals of the Bad Day Syndrome ::: Broken, Unreliable Cars or "Autoshop Education on Unexpected Days"

2010-08-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

Clips that I wrote along with the images.

>>Annals of the Bad Day Syndrome::: Broken Cars. I only seem to learn about the composition and operations of the beastly machine with wheels that I house and transport myself in so frequently... only when it breaks... always at immensely inconvenient times. Writing about auto-break-downs is probably the only possible way to transform negatives into positive, humorous reflections. Good luck to ME!

>> My poor wittle green, 225,000-mile Toyota Tercel resting in front of Bob's Auto Service, at the intersection of Magnolia and Jurupa. George has been the "doctor" for this car since my ownership (back in 1999 I received the car as a high school graduation present, at 70,000 miles). I want to drive this car until it dies, but now it has electrical problems (and it won't start!)!

>> I waited at Bob's Auto Service for a half-hour today, until my father (knight-daddy-in-shining-armor) came to rescue me in Ray's being Toyota Camry. The parking lot is a bleak landscape, it symbolizes my mind's state of depression. Life keeps happening, and I wish it would stop happening, so I could sit down and reflect.

>> I am learning all about my Toyota Tercel every time something breaks. This time the car doesn't start and it makes a clicking noise. Jules and Wes said it could either be (1) the fuse box (above), (2) the little switch behind the clutch, like a light switch, (3) something in the key-ignition area, or (4) bad starter. George says if I'm hearing a clicking noise, it looks like I have a bad starter. I am developing a lack of trust in my once very reliable Toyota Tercel. It's mortifying that such a tiny little issue is preventing the car from turning on and driving! (I had to replace a couple of fuses in the past, not too many times).

>> Jules and Wes were messing around with this little "light switch" or sensor behind the clutch. Jules even took it out and messed around with it. Apparently that's not an issue. George said he started the car, no problem. Both my father and I are pissed that we wasted our morning towing my car and my body around. I used one of my "4 times" for AAA auto club tow. The tow-truck guy was a very nice, jovial person at least!

541. Annals of the Bad Day Syndrome ::: Broken, Unreliable Cars or "Autoshop Education on Unexpected Days." The most beautiful and most sacred aspect of writing (and storytelling all together) is the ability to transform a very negative event into a positive, humorous reflection. And that nothing that happens in life is a "wasteful experience." And such is the case with today... another day to go down in the books of "Annals of the Bad Day Syndrome."

The other benefit of broken-down cars is that is when I am forced to learn about cars. Basically, I feel cheated by my education system. I was explaining to Larry (in San Diego) the other day that my high school system rewarded students for taking courses like physics and chemistry and higher math, but the the bureacracy penalized students who decided to take more practical, real-world courses like "auto-shop." So, instead of taking a year-long course learning all about the mechanics of cars (and receiving maximum B+ for all my efforts), I ended up taking physics and all these other geek courses that I still feel like my mind is not intimately connecting to my daily life. But cars... cars, especially old cars that break down frequently... IS everyday life. Jules even says that I can get away with not knowing anything about cars (not even knowing how to exactly change my oil, as my housematie Kyle was trying to teach me) because "I'm a gurrrl." Jules says that all I have to do is just smile and act like an idiot female and the guys will take sympathy and fix up my car... ya and jip me and jip me even more for my ignorance, until I feel like today I would have $1000 in the bank if I knew more about cars and did not allow auto mechanics to take advantage of my "feminine ignorance." I feel like a lot of people are earning a lot of money because "certain people don't know certain things that if they had a little extra time and brain space, they could easily learn and save a lot more money." In other words, people earn money because they know certain things that their "customers" don't know. So much for economic rationality.

Well, I'm tired of the "I'm-a-girl" excuse and I'm just going to have to learn slowly, in my own bizarre, painfully experiential ways... how cars work. Ideally, I would love to build a car from scrap, and understand how to build all these energy and electric feedback loops... I would love to start with the Conceptual, treating the Car like a Biological Organism, with organs-parts and flows of energy and fluids (energy, water, and air) (I had a music video vision of overlaying an aerial view of car mechanics repairing a car with an aerial view of doctors performing a surgery on the human heart, one day I will write a poem about this... maybe I already did... is it called "Nonlinear"?)... then the Conceptual can be mapped onto the detailed Practical Nuts-and-Bolts but how I am learning as of present is "something-broke-so-how-do-I-fix-it." Kind of like how doctors learn about how human bodies work. So, right now my car knowledge is limited and fragmented, and "tuition" is expensive, but at least you get a two-for-one "education plus a car repair from a mechanic who might just not jip you and appreciate the customer's inquisitiveness, and take the time to satisfy her inquiries."

I have had two "psychologically destroyed" days--today (Monday) and last Friday--due to a novel electrical problem with my Toyota Tercel car. On Friday, I was innocently pulling up to a USA Gas Station in Lemon Grove, San Diego, and when I finished pumping gas, I tried to turn on my car, but my car wouldn't start. Thankfully I was nearby Jules' house, and he came to rescue me in about ten minutes... and with his magic touch, he was able to get the car started one more time, as we were able to get the car back to his house from the gas station. Then Jules took a break from his work making buoys for his lobster traps and helped me tremendously trying to figure out what was wrong with my car... either being the electric sensor behind the clutch, the fuse box, the ignition, or the starter. I was extremely stressed out and he asked me to wait inside while he messed with my car. We waited for Wes the auto expert to come home, and after an hour or so, Wes came home and he started the car without doing ANYTHING! Jules and I raise our hands, clueless and stunned, and then I was off on my way to Riverside for a hike to Mount Baldy the next day! So, my car worked fine throughout the entire weekend... Saturday a little bit... Sunday all day... and then Monday morning, the car became moody in front of the Rite Aid at the Canyon Crest Towne Center in Riverside (where I met the Great Raguzi, magician!). I discussed with my father and mother on what to do, as I spent my half hour messing with the little electric sensor box behind the clutch and all the fuse boxes, but nothing started!

A very friendly tow-trucker came by Rite Aid very fast after my phone call to AAA Auto Club. He unfortunately had a broken hand from an on-job accident three weeks ago! I ran out of the Rite Aid (trying to buy Werthers and trash bags to consolidate the crxp in my car; I just abandoned the purchase all together!) and before I knew it, the tow trucker and I were on our way to Bob's Auto Service, where I proceeded to clean and patch up the car's front seats a little bit, so George could work without trash being in his face (our family has much respect for George at Bob's Auto Service; he has repaired my car ever since I came to own it back in 1999; I think I knew George since I was 10 years old). My father was frazzled and pissed that his morning was disrupted, as he had to come save me as Bubsy-Knight-in-Shining-Honor.

I waited in the parking lot of Bob's Auto Service, feeling quite depressed and down and empty-headed. My mind craved some serious stimulation and work out, and it unfortunately was not getting any (the previous day was very hard for me, because I spent the entire day patching up meeting notes for the Cal Sea Urchin Commission, I had no mental ownership of my own brain). After a half-hour of gross sweating, my father picked me up, and we pareused over to the Starbucks for coffee (at least to cheer Bubsy up and calm him down!) and then I attempted to drop off my father in front of his office by the UC Riverside Geology Building, but all these bulldozers were destroying the entire geology loading dock behind the building. We wasted another 15 minutes trying to find parking by the botanical gardens or at the visitor's lot by the Science Library, but no, you can ONLY park for two hours, that's it! Where's the lot for whole-day parking? There were no full day visitor passes?! Finally, I dropped my father off, and decided to head toward the University Starbucks to work for a little while, at least (to let you know, that's ANOTHER SYMPTOM of the BAD DAY SYNDROME, when MORE THAN ONE HOUR PER DAY OF YOUR LIFE IS DEVOTED TOWARD FINDING A PARKING SPOT, ESPECIALLY BY A UNIVERSITY, ATTEMPTING NOT TO GET A TICKET). By that time, I was considering suicide and how my life was falling apart... and then... I ventured into the Starbucks, and started writing, venting, writing.... Here I am trying to draw cartoons of highly conceptual issues, and I need to massively catch up with myself at the level of writing. I feel the bubble of ideas inside me.... I most certainly need some streamline writing exercises.... just to sort out my mind and untangle an overwhelming accumulation of un-accounted for experiences.

Then the other dilemma is that "I feel guilty for writing because I'm not writing about anything pertinent toward my Ph.D. or pertinent to society." WELL, FXCK EVERYONE WHO MAKES ME FEEL GUILTY, BECAUSE I HAVE THE RIGHT TO WRITE, JUST AS I HAVE THE RIGHT TO BREATHE AND THINK ABOUT ANYTHING THAT I HOOHAAAHEY WANT TO AND I DON'T GIVE A FXCKING FXCK THAT MY WRITING HAS NO FXCKING MEANING ANYONE FXCKING ELSE AND I DON'T CARE IF MY WRITING DOESN'T FXCKING ADVANCE TOWARD MY PH.D. BECAUSE PEOPLE WITH CLOGGED BRAINS DON'T PRODUCE MEANINGFUL PH.D. DISSERTATIONS ANYWAY! AND EVERYTHING IN MY BRAIN IS FXCKING CONNECTED WHETHER PROFESSORS LIKE IT OR NOT; IT'S FLIPPING FEMALE NEUROBIOLOGY, WE'VE GOT MONDO CORPUS CALLOSUMS, OKAY? AND IF "THEY" (GENERIC "THEY") EXPECT ME TO STARE AT A SUBSET OF A SUBSET OF A SUBSET OF A SUBSET OF A SUBSET OF A SUBSET'S SUBSET FOR 5+ FXCKING YEARS, THEN THIS WHOLE ACADEMIC SYSTEM IS FLAT OUT FXCKED UP! Well, now that I said this, and I feel a bit better, I sincerely hope no one reads this.

And then again, people have the right to be emotional when they have car problems. I thought flat tires and worn clutches, being stuck in the middle of the 101 freeway on the Camarillo Grade were "anti-climactic," but when your goshdanged car doesn't even start, with some put-put clicking noise in the background, it's so pathetic, you feel your car is dead, and that you're dead and gone. And I'd rather have a flat tire on the 405 freeway than have my car not start in some calm parking lot. I don't want my car to die! I don't want the flame to go out!

Okay, ya, so here I am at Starbucks, writing about writing, as what writers do, tend to write about themselves writing about their friends writing about writing, because they're writers and they are paid for their "writing labors" (well, at least I'm writing about my car!). I'm just trying to convince you that writing is no longer a valuable skill, because anyone can write nowadays! Earlier I rapped up a blog, updating about my mother's bizarre eating habits... and now I feel a little bad for saying all that I did say because I just got off the phone, and my mother was willing to pitch in $100 toward the repair of my car starter...

Aha! The Car Starter? So, while I was writing away this afternoon, George called and told me "I started your car without doing anything." And I was like, "What?!! That's not possible!" And I told my father over the phone and he was pissed. And I told George, this is bizarre; this is exactly what happened last time... on Friday. George said he was suspicious that the problem could be traced to the starter, but he wasn't willing to do anything unless if the car wouldn't start. He wasn't exactly interested in fixing a car that actually worked. So, I made arrangements to pick up the car this evening, and then, after my blogging about my bizarre mother's eating habits, I start to look up information on the internet on the costs of a car starter (with solenoid), and it seemed like the average cost ranges from $83-$100 for re-manufactured starters. Then what was really cool was that I found some instructions on how to replace a car starter on http://www.ehow.com, and even COOLER was I found some instructional videos on how to diagnose and replace your car starter, which I watched, and it seemed pretty straight forward, but every car is different, and one may have to move around some other parts to get to the starter. And then what was SUPER COOL, no, no, SUPER MONDO COOL, was that I accidentally found some websites that specifically and directly addressed the exact same symptoms my Toyota Tercel was experiencing (Tercels, 1995-1999 models). And these 5 or 6 websites all pointed exactly toward the same diagnosis: if there's not too much corrosion on your battery, and your car battery is very secure, AND your lights come on (electric's fine), but your car is clicking, and not starting... then it's the bad connection between the solenoid and the starter, and so it's best to get the starter complex repaired. Routine symptoms, routine diagnosis, routine treatment. And I became very excited because I was unsettled taking back a car that could just stop working in the middle of nowhere in particular, and finally... something could be done!

I called George back and he said... "Sure, no problem, I can replace the starter, but you can't get your car back today." I'm cool with that. I asked for a quote, which was $290 parts and labor. *Gulp!* Then I called my mother, and I will be paying $100, my $100 birthday money will go to the car, and my mother will pitch in $100 more. My mom told me not to tell my sister Jenny because she always compares and such, and plus my parents helped my sister a lot during her schooling (but my parents did and DO help me a lot too, and I will need lots of help this upcoming year). But my mom always says that "don't tell your sister," maybe she is trying to make me feel special. And honestly, it's nice sometimes that people try to make you feel special, even though in the broader scheme, you're just an object, a body count, a number in the system.

I called Jules and he was pleased with the situation. He's going rock cod fishing tomorrow. In a certain way, this day was a total waste, but in another way, I learned something about cars... in an unexpected manner.... Bad day turned good. I didn't control my ocean today, but I had to ride unexpected, and unruly waves.

540. Public Session Hosted by "MPA Monitoring Enterprise," Associated with the MLPA (Marine Life Protection Act) Process

2010-07-21T12:13:00.001-07:00

Oh yes, another typical hotel meeting room, this time at the Merigot, in Santa Monica, California. Another typical meeting, as on the surface, seems very boring, but the issues discussed, and the minds involved... are very exciting... So, my own mind occupied this hotel room for 5 minutes, and otherwise occupied the conceptual designs and monitoring of south coast marine protected areas!

Same image, black, white, and gray.

As so the recipe goes, core discussion and swaying always seems to happen over lunch, dinner, and at the bar. Never really in the formal meeting process. Wine and cheese schmoozing throughout the entire MLPA BRTF initiative process (first BRTF meeting I thought that all the stakeholder were engaged in some kind of amicable Thanksgiving Feast!). More conversation over lunch in the sheltered ambiance of the Merigot.

Same image, black, white, and gray.

Well, well, where do we start? My brain is extremely anxious because of Comic-con, and despite the start of the conference drastically approaching, Bob Bertelli convinced me to attend and (god forbid) participate in this public workshop designed for discussion on how to set up monitoring for south coast marine protected areas (MPAs). I started stuttering over the phone, "Bob, I've been a keen observer all this time, a bystander, since fall of 2008. Someone intensely watching, recording with camera and film and audio and notes. Now you want me to PARTICIPATE? I'm 28 years old and I have no sea tenure (I barely know how to scuba dive and I've only caught two real fish, with the help of someone else) and my being an academic, I'm an educated idiot!" Bob convinced me that I should have more confidence and I'll have something to contribute, and so I decided to attend... without so much personal pressure to visually document with photography and film.... Which is nice for a change, not to hide behind a camera for once....

I slept in Riverside (my folks house), woke up 5am, hopped in the car at 5:10am, drove for an hour and fifteen minutes to Santa Monica (no traffic!) got to a rather quiet, deserted "Santa Monica ghost town" around 6:30, ran some errands at the closest open grocery store, found a FREE GOLDEN PARKING SPOT one block away from the Third Street Promenade (and a Starbucks Coffeeshop), and by the time I found this parking spot, I couldn't help thinking how I was bound to have a good day, because most of my spare time in Santa Monica in the past was often revolving around traffice and parking... but somehow today, I'm managing to bypass both of these arduous tasks. I ended up taking a long jog at the Santa Monica Beach near by both of Cousin Mike's previous apartments, imagining how Dr. Kennedy was explaining to me the sedimentological history of Santa Monica Beach back in 2006 (I wished I remembered more, I couldn't help thinking how much sand there was!). I also saw a dude who looked like Richard Dawkins (but he was jogging!) and I couldn't help thinking that probably almost everyone I lay my eyes on has a high likelihood of having some form of Hollywood status of "fame" or "nobility producer position." So, whatever. Me and my raggedy jogging clothes. Yay! I'm just a passerby. Bob called me toward the end of my jog, and I rushed back to the car to get all my stuff together, like change clothes while I was driving my car three blocks over to the Merigot. By the time I entered the hotel, I swear I was intrinsically ashamed, because here's my ghetto green Toyota Tercel entering some elitist hotel with lexuses and mercedez benzes wherever you looked. I told the Valet dudes (three of them), "I'm sorry." And the man said, "Ma'am, do not worry whatsoever. The only people who will see your car is us." I was frazzled, as I accumulated all my items, and some door man opened the door as I entered some Microcosmic Hotel where I swear across the street you could see 15 bums and five run-down buildings. Santa Monica is such a bizarre landscape of extreme "wealth and lavishness" in a backdrop of run-down buildings and homeless tweakers and crack addicts and such. I felt guilty for stepping into some kind of manicured Hotel Utopia right next to... normal society.... I don't know how all these MLPA operations can afford having meetings in such well-to-do places. Some other man in suit and tie guided me to the location of the meeting, and then finally I felt better because I spotted Bob and Josh Fisher and a few other familiar faces from the south coast MLPA Regional Stakeholder Group. *Whew.* And a lot of new characters, like a high school teacher from Team Marine, a professor from Occidental College, and a few Chumash representatives, wow, so cool! There was also this really cool dude named Ken Kerns? who is a representative of the Statewide Interest Group and made a few comments ensuring the smoothness of the process. He's a spunky person! And a few faces from way back... like Tom Ford, someone I scubadove with at Malibu, five years ago, when I was at UCLA! Amazing! Tom... is simply... hilarious! A free living, walking, breathing comedy show. Great to be around. So, the world becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, eh?
Bob saved a spot for me right by him and Josh, and I couldn't help to notice the arrangement of the room. A long U-shape assemblage of tables where all the "public participants" sat, with a slide projector, screen to the front, and podium to the side. Another table was placed on the other side, where individuals from "MPA Monitoring Enterprise" sat. I do think that's a scary name for such an operation. "Enterprise" has connotations of entrpreneurship, corporate business operation, though it is a non-profit group consisting of a team of scientists who are contracted by California Fish and Game Commission to set up and establish monitoring protocols without the baggage of stating any management recommendations... except to manage the monitoring.... I wished a better word were chosen beyond "Enterprise," but who am I? An educated idiot grad student, so I have no say in such a matter.
The meeting went from 9am to 5pm, and can be broken down into four sections. First, the meeting organizers provided their schpeal about an overview of MPA monitoring, and how to approach monitoring in the south coast, from an overarching perspective. Secondly, was lunch. Mexican food, fajitas! Yum, yum! And chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter and oatmeal... for snacks! Why don't they ever serve fish at these operations?! Just to be politically correct?! Thirdly, was a breakout session to discuss components of the "ecosystem" in which public members valued and desired to be monitored. We reconvened afterwards. Fourthly, was a breakout session that discussed "designer ecosystem questions," which placed the fishermen in shock because it was the first time we were ever asked to wear the hats of the Science Advisory Team, and ask fundamental questions relating to whether MPAs worked or not. The Regional Stakeholder Group was SOOO used to being "bullied around" by "moving goalposts" of the Science Advisory Team for the past year, and that suddenly we were asked questions such that if we had criteria and parameters for designing and re-evaluating MPAs, what would we do, what questions would we ask, which then, my rambunxious Group 1 asked a string of questions that probably entailed 10-15 potential Ph.D. dissertations.... Now, that was fun! And after these two breakout sessions, we re-convened, and MPA Monitoring Enterprise told everyone they would have another public meeting sometime in October where these meeting notes would be processed and shown to us for further evaluation, and then I said adios to Bob and Josh (who chose to drive out in the 5pm traffic, nutso!) while I zoomed out of that Utopia Hotel and recommuned with the hobos and other regular people on the street. I found another ideal parking spot near by the Third Street Promenade, where I came to enjoy some works of two street performers, and confined myself to the back of a Starbucks, where the line to using the restroom was longer than the line for purchasing coffee (I think that's a good joke for a comedy routine, sad but true). While I was walking along braindead, my mind started to craft a song, "I don't see anyone, going anywhere, anytime soon // so I'm just chilling out, hanging out, making up a silly tune // cuz these silly songs, are th' only means to sanity in the traffic of Hollywood // cuz these silly songs are the silly means to makin' money in the Hole of Hollywood."

As I'm reviewing my notes, I decided to write here some takehome messages of the day from this meeting, as well as ideas for cartoons, concept toys, film clips, and other forms of media. Coming to think of it, this is the first blog I have written about the MLPA process in a year. It's been a while. I think this whole process stresses me out because it's so overwhelmingly huge and that I think I can grasp it, but then again I feel like a little sediment gushing down some river where I feel that the question of control has just gone down to the physical elements and that a single human agent has no... agency.... So? I'll enjoy the ride of process, though I have a purpose, though the purpose is so insignificant, that it has been crushed to process. I'm a meeting body count. Yay (I'm already used to that). Well heck, at LEAST I got to hang out with Bob and Josh and get a free lunch!

**MPA Monitoring Enterprise stated from the beginning that they were taking an "ecosystem-based management" (EBM) approach, including humans, so more of a nested-scale hierarchy, umbrella of monitoring programs. Old news to me... that's the whole UCSB cult... ecosystem-based management, generally, several marine scientists are EBMers now. But but but! This is a misnomer, ecosystem-based management. If the MLPA process were EBM, (1) it would not be housed largely under the Department of Fish and Game (it would be under some new inter-agency umbrella organization) (2) it would have not only restricted fishing, but would have made more effort in waste-sewage issues rather than just "avoidance behavior" of sewage outfalls, aka prescription would have involved simultaneous regulation of ocean inputs and outputs and (3) so? Dangit. I forgot my third point... give me some Time To Think (T3) here....

**MPA Monitoring Enterprise used the "doctor metaphor" for understanding the process. Though it's an imperfect analogy. So, let me try to elaborate (or unpack) this metaphor. The ocean can be considered an organism. The ocean has been diagnosed as "sick" (Jeremy Jackson in summary: "The ocean is going to hxll. We're taking too much out and dumping too much in.") and is "human-induced" (not non-human-induced, like El Ninos and Pacific Decadal Oscillation cycles) and therefore since we caused the problem, and a problem is a problem, if we humans perceive it to be a problem, and therefore the ocean is in a humanly undesirable state, and we humans are responsible, and we humans need a healthy habitat to live in, we need to "heal" and "cure" the ocean (prescription, medication, surgery, aka Designer Ecosystem). Medications and surgeries should curb "taking too much out" and "dumping too much in," which would be in the form of fisheries management, marine reserves, restoration-enhancement sites, and technological/sewage-waste treatment/human population management. The medication we have been focusing on is ONLY MARINE RESERVES, which is of course, non-coordinated with fisheries management and human population-waste management. It's like telling me that we're going to cure cancer but today we're only going to discuss and implement "radiation therapy" without the "chemotherapy" and "diet/habit/lifestyle changes." Ya, so whatever... human-enviromedicine is way behind. We're in stoneage ocean and earth therapy for our own individual and collective benefit, I guess you can say. When an MD imposes a medication, surgery, or therapy on a patient and asks "Does the treatment work?!" then we're in BAD shape... because MD's are supposed to proclaim with certainty "this treatment WORKS X percent of the time." We primordial earth ecosystem prescriptive scientists can't even say for certain "MPAs WORK." Shxt. Oh shxt. But what can I say? Just because you don't know doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything and let things going by. Doing something is doing better than nothing, that is for sure.

Another issue is that different doctors would diagnose the ocean with different levels and scales of sickness, and certain doctors wouldn't even say the ocean were sick, and that the severity of the sickness varies as well--is the ocean in a state of Stage 4 lung cancer or a mild case of bacteria in the ears? Or common cold? I'm sure it's somewhere in between. So, now we have a few thousand doctors trying to prescribe medicine for an ocean that is perceived with different varieties and scales and degrees of severity of sickness. And it's not just a sickness issue, it's a wardrobe aesthetic issue. It's about ocean fashion too. How the ocean looks like, how we crave for our "natural underwater parks" to look like as our Japanese Gardens, designer ecosystems. So, we also have to consider what wig or toupee we're going to put on our marine protected area after it lost all of its hair through radiation treatment. Image is everything, Agassi and Canon Rebel once said. Goes along with our MPAs too. **MPA Monitoring Enterprise also discussed how doctors take a few initial measurements (such as temperature, pressure, and pulse) to serve as diagnostics for human health. The question is, are there a few indicators or diagnostics for the ocean that would likely best represent overall ocean health? How do we take the pulse of the ocean, and how would we construct the notion of a "healthy pulse" or "healthy metabolism of the ocean"?

Expanding the doctor metaphor conversation with a phone call with my father: If environment-related scientists and scholars are to become and embody the doctor MD diagnosis-and-prescription metaphor, then I could clearly say that environmental doctors are in the stone age of medicine and surgery: (1) environmental doctors have no clear-cut hierarchy of diagnosis for a healthy or unhealthy ecosystem (e.g. taking pulse, temperature, and blood pressure, then going from there, there is no magic probe for measuring ecosystem health) (2) environmental doctors don't even know that their treatment will work, let alone have a percent chance of survival (e.g. "Do MPAs work?" is still a QUESTION, not a percent chance of success, like 90% chance of survival post cancer treatment) (3) environmental doctors do not engage in holistic treatment (e.g. control of inputs and outputs, like control of fish take and sewage dumping and landscape enhancement all under the same breath, e.g. right now they are focusing on radiation without the chemotherapy) (4) a wad of environmental doctors all on the same roam would have different diagnoses at different scales with different ecosystem-body components with various degrees of severity of the problem, due to the point of view effect, blind men feeling parts on an elephant, variations in value systems, degree of specialization of disciplines, etcetera, universals in diagnosis are less apparent and less confined contained than with human body medicine (5) environmental doctors do not prescribe treatment strictly for medical-environmental health purposes, collective survival purposes, superflous value systems are also included, such as aesthetic (shallow beauty, stimulating pleasure center, image is everything) and heritage (deep knowledge of a system, Kantian sublime blah blah bullshxt stuff). Which makes diagnosis not survival related but also diagnosis containing a level of aesthetic. Environmental management is like dentistry; certain forms of dentistry operations are for needed survival and functionality for chewing, but many dental decisions are made for image-based purposes, like the color coordination, size and shape of teeth, spacing teeth so that there's no embarrassing gap, etcetera.

**About a year ago, I had a fantastic discussion with Merit McCrea (who whenever I talk to, I feel like I'm talking to a professor and not a fellow grad student, because he knows SOO MUCH STUFF about the ocean, from a fishing AND academic perspective)... so Merit told me this analogy. If you placed a scientist in a black room that symbolizes the ocean, and you gave the scientist a flashlight, what the scientist would do is beam the light very brightly in one spot, with very high resolution. And then he would use some math model to connect the dots for a conceptual overview of how the rest of the black ocean works. Then Merit said, if you give a fisherman a flashlight in a dark room, the fisherman would illuminate the light everywhere such that the entire room lit up, though in one particular, specific area, the light would be grainy, diffuse, and in low resolution, the fisherman would have a rather large conceptual mental map of a region of the ocean, that was generated by experience, not by a math model. And of course, based on the problem and project at hand, they would focus on specific dots at the time, but the overarching "conditions" could never be lost in order to function out in the ocean.... They would know how all the dots connected, in a way that allowed their daily survival out in the ocean, and getting by to catch fish to feed oneself and earn for the family. So hence, we have two types of people learning new things about the ocean world in very different ways, and each has their advantages and disadvantages. MPA Monitoring Enterprises knows they are shining lights on a few very, narrow, bright spots, because that's how science does it, because that's how science has been done before, and scientists are just creatures of habit and historical convention sometimes, and science has not placed any value on those who have a mental map (cognitive map) that can illuminate the whole room, because it cannot be quantified, because science loves numbers. Who does this work of illuminating the whole room? Who tries to construct the narrative of human-environmental change? Historical ecologists and environmental historians--who are placed in humanities and social sciences (largely). But there were none of those at this MPA Monitoring Enterprise meeting. Science does not value holistic experience and narrative, because you can't numericize stories. Stories are stories, they are the spoken words, image, emotions, but of course, no place for that in science, no place for that in monitoring. No one discussed taking oral histories of fishermen as a line of data... I wished I had mentioned that. Oh well.

I thought Merit invented this metaphor of shining a flashlight in a dark room... I must ask him who invented this metaphor now that I have heard it twice, from two very different mouthes. I found out that the MPA Monitoring Enterprise received a dose of Merit McCrea up in Santa Barbara. Maybe they were inspired. :-) One way or another, I need to cite my sources, and since I heard it from Merit first, I'll cite him.

Bob said that fishermen have their high beamers on, scoping the conditions, and over time through trial and error, weed out the distractions and focus on what is pertinent for the project. Scientists on the other hand have no incentive to scope and are invited to dive into a narrow discipline for their entire lives without any justification except for an arbitrary liking of a subject and historical contingency of some specific discipline rather than using instrinsic caveman optimal foraging skills to focus on specific environmental elements. Fishermen think in hourglass mode, whereas scientists are specialized and narrowed into belljars, from my point of view.... Which ultimately explains why I myself like to and kind of need to be around fishermen because my mentality matches their mentality better than those of scientists. I can't make decisions based on historical contingency and arbitrary likings. I need to make decisions because somehow they touch upon the core essence of survival, like catching food for dinner.

**This dichotomized, controversial notion of "consumptive" versus "non-consumptive" uses of the ocean is becoming pervasive in the literature and protocols, as I had first encountered this labeling in a scholarly article by Ecotrust, continued by MPA Monitoring Enterprise. This labeling is (1) grossly oversimplified, dichotomized (2) discriminating and stereotyping, basically anyone who fishes and anyone who impacts the ocean through all other means other than fishing, which includes eating fish that the fisherman fished for that day. I asked an employee of the Department of Fish and Game about the "origins" of this dichotomy and he said he did not know, but though he agreed that there is a gradient of use of the ocean, from consumption to production and waste, there was some level of "utility in classification" such that scientists could collect their data appropriately. Well, that's still not fair, because this "labeling" frames the way how scientists gather whatever desired data in the first place! Argh! Bob Bertelli suggested using the terms "primary and secondary consumptives" rather than "consumptive" versus "non-consumptive." And besides, consumption is not the only way how humans USE the ocean. What about PRODUCTION? Of waste? So, who in the hoo-haa-hey is going to listen to this and overturn and re-organize an entire massive dataset? No one, of course. Do what you keep doing, label how you keep labeling, because it's convenient, and that's what it has been done before, and we need to match the data sets, it's not what is right or wrong or more accurately portrayed. I'm not dxmning any humans, but "Dxmn Incumbency," I do say.

So... in the monitoring section, I recommended that there should be a breakdown of "direct" versus "indirect" impacts of human uses. Ecotrust failed to look at multiplier effects of socioeconomics (analysis "stops at the dock" so they said) and I think that these multiplier effects need to be considered. I also reasoned that in terms of short term benefits and costs, fishermen are directly and negatively affected (but in the long run, may be positively affected), and that all those folks involved in education, tourism, recreation, valuations of natural and historical heritage tremendously benefit, short and long run. It's an easy call to make... a simple conclusion. I don't exactly need to measure or collect data this at the moment.

I think that since benefits and costs of MPAs are highly dependent on the point of view (ie "what is perceived as good or bad is arbitrary, non-Biblically determined, and is highly dependent upon the point of view rather than clear-cut universals" e.g. sea urchin barrens as "good" or "bad"?), that there should be a few separate, independent groups of researchers to evaluate the same data such as to enable some level of control for the point of view effect (hmmm... I think I just had a good idea!). Because, of course, scientists will be a little more eager to show net benefits of MPAs in terms of numbers and sizes of fishies, and of course, fishermen will be a little more eager to show negative socioeconomic impacts of MPAs, it's human nature to have a point of view, and that a few separate agencies should do their own unique analyses such as to enable how data can be intepreted differently based on the point of view. (Expanded conversation with my father: the Point of View POV effect is also similar to the Shifting Baseline Syndrome SBS effect, in which people have evolved different baselines of understanding, focusing on scales in space and time, the POV effect overlaps with SBS, but primarily focuses on how that particular individual relates to and interacts with that particular system, in this case, the ocean. For example, a fisheries scientist funded by NOAA will have a certain special interest on fish, revolving around the agenda of the funding source, and a marine ecologist funded by the Packard Foundation may have a certain special interest on larvae, and a fisherman may have a certain special interest on socioeconomics. Science is not unbiased to POV and special interest. As long as their are specialized disciplines, there is special interest, PERIOD. Science IS politics, PERIOD).

**Concept Toy: Empty cube fish tank and get a bunch of plastic figurines of all the players or "agents" of a California kelp forest / sandy bottom ecosystem. I need to go to some nature store and buy some plastic California ocean toys.... I wonder where I can get this cool stuff? Like Design your own MPA kit?

**Cartoon of the Day: Five years, waiting in line at the University-Mart (Uni-Mart), Fisherman brings in a broken, half-open box that says MPA written on it. Fisherman gives scientist receipt for dozens of thousands of dollars. Fisherman says, "I want to return this product, because still after the five year warrantee, it doesn't work." A fisherman asked at the meeting today, "If MPAs don't work five years from now, can fishermen get their money back?"

**Cartoon of the Day: Ph.D. Question for Fisherman: "How does my blood pressure change when DFG closes off Laguna as a marine reserve?" Ha! Correlating human health with human-environmental / political change

**NEW WORD: Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD), southern California concept, Bob Osborn mentioned, "You gotta have some nature in order to interact with nature." Bob O. is kind of funny. He sounds like Mr. Mackey from Southpark, "Nnh-kay?"

**Another Cartoon of the Day (and NEW T-SHIRT!): Dr. Randy Olson worked with some non-profits to design some campaign slogan for MPAs, specifically during the south coast MLPA process. A bold statement was printed on hundreds (thousands?) of shirts: "MPAs WORK." Alternatively, the beginning of this monitoring session today showed the slide with a big question: "DO MPAs WORK?" And to make it work, Ken Kerns (?) stands up and asks the questions: "Do MPAs work? Do MPAs NOT work? Do non-MPAs work? Do non-MPAs NOT work?" "What defines a successful MPA? Or a failed MPA?" ACCKKK!!! And I was kind of shocked to see this question because here we are, the last year or so, a whole bunch of scientists and stakeholders, with imperfect information and "best available science" trying to make firm decisions on setting the goal posts and designing MPAs, and here are all these monitoring folks who are just taking this entire game of portraying a false illusion of certainty, suddenly transformed into doubt and uncertainty all over again... Intellectually, I felt derailed, as if we were starting from scrap all over again. Starting with a blank slate. Complete creative artistic freedom to redesign the whole universe of marine reserves! *Sigh.* It's was philosophically and artistically... overwhelming, and I think it's a new direction I should take some of the film interview questions. MPA Monitoring Enterprise encouraged the group to consider these questions because once the five-year review is up in terms of monitoring, the data may be telling a very different story than what the scientists and stakeholders originally portrayed during the MLPA initiative process. Blank slate rocks!

**I felt that this monitoring workshop partly failed because (1) this team of scientists who have gone through several iterations of setting up monitoring schematics for several marine reserve systems around the world, failed to educate and inform us ignorant public citizens of what they have learned in their past experiences. This knowledge would have been very interesting to know. For example, they mentioned how goals of marine reserve designation has shifted over time, from specific species conservation to aesthetic landscape more to ecosystem functionality... they must have many other insights beyond this simple, yet profound statement on shifts in marine reserve goals through time (2) this team of scientists failed to provide a holistic "map" of the south coast region in terms of pre-existing agencies-programs either in research, monitoring, management, restoration, communication outreach, etcetera (e.g. SCWIRP, Algalita, Seagrant, Surfrider, non-profit projects, university programming, etc, etc, etc). I see this MPA Monitoring Enterprise doing EXACTLY the SAME exercise that my Ph.D. group from an Interdisciplinary Research Course at Bren (UCSB) was doing when we were trying to set up a collaborative research experiment on how to best restore Chesapeake Bay Oysters. All five of us had to figure out all the pre-existing literature and pre-existing monitoring and management programs in order to effectively make umbrella, hierarchized recommendations (rather than "re-invent the wheel"). We as a group of public citizens would have benefited to know this "map of existing agencies and programs" of southern California that this enterprise was utilizing and plugging into in order for us to make more effective recommendations and considerations in terms of what agencies and groups and programs they were missing out. In other worse, the MPA Monitoring Enterprise did not provide us with a "Regime Profile." I bet my advisor Oran would be pissed they didn't do that either. It's funny though, because when our group finished this Chesapeake Bay project, we all felt like, "What's the point of proposing this research, because so many people are already doing so many things?" Sometimes kinda wonder what's the point of doing a Ph.D, eh? Reminds me of that Nick Drake song, where people say it's not worth singing because everything's already been done and everything's already been said. Well, no one should worry about me, because my Ph.D. encompasses the notion that scientists and scholars have become language-and-number-oriented, and the quesiton is, how would the structure and order of knowledge of human-environmental relationships be re-sorted if one included visualization, acoustic interpretation, and emotion into the slush piles of the ways of storytelling? So, I don't wonder about the "what's the point" because I know my Ph.D. will be interesting, one way or another.

I had a phone call with Bob today and I was wondering why so much information was withheld from the public group meeting. The MPA Monitoring Enterprise wanted to know what we knew and what we valued, but I feel that they didn't do a good job about informing us what THEY knew. And honestly, for me, that's not fair. We learned a lot about the monitoring enterprise team in terms of personality, but I felt like I learned a lot about how much information they were not willing to initially tell us. I'm sure all this monitoring information is going to have to be public... but why not sooner, when stakeholder and public input window is now open... and later... closed?

**Factors to Be Considered with Monitoring... A Suite of Elements of the Ocean Environment are already being monitored, the question is how to organize this monitoring such that it caters toward the MLPA political mandate and revolves around the question "Do MPAs work?" So, does placing a no-take box in the ocean work? And for whom and why? "MPA-CENTRIC MONITORING" so it's called, which has overlap with several other existing monitoring programs. Monitoring needs to be ideal, but also feasible, practical, cost-effective.

**Do ocean factors change or stay the same?

**Human versus Non-human changes in the ocean (el nino cycles, warm-cold water cycles) (abiotic changes--oceanography, climatology, geology, biotic changes--ecological, evolutionary shifts, artificial selection and MPAs, habitat variation, species variation, composition, structure)

**Changes in the ocean associated with human prescription, management versus marine reserves or synergisms with management and marine reserves; changes in size-shape-spacing of reserves

**Human changes (perception and value shifts, behavioral shifts, institutional shifts, bureaucratic shifts, technological shifts)

**How is "conservation" and "consumption" compromised, or are they being effectively compromised by the presence of MPAs?

**Lifestyle shifts of fishermen due to MPAs, e.g. driving costs, port infrastructure shifts, fishing the line, compaction and displacement concerns, benefits of "spillover" effects?

**Individual and public perception / sentiments of the ocean, increase or decrease in ocean awareness

**Levels of impact on education, tourism, degree of recreational use of the ocean

**Effectiveness of enforcement, designnation of SMRs and SMCAs, levels of protection, levels of poaching

**Success of MLPA implementation based on degree of co-management of bureaucracy with local stakeholders (e.g. fishermen, Chumash, other community members)

**How do lawsuits affect the MLPA process (ha ha ha!) someone asked this question!

**Scientists told the stakeholders to avoid oil and gas rigs though Dr. Milton Love's research demonstrates that oil rigs serve as even more effective reefs than neighboring kelp forests. Maybe this SAT guideline based on the "best available science" should be reconsidered.

**Well, Bob? I guess this is the first time I "participated" in an MPA-related activity. And to my surprise, I felt a little bit knowledgable and useful. Bob has somehow over time become my "agent" in which he had freely stepped in and introduced me to nearly everybody in the broader MLPA process (yes, I do have my times when I'm shy and Bob? He has no people fear!). And yesterday, I could say I was Bob's agent at least once. Yay, I'm recriprocating! It was toward the end of the day, and Bob was tired and rambling about something related cold and warm-water cycles (man, a lot of people in this group of public citizens ramble a lot! I have been trained to sell my soul in less than five seconds and tell my life story in less than a minute, haven't people met literary agents or Hollywood Casting Directors before? People have got to learn to say the most with the least!) and then I politely stepped in to tell the MPA Monitoring folks, "In other words, what Bob meant was this--" and one short sentence followed. One of the meeting coordinators told me a little later, "You must have lots of experience with these types of meetings!" And I said, "No, I just know Bob very well :-)." (And I didn't mention anything about the literary agent Hollywood casting director hot seat, oh well). In all honesty though, everyone has a right to ramble when they're tired and it's the end of the day. Period. No one's fault there. I ramble to Bob several times and he puts up with me! Anyway, rambling is a disease (or superhero quality) both Bob and I have, and speaking of rambling... look how LONG this blog is!

**Just to state, the MPA Monitoring Enterprise stated that this workshop does not affect the MLPA planning process whatsoever, but they are just doing a head start, just in case a set of MPAs are drafted by the Commission toward the end of this year, then they will have to kick into drafting a monitoring plan ASAP. I also thought that MPA Monitoring Enterprise introduced themselves in self-deprecation "Pointy-headed staff with Ph.D.s" which I think in a certain way is humbling their acknowledgment of pointy-headedness. I'm even worse: an educated idiot! Ha! The monitoring plan required a public input and public interest component, not just scientific parameters, which of course there is overlap.... The staff also mentioned a $4-million budget from the OPC as a start-up, which can be coupled with other forms of funding from private and public sources.

**Someone made an interesting statement: nothing in the MLPA law states that the six goals have to be fulfilled through marine protected areas, or marine reserves. Wow, that's a CRAZY thought! I am going to have to re-read the goals!

539. A Most Fundamental Biologically Incorrect Cartoon::: "Frantic Squirrel Helps Stuck Bird Get Out of Cage"

2010-07-19T13:34:00.001-07:00

Caption I included on Picasaweb: It's just a few days away from my first ever Comic-con, and I had to switch my mental processes from music to cartoons. I asked myself what are the fundamental images I need to draw such that a Comic-Con alternative adult comic audience will better understand my Biologically Incorrect cartoons? Ever since I went through Self-Standardization (Victoria's SI units for cartooning consist of fine-point black sharpies, a simple black-white-gray color scheme, and white xerox paper), I realized that I needed to re-draw certain images that were unforunately constructed in pencil or other form of pen. Not only do publishers want originality and audience comprehension, but they also want consistency and standardization from the author. So, I'm going back to my fundamental images that I live by my absurd life, and re-drawing them to near-"human perfection." One image I keep going back to is "Frantic Squirrel Helps Stuck Bird Get Out of Cage." More on the Biologically Incorrect Blog 539!

I decided that if I were my own country and had a designated flag, the little green square with ths squirrel and the bird in a cage would be on the flag. It summarizes my existentially absurd pursuits of life of trying to simultaneously occupy two spaces: being stuck in the box, and always trying to escape and jump outside of the box, always trying to avoid the belljar of repetition and slipping into an hourglass of novelty and growth. This "Squirrel and Bird in a Cage" image has received much attention from my past blogs... Blog 253 (the origins and history of the bird-in-a-cage idea, Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller, Dr. James Reichman, LAP Records, Robyn T., QR Cover, Advisor Oran), Blog 317 (images I gave to my UCSB advisor as a present), Blog 329 (Biologically Incorrect and Ecology of Scale Images derived from the Elephant-Oak-Tree Story), and Blog 489 (elaborated and darkened images of the Bird in the Cage for the Biologically Incorrect PR page... dead end page!). Not only that, I decided to experiment with a Zazzle Page (http://www.zazzle.com/stokastika) and Deviant Art Page (http://stokastika.deviantart.com) using these image-logos as the first two items of display on each page.... Heck, it's a start! Since I have discussed this bird-in-a-cage so much before, it is questionable to expand this discourse! As others would say, "Get Over It!"

Such is finding passion in the Absurd life of the Absurdist Existential Environmentalist. So I was trying to be an environmentalist and then I realized how impractically absurd it is to be an "environmentalist" and so now I am a Human-Environmentalist Existential Absurdist, or something like that. I try to send out meaningful messages, but then I come to realize how meaningful messages have become overall impractical to materialized... and so I fail... because I'm always a bird stuck in a cage, and I'm always that squirrel trying to get the poor bird out of the cage. And so it goes. And so on (Slaughterhouse 5). The sad thing is that I bet corporations will love me because I try to send some kind of quasi-preachy environmental message and then I self acknowledge my failure to practice what I preach, and that it's all modestly impossible anyway... so there you go... my absurd values align very well with corporate environmentalism... at least on the surface... ha ha! I hope no one reads this blog, down this far....

It's funny, I even remember back in the fall of 2006 that I imagined that my first music CD cover would have the squirrel and the bird in a cage, and that it would be neon-green so that it would stick out of the pile of dull-colored CD jewel cases that are more so covered with poofy blong hair and elaborate make-up rather than some existential structure or image that could possibly have meaning to the core of existence (like Jack Johnson's cover "To the Sea" or something like that. And now? FINALLY! I did what I sought out to do, back in 2006. Yippee! Slowly, very slowly, things are off the to-do list... ideas get off the to-do list to some final-like form. I'm glad Comic-Con is coming because it certainly motivates me to reconsider my roots and fundamentals of how to advertise and represent my cartoons!

I have been living a good summer. Chris Lods was right. I argued with him over a burrito at Freebirds last school year that everything we do today is built upon history, but Chris made a point that we have no obligation to history and that every day is a new day for new opportunities and to break the habits and burdens of history. Janelle Monae tells me to be a thrival, break all bad habits of history, whether family history or collective history. Even in this modality, the present is built upon the past... but why should the past ever be a heavy weight? I'm embracing this modality this summer... and let whatever positive trickles of history blossom in my mind to its novel and fullest creative potential... Trickle... then EXPLODE! Thanks Chris. I guess I'm kind of being Zen Buddhist right now, eh?

538. Adventures of the Coffeeshop Hobo

2010-07-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

If there is some label I can definitely call myself (besides "pink with yellow pokadots"), it would be "Coffeeshop Hobo." More specifically (especially now that they are providing free internet), I am quite a Starbucks hobo / addict. It's a ritual now. It's like I need a two-dollar cup of coffee to start the day as fresh, a blank slate (and then 3 refills throughout the day to survive). I do not have much passion for advertising with corporations, but if there was one project I would be proud to do, it would be to travel across the country, coffeeshop hopping from one coffeehouse to the next (predominantly Starbucks) and engage in random conversations with random people, write about them, photograph about them, cartoon about them, film them, etcetera... and perhaps, much like Steinbeck's "Travels with Charlie," I could capture the American Experience... embedding the eccentricities of my personal life (not like it's anything special, but I have been contracted to give these top secret aliens an Environmental Impact Report so that they can figure out an optimal human-environmental management plan for a place and a people that can't seem to manage themselves).

Starbucks is probably the most prominent aspect of my life where the corporate ambiance and personal sphere mesh and tightly intertwine.

July 17, 2010 ~ The reason why I'm starting the Coffeeshop Hobo blog entry now is because I just had a random experience with a random person that transformed my day from ordinary to touching and unusual. I walked into a Starbucks in Escondido, and there was an elder man in a wheelchair (I think some level of motor defects, but he was still quite functional) who said hello right-off-the-bat (usually I don't interact with random customers in Starbucks) and made a huge effort to buy me a coffee refill (a whole 50 cents!). I was touched, and then he said I was pretty (uhmmm... awkward moment), and we shook hands. Jimmy (so he told me his name, and visa versa) hopes that I come by a little more often, as he was escorted by his sister off into the barely tolerable heat of July. Talk about paying it forward.

It's strange, though Starbucks at first constructs a corporate mass-produced atmosphere with their chain stores, I still feel like this somehow creates opportunity to engage in random, yet very intimate interactions that would have never otherwise happened. I'm truly thankful for that. And it's strange how sometimes I am deeply craving for a random act of kind intervention, and other times I want to be completely left alone and not deal with people. Today I was more so in the "leave me alone" mode, so I wished I could have better appreciated the Jimmy's kindness more than I have. *Sigh*

The CoffeeShop Hobo (column on meeting random interesting people at the local coffeeshop, based on a North High School student's senior thesis: "I've learned more in one month just talking to random people at a coffeeshop than I have learned in all four years of my high school education!")

537. Music Experiment with WidgetBox, Google Sites, Myspace

2010-07-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

Living as Memory

http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/mp3
Oh my gosh! It works, it works! Download the mp3 through Google Sites, and then add the widget! Woohoo!

Okay then, since it works, here are the seven other pieces I worked on...

>>Unthrough the Soul
(Spoken Word w Abstract Music Track)

>>Unthrough the Soul (Spoken Word)

>>The Co-Evolution of Collective Action
(Spoken Word with Abstract Music Track)

>>The Co-Evolution of Collective Action
(Spoken Word)

>>Red Tape Manifesto (Vocals with Chorus)

>>Red Tape Manifesto (Vocals Emphasis)

>>Red Tape Manifesto
(Audio Plug-ins Experiment)

And all the music is innocently downloaded on http://www.myspace.com/stokastikamusic.

533. Theorizing Vic's Alcohol (Drug) Consumption (W Thought Sketches "Earthworms in Strong Beer" "Manufactured Emotions" and "Alternative Addictions")

2010-06-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

The last couple of days I have found myself constructing a rather elaborate narrative on Victoria's relationship with alcohol. It is a rather intriguing topic because what is presently occurring, as it did the night I went to watch Mia Doi Todd and Michel Gondry perform at Spaceland Silverlake, I was the only girl in the club who was drinking coffee and reading environmental history papers while everyone else was drinking quite a bit of alcohol and was ATTEMPTING to dance (because strangely, I felt that about 90% of the music played that night, by all four groups of musicians, was ridiculously slow for a club... I was like... where's David Guetta? Where's the fast-paced jazz? Where's the boom-boom-boom fast-paced chicka-chicka-boom drum-and-bass jungle techno?! None to be played... *sigh*).

Yes, that is the case. I am about the only girl in the bar or club or party drinking coffee or diet coke while everyone else was hammering down on the alcohol. As Einstein recommends to "simplify but nothing simpler," the going theory on Vic's alcohol consumption is "I'm more drunk when I'm not drunk." And to elaborate even further, when people claim for some reason that "I'm smart," I simply state, "It's not that I'm smart. It's just that I have this very hyperactive brain that chronically needs a mental work out because I didn't drink enough alcohol in college to kill enough brain cells such that I could consciously and pacifyingly follow suit to society's expectations of my own desired road to life." Hence, I seem a little more rebellious merely because I didn't go through the protocol ritual of university frosh drunken purposelessness. Oops! I guess I skipped a few steps in life... besides the alcoholic rite of passage and 6 years of menstrual cycles (due to over-thinness) which makes me structurally seem like a 21-year-old female with the hormones of a 16-year-old and strangely the mind of a 60-year-old. Oops. Talk about differential timing of body rhythms. Oh well.

This "I-didn't-kill-enough-brain-cells" theory was actually derived from my undergraduate-advisor-parasite-invertebrate expert, Armand. One day Armand told the class as to how he ended up being an invertebrate zoologist and parasitology. In short, Armand started out in economics, and then by accident he took a zoology course in his third or fourth year of college (?) and right then and there he fell in love with invertebrates and went to the chair of the department and asked him to allow him to complete all requirements for a zoology major in one year, in which he did, acing courses in flying colors. In a brief description of his improved sense of identity and self-esteem, I vividly remembering Armand stating (paraphrased), "It was a simple decision. I would rather count worms and bugs for the rest of my life than counting dollar bills. Life was getting better since I found my calling. I had to slow down my alcohol consumption so that I could save a few brain cells to pursue this career pathway. Heck, I even started dating girls again." The last thing I remember, Armand applied for a Ph.D. in zoology (?) at Berkeley, and apparently his father wanted him to be a medical physician. Armand was upset with this parental pressure and never conceded to this road to life. Perhaps that is why Armand has made such research break-throughs in ecological and evolutionary approaches to parasitology... he simply has refused to see these little buggers from the typical lens of a doctor.

Getting back to the point of alcohol, Armand pricked my interest in terms of his "conscious decision to slow down his alcohol consumption such as to spare some brain cells to pursue this calling to life." Alcohol? Killing brain cells?! Apparently alcohol kills everything that it touches.

And hence, Armand ultimately set up my Existential Moment that has largely solidified my own personal relationship with alcohol. Let's consider this paragraph as an exploration of a future poem entitled "Meditations on an Earthworm in Strong Beer." (or Booze? what's more poetic?) During my first attempt to take Invertebrate Zoology (with my ultimately cool TA Lise Goddard-Schickel, now teaching at the Midland School out in the Santa Ynez Valley), one of the first labs required us to dunk a living earthworm in a transparent bowl halfway filled with 70% rubbing alcohol. Aka. or substitute as "Very Strong Beer." In other words, we poor students had to kill the worm (we had to chop the head of the chicken, carve out the sides of the cow, etc etc etc). And so, my being naive, I dunked an earthworm (derived from this lasagna pan full of dirt in front of the classroom) and to my great shock and surprise, after three seconds of immersion, the worm started to violently wriggle and convulse and shake and squirm and contort and twist and tie itself into knots and it wouldn't stop shaking and shaking and shaking and forming these wild shapes part fractalous part complete chaos, the most bizarrest wild dance around the fire I could barely even replicate myself just thinking like is this what all animals and organisms could possibly experience when they die? I mean, is this what people went through when going through the gas chambers of the Holocaust? It reminded me of this horrible dream I had early on last quarter where I was a human-fish and my whole body was chopped up into parts and my body was stacked on all these other human-fish bodies, you could see the patterns-serration of the bloody muscle and it just smelled so bad and we were on the bottom of this ship, and then for some reason the ship started to sink to the bottom of the ocean and my fish body started floating around and I was following my Mumsy, Bubsy, and Jen-Jen around trying to tell them that I had passed on, but they never even noticed that I was there, and I was frustrated... and this other bad dream that I had lost all my hair from cancer therapy! And god, it just kept happening how this worm kept wriggling and contorting in streaks of fast-slow-fast fast fast-slow motions and I had to watch this for three very long minutes, but the last minute the worm started to slow down and calm down its sine and cosine waves of violent bodily chaos and eventually it stopped moving and I wondered where its poor soul went (it certainly went into me to some degree), and I think I was so shocked I didn't cry at the time (I was in class) but I was silent for the rest of the lab, and I think I cried that night.... After that, I spent time dissecting that worm, figuring out where all its body parts were... and I couldn't help to think of the ways and values of science, "Sacrifice a few, so as to save the many." And since then, all I could help to think, "If alcohol, whether 70% or 5% does that to a worm in three minutes, imagine what it would do to my own body, my own brain!" And I never really established an appetite, desire, thirst for anything alcoholic. And then I really didn't understand the University Frosh (and Beyond) ritual of drunken purposelessness. Why would people perceive self-bodily destruction as fun?! Oh I know... the goal IS to make most of your brain dead, strip nearly all layers of consciousness (logic, emotions, social sensitivity, motor skills) so that the only thing left that is possibly operating on your mind is... of course... the sex center... yes, yes... all that left is sex, uninhibited reptilian painful pleasure. Yay to Isla Vista! Kill the brain cells for primordial beastliness! Yaya!

Sooo... back to the Earthworm... that poor earthworm. I feel so bad. There are so many better, more instantaneous ways to go to the AfterWhateverWorld. I'm very sorry.

I turned 21, and my Uklan best friend Lauri took me out to Alcapolco (chain Mexican restaurant) in Westwood, CA. I only had half of a strawberry margarita. I didn't feel I passed through any Societal Rite of Passage. All I could think is that this 21-year-old age law was stupid because in Europe you can drink at any age and people usually don't binge like how that earthworm got dunked in alcohol. Get over it.

Basically, I am hypothesizing that my mind and body are wired to a "natural" sense of drunkedness at nearly most or all states of wakened consciousness, and that if I actually do consume alcohol, it would transform me into a quiet stupor, which would render my state of being as "boring," as described by my aunt-cousin-Jeri Lyn. Last summer, when I was having a super dinner with Jeri Lyn and Chris Lods up in Sebastopol, she gave me a glass of wine, and as soon as I had some, I stopped talking and chattering and I was fairly quiet and non-participatory. Both she and Chris agreed that I was "boring" and soon after I remember myself wanting to go to bed.

As I remember at grad student parties I attended when I was at UC Riverside, if I consume about half of a light beer, I tend to become loose and giddy and was more willing to socialize and take chances with social interactions than before, in which I am always a little nervous and apprehensive when I first approach a party, and think (way too much) about strategies on how to blend in with the crowd. After that, if I drank more, I became extremely conscious that I was becoming slower in my thoughts and actions, and because of that I started to feel vulnerable, and that I felt like everything inside me was caving in. I felt like I wanted to crawl into a corner, hide under a table, curl up into a fetus, and cry myself to sleep. I ended up leaving parties early because I felt such a heightened sense of vulnerability.

On the other hand, I have made several observations that other people become more and more extroverted when they drink more alcohol, and that they release-expose either "subliminal skill sets" and-or "subliminal emotions." My cousin and a fisherman friend of mine say that they both get very angry when drinking too much alcohol, and that anger can lead to horrible events with regrettable consequences. (An aside: My cousin said he's been a part of Alcoholics Anonymous in Los Angeles for ten years... stating that it's some form of social club... some form of alternative to the alcohol. I quizzed him, why do people in Alcoholics Anonymous folks identify themselves with the addictive substances they are trying to resist, not the positive alternatives they are trying to pursue? Why does one have to change a state of mind through chemical intervention? Why can't your neurochemical composition and interactions shift through behavioral shifts, through environmental changes? He said that was a good point, and a day later, I created the the new AA, essentially called Alternative Addictions.) My friend Talei, on the other hand, becomes more bipolar--extremely happy, extremely sad, singing loudly, doing the chicken dance, and kissing girls on top of a table in front of ten people at a fancy Mexican restaurant, revealing her bisexual properties, in which she was not so able to reveal in China. Other people find alcohol a total release, ritualistic exposition.

At the same time, I was guinea pigging myself at UCR grad student parties and Getaway or "Get-a-life" pub-across-the-street-from-the-U bar-hopping a couple of times to the mock-British-pub Falconers in downtown Riverside (lame, it had no pool table! but heck, I had some pretty intense existential conversations with folks over there, much more so than at the Getaway!), I was doing some observational investigative studies of optimal playing of pool and darts and mini-basketball depending on the amount of alcohol that was consumed by the particular individual. Of course alcohol tolerance level had to be calibrated. I have come to realize that people tend to optimally perform at a certain low level of alcohol in which the "social sensitivity sensor" in the brain is ultimately bathed and non-operational and one establishes some level of critical hyperfocus on the game of pool, and only pool, tuning out all other distractions, while motor functions remain intact... but as more alcohol is consumed, not only the social sensitivity factor is dysfunctional, but also the motor portions of the brain are affected and eye-hand-body coordination ultimately deteriorates to a point in which you become a social disgrace to watch in terms of skill level in pool. Tragic. This theory ultimately needs to be illustrated in a cartoon. Though, when one comes to an "art party," as I had been invited to an art-grad student party at Riverside in which grad students brought their artwork and engaged in "art therapy" painting and sculpting and writing existentially humorous poems while drinking beer, it is not that there is a level of "deterioration" in the art produced as more alcohol is consumed, it is just that the art tends to become more "Picasso abstract" and "unexpected in outcome" than one's more predictable routines of art skills when in a completely conscious state.

So, the discussion of alcohol seems to lead to conversations about the generic comparisons of drugs and what drugs do to alter the human mind and body. I seem to have accrued a group of experts on such a subject matter... or let's put it this way, though not formally indoctrinated, I know a whole bunch of people who deserve a Ph.D. in Drug Consumption and Experiential Analysis, or maybe it should be an MFA in creative science writing on experiential drug analysis. Members of these informal professionals include this dude Todd? who was an insect-ologist at UCLA (professional in mushrooms), Trixl (professional in crystal meth and weed), my invert-parasite lab partner Aaron (expert on weed), my whole Greek family in Greece (professionals in chronic smoking, heart bypasses, extreme medical therapy, and stints), and Lauri (expert on the whole buffet of options and comparative psychological effects... but she has bonus knowledge in the family, her mother was a shrink!). Heck I'm neighbors with a weed doctor in Goleta!

So, Todd claimed that when you take mushrooms the world become extremely psychadelic Austin-powers like and you're able to connect the dots in ways you would have never connected before. I remember Trixl emphasizing the use of mushrooms by native american peoples (shamans more specifically, neurological phosphenes in the eyes as a biological universal in cave drawings by several indigenous groups around the world) when we were by the Painted Cave up in the mountains here in Santa Barbara (on my birthday, August 12, 2008). Well, the issue is, that I can place myself in some form of more dulled psychedelic trance form if I don't eat, don't sleep, and don't exercise for 2.5-3 days or more. I've done it several times since late March of 2001, and now I usually do it when I'm in a manic film editing mode. So, I don't exactly need mushrooms.

I've received extensive 2-3 hour long dissertations from Trixl on the experiences, addictions of crystal meth... aka... tweaking.... Though he had claimed that he only did it once, tweaked once, that he described his knowledge so vividly that I wondered whether his experiences were more than once.... But nevertheless, he was in a circumstance in Oregon in which he had to live with tweakers... and they were pretty amazing people... they were so focused, no narrow, so obsessed... and SOOO paranoid... but so 120-miles-per-hour, they had the ability to clean the entire kitchen with a toothpick (like cleaning the grout between tiles)! Trixl emphasized that the worst part about tweaking is the crash after the high.... You go super "low" and it drives you mad... I'd assume, so it's better to stay in a tweaked up state just to avoid the crash... I saw clips of a film called Spun that kind of detailed the crazy, irrational paranoid lives of tweakers... The visual representation was profound... their minds WERE going 120 miles per hour.... But then I was thinking about the pace of my own mind. Most certainly for at least 4-6 hours in the beginning of the day, my mind does go about 80 miles per hour... I essentially have to give my brain a marathon work-out every day to beat out its hyper ADHD-like energy, but why would I want to make my mind go 120 miles per hour, at the price of thinking more narrowly paranoid, with horrid crashes?! Not worth it.... And besides, if I want to crank up the speed of my life and my mind, all I have to do is listen to wordless techno, jungle house drum-and-bass... getting high on a behavioral-environmental change rather than a chemical-ingestion.... I look back at my time interacting with Trixl and especially toward the end of our relations, his behaviors were so "cut-the-strings" and even so negative and paranoid that... I was wondering that... if tweakers take in crystal meth long enough... do they have brain damage and remain forever... to some degree paranoid?!

I've met dozens upon dozens upon dozens of weed/marijuana consumers. I could say though it's supposedly illegal to smoke marijuana in California, I could say that it's pretty dxmn rampant... all over the place.... The most extreme circumstances is that I met two weed dealers at the Kinkos in Goleta I'm working at right now, and I found them to be kind of overly enthusiastic liars, and very dirty, kind of looking like hippis in the hills. And when I was traveling for Roadtrip Nation last summer, I met this jovial young man eating a sandwich at a gas station up in Yreka (Weed County, most appropriately). He politely asked me about Roadtrip Nation, and we ended up having a lengthy conversation. He told me about his marijuana operation up in the forested hills, and pointed out where the reflections where. He also explained to me how he survived this dire circumstance of two guys mugging him, beating him up with a baseball bat, placing him in a bag, and dumping him in a ditch. He was lucky to be alive, awake in an emergency room. He had some brain damage and lost all sense of taste (he couldn't even taste his sandwich), let alone losing his appetite. He also further explained how he was shipping his weed all the way over to the East Coast (so he has a huge market over in the Boston area) and that there was no point in establishing distributions down in southern California, particularly Isla Vista (so I heard, most IV weed comes from Humboldt... so I've heard)....

Sooo many people around me smoke weed... my two former roommates... my neighbors... my friends... people with chronic illnesses... Trixl.... He even encouraged me to try it out... and I had a few puffs and I was just thinking, "How in the hxll could this stuff be illegal?!! Sure, I felt a little bit lighter and giddier, but there's no comparison as to what alcohol does to my brain versus what weed does to my brain. Alcohol is by far much, much more dangerous." As a matter of fact, if someone gave me weed/pot/whatever versus alcohol at a party, I would choose weed because I remain functional and just feel a little bit lighter. I noticed that Trixl consumed less when he was less stressed (when school was out during the summer). So, this realization led to Trixl extensive 2-3 hour lecture to me on the history of "why marijuana was made illegal, and why it continues to remain illegal." The part of the story that I remember was how marijuana was competing with other forms of drugs for the market, and that presently many psychiatric pharmaceuticals are replacing the function that weed essentially carries for folks.... Primarily what I heard is that marijuana can allow one to function and focus and not feel pain, and essentially have some level of control of ADHD. My invert-parasite partner Aaron told me toward the very end of the year that he came to lab stoned for the whole time, and he asked me if I could tell. I said, "No! I didn't know that! You were fine! You were functional! You got your work done!" And then Aaron said, "Well, that's the point. Being stoned helps me slow down and focus, otherwise I would be rapid-firing-scatter-brained and all ADHD." I heard since then (and a while back) that his parents found out that he was smoking pot, and that they converted him to taking Ridlin... but that's such a long, long time ago... who knows what's going on.... Nevertheless, Jxlees, back in his wild wild days, used to be a grower and he just tells me, from his own simple, first-hand experience, just stay away from heavy pot users.... They're so lethargic and apathetic losers and just sit their xsses on the couch all day doing nothing... which I'm not sure how true that is...

What can I say? I could state that "my big fat greek family" back in Greece contains a few family members which I consider to be pathetic... in terms of their level of chain cigarette (or cigar) smoking and lack of consumption of healthy foods. I don't need to name names... my two uncles.... News from Greece... heart attacks, quadruble bypass surgery, stints, death from cancer in the gums, spread to the brains, with brutal radiation therapy frying my grandmother as if she were a roasted pig and not a human… the usual.... I guess what makes the whole experience in a state of "abstract pain" rather than the real, agonizing, tormenting pain, is that we have thousands of miles between California and Greece. The only true pain I felt was when I saw my mother's ghostly pale, blank face, after watching her mother (my grandmother) pass away after radiation therapy in Greece. Yet overall, from a distance, these forms of behaviors seem absurd, but if I were right in the thicket of the lives of my relatives in Greece, I am bound to feel very different about this subject matter. I can remember a grad student named Jimmy in environmental sciences at UCR who was asked on his written exams how to measure the health and environmental impacts of smoking. All my mind did was flashback to the vaulted, smoke-filled rooms of Circus Circus and especially Caesar's Palace, as I was choking and coughing trying to get through these casino rooms with my family. Jimmy stated that he would measure impacts of first-hand and second-hand smoking. And then I said, isn't there a measure of "cumulative impacts"? (just as there are cumulative impacts on the ocean, as investigated by Ben Halpern). Mass accumulation effects? Like the effect of smoking in an entire massive vaulted ambiance of Las Vegas?! He said no. No one is doing that. It didn't make sense. He only focused on proximate impacts of the smoker and potentially someone who lived with a smoker. But what about all those people who are stuck working or gambling in these Las Vegas environments? There must be a cumulative effect!

As for Lauri, the Comparative Expert on the Buffet of Drugs (I vividly remember her giving me a lecture on this topic when we were both looking over the balcony of a swanky hotel where the Western Society of Naturalists was being held, back in the fall of 2003). Though the lecture-conversation was sooo intense, I don't remember any of it. Nevertheless, what I do remember is that she is the source of the Buffet of Knowledge, so when I need some guidance (perhaps to seek some non-consumptive inspiration for new approaches to artwork... ha ha...), Lauri is the go-to person. Other than that, I've had run-ins with former cocaine and crack addicts (dudes who seem to function being bartenders for 8 hours straight), and our neighbors in Riverside used to be drug dealers, also illegally dumping oil in the ground... they were eventually arrested and evicted from the household... other than that....

Alas, alas! Returning to the alcohol!!! Coming to think of it, one would think that my modern theories of alcohol consumption must hold some historical roots! When Lingxuan and I were driving to Oran's house, he stated that some research has shown that if a child likes alcohol, then there is a high chance that the child will like alcohol as an adult. Well! I happened to tell him what happened to me! When I was eight years old, my mother stopped me in the kitchen and gave me some sips of red wine. I had one or two sips and I had an instant aversion, stating that it was sour, bitter, disgusting, and that I didn't want to finish it. My mother laughed and said that was fine. She also said that she gave me wine because I wouldn't get all alcohol-crazy later on in my life... Alcohol is not a big deal... My aversion to booze continued when in Greece. The whole family was at a giant dinner in Spetses, and my uncle Panos plopped a half jar full of beer and asked me to drink it. I tried some and didn't like it. I blurted out, "You adults are crazy! Why do you like things that taste sooo bad?!" Then the dinner came, and it was quite salty, so I drank the rest of the beer out of desperate thirst, not out of any form of liking.

In conclusion, the signs are good and not good in terms of my relationship with chemical-induced society-classified drugs, with observational backing from my ontogeny. My own body and brain chemistry indicates that I go on these "all-natural highs" that could possibly be induced by alcohol and other forms of drugs, but why do I need to take drugs when I'm already giddy, when I'm already manic, when I'm already slowed and calmed (after jogging) when I'm already in some desired existential trance state. I change my brain chemistry by learning something new, by changing my behavior, by changing my environment, not by ingesting additional chemicals beyond the regular food. In fact, if I am addicted to anything in the world, I'm very much addicted to learning new things (which is why I want to stay in the university!). With mounting evidence of such an addiction, a geology professor at UC Riverside stated "Scientists and heroine addicts are one and the same. We both wake up in the morning, surging with life, racing after our addictions, stimulating the same pleasure centers in our brains... except that scientists typically have their brains strapped to a computer and the heroine addict holds a needle to his arm. But really, what's the difference?" Strange enough, being addicted to learning is perceived as a positive, socially acceptable addiction... but with some consequences. If I learn too much and attempt to absorb too much information at once, then I get overwhelmed and vulnerable and mentally collapse and hibernate for several days at a time. Aka being "drunk with information overload."

My brain is hard enough to manage in a state of waking consciousness, why would I need any more chemical substances to alter a system that is already altering too fast for me to keep up?!

It is an endless Myth of Sisyphus, an endless quest to stimulating your pleasure center and feel some sense of self-satisfaction and content with yourself and your life circumstances. Or for me, to maintain some level of SANITY.... Society keeps throwing all these pills at me, pills for alcohol, pills for bipolar disorder, pills for ADHD, pills for depression, pills for anorexia (at one time), pills for all sorts of things, claiming that they will somehow help me and and enhance my life somehow. But after at least 10 years in the real world, I can proudly state that I have managed not to become hooked onto any of these candies that society keeps marketing to us, trying to figure out ways to convince us that we're all "sick" and "need a life" or need a better life.... Instead I've come to look at other organisms. I have come to look at evolution and ecology. I have come to explore and unearth my "caveman-girl instincts" that lay dormant in all of us but can be courageously expressed and released in the arts. I have found my addictions, my mental chemical alterations through being addicted to learning, exploration, being addicted to freedoms of expression, being addicted to change, change of behavior, change of environment, being addicted to clean air, water, healthy minimally processed foods, exercise, sleep (working out my brain while resting my body, working out my body while resting my brain), my family, my friends, and a sense of absurd purpose in life presently chilling out at the university (the whole Maslow Hierarchy Millenium Ecosystem Impacts). Evolution has already thrown enough addictions and drugs toward my direction, each of which if I explore enough, will help me achieve that sense of pleasure, maintain a sense off sanity... so why in the world would I need to acquire and latch on to any more superfluous pills so well proliferated (and promoted) by human society? (Or at least the first world, the "First World" is in mental warfare and the "Third War" is supposedly in physical warfare).

I shall end in a four-liner poem
(which I tried to expand, but it didn't work so well):
Manufactured Emotions:
It's not really me, It's not really me.
I'd rather go through the down days, knowing,
just for a moment, I was truly happy.

Vic's Official Theories of Alcohol and Drug Consumption:

General Observation of Vic's Life History Strategy:
"The coffee drinker in the corner in a bar full of drinkers."

Conclusions:
"I'm more drunk when I'm not drunk."
"Drunk... in context, by context."
"It's not that I'm smart. It's just that I have this very hyperactive brain that chronically needs a mental work out because I didn't drink enough alcohol in college to kill enough brain cells such that I could consciously and pacifyingly follow suit to society's expectations of my own desired road to life."
"Alternative Addictions: Why define yourself by the negative elements that you're trying to resist, rather than the positive, alternative solutions you're trying to actively pursue?"
(what's the new crutch, the new prosthetic?)

Some old blogs I wrote related to the subject: Blog 356, Blog 294 (States of Consciousness, Poem Pure Being to Self-Aware Being), Blog 330 (Addicted to Learning, The Science of doing Science), Excerpt Poem from "Another and Again"

531. The University Tower of Babel for Human-Environmental Relationships ::: How I'm Accidentally Involved in Eco-Linguistics (Phenomenology?)

2010-06-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I ended up having a psychologically-relieving conversation with Dr. Melack (ecology-evolution member of my Ph.D. committee). I vented to him about all these problems I was encountering with cross-disciplinary literature reviews (largely a giant game of academic scape-goating, or as they call usually finger-pointing and false accusations of who thinks what and does what). Dr. Melack pressed the pause button and asked me if I had ever read mathematics or biochemistry journals (which are full of symbols and code and shorthand, much worse than Chinese or Greek, I'd say). I said ya, but I'm actually reading ENGLISH, and people are using different words for different meanings to their own advantages in their own playing fields. (Oran agreeds, the word "institutions" is abused outside of his field. Dr. Freudenberg mentioned how "longevity studies" have different meanings in medical, geological, and sociological fields. My immediate concerns were words such as "intersubjectivity" and "social constructivist ecocriticism" and a few dozen after that.) A few months back I even emailed Dr. Melack my Blog 404, which is becoming an elaborate collection of words that embody "human-environment relationships" all from different departments, which contain an arbitrary package of historically accumulated baggage of assumptions collected by the members of that specified discipline that coined that specified word. And when I attended the Origins conference, I even noticed how different disciplines were borrowing different terms, transfers from social to natural sciences, natural sciences to social (even for me, I'm applying "collective action" as a word that should be used in the natural sciences, instead of all that bullshxt Gaia superorganismic everything-is-a-life-force-bullshxt thinking). I guess, as Dr. Mike McGinnis (now in New Zealand) might tease me I'm accidentally becoming some kind of phenomenologist or eco-linguist type... but in all honesty, I'm more driven by the images that words produce. Words have largely been a pile of clutter getting in my way to creative visualization.

And then, Dr. Melack reminded me of a fable (Biblical of all things, but very secularly useful) that I encountered and grasped a while ago (but frighteningly forgot)... the fable being the Tower of Babel (in short, how God made this city and this tower of Babel, and then for some reason God got angry and made all these sections of the city speak different languages, and then everyone started to fight and the Tower of Babel collapsed). Right now, we're experiencing this whole Tower of Babel effect in the University with human-environment relationships, and that though we're all speaking these different languages (though we are talking about the same underlying things), that I shouldn't be all consumed with this problem of the Semantic Jungle, I should escape the Jargon Jungle (both Oran and John wanted to spare my sanity :-). The solution was to make a sketch list of questions for guiding the readings, and to take the exam earlier, so I will no longer be consumed with the writtens.

Maybe it's my state of mind right now, but what Dr. Melack said--with the whole Tower of Babel story--really soaked deep into my mind (as a framing device), and now I will be placing this Tower of Babel metaphor into my suite of images for my meditation on human-environment relations at Isla Vista's Sands Beach. And then I also started to notice more recently how many scientific and scholarly papers refer to past fables and stories to derive metaphors, with some being Biblical or religious, but applied in a more secular way (Tower of Babel, Serenity Prayer, Genesis), Greek Mythology (ocean as Neptune, Icarus and Daedalus), and Shakespeare (Peter Alagona's Conservation Biology paper on Credibility). It's a riot act... how there are these little trickles of English literature that serve as metaphorical staples for the sciences (ha!).

But in short, I'm touched I'm able to leave a professor's office feeling inspired... and not stressed. It's a foreign concept to me, and I'm enjoying it.

That evening, I talked with my Bubsy over the phone, and I was on such a good role, I have a script for a flipping awesome Biologically Incorrect Cartoon. I think this one will most certainly be collage-like and a part of the "Envirochondriac" series. I will have to cut this down, but it's a start....

Terra (engages in a lengthy meditational trance with Buz):

The question is whether an "environmental problem" is actually real "problem." After all, a problem is only a problem, if you perceive or define it to be a problem

But to me, an environmental problem IS a problem.
A REAL problem!
And not only that, an environmental problem
is not JUST an environmental problem!

Just a definitional problem,
or assumptional problem,
It's a layered problem.
It's a simultaneous peeling-an-inner-and-outer-onion-problem.

It's an internal problem.
It's a language problem (linguistics, phenomenological, literacy).
It's an empirical problem (math model).
It's a Jargon-Jungle-Tower-of-Babel problem.
It's a perception problem (conceptual).
It's a scale problem.
It's a space problem.
It's a time problem.
It's a framing problem.
It's a point of view (POV) problem.
It's a visual problem (representational).
It's a metaphorical problem.
It's a boundary problem.
It's a mapping problem.
It's a mental mapping problem.
It's a theoretical problem.
It's a metaphysical problem (amorphous, abstract, intangible).
It's a practical problem (tangible).
It's a baseline problem.
It's a shifting baseline problem.
It's a-story-is-a-product-of-your-original-premises problem.

It's a survival problem.
It's a value problem.
It's a needs and wants problem.
It's a problem of purpose.
It's a motivational problem.
It's a visceral problem.
It's a physical problem (resource).
It's an emotional problem.
It's a spiritual problem.
It's a mental problem.
It's a psychological problem.
It's a rational problem.
It's a cognitive problem.
It's a fading memory problem (individual experiential, story, and collective).
It's a conceptual problem.
It's an organizational problem (epistemological).
It's a what-is-and-what-ought-to-be-ethical problem.
It's a deconstructivist's problem.
And a re-constructivist's problem.
It's a solipist's problem.
It's a social constructivist ecocritic's problem.
It's a separatist's problem (disconnect, denial).
It's a detachment problem.
It's an inclusivist's problem (connect, accept).
It's a care-connect-attachment problem.
It's a problem of denial.
It's a problem of acceptance.
It's a problem of cognitive dissonance.
It's a filtering problem.
It's a problem of idee fixe.
It's a "question-driven" problem.
It's a "hypothesis-framed" problem.
It's a belief-system problem.
It's a problem of the hedgehog.
It's a problem of the fox.
It's a behavioral problem.
It's a collecting problem (methods).
It's a pigeonholing problem (classification).
It's a paradoxical problem (oxymoron).
It's an identity problem (individual and collective).
It's a problem of self.
It's a problem of health.
It's a problem of wealth.
It's an image problem.
It's a story problem.
It's an experiential problem.
It's a degree-of-ownership problem.
It's a peacock's problem.
It's a bowerbird's problem.
It's a problem of consciousness.
It's a problem of contextual consciousness.
It's a selfishly selfless problem.
It's a thoughtfully hedonistic problem.
It's a futuristically-present-based-on-the-deep-past problem.
It's an adaptively manipulating problem.
It's an ego problem. Not just an ego problem.
An ego-anthro-eco problem.

It's a layered problem.
It's a relativistic problem.
It's an outer problem (external).
It's a biological reproduction problem (fitness).
It's an exponential-replication-in-finite-space-and-materials problem.
It's a familial problem.
It's a community problem.
It's a social problem.
It's an institutional problem.
It's a problem of rights, rules, and decision-making procedures.
It's a competition problem.
It's a collaboration problem.
It's an equality (inequality) problem.
It's a technological problem.
It's an infrastructural problem.
It's a resource problem.
It's a biological problem (ecological, evolutionary).
It's a geological problem (abiotic).
It's a problem for jellyfish, plants,
sharks, coyotes, and us humans!

It's a problem of air, water, food and shelter.

It's a problem of the stakeholder circus.

It's a government problem.

It's a corporate problem.

It's a media problem.

It's an information overload problem.

It's an educational problem.

It's a problem of the university's construct of the universe.

It's an ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny problem.

It's a human-leaf-cutter-ant-colony problem.

It's a division-of-labor problem.

It's an acquired problem.

It's an inheritance problem.

It's a cross-generational inheritance problem.

It's a Darwinian problem.

It's a Lamarckian problem.

It's a knowledge and action problem.

It's an imagination problem.

It's a creative freedom problem.

It's a science problem (normative).
It's a policy problem.
It's a grassroots problem.
It's a financial problem (economic).
It's an objective problem.
It's an observer's problem.
It's a reflexive (self-referential, open, transparent) problem.
It's an intersubjective problem.
It's a participant's problem.
It's a humanistic problem.
It's a religious problem.
It's an historial problem.
It's an artistic problem.
It's a learning-from-past-mistakes problem.
It's an unable-to-predict-the-future problem.
It's an Extreme Makeover problem.

It's a local problem.
It's a regional problem.
It's a national, continental, global problem.
It's a distant problem (in space and time).
It's a problem since the origins of life,
and us Homo sapiens,
especially the last 10,000 years!

It's an ideological problem.
It's a problem of dichotomies.
It's a problem of gradients.
It's a cumulative problem.
It's a system's problem.
It's a collective action problem.
It's a summation-of-triumphs-leads-to-a-tragedy problem.
It's a contingency problem.
It's an uncertain problem.
It's a probablistic problem.
It's a nonlinear problem (linear).
It's a problem of one- and two-way streets.
It's an interactional problem.
It's a feedback problem.
It's a positive, negative, neutral problem.

It's a problem of patterns (cycles).
It's a problem of rituals.
It's a problem of conventions.
It's an addiction problem (habit-forming-and-breaking).
It's an inertial problem (resistance to change).
It's a static, constipating problem.
It's a dynamic, fickle problem.
It's a tipping point problem (threshold).
It's a gradual, slipping problem.
It's a drastic, disastrology problem.
It's a problem of making, breaking, and re-making.
It's an autonomous problem.
It's an obligate problem.
It's a direct and indirect problem.
It's a diffuse problem (vague, ambiguous).
It's a discrete problem.
It's a problem of options.
It's a problem of constraints.

It's a utopian, Arcadian (pastoral) problem.
It's a Baconian domination problem.
It's a Thoreau-Emersonian transcendentalist problem.
It's a superiority complex problem.
It's a dominance hierarchy problem.
It's a problem of unexpected surprise.
It's a problem of adaptation.
It's a problem of programmatic response.
It's a problem of manipulation.
It's a problem of engineering.
It's a problem of planning and organization.
It's a problem of design.
It's a problem of adaptive manipulation.
Errr, politically correctedly, adaptive management.

It's a problem of flow.
It's a materials problem.
It's an energy problem.
It's an input problem.
It's an output problem.
It's a processing problem.
It's a consumption problem.
It's a production problem.
It's a metabolic problem.
It's a mass balance problem.
It's a "sustainability" problem.
It's a rate (pace of process, change) problem.
It's an efficiency ("artful efficiency") problem.

It's a problem of recyclicity.

It's a problem of biogeodegradability.

It's a nested scale problem.
It's a jigsaw puzzle problem.
It's an over-specialist's problem (of overspecialization, ostriche-head-in-sand).
It's a fragmentation problem.
It's a precision problem.
It's a navel-gazing problem.
It's a generalist's (jack-of-all-trades) problem.
It's a big picture problem.
It's a synthetic problem.
It's an interdisciplinary problem.
It's a problem of the blind men feeling parts of an elephant.
It's a case study problem (earth, N = 1).
It's a non-replicable problem.
It's a problem of ratchets.
It's a problem of change (evolving).
It's an inner-and-outer self problem.
It's an inner-and-outer-self-in-dialogue problem.
It's an inner-and-outer-landscape problem.
It's an-inner-and-outer-landscape-in-chronic-dialogue problem.
It's a people-and-place problem.
It's a self-people-AND-place problem,
inseparable puzzle pieces...
It's a problem of a game of CHESS.

It's... it's... it's... just
a problem with reality!

The environmental problem
is an environmental problem
is an ENVIRON-MENTAL PROBLEM!
It's ALL of it...
with all layers of our
internal and external environment
individually and collectively
interacting with all other layers
all at once... AT ALL TIMES!!!

Buz blinks while Terra snaps out of meditation.
Terra (riled up, with her hands raised):
And that's what I've been trying to tell you... all this time!
You can't just zoom in and stare at one dot!
It's the construction of your entire inner and outer universe!
It's everything, EVERYTHING!!!

Buz puts his hand on Terra's shoulder:
Terra? Uh, your trance was sooo far out... that
I think your environ-mental problem is becoming a real mental problem....

(I think I'm going to have to re-arrange the poem to a more intuitive layout in space and time, but not now, this is a just a starting point) (This monologue also reminds me of this poem Pure Being to Self-Aware Being)

530. Annals of the Random Day Syndrome (abbreviated as RDS)

2010-06-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

Definition: A Random Day or Random Event is an unexpected day or event that occurs within a more predicted course of action as constructed by the author's mind, that brings a sense of pleasant surprise. Though these events are tiny affairs in the grand scheme of life, they bring such a sense of delight that they are worth documenting!

June 5, 2010 ~ I wake up to noises next door, which turns out to be a yard sale held by Lily (counselor at UCSB), Dr. Bearman (ran for office locally), Benji, and Sam. It was the first time in my three years of living on Hillview Drive I ever was able to directly and personally interact with the family. Before it was distant hellos. I ended up buying a brand new anatomy set for Dr. Jen Jen (physical therapist now)... a cooler that can carry rock crabs... a giant crayola coloring pencil set $3! a brand new orange beanie (flaming orange!) some tie dye socks personally made by Sam $1 and a beanie dinosaur brown $1, who doesn't go near Mr. Bun because he's a giant herbiverous stegasaurus...

(Maybe one day in a future blog I can discuss a brief personal and collective history of yard sales and gleaners... especially through my Aunt Jean and Uncle Chuck in Corona...) (I should also make a collection of blogs that document super-crazy random days in my life)

June 11, 2010 ~ Today and yesterday have been excellent, yet very overwhelming days! First of all, within just ONE day, I was approached by two professors for teaching-like positions: one of them is potentially TAing Environmental Studies 1 (I think), and the other position revolves around helping design an upper-division undergraduate course in marine environmental history... which my brain is already buzzing with ideas.... I have come to realize that my "academic life" is not moving forward, simply because I have not been TAing... I need one course under my belt, at least! I was thinking how fishing and teaching were one and the same: if you give a man a fish, his belly will be full for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will have food for a lifetime. If you teach students, they will be full for the day, or the quarter. If you teach students how to teach themselves, they will feed themselves with knowledge for a lifetime. And then there's a lot less work for the teacher... he he he... and that's the point. Less work for me, watching student be their own energizer bunnies... I hear Dennis Divins (my scuba diving instructor) echoing in the back of my head--he really emphasized that I need to express my enthusiasm (for nearly everything) to students; undergraduates need this kind of exposure. The issue is, nothing is set in stone, so don't think too much about it. I just consider this an amazing compliment... I'm thankful for even being asked...

The day before the Younglab at Bren had a superb gathering at Oran's house (which has a view of Santa Barbara and the ocean!). Everyone was in great spirits, and we had a chance to talk a lot more than the more rigid confinements of a restaurant, like the Beachside Cafe. I remember a fond moment when I asked a whole table of graduate students (all natural-social science mix), that if there were an eighth continent on Planet Earth that we had an opportunity to colonize, and if biologists, earth scientists, and environmental scientists had the ability to draw the political boundaries, where would they draw them? And me and my father's arguments were based on physical barriers (mountains-oceans) and for me, watersheds. Dr. Alagona pointed me toward a book entitled Shaping the Sierra, in which a planner fantasized how the county lines would be re-drawn such as to consider environmental factors of the landscape (besides usual human-oriented, arbitrary-lines drawn). Fantasy, science fiction as it is. So my asking that question created a lot of hub-bub around the table, and I was happy. Thanks to Jaime's project about matching scales of ecosystem and governance! It was his fault I got that idea! To top it off, Milton (Love) showed me his latest flick on the Homage to Pruest on the life of a research cruise from a mock Cousteau French documentarian. Flat out, Milton is hilarious. One day I will be his camera and audio girl, and editor, at least for some project.

Before that, I went to Carla Guenther's talk on the socioecological impact of marine protected areas (MPAs) of the Channel Islands, which ended up being very controversial research because the findings were hard to swallow for all those "pro-MPA" scientists--seemingly permanent income losses combined with fishing behavior of "fishing the line" of the MPA does NOT exist (in which fishermen would supposedly benefit from "spillover effects") because the opportunity cost is too huge (at least from an environmental and legal point of view, e.g. El Nino storm pushes trap into an MPA or sportfishing boat misplacing the trap after looting it). I could say that Carla is very quoteable. Here are some cool quotes I picked up from her: "Our knowledge of human behavior changes when we observe humans rather than make assumptions about humans in a math model." and the other quote was "You know you are at the Frontier when you and no one else really knows what the hxll they are doing. That's when you know for sure you're at the Frontier." The composition of the audience was extraordinary: a packed room full of fishermen, a shxtload of natural scientists (marine ecologists), a few social scientists, and a few folks from the DFG and consulting agencies. David Carr introduced Carla as someone who not only knows how to read and work with the literature, but she has an extraordinary sense of social intelligence." The best part was I was able to interact with a lot of the fishermen afterwards! They were so encouraging! It really pumped me up... I was so excited to see them all again. It reminded me of what made me happy and relieved me from the anxieties of being around too many academics too much of the time...

529. It's Official::: I Have the CRICs Disease (Chronically shifting Relativistic Identity CrisiS)... As I've Always Had, But Now Officially Diagnosed

2010-06-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

Though I get along best (and most strongly affiliate myself)
with Environmental Historians,
a rogue group of human-environment synthesizers, indeed,
I find it extremely difficult to call myself an "Environmental Historian."
I think academic disciplines are sooo retro, sooo old school,
sooo collapsing Tower of Babble Syndrome,
that with today's cumulative, interrelated problems,
I think that the next hot and fashionable and sexy and NEEDED
thing to do is to be some kind of unclassifiable, free-range intellectual,
so versatile in thinking and feeling,
that you can maneuver deeply into the minds
of any intellectual you encounter, whether at the bar
or a grocery store or a university campus.
And that there are no arbitrary rules or conventions
or terms of agreements or strings attached
that control your thoughts and actions,
except that you're on an ultimate quest, an ultimate purpose
to ask the most pressing questions, seek the most profound answers
that guide daggars to the root guts of all disciplines,
splice and reweave their messy, bloody cores
to a new, workable whole of self and one's place in the universe,
to satisfy the metaphysical (abstract) and the practical,
and solve real problems, for personal sanity
and self-constructed world order.
Or then, is this pursuit all just a self-indulgent video game,
all constructed in my mind?

So, you'd think this profession described above would be
called "philosophy," but you're wrong,
because it turns out in the so-called university "philosophers"
are actually studying the brains of dead philosophers
who passed away +200 years ago
rather than observing and experimentally interactiong
with the world, pursuing their own sense of contextual self.

But just in case, if you really do want to know
how I do classify myself, I'm actually
a biologist who loves rocks and studies humans.
I survive, I replicate, therefore I am.
(as Descartes rolls in his grave).
And therefore... I'm a biologist.
It's by default; I can't change the fact that I'm an organism.
That I'm life. That I'm a sack of chemicals
encased in a gooey membrane that detects
and responds to my environment such as to keep
me--the sack of chemicals--in one functional piece.
Heck, I was born that way!

(Disclaimer: As you can see, I find poetic comfort in the mechanical,
machinist "scientific" description of the world.
Other post-modernists would critique that my definition of life--
sack of chemicals that replicates, etc--is so "cold" and robotic.
I find it so invigorating and so paradoxical
that it's flipping cool to just think that I'm merely a sack of chemicals.
For me, it takes a heavy load off of thinking of the
"true meaning of life," because in the end,
it's all pretty straight forward...
if you decide to see it that way).

Other Blogs/Files that are precursors to the CRICs disease::: Blog 135 (Discrimination Against Difference), key words: intellectual identity, individual intellectual identity, Vic's list of resumes on the right hand side of Biologically Incorrect, Vic's Long PDF and Vic's Short PDF...

522. Collection at the Intersections of Science and Poetry (and Song)

2010-05-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

First off, to say this is a touchy subject for me... because all my poetry and lyrics are deeply embedded in thoughts and themes of science. The question is, how have science and poetry become so distinct, so divided? As I was scrounging around through the internet, I learned that a lot of early scientists and explorers expressed their knowledge through art and poetry. Haeckel is an obvious case, Darwin wrote a prose adventure novel on the origins of the species... and I encountered someone who wrote poetry about developmental biology. Scientific expression through artful means was rather common.

But then somehow through time, science and art started to split to a point in which scientists and artists in the same room would look at each other like they just sited a pack of aliens across the room. Milton Love and I even discussed this theme... somehow through time, the structure of scientific expression transformed from artful and emotionally driven to logical, robotic, emotionally-absent, highly precise, verbiage that no one intuitively enjoys reading, including scientists themselves (me being one). I told Milton that writing a scientific paper became meaningless as I discovered that it was like filling out a form and that only 10 people in the world was going to read it. But then again, as I discovered the difficulties of publishing POETRY and SHORT STORIES, I started to realize that ... well, at least I get my scientific paper published, and THANKFULLY ten people read it. I announced to Hector in the car a couple weeks back, "It is officially easier to publish a scientific article than a poem," and then my heart sunk as I scratched my head, "And a lot of the published poems SUCK, the poets already established a big name, and they say nothing in particular... geee, this is really sad." And THEN, I realized the SOLUTION to this double-edged sword (as I spoke with Barry Spacks) was TO MAKE A FILM ABOUT BEING REJECTED BY DOING SOMETHING MEANINGFUL AND BEING ACCEPTED DOING SOMETHING THAT HAS LOST MEANING OR VALUE. And that, would be meaningful! *Sigh*

Captions from Above Slideshow: Collection at the Intersection of Science and Poetry (and Song). Well?! I've written over 500 blogs, I can say it's extremely surprising that I'm covering such a topic "so late in the game." I've bene having a long-term discussion with Barry Spacks on the intersection of scientific knowledge and creative storytelling for the last two years now... and have learned sooo much... but at this point, I am paying particular attention to the inter-relationships between science and (specifically) poetry, as brought to the forefront through NCEAS'-Santa Barbara Poet Laureate gathering last June of 2009 (where Barry presented a poem, I was so excited to review it before its presentation!). In addition, as an undergraduate, I happened to run into a few oddball poems in the middle of my science textbooks and handouts... so I just started to save a few snipits of other people's work, and I sincerely hope the collection grows!

The Poetry of Science. June 5, 2009. 8pm. Fe Bland Forum at SBCC. Sponsored by The National Center fo Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Santa Barbara City College Creative Writing Program. Santa Barbara Laureate. My professor Barry Spacks (or poetry pal?) presented a poem and the only metaphor I remember out of the whole event (a year later) is how scientists behave like swarms of bees. Some snipits of Barry's poem: “Mostly she likes to count, to fill spreadsheets, to sample populations, invent software,” he read, garnering laughs from the audience, including Ryan, who stood on stage with him. “Oh, scientists so like to count! And foremost to get it right! While we slovenly poets need wild elixir for our work..." Noozhawk wrote an article on the event HERE. :

PDF of the Poetry of Science can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/poetryprogramfullfinal5inorder.pdf.

"This is How Shxt Happens" Poem that I yanked off of Dr. Raul Suarez' office door to make a photocopy. We both tried to find the source of this poem but it was futile (one of Dr. Suarez' predecessors). Most likely it was an imitation of a well-known poem of "This is How Shxt Happens" in the corporate world. Fall of 2008. (probably will include in an essay in Ecology of Scale / Environmental Metaphors). Written on the Blog 105 .

"When a Fellow Needs a Friend" icthyological (fishy) poem by the esteemed Dr. Milton Love. Found in the book "Probably More Than You [Ever] Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast." This poem captures the miniscule parasitic male clamping onto the gigantous female of anglerfish. Whacky and very sexually exploritative! Uploaded Fall of 2007. Blog found at http://www.biologicallyincorrect.org/2007/09/two-and-half-poems-by-dr-milton-love.html (Two and a Half Poems by Milton Love).

"Reproductio Ad Absurdum" icthyological (fishy) poem by the esteemed Dr. Milton Love. Found in the book "Probably More Than You [Ever] Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast." This poem explores the bold and edgy notion of sex changes in fishes (wrasses, basses specifically). Uploaded Fall of 2007. Blog found at http://www.biologicallyincorrect.org/2007/09/two-and-half-poems-by-dr-milton-love.html (Two and a Half Poems by Milton Love).

Page 1. "Sweet Parasite Lovin'" Spoken Word by Martin Moretti, as found in my Parasitology Laboratory/Handbook from Dr. Armand Kuris' epic UCSB course... back in 2003.... Sigh... I still wish I were still an innocent undergrad... (missing poem Ode to an Alga)

"Digital" Lyrics by Mia Doi Todd. Last quarter I had the golden opportunity to watch her and Michel Gondry perform at Spaceland in Silverlake, California, though unfortunately she did not sing this song, which is potentially my favorite of hers. Though the lyrics metaphorically detail some form of intense male-female relationship, the metaphors evoke scale in a scientific fashion.

The one very weak spot in the entire tune is use of the term "plastic bag lubricated safety tube." All lyrics were surreal and metaphorical, and then this moment of precise, literal, and TACKY language destroyed the essence of the song--the worst part is that Mia ACCENTUATES these words when SINGING! I cringe every time I pass through this part.... Maybe that is why this song is not super famous, which it deserves to be. I think a more benign, and metaphorical term like "love glove" would be more appropriate... and the strange thing is that she had NO RHYMES to constrain her word choice... and still decided to use such gnarly words!

Refer to BLOG 454, an analysis of "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop.

"Science and Poetry" is like this whole can of worms I just opened... A can of worms so large I feel it's even worth exploring for an entire quarter, like in a College of Creative Studies Course (e.g. Bruce Tiffney and Hank Pitcher go out to Sedgwick Ranch and both offer commentary on landscapes when designing artwork depicting landscapes).

Here are some websites and names that may serve as starting points:

http://www.firstscience.com/home/poems-and-quotes/poems.html
Classic poets address science in their works.

http://www.helpstoknow.com/html/ps/
An attempt toward a first e-zine devoted to the intersection of science and poetry. Seems pretty dead right now, but it's certainly the right idea!

Of course, there are endless resources on Ecocriticism, "Nature Poetry" (like in Orion)... etc...

And then... just in the last hour I encoutered more than enough media classified in the "LAME" category... or "SUPER LAME" and "SUPER TACKY" category. For example, I encountered this Youtube video entitled "The Symphony of Science," and it was essentially old footage of science figureheads (Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Shermer, to name a few...) with altered voices to make it seem like they were singing to some techno music track. Ummm... I'm sorry, if people were inspired by this piece (as state on Youtube comments), I could say this was more disturbing than inspirational. There was no sense of artfulness in the visual aspects, though quite a bit of technical music skills were portrayed (plus a lot of patience to dig through old video footage)! I'm trained as a scientist and I could barely watch any of these music videos. In all truth, I am appalled that there is recycling of old footage "old science icons" rather than generating new icons, characters, adventures...

Another tacky hit I got was a video called Science Cheerleader and it ended up being a bunch of ditzy blond (some were blond) high school girls waving pom poms and narrating "fun facts" about physics and chemistry and advocating that science was cool. Ummm... this honestly to me... was a bit degrading... to both parties... the cheerleaders no longer looked cool and the scientists were being associated with ditzy cheerleaders supposedly saying intelligent things (without demonstrating much comprehension of their knowledge).

So, the reason is that WHY I am in environmental media, is because the old "science and society stories" are OLD and the ICONS are the same old icons... and novelty is needed.... I'm also environmental media because I want to make Tackiness and Lame go EXTINCT.

521. Emerging Collection of Photography "Biologically Incorrect's Photographic Compilation of Crazy Signs"

2010-05-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

Caption: Emerging Collection of Photography "Biologically Incorrect's Photographic Compilation of Crazy Signs"
Emerging Photography "Biologically Incorrect's Collection of Crazy Signs." Sometimes I go buy that epic indie signage (or grafiti?) that I wished were distributed on national billboards... The least I can do is place them on this here blog. Sigh.... (This collection used to be on my StokastikaPortfolio Picasaweb album, but then came to realize how in appropriate the location was).

519. A Random Videographic Adventure with Alexander "The Great Raguzi" and Ron "The Voice" Jackson at Pechanga Casino, April 10, 2010

2010-04-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

Picasaweb Caption That Goes with the Images: When I first met Alexander "The Great Raguzi" on Thursday, Midnight, at a Rite Aid Parking Lot, in Riverside, California, and we ended up talking and yapping for about an hour, I think both of us were probably looking for something new, something random, something different, something unexpected in our own lives. As my poetry professor Barry Spacks started a short story, "Change your life, until your life changes." And that is what exactly happened--both our lives changed, even to the smallest degree, through our own interaction--before I knew it, I was doing videography and photography work for Alexander at Pechanga Casino on a Saturday afternoon--it was my first, small-paid video/photo gig--and it was just wonderful to jive with someone that you never met before, but a few days later, you felt like you knew them for your entire life. I left Alexander in a big smile with my work. A new resume item: "I even astonished a magician with my video work!"

Youtube Caption: Adventures with the Great Raguzi, Magician: Collage of Magic Acts at Pechanga Casino, April 10, 2010. Shot and edited by Victoria Minnich.

Youtube Caption: Adventures with the Great Raguzi, Magician: Act with Lights and Dove at Pechanga Casino, April 10, 2010. Shot and edited by Victoria Minnich.

Youtube Caption: Adventures with the Great Raguzi, Magician: Act with Knots and Candle at Pechanga Casino, April 10, 2010. Shot and edited by Victoria Minnich.

It was Thursday night, and I was determined to participate in Duke University's "Green in Three" video contest. The only problem was that all my 30 hours of rock crab footage was in Riverside, and I was in Santa Barbara that week. So, after having a superb photographic discussion with Shannon Switzer (she'll be a conservation photographer for Destination Three Degrees, two elite surf kayakers traveling through the Hawaiian islands to raise awareness about plastics in the ocean), I started to head home to Riverside, with the worst traffic ironically in Santa Barbara. I was going crazy because I couldn't buy a rock crab at the Ranch 99 market in San Fernando Valley, so I started to improvise my initial ideas and head home. By the time I reached Riverside, it was 11:30pm at night and I needed to get some sugar free candy at Rite Aid. So, I go about in my usual routine and I'm sitting in the car, moving my cell phone around to get it charged, and this man approaches me--he's tall mid-aged, very-cool looking African American wearing some hip clothes that were kind of like funk army-wear--and he asked me to roll down the window. "Excuse me for asking, but you went on a road trip?" There was a hesitating part in me at first--I'm wired up to editing a film with a deadline for the next day--and some random guy I don't know wants to discuss a road trip close to midnight at a Rite Aid parking lot! Well, the hesitation started to melt away, as I began telling him about how my friend Shannon and I went around the Pacific Coast, but not the midwest or East Coast--which this guy's from Chicago--but maybe in the future we can take a longer trip. I was quickly learning that this person was very kind, intelligent, open-minded, had a charming personality, and though we were two random people we ended up having a lot to talk about. I soon learned that his name was Alexander Germaine "The Great Raguzi," a professional magician who was about to do an opening act in Pechanga Casino, and Alexander learned that I'm a graduate student in science and art--with film training--and then I learned that one of his sons was accepted into medical school at UCLA and UCI (his son worked with Dr. Neil Schiller at UC Riverside, who I knew through my younger tennis days) and my eyes bulged because I had a few friends from high school who tried to get into medical school and they ended up having to go all the way back east--being rejected by the programs in California... my gosh.... Before I knew it, Alexander was performing magic tricks right in front of me--with a handkerchief and a few coins--as I was left flustered wondering how he performed these tricks (increasingly frustrating for a scientist, eh?) as he was explaining to me the philosophies of magic: (1) the whole goal of a magician is to practice tricks to a point in which the audience experiences a sense of astonishment (from experiencing the unexpected, from being innocently fooled) and that (2) magic is a combination of blending math, science (physics), engineering, and most importantly... psychology. In addition, the word "magic" is always a word of attraction to people. Always luring people to watch. And I even learned some more of Alexander's background: how at a certain point in his life he was involved in engineering but received a two-year grant from the Chicago Arts Council to pursue magic full time. And that's when his pursuits led him to California. Alexander also trained with Siegfred and Roy and worked with tigers! (that's probably how he learned how to stay cool on stage; it's easier to perform in front of other humans instead of tigers, who can attack you if they sense any fear around you) (and operated an organic restaurant).

As I am learning there is a whole tight circuit of magic entertainers out there... Alexander is the first magician I have gotten to know well, but I also encountered a fellow UCSB graduate by the name of Jason Latimer, back in April of 2009 through Dr. Lawrence Krauss at the Origins Conference. Jason was proclaimed to be the World Champion of Magic, and at the time I didn't know the significance of this "title;" it sounded a little to glorified for me especially upon first encounter with a guy who could exchange little balls in three cups at a fancy party in Arizona. I just visited Jason's website and now I understand better this entitlement, and how he is blending academics, technological innovation with psychological illusion. Jason's work is at the cutting edge of BOTH the science, technology, and art of magic. Jason's the same age as I am and he's built an entire empire around himself! And so it goes with my accidental, strange encounters with magicians, eh? Random academic party in Arizona and a Rite Aid parking lot in my Riversidian hometown!

Before Alexander and I parted, he recruited me to videotape and edit his act at Pechanga this Saturday, and I was to call him the next day so we’d both confirm. It was like a reward was waiting for me after the stint with the 30-second rock crab video to Duke. He flat out told me that he admired my sense of enthusiasm, my energy, and excitement. And me? I sensed his knowingness… and his trust. He was not someone who talked the talk. He walked the walk.

When I drove home to pick up my black bag full of rock crab footage (you'd think it was full of a million dollars stolen from a bank, from the outside looks of it), I couldn’t help thinking how glad I was to keep all the “Roadtrip Nation” orange paint on my car. This interaction was by far the best conversation ever started with my roadtrip nation signage. Over the year, I had thousands of strange looks but only two people approached me and asked what exactly Roadtrip Nation was… but this is the first time Roadtrip Nation led to new friendship and even a job-line on my resume! I have my mom and a few fisherman friends on my case to get all the painting off the car, but now they have to think twice about giving me such kind of advice. I probably wouldn’t have met Alexander otherwise!

I am really glad that Randomness happened. It happened at the right time. I was also prepared to see Randomness—I was in a groovy film-making mode. I was in the “change your life, until your life changes” mode, even if it’s as subtle as making a new friend. But then again, who said making friends is a subtle process? The whole experience felt like a Michel Gondry Moment (MGM). I like to call them Michel Gondry moments, the whole pursuit of finding the magic of humanity in the cold and ordinary, always with a pinch of surrealistic mysteriousness…. Heck, it was midnight! Recently I had been taking photographs of “famous people,” including Gondry himself (also Malcolm Gladwell and Barbara Kingsolver). I look at those pictures, and I felt a sense of impersonality and distancing. I felt that my assumed role was just another body count to purchase and consume their books and movies. And that is why I felt like an unwelcomed "paparazzi" rather than a welcomed “photographer.” I look at the photographs above of The Great Raguzi and his sidekick Ron The Voice Jackson, and I feel warmth and love, and that I was embraced as a human and a part of a production team, and that means a lot to me, especially after this string of encounters that embodied alienation….

This interaction all happened amidst my 30 second rock crab film frenzy. I started to realize that editing my film footage is my cocaine, my crystal meth, my ultimate high. I’m an editor addict. When I start, I don’t stop. I don’t eat, I don’t sleep until I finally finish my film that I intend to create. When I was swiftly editing away into the wee hours of the night this rock crab film, I was thinking that this society makes film production such a BIG DEAL, and that for me, film editing is so easy and intuitive that I perceive the process as a sequential arrangement of moving photographs (which I did before I was actually filming, making arrangements of photographs to tell stories). At one point I felt like I was mindlessly arranging flowers blowing in the field… and ANYONE can arrange flowers… at least in my mind. Then again, I have to remind myself I’m a freak. I’m a right-brained, left-handed person in a largely left-brained world.

So, Friday night after my rock crab film frenzy, I called Alexander around 11:40 pm and said I can do it. And the next morning he gave me some general logistics… I was supposed to look for Timmy D at the casino. And through this conversation, I learned the concept of negotiating price. I gave Alexander two prices. The bare minimum student price for labor and products, and the bare minimum stipend appreciation price because I really want to do this, and this is partly an experiment and a training session so we can feel each other out, and I can gain something on my resume. I told him, “I’m stating two prices because I want to show you that I don’t want money to be an issue. I want a token of appreciation for my effort, but I really want to film your magic show and I don’t want price to be much concern.” And Alexander and I were both fair to each other. I received the stipend appreciation price (plus a tip and a coffee!!!) divided into initial halfway payment then final payment upon delivery of the goods. And later on Alexander said he would be prepared to write me into the budget so I’ll be properly paid! I’m glad that I was able to be upfront about this issue. I myself have a hard time discussing price, especially as an artist who wants to be inspired, not motivated to make money (but money is a matter of survival, the money is used to keep my visceral components alive so I can do art). My visceral self (my agent, my bulldog manager) is negotiating the contract and my artistic self is in performance.

I watched my fishermen friends Ernie and Jules in operation in terms of price and negotiation. Ernie and Jules are two people who love their jobs. Their profession is 50% work and 50% hobby, adventure, and pure fun. But they have to have this visceral side to them where money has to be upfront such that they can sustain their work, their fun, their adventurous livelihood. Ernie strategizes to have people pay right before the boat takes off on the sportfishing trip, so that the business side is over and done, and then it’s all about having fun! Jules keeps close tabs of his receipts, and he acts as a distributor of seafood, which eliminates some of his reliance on middlemen. It’s amazing I have learned so much about the psychology of business just by watching my fellow fishermen interacting with their customers. I would have never learned this through school. I would have had to see independent businessmen in action.

On Saturday, April 10, 2010, I drove down to Temecula from Riverside and showed up to Pechanga around 12:15. There was some bizarre freeway traffic before the entrance (probably a bunch of wine snob tourists) and I had a hard time finding the showroom. Alexander accidentally told me I was supposed to be at the “ballroom,” not the showroom… but that was straightened out fairly quickly. The ballroom was bizarrely empty. No one was around for some corporate Survivor’s meeting.

My walking through Pechanga Casino was a strange, novel experience. It was the first time I entered a smoke-filled, flashy casino in CALIFORNIA. I mean, it was a classic Nevadan, Las Vegas experience, except I was in California! My brain was not used to such displacement. Everything in Pechanga was neat and straight and looking brand new, the usual fantastic flashiness of Vegas. Lots of employees, lots of customers, lots of business. I passed by hundreds of people dribbling away their money to slot machines, as if they were playing to dream, playing, losing money in order to win a dream. Gambling felt like a displacement for hard work, for earning your money. I felt it was a place where the value of the dollar was completely lost… but then the casino makes so much money that they could afford a fancy-super amazing, professional showroom that holds really big gigs, ranging from Jerry Seinfeld to David Copperfield to Jamie Fox to the Gypsy Kings to many many more! So, other people waste away their money to win their dreams while some of this money is displaced to the world’s top entertainment! I don’t think that’s a bad thing… partly…

The Pechanga Showroom was extremely high-end professional. Everyone there had their place and if one person screwed up with their job, everyone screwed up and looked bad. Everything was super-organized. And for some reason, when I was walking around, I felt embarrassed for not knowing who was doing what and why, and I felt I needed some kind of stage production course or at least some one-hour training session so I felt more comfortable knowing everyone’s places and operations. Professionality was of essence especially when I saw all the posters of the big names in the backstage area. I told Alexander I was back stage at the Arizona State University arena, in which I sensed professionalism in the production of the Origins conference, but I didn’t feel that same wired tension of “if you screw up, you’re screwed.” The operation felt like there was room for glitches, and it didn’t even matter if you did mess up. The university is a place where mistakes are partly welcome. That's how you accidentally discover new things!

I signed in and received a cloth sticker from the police officer, stating that I was legit. I could tell that this officer and a few others who worked at Pechanga held some Native American blood in them; you could see it in the structure of their faces, the darker tone of their skin. It was cool. I finally hunted down Timmy D and Alexander and met his sidekick Ron “The Voice” Jackson, who was a professional heavyweight boxer (?) in the past. Alexander and Ron look like two peas in a pod. I had to borrow a monopod for my camera (good thing I did because it’s hard to do good hand-held work when shooting at a distance). It turned out that my clothes were a problem—I was wearing a nice shirt and nice shorts—but I didn’t know I had to be in uniform. Production crew was supposed to wear black: black shirt and black pants… and I myself was an eyesore. I was a white sheep. Ooops. Alexander didn’t know either. But we resolved the problem. I borrowed Timmy D’s production shirt and I blended in with the crew afterwards. Now I know for future reference. Crew are men (and chickas) in black. I explained to Timmy D that I’m used to doing film work on boats and in the field, so I didn’t know that there was a standard dress code.

After getting used to the fancy arena and stage area, I spoke with the audiovisual director to make sure where I can and can’t be, to make sure I’m not stepping on his toes or the production’s toes, as well as not being a nuisance to the audience. The director also gave me an overview of the show, in order to know what to expect (a little bit), which helped me in filming. Pechanga tapes all shows sometimes for commercial purposes, but mostly archives the tapes more so for legal purposes because in Power Player, a contestant could possibly win a million dollars! It turned out that I could be in the “front area” and the front sides, but these areas (especially the front) were largely horrible shots and I ended up finding a niche in the very back, toward the middle (with slight angles), such that I didn’t interfere with the audience whatsoever.

As the show started, I was thinking of a way on how I was going to retrieve multiple angles (as I am a one-camera girl). I retrieved establisher shots of (1) the stage area (2) the audience (3) the band (all distant and close-up). During each act, I stayed put in one area and largely filmed The Great Raguzi at full-body or ¾ body. I began to realize that magic on film would only work if you film it continuously—to make the magic tricks believable. I couldn’t create shot diversity within acts, but among acts. In between magic acts, I transferred my position to get a new angle. As Raguzi was marching through several acts, from Act of Lights and Doves, to Act of Ropes, Act of Flags, Act of Handkerchiefs and Knots, Act of the Guillotine, and Act of Cards with the Snake… I started to notice how smooth, professional, and modest Raguzi was, especially in his suit with a jacket of long coat tails! Most magicians are very fast and jazzy and showy, but Raguzi present himself as “this is who I am and this is what I do, and can you figure me out?”

I could say that the Act of Knots was most impressive because Raguzi chose the most superb audience member who was totally jiving with the tricks and the show in general. This kid looked like a stage performer himself! I retrieved the best footage for this act! I had one technical difficulty in my part, but I managed to adjust in just enough time. The brightness and contrast was a huge issue due to the spotlight effect on Raguzi, and I ended up having to adjust shutter speed, and since that moment all of the film came out in full quality…. All of the acts were choreographed to superb music, much like Jason Latimer’s shows, and it was a very cool, and classy assemblage of music, ranging from classical to jazz to modern Cirque de Soleil soundtracks.

Before I knew it, the show was done, and I rushed back stage to meet up with Alexander and Ron. We “cooled down” and talked much more. I ended up taking some phiotographs of Alexander and Ron and the doves and not only that, we reviewed the video footage and did on-the-spot editing. That was an excellent move in my part. It’s so important to review and reflect upon the footage right away! The audio was superb with my Seinhausser! About an hour later, I left the stage very happy, and so was the great Raguzi: “We need to take good care of this girl!”

It took a while for me to wind down after what happened. To shut out my state of being stunned and exhausted, I ended up calling three or four people, and my friend Connie called me for a photography gig at her wedding this summer! My golly! What fun! Finally, around sunset, I mozied over to a 24-7 Kinkos (Fedex Office) off of Winchester (it’s a wonderful Kinkos, nice and big and lots of space), and I went straight to downloading footage and photographs, marking the best footage, and editing the necessary and needed and most aesthetic. I knew that emotions and creativity were spontaneous creatures (or beasts) inside of me and all of us humans, and that I had to feed off of the emotional recency. Otherwise, this project would become another buried piece of material that would be difficult to unearth. Sitting on this project was NOT an option.

And I suppose in this brief window of time, which ended up being around 10 hours, I learned the most about myself. I learned about my workflow in photographic and video editing. How fast I was able to sort and edit and compile and make a final product. In total, I think it was a 12-hour photo-video editing and uploading gig. I really felt in this round of video work, I was learning the most about myself. I was creating an optimized, orderly workflow for myself, such that if any future client off the street wanted video work, I could create a neat operation. Any possible way to get a few gigs every once in a while to have a little bit of income and keep the student loans down to a minimum *gulp.* At first I felt vulnerable because I was thinking about how I needed to learn much more about Final Cut Pro, but I decided to make the best of what I knew at the time.

A brief review of my workflow process: (1) download all footage (2) arrange footage in nice, neat folders (3) reviewed the footage (4) place markers around the footage that I liked (like identifying the best photographs of the heap) (5) dissected the video footage to its elements (6) dissected the audio to its elements (7) mentally identified the best footage and recordings (8) took a step back and decided what elements to resynthesize into my own products based on (a) what the client wanted and (b) what I wanted to do (9) each new project got its own timeline in final cut pro. Footage and audio editing was to the extent of (1) some audio adjustments, when the recording was too soft or too loud, not in the range of -12 to -6 db (2) some video adjustments, cutting out shaky footage, changing the contrast when the footage was too bright and (3) added some cross-fade transitions (4) added some showy Livetype.

By the time I had the idea for the collage, it was around 3 am in the morning. My mind was still going through an adrenaline rush, but it had NO ABILITY to be exacting and precise. I retrieved all the best footage and barely managed to arrange it into a coherent 37-second collage that complimented Ron “The Voice” Jackson’s introduction to The Great Raguzi at the very beginning of the show. I sped up the timing of some acts in order for all footage to fit as well as make sure that the Guillotine Act was well-timed. I called this timeline a “Pizza Collage” because I was so mentally out of it I was essentially assembling material in a state of subconsciousness. I could not precisely correlate the video and audio such that it could have a form of music beat to it—which is what I would have done if I saved the project for the next morning, but I had no time to procrastinate. Procrastination was not an option with this project.

By the time everything was done, and I was packing up, it was 4:30 am. Just me and one worker at the Kinkos. I drove home happy and had a fake white caramel powder coffee drink from Shell for “dinner” and by the time I reached home in Riverside the sky was turning from dark to dusk. My parents were already awake when I came home, and I crashed for three hours on my sister’s bed. I woke up at 9 and started working on downloading the footage on Youtube and burning DVDs for Alexander and Ron. It took a while for me to upload four videos because of several snafoos (1) I had to create an extra email to create an account for “TheGreatRaguziMagic” (2) Youtube was not uploading some of the larger-sized “mov” files (3) there was a music copyright issue with the Act of Flags that Youtube detected right away! I can’t believe it! That unfortunately took another three hours of my life. Maybe I worked longer than 12 hours. More so 16 hours… a full day of editing life on a total high.

(Called Bob) I then finished stuff, went jogging around 3pm. I met up with Alexander at Starbucks Canyon Crest around 4pm when I told him over the phone “I’ve got the goods!” I show ed Alexander the work and it turned out that he REALLY LIKED the short collage I made! Alexander was so happy with the collage that he said he would use it for part of his Magic Act Reel. What an honor, a compliment! As a magician who is in the business of being astonished, my work has managed to astonish the magician, Raguzi! Pro bonus for my resume and one of the most interesting compliments I have ever received. I may work with Alexander next weekend for a prom, but there might be a conflict with work back up at UC Santa Barbara.

After the business part of our discussion, I ended up showing him my new 30-second rock crab film (30.08 second rock crab film) to Alexander and he was impressed with the diversity of footage (it took a long time to collect… over 9 weeks in the summer of 2007!) as I explained to him what price transparency was and Gwaz’ ingenius environmental advertising idea. Then we had fun talking about photography. Alexander showed me his relatively new Canon Rebel SLR camera with two very nice lenses. That camera was very nice. I really enjoy the colors and the sharpness of the images that the camera was producing. Maybe my next “real” camera will be a Canon. I’m not sure… it’s a long way from now. Alexander was considering in taking a photography course through a camera store, but I offered to take him out for free and expose him to the basic elements of composition. And a final cherry on top—I was taught my first magic trick of “misdirection” with two pennies. He was thinking of using me for a levitation trick and I told him I loved lights, plasma lamps, lava lamps and such.

We parted in our separate ways, with both of us feeling good. “Change your life, until your life changes,” Barry Spacks’ voice whispered in my head, and I think both of us walked away feeling changed, even just a little bit. The initial randomness at the midnight conversation in a Rite Aid parking lot didn’t seem so random after all. As Alexander says, “We are here for a purpose… it was meant to be….”

It’s interesting to explore human relationships that are partly professional and partly fun and friendship. I am learning how to balance both. I think this whole experience has made me realize how personality-driven I am in terms of meeting people. I am more intrigued by personalities and outlooks to life than by people’s content. So it goes to show I don’t hang out much with graduate students at UC Santa Barbara. I think I’m at a phase in my life where it doesn’t really matter what discipline you are. If you have an optimistic, unique outlook to life and an original assemblage of skills and knowledge—it doesn’t matter what job you have or discipline you are in—I will most likely be your good friend.

So it goes to say I never thought I would be involved in “magic.” I think the pursuit of science and advancing knowledge is the process of demystifying the magic and mystery and mythology… and such is the long-term relationship between science and mythology anyway… from the mystical and supernatural and unexplained shifted to the scientific and mechanical understandings of the world…. It’s hard to for my head to wrap around the question, “Where does magic fit in my life?” For me I find that sense of “magic” in myself when I go through that adrenaline rush of losing myself in the activity of creative film editing, as well as the magic of mind in attempting to explore and de-mystify human-environmental relationships.

And then I came to realize that the The Great Raguzi’s mindset is not magical or mystical whatsoever. Magicians are not mythological shamans who have a supernatural understanding of the world. In fact, Raguzi has mechanically and artfully learned how to create the “magical experience” for the unknowing audience. Magicians are very exacting, precise people who have a blend of knowledge in science and art. They are people who know how to precisely, mechanically manipulate objects and subjects such as to (1) astonish people, (2) fool and deceive people, and (3) essentially screw around with people’s heads. In all honesty, I think magicians are essentially the professional and legal versions of cheating and breaking the rules of human perception…. They have found loopholes in our mind’s construction of reality…. Something like politicians and boards of directors on megacorporations (they’re very good at disappearing and re-appearing-in-other-places acts), except they’re actually entertaining. Coming to think, you have to be a very sophisticated person, and very talented person to pursue the construction of magic as a career. I feel like Raguzi is a fascinating character who just stepped out of the documentary Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, by Errol Morris.

I think I can learn a lot from Alexander’s… or Raguzi’s… perspective... this intention to astonish and screw around with people’s heads. These are my intentions when I edit my films: (1) to expect the unexpected and (2) to mess with people’s heads with existing ways of reality. But in my case of exploring coupled human-environmental systems, my magic tricks don’t involve handkerchiefs and decks of cards. They are about human-environmental problems… they are political and scientific problems. And this is where I see the bridge of Raguzi’s magic into my life… we have the same intentions, but I need to learn how to metaphorically overlay his tricks with the real-world tricks of human-environmental change. As Alexander said, he was willing to perform a fish magic trick for my Fish-in-a-Box film.

Besides learning magic tricks, I’m sure I can learn so much about stage production and tactics of mainstream entertainment…. It’s been a beautiful few days, two people with different roads in life have an unlikely encounter and develop a friendship…. And yes indeed, it’s a game of paying it forward; these have been Michel Gondry Moments, making the extraordinary out of the ordinary… like reality has its own magic… only if you choose to see it.

518. The Ironies of Floatopia Isla Vista and the Marine Life Protection Act, Some Initial Thoughts....

2010-04-06T16:50:00.000-07:00

By the time it's spring quarter, my mind opens up with happiness. The days are getting longer and it's getting warmer. Summer is just around the corner... and from the history of the Blue Horizons science-film summer bootcamp... I am developing an itch, a bug, to film something... go outside and pursue a few film projects.... It seems like this filming in spring and summer is becoming an annual ritual in my life, as if filming coincides with my annual metabolism. Then again, summertime is when no one bugs me, and I can give the university the finger (politely) and say yipee! I can do whatever the hxll I want! And when I realize what I want to do, it ends up being something related to the university.... But at least I want to do it!

Last week I slaved away at a grant (that I don't want to publicly talk about yet, because grants are a bunch of to-do lists and I would rather show people to-done lists, which end up being boootiful and edutaining... or at least I try to make them pretty and edutaining). This grant also included a proposal to produced two public service announcements (PSAs). And alas, my dentist, Dr. Dart, announces to me this morning: "Don't go to Isla Vista this weekend! It's Floatopia!!! Facebook has the announcement!" And perhaps to my dentist's dismay, my eyes beamed and I announced, "I gotta go! I gotta go!" I gotta "undercover" film the event! It's footage I need for the PSAs! He looked at me strangely, and then I continued justifying myself to his assistant, Lynn.

I want to film a short, short film that has a complex thesis. It has multiple twists, which is what I like, which is what I thrive on. Which is the epitome of Biological Incorrectedness.

In short, "Floatopia," which is based off of "utopia," is an epic annual spring beach event in which the twenty-somethings college crowd have found a loophole in the "no-drinking-on-the-beach" law by floating on Costco-grab-inflatable-rafts right along the shore... with beers, wines, and other forms of alcohol at hand. The tradition is fairly recent (within the last few years, apparently started in Isla Vista), but the participation has expanded tremendously into thousands upon thousands of people.... Floatopia events are now being held (or considered in being held) at Pacific Beach, San Diego, and San Luis Obispo (SLOtopia!)... and I'm not sure if anything's happening in Orange County or Los Angeles.... (tragic, Wikipedia knowledge, I should probably compile a series of news reports and police records to increase the accuracy of what I'm saying).

So, here comes my mixed up thesis. For one, I think this concept is epically brilliant! It's the continued Animal-House-like tradition of finding any form of loophole in the existing law to come out and having a smashing, alcohol-binging public party! I also think it's amazing how communities can come together and organize public events, create their own fun and adventure independent of "the grid" of consumed entertainment. Self-generated entertainment, Michel Gondry style (I think drinking beers on floats by the masses in the shallows of the ocean could only be a brilliant Gondry music video, it's absurdly hilarious!). In fact, I think Floatopia is SOOO clever that I bet right now some fortunate, high-paid Hollywood screenwriter is now working on a script to make this event as some form of modern Animal House film! Look, I just gave the idea away for free. Talk about the corruption of people in LA getting paid for ideas... *whatever* Sigh. As long as I get some nice, minimum wage academic-public-outreach related job in the future, where I can freely spread ideas and still pay my rent and health insurance (ahem, thank you Obama), then I'm happy.

And so there is a sad second part of the thesis. Unfortunately Floatopia in Isla Vista has a sucky side.... It has negative consequences. I just finished participating in a year-long political process in the design of marine protected areas in southern California, and a group of hardworking, educated citizens (fishermen, scientists, conservation groups, government agents) decided to place a marine protected area right outside of UC Santa Barbara and Isla Vista. It's part of the Integrated Preferred Alternative (IPA) plan and it will probably become official in 1-2 years. I just find it so ironic that people have worked so hard in this political process to largely restrict fishing, and place reserves in areas to reduced exposure to water pollution, but what about the general public? What about public awareness, public use of the ocean? How is that managed and restricted? Apparently extra enforcement will be placed this weekend out on these beaches, plus restrictions at beach access points, but this county and local enforcement... for a "public nuisance" event, not state law. And god knows about human impact of this event. Most visible is the trash left behind. Secondly, my fishing buddy told me that I should interview a bunch of people coming out of the water and asked them if they peed in the water. When you drink beer... you pee... a lot. And so, we come to directly, visibly see how the ocean is treated as the collective toilet bowl... most of the time perceived indirectly... and now... both can be visibly, tangibly linked.

Three messages.

One positive. Floatopia as community building and self-entertainment. The Epic College Party experience, Animal House, Gondry style.

One negative. Negative environmental impact on masses of people of the ocean, trashing, peeing in water.

One twisted. Political irony. Another living proof that the MLPA process was largely a fish-o-centric process, in which it was largely emphasizing fishing restrictions without much consideration of many other human impacts on the ocean... including the smashing Floatopia events.

The audience would be two-fold (1) to inform participants in the MLPA process of other ocean hazards besides fishing, and (2) to inform college students about the negative environmental impacts of Floatopia, the incoming marine protected areas in their backyard, and their reconsideration of the way how they choose to party, with a level of environmental consciousness?!

A good article I found was KCOY (and of course, even a graduate student resorted to being educated through Wikipedia).

Some questions to ask partygoers (1) Why do you participate in Floatopia? (2) How did you hear about it? (3) Did you pee in the water? (4) Do you know what a marine protected area (MPA) is?

517. A Continued Multi-Media Narrative for "California's Fading Wildflowers: Lost Legacy and Biological Invasions" By Richard and Victoria Minnich

2010-04-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

Basically, last quarter I had an opportunity to attend a panel discussion of the University of California Press (with Naomi Schneider, Chuck Crumly, Niels Hooper, Jenny Wapner, and Lynne Withey), and my heart was thumping, my eyes burning with flames of anger: "Who in the hoohahey was drunk or tweaked or high or stoned enough to publish a WILDFLOWER book with BLACK and WHITE pictures?" (My father's book here: California's Fading Wildflowers: Lost Legacy and Biological Invasions, in which I was the ghost author of the existential last chapter). One kudos though. The book cover, which highlighted a meloncholy landscape hue of purple lupines and faint orange (poppies?), was very well artistically accelerated. No complaints there. But the black and white interior...?!!

Well, given the current economic crisis of nearly all publishing houses, I had to calm myself down, lower my blood pressure, take a step back and say... no, maybe people weren't drunk or tweaked or high or stoned (even my committee member Dr. Milton Love told me that he had to apply for an extra grant from the Packard Foundation in order to have his UC Press fish book published in color)... but this is clearly a case in which economics forces people to make irrational decisions, like publishing wildflower books in black and white!

At first the UC Press told my dad there would be an insert within the book of color images of wildflowers. Then that was taken away and all images inside would be black and white. And then many black and white images were edited out, which is absurd because it doesn't cost anything at all to include more black and white images (at least in self-publishing venues). My current environmental history professor said he will be allowed ten black and white images per chapter for his book. Lucky him, I think that's an even better deal than my dad's.

It turned out that I never asked the black-and-white image question to the UC Press panel back in March. I couldn't say that I chickened out, but I decided to ask a more pertinent question: "My name is Victoria Minnich, and I'm a Ph.D. student in environmental media. I am surrounded by a generation of students who are not only information overloaded, but they have greater tendency to process information visually and multi-media formats. What is the UC Press doing about this to account for this shift in information processing? Is multi-media packaging crafted with each book? And what is your response to the creation of Logicomix, a graphic novel on the history of Bertrand Russell's life?"

The response of the audience and the UC Press panel was overwhelmingly positive. When I was asking the question, I ended up watching people in the crowd nodding their heads in agreement. Naomi Schneider, who has worked in several prestigious New York publishing houses before joining the UC Press, stated that she would be very interested in seeing a graphic novel. Not a bad idea for a graphic novel Ph.D! Naomi heavily emphasized the NEED TO BE GENERALIST AND INTERDISCIPLINARY when submitting a book idea to the UC Press when the vast majority of academia is polarizing itself toward the opposite direction of hyperspecialization... and a graphic novel would definitely be a work of broadening horizons.

Chuck Crumly, a senior editor with a biology background, also mentioned a little snag in the process. Chuck flat out stated that the acquisitions and marketing team would be ECSTATIC to have a graphic novel come in as a project, but the DIRECTORIAL BOARD of ACADEMICS would most likely RESIST the idea. Chuck stated that we would need more turnaround time to eliminate the old hoagies and insert the newbies who would then be much more willing to embrace multi-media representations of academic topics... including graphic novels. Which is truth down to the bone demonstrating that academics and science is not truth, it's just the politics of common agreement on ideas. So sad.

Then again, when outer discourage starts to form Sylvia Plath belljars around me, the mind of environmental media, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference comes to town (in San Diego), and I meet a potpourri of people who are ecstatic about what I'm doing, and I receive nothing but encouragement. Someone I met at this meeting who was most encouraging was Stuart Greenwell, the Art Director for Science Magazine! Lucky me to meet him! I ended up helping Stuart out as a volunteer at the "fancy, sophisticated version of Kinkos," or the room full of cubby holes containing press releases for the latest and greatest of scientists doing presentations and getting drilled by the nation's top science journalists. Stuart gave me an orientation of the room. "See all this? It's analog. This is a generation that is going to phase out, die out like dinosaurs. You (as an environmental media student) are on the right track. What you are doing right now WILL be the future."

So now, I guess it's just a matter of phasing out the incumbent, old professorial dinosaurs in analog mode. Why wait for the clock? Why not dominate? Why not accelerate the process of their extinction? Why not be that invasive species biological bully of environmental media? I don't like waiting. I like doing... now....

I always carried the idea with me to continue this black-and-white book of my father (talking about "fading") in living color, through multi-media narrative--including photography, film, even cartoons--especially since the spring of 2005, when I shot my first solid set of images of the historic once-in-a-hundred-years wildflower bloom (mostly of the deserts of southern California). The photographic collection (included below) demonstrated at the time a mastered set of compositional skills, but unfortunately at the period of life I was technologically primitive: I only had a Nikon Coolpix 5700 and a laptop computer with limited processing skills. I didn't even know how to use Photoshop back in 2005! I was a a technological IDIOT! Now I am working with a new computer of high processing power, which allows me to shoot and work with RAW images. Yay, technology is allowing Josie Schmosette Consumer (that be me) to go pro!

But this dormant little seed re-emerged and blossomed to pursue once again for four reasons: (1) direct, face-to-face contact with the source of the black-and-white images, the UC Press (2) expanded technologies and workflow (as discussed above), (3) SPRING BREAK took me to places that were overflowing with wildflowers (okay, only in Baja California, southern California was pretty weak with wildflower blooms). Amen for spring break! and (4) my friend Shannon Switzer (Girl Chases Globe) gave me advice that she received from members of the International League of Conservation Photographers (basically, a whole bunch of famous National Geographic type photographers)--the advice being that it's best to know a region, a subject, very, very, very well (like your own backyard), and this is the way how you will master storytelling of a system, in photography and written word, and this will be your ticket towards bigger and better things.

Caption for Portfolio 1 Above: California's Fading Wildflowers: Lost Legacy and Biological Invasions (Portfolio 1). By Richard and Victoria Minnich. A continued multi-media narrative based on Dr. Richard Minnich's book published by the University of California Press in 2008. Portfolio 1 is a "warm-up" for the more intensive and extensive portfolios. Unnatural is Beautiful at Emma Wood State Beach, just north of Ventura, south of Carpinteria, California. Invasive mustard (brassica nigra) dominates the eroding slopes by the coast, interspersed with a few patches of native Encelia californica. April 2010.

Key words: multi-media storytelling, richard minnich, California's Fading Wildflowers, Lost Legacy, biological invasion, Naomi Schneider, Chuck Crumley, graphic novel, Logicomix, University of California Press, Stuart Greenwell, analog versus digital, analog versus multi-media, American Association for the Advancement of Science

516. "Strings, Boxes, and Plastic Wrap" A First Poem from the Bahia de Los Angeles

2010-04-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

"Strings, Boxes, and Plastic Wrap." First poem written from the trip to the Bahia de Los Angeles, Mexico, with Jules, March 18-26. The PDF can be found here:

http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/stringsboxesplasticwrappoem.pdf.

What can I say? This is the first time I am writing in my blog for a long time. This is the first time I am sitting in my room in Goleta--my clean room, I finally cleaned up thoroughly (removing about 500 spiders, I'm sure!) this past weekend--this is the first time in over four months I am not running around like a graduate-student-maniac, and I am purposefully slowing myself down to inspect every thought.

This poem is an example of a slowed-down inspection. My mind invented a poem this morning when I was jogging along the beaches of Ventura, and I managed to hammer it out to some final version a couple of hours later. This poem is a metaphorical comparison of the lifestyles of "first world" and "third world" countries, and the resulting question is: who is more deprived? I feel I have much more to write about with our trip to the Bahia de Los Angeles, except I am feeling unhappy and creatively stifled being here in Santa Barbara. I will continue my travel writings tomorrow.

535. "Uncertain Moments in Commercial Fishing" Manifesto at the Brink of Summer Vacation

2010-04-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

Uncertain Moments in Commercial Fishing" Manifesto Monologue came about on June 16, 2010, though I chose the posting to be in April of 2010. The PDF can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/uncertainmomentsincommercialfishingPDF.pdf.

Last night, June 16, 2010, was the first time in five years I was going through a noticeable, visible panic attack. I was in San Diego, now I'm in Santa Barbara. I was at Jx's house, and I was feeling weak and vulnerable, for I just started working through the instruction manual for Logic Pro music software (I'm trying to transfer from Sonar Home Studio) and realized that my venturing through the mechanics of music audio production would finally lead me to my salvation of bare minimum professional multi-media production, but then had to be interrupted by the realities that I had to head back up to Santa Barbara, because the following day entailed the initiation of a root-canal process and two meetings with two different professors. Then again, my being in San Diego embodied the first time of my escaping from Santa Barbara for an entire month of brutal labor of "reviewing the previous literature and paying homage to all those who did work before me... spending a significant fraction of my life worrying about what other people think rather than further developing what I think." Fxck! I hate literature reviews.... But nevertheless, I do learn new things and somehow I do build character in the process... then again... I feel more institutionalized... more so a part of the establishment... lovely.... To take things back even further, I had come to realize that this entire academic year I had been mentally bulldozed and riddled with a bunch of unfinished projects, but I emerged from my being in the midst of the intellectual academic hurricane with new directions, digging extremely deep inside myself and feel that I have the answer to the question of "what's next in Victoria's life" whereas in the previous summer I did NOT feel that way. So I've spent the ENTIRE LAST 9 MONTHS HOLDING MY MENTAL BREATH and it's the first time I've had the opportunity to ask "WHO AM I?" and "WHERE IN THE HXLL AM I AT?" being in San Diego, far far away from Santa Barbara, the utopia vacation land, yet riddled with my own academic problems... It's a paradoxical landscape at this moment... and last night was the LAST thing I wanted to do, drive in the middle of the night back to Santa Barbara to wrap up loose ends, talk to professors, and have the worst and most graphic and physical dental operation I had ever experienced in my 10 years of sitting on the dental seat. So here I am, uncovering the hidden prison of my mind--Logic Pro Music software--uprooted from my internal vulnerabilities, forced to return to the land of academidrama I didn't even want to think about and then right before I leave Jx vents to me about his concerns with the "conditions" of the ocean and how the last three months have not been money-makers, it's the first time it's ever happened to him in his entire fishing career... miserable April, like usual, then these blasting red tides with no ocean circulation, and now small vessel advisories due to excess wind.... There's no break in bad weather.... Jx vented pretty badly and then reminded me to be a bit more considerate with my use of coffee cups and the tiniest of things, combined with his fishing concerns (see the manifesto above) just placed me in this super ultimate vulnerable emotional state, where I feel everything is swirling and unstable and that everything in the whole world is "my fault" and then I find myself in this mode of uncontrollable heavy breathing and crying and wailing alone in the car at night, my sleeves covered with snot and these gang-banger cars passing by me with heavy loud rap music right outside the Lemon Grove Starbucks, in which I ventured in, trying to stay bare minimum composed though my face was blotched with brown-redness and the two insensitive women (or do I say bxtches) behind the counter inspected my one-time re-use coffee cup from the Albertsons down the street as if they were holding an envelop possibly containing anthrax, and with the immense uncertain snootiness the older woman rejected the possibility of a 50-cent refill because "it's not the same store" but then she mumbled "but we have coffee brewing right now, it will be about three minutes... but don't worry about it, I'll just bring one out to you," and though this seems to be a kind gesture in words, the older woman's tone of voice was of alien disgust, as if I were contaminated by the Gulf Oil spill or something, and I just burst into tears right then and there in front of those two snooty girls and barely handled my cup, sat down at a table right be the doorway trying to compose myself, but it was a miserable failure... just this ultimate moment of vulnerability where my exposure of uncontrollable emotion is greeted by insensitivity of the humans around me, I just knew, yes yes, this is a Post-Modern Moment (or Post Modern Second or PMS), or so I now know... Victoria Anonymous, Terra Anonymous... one and the same... human indifference to anyone and anything they don't know and are not attached to.... I'm staring at a few hundred humans across the street at the farmer's market, and now I feel like I'm staring at round stones rolling down a hill, I'm staring at tumbleweed blown across the Mojave Desert, I'm in a city and I feel more desolate and alone than when I'm out on the Pacific Ocean or at the Bahia de Los Angeles, so I was sooo uncontained that I just walked out the Starbucks and stormed away, back into the car, without picking up any coffee, it was the perfectly wrong moment to encounter ultimate bxtchiness of lady Starbucks baristas.

Before I left in the dark, I called Jx one more time and he calmed me down some, reminding me that we all need to vent, it's a part of the process... which is very true, but my vulnerability was unbearable at the moment.... He cheered me up with some text messages and cartoon ideas, and after about a half-hour of driving I was calming down... though just that half-hour before I was crying and wailing and short of breath that I could barely hold the steering wheel, let alone see through my watery eyes. As I continued driving up north, parsing the drive into "counties," from San Diego to Orange County (south and north) to Los Angeles, then Ventura and SB, Jx's manifesto sat heavier and heavier in me. It was so sorrowful to me, to give up.... To give up a passion, a self-carved profession that was half labor, half hobby and play, that had worked successfully for over ten years, and for a multitude of reasons all feeding off of each other... this profession no longer works, no longer viable... for more than a few days... an entire season? One thing I can say for sure, it is one thing for a scientist to write about how "all fishermen have to do is change their profession" in the literature in cold, nonchalant text, and then it's another thing to experience the venting worries of a fisherman or fishermen who have become close friends. These include worries... to a point of depression (worse than a bad funk). This distant, cold fine print problem in the literature suddenly becomes magnifyingly personal. A visua-emotional landscape mapped onto the impersonal... it's the least I can do in my life: experience the fine technical print, not just read it.

All the reasons as to why Jx is a commercial fisherman in the first place welled up in my mind: (1) to escape humans, escape civilization (2) to escape the absurdity of having a job in a box, a cubicle (3) to integrate mental and physical labor (4) to be your own boss, impose your own labors on yourself rather than do the labors of another human's will: all the ideals of such work just tapering away... to succumb to the drudgery work of a machinist society, where everyone is working for everyone else and not for their own brains.... Oh but there must be other fruitful and meaningful and connected forms of labors out there... It just takes a while to poke around and figure out where they're at. I spoke with Peter about this manifesto, and he informed me that many natural resource users feel this way: they are under the gun, at the whims of the agents of the environment, and then society comes down on them with additional layers of constraints, it can be unbearably overwhelming... like me... having a panic attack. I just think that "living your passions is no longer financially viable" is a sin of a mass-scale economic system. People are behaving to satisfy the vicious metabolism of a giant machine, rather than fulfilling their inner needs, exploring their inner souls. We're all being swallowed by the giant machine... if only we could somehow survive being at the fringes of the grid. I was thinking about the sportfishing option for temporary work... "You might as well catch people to catch fish. After all, there seems to be a lot more humans than fishes, so you might as well catch naive, vacation-going humans instead..." but then some of the charms of the labors of commercial fishing vanish.... What was the means of livelihood metamorphoses to Disney entertainment of the ocean (in part)....

It's toward the end of June 17, 2010, and somehow I have survived the day. I had the roughest dental work done on me... a root canal at the UCSB on-campus dental offices... lost so much of a molar.... I'm still sore... the dental assistant was a bit of a ditz, but the dentist was hard core. Today I was a phenomenal patient and Dr. Montgomery said he liked to "divorce the patient from the tooth," (quite existential!) so I'm a great patient with a troublesome tooth. It turned out that one of my four tooth tunnels inherently calcified, "nature's root canal" which was against the grain of textbook procedures. After that I had a super discussion about ecocriticism, Literature and the Environment with Dr. Shewry, and then wrote most of this blog at Kinkos in Goleta, and then talked with Dr. Alagona about marine environmental history and a whole bunch of other cool stuff (in which he cheered me up, as usual) and here I am, a little less bummed than before....

520. "Colors Before the Sunrise" A Song? A Poem? A Piece of Vispo? (Plus A Discussion on Vic's Commitment to Cartoons)

2010-03-30T13:26:00.000-07:00

"Colors Before the Sunrise" Poem / Song / Vispo in Poetry Format. The PDF of this poem can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/colorsbeforesunriseSONGPOEM.pdf.

Image displays a typical state of pre-sunrise (dusk, so they call it?!) at the Bahia de Los Angeles, Mexico. Image taken toward the end of March of 2010.

A quick effort toward VISPO for the song-poem "Colors Before the Sunrise."

The end of March seems far off (it's now the end of April). I was in a state of a massive, tangled knot from winter quarter of 2010. I was intellectual roadkill that needed a giant restoration project. But Jules swept me away to his and Duke's place to the Bahia de Los Angeles for a good 8-9 days. It was a much needed calibration. Just crossing the border from the United States into Mexico, venturing into brand new territory for myself (south of San Quintin) opened up my eyes, loosened me up, and brought me into a state of establishing new inner-outer perspectives. The people of Mexico barely had any resources and they made the most of what they had. I noticed that people were more attached to each other simply because they truly needed each other's help... whereas in the United States... it seems like visceral attachment to others has been largely replaced by technology, and so there is not much need to communicate and collaborate with others. We commune with machines instead. For about a week or so I was thankful for some clean water and a flushing toilet. I was surrounded by a land of unfinished and abandoned projects... which kind of felt like my mind... externalized.... Quite soon I started realizing that things in the United States are a bit too easy for our own good and once we get in our habits, it's sooo easy for our minds to take for granted what we have and not realize that we have what we need....

So Jules gave me the best possible present... that even my parents haven't given me for so long.... He swept me away into a foreign land full of empty, serene landscapes and depravity/scarcity of human resources.... His presence allowed my inner self to unravel and untangle a little bit... and re-prioritize.... I largely focused on taking photographs in RAW format (man, I'm officially professional now... well... almost...) and downloading music and photography software... which took me a couple of days (even internet was a scarce resource!). I became a sensual, visual creature, visually absorbing the landscape, ignoring the Spanish (I actually enjoy being in a foreign country where I don't know what the hxll anyone is saying, so I view humans as chattering monkeys and end up only visually processing the landscapes). So I took lots of photographs and soaked up the landscape as much as possible--which was a strange ecosystem indeed. Bahia de Los Angeles is a desert right by an inland Sea of Cortez (hence in my poem "desert's ocean"), which totally threw me off because you don't get these kinds of ecosystems in California (or combinatory ecosystems--desert and ocean right next to each other?!!).

Also when I was down in Bahia de Los Angeles, I figured out how to use my new SANSA mp3 player, and retroactively, I'm quite happy I purchased it. The new versions of the IPOD shuffles are appallingly bad (way too small, no control of audio on the device, forcing you to wear ear buds which hurt my ears in an ergonomic sense). I went on fantastic jogs along the beach and through the salt marsh, even one jog from the LA Bay dumpster site all the way down the hill back to Duke and Jule's house. The final jogs I took were toward the south end of LA Bay toward Larry and Lois' house. There was a lot less traffic (quite a bumpy dirt road!) and the last structures I passed were open-ended houses where squid fishermen were staying... and even a micro squid processing plant. And it was these jogs where the poem/song started formulating. The idea of "Colors Before the Sunrise" came to me in my half-sleep I think on the 4th day of the trip. I told Jules and he liked the title. Then during my last two jogs along the bumpy dirt road, out by the cordone cactus and the spindly cirios and other interesting vegetation structures I was listening to a song entitled "The Passenger" by Iggy Pop (to be honest, I was attracted to the initial melody but I had no affinity with the vocals) . And through this happy backdrop melody (with a few minor chords), I began to formulate my song/poem. It took two jogs along the same road to get the main bulk of the poem worked out (plus a few ideas in my car drive home, back to Riverside and Santa Barbara to start spring quarter). On the last day at the Bahia de Los Angeles, I woke up extremely early in order to have the opportunity to take photographs of the sunrise (which I was procrastinating to do) and last minute images of Duke's neighbor's yard (Carolina's?), which is where the above photograph came from....

I suppose I had been sitting on this song/poem for a while because of my personal epiphanies on how to channel my energy in this society. After my initial experiences in approaching "literary journals" with my poetry and short stories, I had become increasingly frustrated. I talked to Barry Spacks about facing my "string of rejections" with poetry and short stories, and not only that, how literary journals are now failing to respond to the input of work. What a complete waste of my time, waste of my life to endlessly send off pieces of writing to literary journals, only to receive thousands of rejections, and more "no responses." Barry Spacks commented that "things are starting to slip"--that the sacredity of human transactions is vanishing as we interact as if we are in a plasma state as a pinball machine only found at the center of the sun. The Rejected Life is the only life that most writers know nowadays. Barry told me that if he were stranded in the desert for seven days without any food or water... he would crawl to the nearest computer and his death words would be to write a very polite rejection letter to all the people in the world he never had the time to respond to (given that he were an editor of a literary journal), wishing them well, hoping that one day their poetry and short stories would finally find a home. This was so visually striking to me, I hope one day to make a short film featuring Barry and the Rejected Writer Life. Good advice for all his students... in the form of a flick!

After that conversation, which was about a couple weeks ago... how Barry said this society was "slipping" whether it was about even providing a nice or even RUDE rejection letter... it was that moment where I just completely gave up on the idea of submitting my poetry to places (except every once in a while to particular people and specific circumstances). My poetry is published here on this blog. What more could I possibly want? Literary journals are not my venue, not my audience. What is the chance that any literary journal editor would understand the fusion of science, art, creative writing, and human-environmental change? 0.000001%. Sorry, it's a nearly stone-solid truth. Most "creative writers" don't have much comprehension of science, let alone incorporate science into their writing or processing of everyday life. So, whatever. What a waste to deal with people who don't even know how to diagnose your validity and contribution to society.

The other problem is that anyone can be a poet or a writer. Little ten-year old kids can write poems and short stories, let alone little old ladies on their 20th year of retirement who have nothing else to do but sit on their porch and write the 5 billionth poem on the metaphorical representation of sunsets in their lives. Writing is analog. Linear.... But combining writing and art requires one to think spatially-temporally... non-linearly... in essence... right brain left handed. And just through this thought, I am eliminating 90% of the population of storytellers, which consist of linear-thinking, left-brained people who express themselves in writing. And then to combine words with images to tell a story with a consistent set of characters, settings, and plots?! I think I am eliminating 50% of the remaining right brained people. And then for this story to make a contribution to society and the environment? Basically, there is close to no one left. I have no competitition. My Biologically Incorrect Cartoons are so unique that they stick out like an eyesore. And if I want to write a poem... it's gotta be in cartoon format. I can dump most of the rest of my artwork into cartoons. I have my own niche and close to no one having the ability to compete. I just have to keep chugging along and cranking out as many cartoons as possible, while simultaneously building a compilation of emails of people who I know will appreciate the cartoons and can provide editorial advice in the process of making my first few hundred cartoons (before expanding to a subscribed email list service).

Plus, through all the pressures of my Ph.D. committee meeting in February of last quarter... combined with an overstimulating environmental history course with Dr. Peter Alagona, Terra and Buz became fully resurrected into my mind... except this time, it was a near-completely visual format (rather than a long manuscript). I came to grips with the notion that the Question Reality manuscript was not a failure. My Question Reality manuscript will never die. It is the fundamental baseline for all else to grow with my cartoons. I will give interested folks a piece of my mind in mentally digestible cartoons (a little bit every day), that will create a continuum of experience form the QR manuscript to my acquired knowledge as of today....

The other thing I noticed in the publishing world is that to approach a publisher (for writing), you need a literary agent. But to approach a publisher of independent or alternative cartoons? You directly submit to the editor and publisher. It goes to show there aren't that many in the pool of storytelling through cartoons. Bless my right brain... take good care of it, and give it a work out every day! Nevertheless, writing is always a part of the creative process, I will still have to write to even evolve my cartoons and films! It's just that in order to make my WRITING financially viable, I am going to have to prove to people that I am unique and that I'm going to have to EARN MY RIGHT TO WRITE through multi-media arts (cartoons, music, film) before I return to the pursuit of writing... safely... with a little bit of financial compensation....

And after a week of panicking before my Ph.D. committee meeting, I established my own SI Units for cartooning. Fine Point Black Sharpie. White Computer Paper. Portable Scanning Machine. Photoshopping the Fine Details. Black and White and One Shade of Gray and Occasionally a Gaussian Blur Effect with Lighter Lines to establish a Hierarchy of Lines. My cartoons are evolving to higher quality... and slightly different proportions... just like how Calvin and Hobbes evolved. Barry has been very supportive and I send him lots of my cartoons "fresh off the press." We agreed that once a narrative has become apparent to the reader with my cartoons... and/or once I reach about 200 cartoons, we will choose 12 of the best cartoons and approach the Santa Barbara Independent to start a weekly run... which would be so exciting (Barry knows two editors and I know two editors, one editor overlaps)! Barry recommended I check out the "independent" magazine scene, with"Village Voice" being the top (in New York?). He said that incorporating the themes of science into cartoons in a very satirical, but mentally digestible way... is unique and a very valuable pursuit, especially in these times, eh?!! Ya... Science should be culture. But American "culture" is so divorced from science. We have become a user-friendly-push-button-gossip-about-your-neighbor's-clothes type of society... and it's rare for conversations to go much deeper than the shallow schmoozing... even at a university donating charity event loaded with nerdy professors (which I witnessed LAST weekend).

So, here I am, bitterly Blog-publishing this poem that expresses my "inner soul" at a given point in space and time, which separate from standards of society--is a beautiful thing to pursue, self-expression--except that society has destroyed the enjoyment of self-expression through the persistent psychological devastation of Rejection Letters (or No Response, better yet), only to redirect my thoughts toward the abandonment of efforts toward being rejected 5 million times in attempt to publish poetry and short stories through the traditional BS avant garde avenues (though Barry said it would be a grand idea for me to start a science-art multi-media literary journal, scientific research exploration through multi-media arts--so the door is not completely closed!). And then I am again redirected toward the positive route of cartooning about science, politics, and human-environmental change through my charming little innocent kids, Terra and Buz.

I didn't expect all this information to come out on this blog, but stream-of-conscious venting is all for the better for my own clarity of thought. I am going to have to now condition myself... mentally divorce the PROCESS OF WRITING POETRY AND SHORT STORIES from the PROCESS OF PUBLISHING. I have to convince myself that none of my ideas are in final form (or an audience magnet) unless they take shape of a cartoon (or a cartoon-driven poem-short-story), a piece of music or performance slam poetry, or a film. It's amazing to think that my mind can construct any story format--ranging from scientific articles to poetry to short stories to photographs to cartoons to paintings to pieces of music to film to websites to whatever the next new medium is--but I'm starting to feel the pressures of establishing a unique niche in society--the need to be perceived by society as a "needed storyteller" that needs about $20,000 a year in order to have health insurance and a roof over my head to continue storytelling. Certain doors are "closing" (but not completely) right now but other doors are opening full-wide open. Creative survival is a matter of desperation. As one of my recent cartoons discussed my need to avoid the MacDonald's hamburger flipping treadmill that close to everyone else is pursuing, whether in a science lab or at MacDonald's.

I have more to write about with my positive experiences in the Bahia de Los Angeles... plus LOTS of PHOTOGRAPHS! This poem was just an introduction.

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

2010-03-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-03-11T23:27:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-03-11T20:29:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-21T09:04:00.000-08:00

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.