A description of my wild caving adventure in West Virginia coming soon, but until then:

New Radio Show!
I got back from caving at 3:45 or so and then woke up three hours later to head to the radio station. Rock. I have to say, I think this one is pretty good (except for the two minutes of dead air because I had dropped the mouse on a button).

Doing work and errands and whatnot for the rest of spring break. Rock even harder...

Dreams and creams and beams and...ok, really just dreams...

Wow...in my delerious half-sleep of just now (I was up late last night then had to get up at 5 am to finish a project...then I went back to bed for a "morning nap"...ow...) I had the craziest dreams. Here are descriptions of them, given in a somewhat rushed "I want to get everything down without making it sound like good writing" kind of way:

1) I've never had the "oh no I'm walking through the halls of school naked!" dream, but this one kind of came close. I had finished a long run and was somehow naked. Also, somehow I ended up in the canopy of some sort of rain forest. I wanted to get home, but my keys were on the other side of a big spiderweb. I asked my friend, who was on the other side, to throw me the keys. She did, but I dropped them and watched them plummet, lost forever, to the bottom hundreds of feet below. Then I had to walk home naked and try to find keys to my room.

2) Next I was in an Athena cluster sitting next to Sarah. The Athena cluster was very crowded. This guy that is kind of hairy and a whole lot nerdy walked up to Sarah and said he really likes what she does (whatever that may be) and wants to offer her a job. Sarah keeps trying to politely refuse him, but this guy was very adamant. Finally I say something mean to him, and he walks away in a bit of a tiff. Then he comes back with these stacks of papers and distributes them around the Athena cluster. They are seating charts that have everyone's names on them. Everyone (except for me and Sarah, who has disappeared) love them and praise the hairy nerdy man for his cleverness and say something about him bridging the "language of lonliness." I get into an argument with him because my name isn't on there, and he says that I'm just jealous. Then he proceeds to dive into some story about his relationship history while I walk away and find Sarah. I gripe to her how that guy really sucks, and she says yeah, she got in a big argument with him too. Then we walk into another room in the Athena cluster (it's really big, like the 5th floor of the student center) and I borrow some guy's Athena station because now he is off drinking Irish car bombs. Weird.

3) I'm watching a movie, only I'm kind of in the movie as well. It's a movie tracking the life story of a man and his sister. The sister is kind of my mom, but not all the time. Anyway, the man is some sort of male model who exerpeinces the rise to and then subsequent fall from glory and riches (like in Goodfellas and Boogie NIghts). I remember most clearly the end of the movie. This man's family is very poor and he falls at his son's feet (he's wearing my Doc Martens, which I just polished last week) and laments all the luxuries that he used to have that he's lost. Then his daughter starts powdering his ears with this strange beauty product and chanting some kind of jingle/advertising slogan for the product. She does this methodically, like a robot, and can't stop. We see the man getting angrier and more upset. Then the movie cuts to two cars. The daughter now has metal ears (presumably the man ripped off her ears in rage and then she had to get them replaced with aluminum ears or something...it really made sense at the time). The daugther also looks like a random person from one of my classes who I don't know. Anyway, the daughter is getting into a car with her older brother, who is blonde and has very long hair and is named Winston. As she is doing that, she says that she has no more feelings, but she knows that she used to have feelings because she is crying though she doesn't know what for. It's exactly like the "sympathetic limb" effect (or I forget what it's called) that amputees have where they think they can feel their missing appendages. The man and the rest of the family get in a different car. Presumably they will part ways (this is post some big court case...though I'm not sure what the ruling was).

Then my dream switches back to me in the movie theater and I'm talking about it with the people around me. This one annoying girl from one of my classes asks me if I understood what happened at the end (in this really condescending way). I tell her that I think I did.

And then I wake up.



Weeeeeird. And also more boring than I anticipated. We read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams a few weeks ago for Literary Theory, and I wonder if I could attempt to do a self-analysis on those. But it would probably be tedious and rather fruitless. If it really is all about wish-fulfillment...I bet I can find some way to identify those wishes without doing dream analysis.

Also...I need to decide in the next few days (by tomorrow, really...) whether I want to go to Korea to teach next year. Any thoughts?

Also...I updated my Nature Writing blog.

Also...Spring Break! I'm going caving...after I finish my 20-miler tomorrow. Excellent.

A really good weekend...

I just wanted to document the fact that this weekend was the best in recent memory.

Why?

- Saideep visited me
- We watched a Charlie Chaplin movie (City Lights)
- Tried (unsuccessfully) to convince myself that I wasn't just listening to the same song over and over again at the Phoenix Landing (but had fun dancing anyway)
- The Field
- Finally polished my five-year-old shoes
- Slept through Broken Flowers
- Saideep took me out to Ma Soba and then Toscannini's (mmmm)
- Saideep also helped me back up the music from my ipod
- Running 12 miles feels so short when you are used to doing 18
- Hung out with an ex, and actually felt happy and not sad afterwards
- Spike's Junkyard Dogs is amazing
- The Hong Kong and scorpion bowls with tiny plastic animals in them
- Deli Haus
- Ras Na Hierran 5K road race (well, not really much of a race for me) in Somerville, featuring the best finisher's medal ever (it's a bottle opener) and post-running brunch
- Lost my wallet but then found it!
- Finally replaced my running shoes
- Out of context gem: woman running down the street after me yelling, "You forgot your body glide!"
- Somehow managed to pilfer the same number of tea-bags and sugar packets at independent locations
- Impulse buys at book stores
- Quality time with Sarah's family
- Free scoop of hot fudge at Herrell's
- Naps in libraries

Sorry for the list-style blogging. Maybe I'll come back and flush things out later. Which are actually of interest? (It was a full, long, fun weekend...and I even got homework done too! But now I have to go do more...homework...)

Radio radio...

I did another radio show this week. You can listen to it here (3_15_06 show, it's the middle one).

Also, if you haven't yet noticed, I put up my nature writing essay. I got really annoyed with it and wanted to throw it in a trash can and set it on fire, but I couldn't do that because I had to turn it in, and it was on my computer, which, even though it hates me, I still wouldn't burn at this point.

(That previous sentence was an example of the infininite regression concept of language.)

Anyway, I'd like to hear what you like about it, and, more importantly, what you don't like about it. I'm not too hot on the title or the ending, but c'est la vie.

The Oldest Potato

The only piece of mail I look forward to getting at Christmas is the one Fred, my mother’s favorite uncle, sends us every year. Tucked inside a snow-covered tree or a solitary candle or a poinsettia will be a small stack of sketches: ghostly textured lumps flattened skillfully with a pencil and edged into three-by-five-inch sheets of white paper. He draws anything that catches his eye, from driftwood to soggy dishrags to his own excrement.

My mom and I like to play a game where we try to guess what each sketch is without looking at the caption. We never get it right, but it doesn’t matter. Fred only draws things in which he sees something else, something alive. Each item’s physical impetus remains a mysterious shadow, but the individual details and subsurface life forms shine through. I want to run my fingers across the paper to feel each crevice, each dimple, each stain, but if I do I’ll smudge the drawing and ruin it forever.

I have never met Fred, but I imagine he has stacks of palm sized sheets lying around his Rhode Island home, nestled between towers of water-color paintings of all sizes, just waiting for his discerning hand to stumble over them and seal them up in an envelope bound for the West Coast. Inked signatures in each corner disdain the passage of time: ’86, ’92, and ’01. Regardless of how ancient his drawings are, he always remembers exactly what he was thinking when he drew them and annotates them in a chicken-scratch script that looks just like my mom’s handwriting. “This,” he writes, “is a log in the backyard that seemed to have a porcine, silly, and slightly insane face (another self portrait?).” I ask my mom if she can see the face, and she says she can. I tell her that I can’t see the log.



While visiting for my final college basketball game, my parents and I make our first trip to the MIT Museum. I’m wondering why the rooms are so dim. The rhythmic squeak of metal wheels dallies behind me as I walk, stopping when I do and resuming when I take another step. Like a cartoon villain wearing a bushy mustache and a devious grin, my dad sneakily tails me with a cart bearing a sign commanding, “Push Me.” He, however, is not quick enough to dash behind a tree or vanish into thin air when I turn around, and I catch him in the act. Elbowing him out of the way, I chase myself around in squeaky circles, half expecting to grow to an alarming size or shrink into near-oblivion like in Alice in Wonderland. A blue shag-carpet treadmill on the top of the cart turns as the wheels do. Three worms, their bodies not segmented but woven from metal fibers, squirm in self-contortions as I push the cart. “Whoa! They’re crawling!” I can’t help but mentally scold myself for sounding like a five-year old as my dad says matter-of-factly, “No, they aren’t.”
He’s right, of course.
Except that they are crawling.

The room is full of crawling, writhing, lumbering, sauntering, watching, battling, and flapping things. Nothing here (except my parents and me) is alive, so how can they crawl, writhe, lumber, saunter, watch, battle, and flap? Arthur Ganson, longtime member of the World Sculpture Racing Society, has created an artful microcosm of lifelike kinetic sculpture out of wire, oil, gears, chains, paper, and dried organic material. The name of the exhibit is “Gestural Engineering.”

Like a gesture line, the first line you draw when attempting to capture a figure, Ganson’s sculptures tell a simple truth. A single coarse wire, an artichoke leaf, these unadorned objects effortlessly tell the truth of living motion, conveying as much grace, diligence, wonder, and vitality in their movements as a ballet dancer or a basketball player. A pile of linked chain holds all the tension of a droplet of water waiting to fall.

When you look at another person’s face, it’s not like looking at a house or a tree or a landscape. Human brains have a special function for perceiving, recognizing, and remembering faces. More synapses fire and more light bulbs turn on in our heads as we understand that what we are looking at is not just part of the backdrop but another person. In The Eye of the Beholder, a book on face recognition, Vicki Bruce and Andrew Young write, “ infants who are only 2-3 weeks old can imitate facial movements including tongue protrusion, mouth opening, and lip protrusion. An important aspect of this finding is that it shows the baby must have some kind of ‘map’ to indicate which of its own facial muscles corresponds to those of another human being, even though it has never experimented with a mirror.”

What if there is something in us that recognizes life, living motion, animation? Is there an intuitive on-board map that connects what is alive within us to what is alive in our environment? Does life itself go through a mirror-stage? And if my great-uncle Fred sees spirits and sprites in a decaying gourd sent to him by one of his former students, and Arthur Ganson sees a lumbering gait in an artichoke petal, is this faculty in them finely tuned or discordant? Maybe they have made the long dark crawl out of the cave.

In the winter, everything looks and feels dead, especially the mechanical. If I want to find life I have to go searching for it. I start inside an urban triangle, each side a one-way street channeling clouds of stiflingly sweet exhaust as they are spit from sighing buses and trucks, in a shallow sea of snow. Maybe I will head to the cemetery across the road, over the shadows—like prison bars—cast by the iron fence, and navigate through the half-buried gravestones. Sounding the depths with my hand, I will combat the stinging numbness of the snow to reach the rough secret warmth of the gravestones hidden beneath the surface. Although it is a transgression, I will sink my hand further and deeper, all the way into the forgotten graves.

In the cold desert now, let’s say, I will start with a shovel in hand, digging through the dry sandy soil for several meters. Even though it will be broad daylight, and colleagues and journalists will surround me, it will still feel like grave robbing. By the time I finally hit something solid and wooden (not just another stray chunk of bedrock out to deceive me), my hands will burn with blisters. I’ll need a crow bar to pry open the lid of the simple Volkswagen-sized pine box, but finally I’ll rend it off and peer into the dusty darkness. A faint warm fragrance will waft up through my nostrils; a few seconds will pass before I recognize it as rose petals. Shining my flashlight inside, I’ll light first on a knee, then a tan shoulder, then a leathery bald head: Dasha-Dorzho Itigilov, spiritual leader of the Russian Buddhists, sitting in a perfect lotus position seventy-five years after his death. Scientists have described Itigilov’s corpse as one that had been dead for only thirty-six hours. That is, the body has yet to catch up to the fact that it’s inhabitant is no longer alive.

The case of Dasha-Dorzho Itigilov’s self-mummification is rare but not unique. Tetsu Munki, a Japanese Buddhist monk who sacrificed himself in a form of public protest, remains undecayed after two-hundred years; a Tibetan man, his name long since forgotten, has been sitting in a small shack, knees tucked under his chin, lips still in a sorrowful smirk, for nearly five-hundred years. For these men, who purportedly underwent no embalming process other than their own intensive meditation rituals, dying is an art.

All of these men, had they followed the course of decay you and I will undergo one day, would have been disarrayed piles of dusty bones by now. This process would have started with self-digestion, also known as autolysis. Mary Rotch was lucky enough (or unfortunate enough) to witness this process first hand at The Body Farm, a “wooded patch of death-soaked land behind a hospital in the hills of Tennessee,” where forensic scientists study the processes of human decay in morbid detail by burying bodies in the garden and watching them ripen. In addition to the effusion of rank vapors and fluids, Rotch notes “Something else is going on. Squirming grains of rice are crowded into the man’s belly button. It’s a rice grain mosh pit. But rice grains do not move. These cannot be grains of rice. They are not. … It’s kind of beautiful, this man’s skin with these tiny white slivers embedded just beneath its surface. It looks like expensive Japanese rice paper. You tell yourself these things.” After self-digestion comes bloat, where “Bacteria-generated gas bloats the lips and tongue, the latter often to the point of making it protrude from the mouth: In real life as it is in cartoons. The eyes do not bloat because the liquid has long ago leached out. They are gone. Xs. In read life as it is in cartoons.”

When my tenth grade English teacher, midway through Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, gave us his version of the cliché that everything boils down to sex and death, that all words and thoughts can be reduced to simmering syrup of proliferation and extermination, we all laughed. It seemed silly to us because at best (or worst) most of us had smelled only telltale whiffs of one or the other and not taken a bite of either. I have never experienced the kind of decay Rotch describes in her book Stiff (a title that would have also made my tenth grade English class titter). I have never even imagined this kind of decay. I close Mary Rotch’s book, rush to the grocery store, and buy an over-ripe peach and a browning banana. I bring them home, set them on a shelf, and wait to see what happens.

Every day I check up on my fruit. I take pictures even, hoping to catch the process in the act. A week and a half later my fruit are still appetizing. The smell a bit too sweet, but far short of sickening; the peach’s top has grown withered, but hasn’t ruptured; the banana has grown more brown, but I would still eat it (though perhaps only baked in bread). I’m a little disappointed. I am no better at expediting decay than I will be at preventing it.

There is a difference between what is gross and what is disconcerting. Gross is magnetic and contagious (though perhaps I only inherited that as a family quirk), whereas disconcerting is repulsive and shameful to the observer. Take dumpster diving, for example. The gross thing about wading through a pile of trash is that everything is covered in some unidentifiable liquid. The disconcerting thing isn’t the domination of decay but its absence. So many things are well preserved: unbruised apples, heads of lettuce, loaves of bread, boxes of cereal, even unbroken eggs. Decay, on its own, is not disconcerting, and neither is preservation. Annie Dillard knows what I’m talking about. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she writes, “Things are well in their place. […]Things out of place are ill.[…] I used to kill insects with carbon tetrachloride—cleaning fluid vapor—and pin them in cigar boxes, labeled, in neat rows. That was many years ago: I quit when one day I opened a cigar box lid and saw a carrion beetle, staked down high between its wing covers, trying to crawl, swimming on its pin. It was dancing with its own shadow, untouching, and had been for days.[…] I know that one night, in just this sort of rattling wind, I will go to the kitchen for milk and find on the back of the stove a sudden stew I never fixed, bubbling, with a deer leg sticking out.”



Ganson’s sculpture draws me back, and I return to the MIT Museum a week later with a sketchpad. Staying away from the spindly mechanical coils, wires, and gears that comprise the guts of each sculpture, I focus on the wishbone that is frozen mid-stride, its right leg arrested and dangling a finger’s width above the track. Last week, it was a methodical ambler, an old man with rheumatic hips aching at each step yet plodding on. This week the button is broken and no matter how many times I press it the wishbone remains a lonely dead yellow twig, help up awkwardly by a coiled copper wire garter on each leg. When I draw the wishbone’s pores and fibers, its sponginess, I use the same techniques I would use to draw a human figure. I don’t know whether that is became the wishbone demands them, or because they are the only techniques I know.


Ganson’s kinetic sculptures capture fluid lifelike motion, but they also capture perpetual stasis. Red plastic cocktail swords circle each other indefinitely, coming close but never clashing blades. An artichoke petal, its head hung, its spine slouched, lumbers in a bear walk, circumnavigating an ever-rotating disc. A tiny white plastic man dressed in a white tuxedo, no bigger than my thumbnail, turns his head from left to right and back again, searching ceaselessly and never finding what he seeks. The head of a doll, faintly smudged with dirt, mounted on a metal shaft, uses its cartoonish plastic eyes to track a plastic balloon that spirals up and down. The caption reads “Child Watching Ball, Mixed Media, 1996.” Today the baby is ten years old.

Before his death, Socrates speculated that, “For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them.” Ganson’s sculptures will never have the luxury of finding out whether Socrates was right. They will never die because they were never alive. Although Socrates poses a question that the living—and the immortal—can never answer, one thing is clear; for the bacteria waiting patiently in our intestines and the insects waiting patiently in the woodwork, our death is beyond a doubt the best thing that will happen to them.

Brownian motion describes the random movement of particles in a fluid. Ganson’s Brownian Rice, a tray of dry grains that writhe as I turn a metal crank, however, is not Brownian. Rice, charged with maintaining our physical bodies, a synonym for nourishment itself, has come to resemble the things that help us, ultimately, to decay, to cease to be physically: maggots. To me, there’s nothing random about that.

Moving to the “Robots and Beyond” room, I watch video footage of a mechanical kangaroo hopping around a track and stumble upon Kismet, a “sociable robot” with expressive eyebrows and floppy docile ears. The robots in this room, the test-bed for artificial intelligence, are famous for their ability to learn, adapt, and think, yet I never mistake them for something alive the way I do with Ganson’s plastic doll and writhing chains. No spark in my brain ignites, as it does when I hear bushes rustling due to the rats scurrying in the underbrush, or my eye catches a plastic bag racing across the concrete sidewalk carried by the wind. These robots have all the details of living motion without that intangible fundamental gesture.

In Bruce and Young’s book I read about a facial recognition disorder called Capgras delusion, “the claim that one or more close relatives has been replaced by near-identical impostors.” The most famous sufferer was Victorian painter Richard Dadd, known better for murdering his father than for his fantasy paintings. At the time, he didn’t recognize his own father. He thought he was killing the devil. Bruce and Young give a scientific explanation for the Capgras delusion: a broken link in the brain’s orienting pathways, which, “When we look at faces of people we know … set up preparatory reactions for the type of interaction that is likely to follow.” For a person with Capgras delusion, the act of recognition occurs without the supporting emotional framework. Maybe this is what I feel when I come face to face with the robots here.



After three and a half years of living less than an hour’s drive from my Uncle Fred, I finally decide to skip my Friday afternoon classes, grab my friend Anat (to whom I promised an adventure), and make the trip down to see him.

Fred grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island, went to school at the Rhode Island School of Design, spent several years in Germany on a fellowship, and has lived in a duplex in Providence for the past thirty-six years. Fred never throws anything away. Two spindly fossils sit on the windowsill in his kitchen. He hands one to me, saying, “This is what I call ‘The Oldest Potato.’” It is brittle and dry and cavernous and bristly, and Anat won’t touch it for fear of breaking it. In an old margarine container, green tentacles sprout in every direction and smother a withered brown and crimson root sitting in a bath of cloudy water. “And here’s the infamous ‘Bull Scrotum Beet’.” Anat is surprised that it doesn’t smell bad at all. “That’s because he’s still alive,” Fred says. “I feel bad for exploiting him for so long. He’s been through enough.” The series of watercolors Fred has done of the Bull Scrotum Beet show the progressively ratty and overgrown head of green hair mangled yet full of motion. “In this one he looks forlorn,” Fred says, “but he used to look mischievous.”

Clues of a long since grown-up child are scattered about the house, like the curling Sesame Street poster diagramming the parts of the body that looks down upon the Bull Scrotum Beet. Faded crayon drawings are taped to the wall next to a 1977 airline schedule in a room upstairs. Plastic Easter eggs dangle from a few branches tied to the ceiling with twine.

The carpets are beyond threadbare; in some places they are worn completely through to the hardwood floor. Heading up the narrow stairways, curling yellow wallpaper, cracked in geometric tessellations like the surface of once wet desert soil, hides underneath paintings that Fred did earlier in his life. He doesn’t use oil anymore, only watercolor, because he feels he can express more with the medium. While most of his paintings are of spirits he sees in dead objects, some of them are demons from inside his head. “These demons kept me up night after night,” Fred says, “and I stared at them until I could paint them.”

Anat and I squat beside Fred as he shows us his albums of watercolor paintings. The newest ones, not yet matted and photographed, are tucked inside a book. We aren’t merely looking at tomatoes and rocks and tree-roots, but gnomes and monsters and ghosts. “Ah, I have to tell you what this one is,” Fred says excitedly. “Every few years I get a colonoscopy, and I always ask to keep the pictures they take. I call it ‘A Voice from Deep Within’.” After a few dozen paintings, before he tells us, we already know that one is a sea-dragon and another is howling at the moon.

We are heading into the sun for most of the drive back to Boston, and I can barely see through the glare, no matter how many times Anat tries to clean the dirt off the windshield by squirting water from my bottle on it.



Moist coffee grounds and soggy tea-bags always make me nervous. I used to think it was a matter of unfamiliarity, but as my caffeine consumption sky-rocketed the past year I realized that wasn’t the case. No matter how many times I brew my own coffee or tea, I’m always uneasy as I scrape coarse black sludge or dripping leaves into the trash. Used coffee grounds and used tea-bags haven’t lost anything; they’ve gained a fluid overcoat. Yet what makes coffee coffee, or tea tea, its essence, its usefulness, its functionality, its ability to procure change, has been siphoned off into oblivion. What’s left behind is a Dasha-Dorzho Itigilov, a Tetsu Munki, an anonymous Tibetan monk. Perhaps these Buddhist lamas would balk at being compared to used food products; I think they’d grin, reveling in their own non-fungibility.

What would it be like to draw Dasha-Dorzho Itigilov, if I had the chance?

All right already!

Too many things to talk about, yet too much work to finish...

Let's see, today while I was walking (er, rushing) to class my flip-flops broke (it was a mix of long-term disintigration and a catastrophic failure induced by me tripping over myself). I didn't have time to go back to my room and change shoes, and I refuse to become a barefooter (plus, it was kinda sorta snowing), so I did what any overly-prepared girl would do. I tore some duct tape off of my Nalgene bottle and hastily repaired my flip-flop. It is most definitely a temporary fix, but I was so happy that there was a reason that I had that duct tape. I also used it to repair my corroded watch-band a few days ago. Yes!

In other news, I (finally...geez!) heard back from PiA but the message was confusing and ambivalent:

Dear Jordan,

Greetings from PiA. Just wanted to let you know that we have sent your credentials to the University in Singapore. Their administration is considering the PiA candidates and will hopefully get back to us soon. You are still in consideration for other PiA posts as well so please give us until the end of March to get back to you. Hope all is going well in Boston!

Take care,
Leslie

Well, at least they sent it twice, once at 1:29 am and once at 1:30 am. Ok...Singapore? What? (Nothing against Singapore, but I thought they were sending me to either Korea or Kazakhstan...huh?) And...end of March? Seriously, do they think my life is on hold until I hear from them again? I'm going to start actively applying for all those other opportunities I unearthed last week...

Ok, back to revising my Nature Writing essay. I have that uneasy feeling that every change I make is just ruining it. Agh! This is why I always hated revision.

Oh yeah...and that oral midterm in Computational Methods in Aerospace Engineering that I have in 6 hours...huh?

Sorry, I hate it when I sound like an MIT student. But...what the hell is going on here?

Also...did another radio show today...that'll be up here soon...

Studying on Sunday for a test I don't have until Thursday is such an odd feeling.

In other news: chafing. Avoid it if all possible.

I need to buckle down for a while, but there's shaking and moving going on...somewhere around here...

A winding way to get here...

(Disclaimer: This post is decidedly more emo than my normal posts.)

Maybe I should stop looking at small daily events as if they are a metaphor for my life as a whole (what is that, anyway, my life as a whole?), but for the moment, I can't resist.

Yesterday, while on my way to see the current NASA Administrator, Mike Griffin, give a speech about architecture for returning to the moon, I passed a small gathering for "International Women's Voices Day" (or something along those lines). My favorite professor (a literature professor) was about to step up to the podium to do a reading. I experienced about a hundreth of a second of indecision before siting down to listen to him speak about a Polish poet (even though I spent a good chunk of the summer trying to track him down to do an interview for our Mars movie). After he was done, I stayed for the next presenter, even though by then I was ten minutes late for the Griffin talk.

I finally wrenched myself away from the presentation and headed across campus. It turns out the talk started a half hour later than I thought it did, so I got there early anyway. As I was sitting there waiting, I wondered why I was even there at all. Then I realized that when I'm around space stuff, and space enthusiasts, I get really excited about it. And oddly enough, even though aerospace engineering has become somewhat of the antithesis of where I now think I want to end up in life, it's probably still, in some way, what's going to get me there. The fact that I'm part engineer as well as part (or...mostly, as it seems now) reader/writer/literature nut is probably what's going to set me apart from the rest in life (for better or worse). So...there you go, I ended up doing a bit of a deconstruction on myself.

(Really, Derrida what are you doing to me? I try to deconstruct everything now and I'm still not quite sure I know what that even means...my friend asked me to proofread her essay for her and I started deconstructing the system she set up...then I realized that in The Meadowlands Sullivan is deconstructing the nature/civilization dichotomy. What's going to happen to me?)

All right, on to seemingly insignificant but Jordan-ily monumental event number two:

Tomorrow I am taking a trip to Rhode Island to visit my eccentric artist great-uncle, Fred. I'm very excited about this trip, and it's really important to me. I'm also more than a little anxious, and up until 5 minutes ago I was going to be making the trip by myself. The strange thing is...I was bothered more by the fact that I didn't have any friends that were willing to drop their mundane Friday duties ("work" and "class" and whatnot) to take a spontaneous (and veritable) adventure with me than I was by my fears and apprehensions about driving to a strange place to meet a strange person by myself. I guess whether or not I have friends that will embark on spontaneous adventures with me is a way of measuring if I'm where I want to be in life. I may have a strange system of value judgments, but certain odd things are important to me. Heading out on an adventure is one. Reading my blog is another. I was probably just rounding out a bad day (with some good parts, like Miyazaki's Nausicaa...like Princess Mononoke set to 80s synth music) with a negative outlook, but it seemed like most of the people that would do those kinds of things (with some notable exceptions) are not here in Boston.

But...there's a happy ending. A friend of mine called me back and wholeheartedly agreed to go to Providence with me. Thanks to her, you are all (including those of you who don't read this) redeemed and my faith in my friends, my life, etc., has been restored. (Sorry about the religious overtones there...they were purely accidental, as any of you who know me will have figured out already.)

In other news, my running has been going very well this week (though I hope I didn't step up the mileage and the intensity too quickly).

Also, today I realized yet again that I hate engineers and I love scientists and humanities people. Seriously, what is the problem with engineers? Do they just hate people? (Mom, Dad, you are, of course, excused from that accusition...)

Discoteca Flamingstar and Derrida

The past five hours have been quite intense. First, I listened to a talk by two German performance artists who like to call themselves Discoteca Flamingstar. They do very interesting, sexually charged, gender bending, challenging fusions of visual and auditory art. Neither of them really know how to sing or play instruments, yet they often do just that, reinterpretting songs or types of music that have very culutral connotations to express something completely different than you'd expect. For example, the last piece they showed us was a video set to an Arabic translation of a famous World War II era song ("Lili Marlin" I think?). They held a dinner party where the male half of the group was dressed in a wedding dress. In the middle of the dinner party, they got naked and got into bed (a la John Lennon and Yoko Ono). Spliced in between were shots of some dancers doing very mechanical robot-esque (though not parodizing) dance moves.

After that I watched a documentary about Jacques Derrida and Deconstructionism (aptly titled Derrida). I very much liked the style and editorial choices of the documentary. There were a lot of shots of Derrida watching video footage of himself on a TV, or pointing to cameras and commenting on them. The cameras were often themselves captured in the footage. There were lots of interviews, speeches, and readings of Derrida's manuscripts.

Anyway, after those two gems I was all European-ed out and so I came home and made myself a peanut butter sandwich (whether that's because peanut butter and bread are just about the only foodstuffs I have right now, or becauset that's exactly what I wanted or need, I'm not at liberty to say...).

I've been trying to decide whether Discoteca Flamingstar is a Deconstructionist group or not, and I think Derrida's answer might be: everything is a Deconstruction and nothing is a Deconstruction.

So there you go. I hope that's unsatisfying. Or rather, not satisfying.

Another nature writing blog...

I just updated my 21W.775 blog. Read it here!

My 100th Post

Um...I wrote a really nice entry about the day I spent in the machine shop on Friday for my 100th post...but it disappeared somehow and now I am very sad.

While I'm still recovering from that loss, I'll give you the quote my mom just sent me:

Otium sine litteris mors est. -Seneca
Leisure without literature is death.

I didn't place too much stake in the fact that it was my "100th post" anyway...but I did like what I wrote...maybe if I feel up to it I'll write about the machine shop again...maybe for my nature writing blog...

Sigh...

Multimedia for you!

I am officially back on WMBR's programming schedule! I'll be doing LRC every other Wednesday. That's the country's oldest daily punk show, 10 to noon each weekday. Yesterday was my first show of the season, and it went relatively smoothly. You can listen to it here in mp3 format. (It's the bottom one.)

A picture is worth how many words?

My last basketball game (also my last NCAA intercollegiate competition) ever was two weeks ago. Yes, that is actually me (I think?), number 20, trying to a shot off a hustle fast break. (I missed it, but as far as the picture is concerned the ball is about to go in the basket.)

She shoots!

Fun with cooking...

Hmmm, what is this?

And, the long awaited new piercing...


For the nature (or perhaps "nature") essay I'm writing, I did some sketches of kinetic sculptures at the MIT Museum. Here are the least abhorrent (I mean my favorite) ones:

A lumbering artichoke petal


A paralyzed wishbone


I was considering putting my first draft of my nature writing essay up here so that you guys could observe the "creative process", but I decided against it. You'll see it when it's finished (or at least, more polished).