Home | Join! | Help | Browse | Forums | NuWorld | NWF | PoPo   

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
A Tale of Summer
Wednesday. 6.13.07 8:47 pm
The three of us moved slowly though the field, our feet feeling for purchase in the dewy grass and soft mud. It was very dark; the summer moon had not yet risen above the horizon. I was between the two boys. My sandals lit up if I tread on them hard enough, an other-worldly series of green flashes that glowed through the nearby grass enough to plan another step. The air was cool and the darkness stretched around us as we moved into it, passing us ever closer to the sound of running water.

We reached the bridge, this bridge that the boys had made with their own hands; it was solid and sturdy and the extra traction coupled with excitement quickened the one pace it required to cross it. There was a small hill of thick, black mud. They took off their rubber boots and I slipped off my sandals, and the cool mud squished between our toes as we scrambled up the hill to the sauna. This exercise set us to laughing; the sound was hemmed in by the dark night and the shady trees that just now began to appear in my adjusted vision.

We entered the sauna and perched ourselves on its shelves like merchandise in a store. There was a light inside and it leaked into the darkness, providing less of a shine than a flickering glow. The older boy went to work pouring water onto the coals in the corner of the sauna, filling the already sweltering room with hot steam. It was filling up the sauna, this sauna, that the boys had built with their own hands.

Hardly any time had passed before the heat became unbearable. Surely that had to be steam condensing on my skin: it was impossible to sweat that much. The younger boy was looking at his watch. He kept shaking his head. It was not time yet. Wait a little longer. With a mischevious smirk he took the water cup and emptied it over the coals. Steam filled the sauna so fully we could hardly see one another. The air was heavy and scorching in my lungs.

It was time! We went to the door and spilled out onto the slippery hill. Sweet cool air on my skin! What bliss! But that was not enough. Come, they said. We slid down the mud to the edge of the brook. Here, they said, take a hold of the side of the bridge and go into the water. It was cold, my toes reported... oooh it was so cold. The water was higher than either of them had ever seen it- there was no space under the bridge, it was like a roughened pathway through the river itself. I dropped into the water. My nerves went haywire. In a loose crouch it came up to my neck. My breath, just a moment ago languid with humidity, became sharp, shallow, and quick. Following instructions, I ducked my head swiftly under the water. Electricity!

I leapt from the rippling darkness and onto the slope. There was another instruction. Look up! I threw my head back to the sky, the sky of midnight black, peppered with a million stars like an inverse of cinnamon on toast. The Milky Way used to be there, and the summer constellations. Now they were completely unintelligible for their bobbing and weaving and pulsing with my madly beating heart.

We city kids have drugs for this kind of stuff, I joked.

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

KABOOM!
Monday. 6.11.07 11:44 pm
Today they paid me to move images around on a screen, screw around on Google Earth for a while, search for pictures of lava, and then read about the difference between a flash fire and an explosion (i.e. the difference between deflagration and detonation). I might have to give a presentation on explosions later, especially with regard to explosive volcanoes. My job is pretty sweet.

Comment! (2) | Recommend!

Happy Birthday, Housemate
Saturday. 6.9.07 9:59 am
Chris turned 30-something yesterday. He kept telling me that he didn't care how old he was, that it didn't really matter, that he wasn't one of those people who was touchy about that kind of stuff. But he still wouldn't tell me how old he was turning. By my calculations it was 34.

"Tell me... what difference do you think there is between the ages 32, 33, and 34?" he said. "Seriously, I mean, is there a big difference, do you think?"

I said that they were all pretty old and that I wasn't really old enough to even start thinking about if there was a difference between them. Haha. I mean, I said it like it was a joke, but it was also true. So we got into a long conversation... this conversation lasted for HOURS AND HOURS, but that's just the way conversations with Chris are. We covered everything from the timeless nature of the Universe to the real meaning of true love and how to find it to the AIDS crisis to the meaning of religion, current US politics, how much we both like Tony Blair, the Jews (for some reason people on the East Coast like discussing Jewish people a lot), abortion, The Rules, how it would suck to be eaten by a lion, the weather, Tennessee, how annoying people can be when you travel with them, Freud, the beach, the stress of the modern workplace, leukemia, ground water flow lines, how artesian wells work, the Carboniferous, cake, what we're going to do tomorrow and man's ever-present and approaching mortality.

At one point he looked up out the window into the misty night and he said, "Do you ever think about... the Universe?" and I was thinking about how in the last couple of weeks I'd been thinking that I really wanted a guy who said things like that. Because of course I think about the Universe! All the time! Chris is such a contradiction! Of course this time he was thinking about the Universe because if you consider the depths of cosmological time, the human lifetime is but a blink, and therefore the 10 year age difference between him and his girlfriend isn't really that much.

Comment! (3) | Recommend!

ONLY TEN PERCENT?!?!
Saturday. 6.9.07 12:23 am










Comment! (3) | Recommend!

A Feverish Dream
Thursday. 6.7.07 7:36 pm
I had a wild and feverish dream. In the dream I was sitting at a kitchen table looking through a list of classified ads.

"Ha!" I exclaimed. "I am qualified for all of these jobs! Don't these people know that the only thing you need in order to do what they're talking about is have a basic set of computer skills? Apparently not-- look how much they're offering!! These skills must be in short supply if they're offering that much for these jobs." I continued looking through the jobs. Every job reaffirmed the fact that the skills that I had were exactly the ones that they were looking for. My unknown companion nodded obligingly over his or her orange juice, busy reading a different part of the paper.

I woke up with my body and face drenched in sweat and the blankets twisted around my legs like ropes.


So the moral of the story is...

If this is an example of what my dreams are like when I have a FEVER over 100 degrees.... I wonder what my real job search is going to be like?

Comment! (7) | Recommend! (2)

The real reason you shouldn't drink coffee.
Tuesday. 6.5.07 7:43 pm
Inside the world of my book, a ragtag group of unlikely companion is being chased by legions of Trollocs, coursing through wilderness on horseback, staying just ahead of their pursuers. Their protrectress is growing more weak with each time she must call upon her magic to keep the army of approaching darkness at bay. The lads, previously untested in battle, are still smarting from their close encounter with death, the wild beating of their hearts as yet unquieted, the sweat on their brows in the midst of the cold winter's day unnoticed. Not enough time has passed for them to process what has happened.

Inside the real world, yes, where most of us live, I am sick. This is some kind of karmic retribution for the entry I wrote earlier, because I forgot to mention that nobody, NOBODY likes being sick in the summertime. GRAAGGGH! Now I have a slight fever but I took some medicine... all day it seemed like the medicine hadn't been working, but I think just that I had gotten a bit worse during the day and the medicine had staved that off until it ran out a bit ago. So during the day I just thought the medicine was doing NOTHING. But maybe that's not true.

Now I'm trying to eat some dinner but I've lost all sense of taste. I was wondering what the hell was missing from my meal as I spooned it into my mouth and then I had my answer. No taste. Tomato soup: no taste. Baked beans: no taste. I downed a cup of my very tart cranberry juice. Nothing, just the barest glimmer of taste around the edges when I licked my lips. My friend at work had it the worst though, she had a bad cold and when it left her, she couldn't smell, and worse, she couldn't taste but three things. I can't remember what they were, but any three things would get tiresome after a short while, because sickness distorts all smells and tastes, and EVERYTHING she ate smelled like one of those three things. It's been months and she went to see a specialist about it, but he told her only time would give her her senses back. In the meantime, nothing she eats tastes good. It's a wonder she eats at all.

Now back to my dislike for taking any kind of medicine, perhaps I'd better explain. This dislike extends to many other things: drinking coffee, alcohol, smoking cigarettes, etc. I kind of thought that I was alone with my strange reasons, until one day I was talking to Justin about it. I admitted to him this aversion to all of these items, and when he asked I explained that it was because if I were ever kidnapped or my plane crashed or whatever and I suddenly found myself in the middle of the wilderness (I usually think the jungle... maybe the Amazon... it did happen once in Animorphs), then I was going to need every advantage I could get to survive. If I usually used pain meds to get over my pain, the pain I was about to feel would be ten times worse. If I was addicted to anything- coffee, cigarettes, anything--- I would have to get over that addiction, which would bias me just that much towards not surviving. I wasn't going to take those kinds of odds.

"Or," said Justin, "If you went back in time."

Justin doesn't do any of the above things (except drink alcohol, the reason for this discussed below). Not because he thinks he might at any moment be dropped in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, no... but because what if suddenly he were transported back into time, to a time that didn't have a Starbucks on every corner or readily available Advil for his every pain? WHAT WOULD you DO??!?! You'd be struggling with all of the changes associated with another time period PLUS you'd have a ripping headache from your caffeine addiction!! You'd never survive. Alcohol, as you might have surmised, is usually available in other eras, that is perhaps the reason it gets the go-ahead, though I don't know. It's easier not to be addicted to alcohol than cigarettes or coffee, though you can become socially addicted fairly easily to all three.

Now whenever I talk about stubbornly not taking medicine I bring up the Amazon, and Justin rightfully appends "or back in time".

........ because you never know.

...............are you ready?

Well looks like my modern CRUTCH, that is, DayQuil, has taken a little bit of effect. Guess it's time to get back to the world of my book, where their problems are obviously way simpler than mine.

Comment! (2) | Recommend!

Eighth Grade? More like "Geighth" grade, amirite?
Monday. 6.4.07 8:53 pm
So I'm having sweet peas for dinner. Big bowl of sweet peas. I was just not going to have dinner because I randomly had an onion bagel around 6, but it was 8:30 and I was hungry and I have all these random cans of sweet peas and when am I ever going to eat them amirite?
Haha, I joined this facebook group called, "8th Graders need to back off 9th grade guys especially other people's BF's" haha. Cause man, those hoochie-mama 8th graders totally need to step off. The group description says, "This is a serious issue."

Some college guy had this to say:

"Eighth grade? More like 'geighth' grade, amirite?"
and everyone was like, "yah, lol, usorite!"

Tomorrow the Mercury Messenger spacecraft begins its second flyby of the planet Venus along its winding path towards Mercury. You always have to go a really windy way to Mercury because it's one of the most difficult planets to go into orbit around. This is because it's so close to the Sun... since gravity is speeding you up constantly as you shoot toward the sun, by the time you get to Mercury you are going seriously fast. Complicating things is the fact that Mercury itself is so small and it doesn't have a lot of gravity to help stop you. It's really hard not to just shoot right past Mercury and go straight into the fiery inferno. In fact, that's all we've pretty much done so far when it comes to Mercury. Because of this, we've only actually seen half the planet so far. We have no idea what the other half looks like (only the barest of shadows seen by Earth-bound telescopes!) So in a couple of months, we'll have another look at Mercury.
This flyby of Venus is special because unlike the last time this same spacecraft flew by Venus, this time we'll be turning all the instruments on, just to test them out for the first Mercury encounter (we also have to fly by Mercury several times to slow ourselves down before we enter orbit). Unfortunately, since the instruments on Messenger are primed for looking at the small, rocky body of Mercury (aka it sees mostly in the visible), all we'll be able to see of Venus are its thick, 70km high-altitude hazes. BORING! Well, not for atmospheric scientists. But we aren't atmospheric scientists, are we? There may still be a few small wavelength windows where we might get to see something of the surface, but not much. Today they had a press conference in preparation for the launch. My advisor wanted somebody to go watch it because he's on the mission so he should watch it but it's really boring. He came in and asked us innocently if anyone was planning to go watch. Nobody moved. I didn't even take of my headphones. Caleb finally got up because he was seriously bored doing what he was doing and he'd been trying to get out of it all day.

"Oh, come on, guys! Look at you!" said my advisor. "Our mission is FLYING past another PLANET tomorrow!!!"

"And I'll go and watch it," I said, "TOMORROW!"

He just laughed and ducked his head out of the lab. Caleb came back less than five minutes later. "I couldn't stay," he said, "I told Peter (the guy who pipes in the NASA tv), I told him I had to leave."

But it's pretty cool we're flying past another planet tomorrow, huhn? If you have NASA tv (which you obviously do) or maybe it'll be on the internet, you should tune in.

In the spirit of this exciting event, here is a picture of the module that took the astronaut that I MET the Sunday before last to the MOON:



And here's when I burned my finger on the hot fudge:


Side view:


And a tree that looks like a heart!!!

Comment! (5) | Recommend!

It's Great to be Straight
Monday. 6.4.07 7:51 am

Comment! (14) | Recommend! (9)

Zanzibar's Weblog Site • NuTang.com

NuTang is the first web site to implement PPGY Technology. This page was generated in 0.041seconds.

  Send to a friend on AIM | Set as Homepage | Bookmark Home | NuTang Collage | Terms of Service & Privacy Policy | Link to Us | Monthly Top 10s
All content � Copyright 2003-2047 NuTang.com and respective members. Contact us at NuTang[AT]gmail.com.