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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.
The Road of Life
Wednesday. 2.18.15 1:12 pm
On the road of life, our teachers come in many forms. On the literal road, Cherry Creek High School Driver's Education and Dad were my main instructors. As I navigate the completely insane roads of the Los Angeles Basin, their lessons often roll through my mind.

The most important lesson that I learned from CCHSDE was through an informational video that they showed us in a simulator. In the simulation we were driving down a two-lane road crowded with parked cars on the right-hand side. On the other side of the line of parked cars was a sunny park filled with children playing. As we rolled along, the simulation would periodically stop to point things out. There-- a person inside one of the parked cars. The word "HAZARD" would appear in bright orange capital letters, with an arrow pointing to the person. Immediately afterwards the person would open the door of their car directly into traffic, requiring a quick brake. If you could identify the hazard (person in the car) before the action (opening the door), you could avoid hard brakes and close calls. And so it went-- kids playing with balls [HAZARD], pedestrians coming out from between parked cars [HAZARD], cyclists going straight when you're turning right [HAZARD!].
The bright orange capital letters and the HAZARD refrain are forever painted upon the scenery of my driving life.

Dad's lessons were similar, but his style was different. He had an eerie way of forecasting the actions of cars on the road far before they happened.

"Look at this car," he would say. "It's about to do something stupid."

And the car would. Every time.

At first I didn't understand how Dad was able to predict the future, but over time, as Dad patiently pointed out the stupid cars, I gained some level of predictive power myself... a feint in the direction of changing lanes... a turn signal turned on and then off again for a while... a propensity for changing lanes or passing on the right. I got the feel of the road and the people on it. I learned to read their subtle cues. Knowing that someone was about to do something stupid meant that I was prepared for it-- which made their action not so dangerous, at least for me. I learned to read Dad's subtle cues, too: clutching the handle on the top of the passenger side window... pressing an imaginary brake on the passenger side floor... a little uptick of his cheek and an intake of breath as he clenched his teeth in sheer terror. I worked hard to reduce these moments of concern... increasing my following distance, taking my foot off of the accelerator well before a stop... putting my foot on the brake when the brake lights of the cars in front of me were illuminated.

Terminology was important, too. Through the CCHSDE I learned about the meaning of things like "Yield", "Four-Way Stop" and "Flashing Yellow". From Dad I learned that people who drove significantly slower than you were "idiots" while people who drove significantly faster than you were "maniacs".

The people of the CCHSDE were many things-- boring, obsessed with mindless details, bureaucratic. As for Dad, he was brave. He taught all three of us kids how to drive when we were teenagers. He had to drive 50 hours with me, including 10 hours at night. We drove home from soccer practice, we drove on highways, we drove in parking lots. When were missing hours closing in on my 16th birthday, we drove all the way to Montana and back. We hit a goose. We traversed Wyoming. I tried to make an ill-advised left-hand turn, Dad panicked, I backed up into a man's side reflector. Dad took care of the talking while I tried not to laugh at the man's name: John Bobbitt. At the time I did not fully appreciate it, but 15 years of riding in cars with terrible drivers has cast new light on Dad's bravery.

Among the insane drivers of the LA Basin, my education continues. Moving across six lanes of traffic to reach an exit within a quarter of a mile... getting out of the way of people moving across six lanes of traffic to reach an exit within a quarter of a mile... parking on steep hills, downshifting on steep grades, avoiding scraping my car on gas-station entrances. I've come a long way along the road of life, and I can now take a lot of things for granted. Parallel parking: easy. Parallel parking on the left-hand side while driving an English car: no problem. Driving up rock-strewn dirt mountain roads: totally doable.

Taking a teacher like Dad for granted? HAZARD.

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Riding Around on Bicycles With Boys
Saturday. 2.7.15 4:42 am
I spent the evening with M and the boys. Arthur made an amazing beef/mashed potato quiche, and M and I made chocolate chip cookies from scratch. The evening quickly regressed into looking up YouTube videos and dancing on chairs. Flav took a whiteboard marker and wrote obscene things on all of the glass frames and door panes and encouraging things on all of the mirrors. It will be a while before they find everything he wrote. Arthur broke a glass of wine, as must happen at every good French party, and, c'est parti, M and I started playing ping pong in the dining room... one of those games that only young boys would think of and mothers would abhor. At last it was time to go, and Arthur want to continue the party on the other side of the Seine. So we poured out onto the street. The boys immediately took some of the Parisian shared bicycles, but I don't have a subscription, so we considered how I might participate. Finally it was suggested that I sit in Arthur's basket. This sounded like a dangerous idea that only stupid youths would agree to, so I agreed, because I clearly spent too much of my actual youth studying geology instead of giggling with boys. Off we went through Paris, weaving around the streets, going in a counter - traffic direction, me occasionally falling out of the basket, eventually arriving at my apartment around 3 am. Yolo.

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Frozen in Time
Tuesday. 1.27.15 5:35 pm
Today I went back to my old office. I lot of my of friends were there, even ones that I didn't expect. It was sad and happy at the same time to realize how many friends I had in Paris, especially compared to how few I have now, starting over from scratch in a new town. My old office was almost exactly how I had left it one year ago... despite the new people who were occupying it. The gingerbread house my friend Christine made on the door with our names on it, my old advent calendar, a bunch of paper hand turkeys... and everything that I had ever written on the white board, still there. The maze that M spent weeks drawing for me (and that I had spent 10 minutes solving), still there. Someone had added a photograph of me to the board with my eyebrows raised, with a caption saying, "She is Watching You". The bag of clothes that I couldn't fit in my suitcase that I'd told M to throw away... still there. My little glass dome with a cake-shaped candle- still there. The "Hello M!" that I wrote in the grime on the wall.... still there. I guess we've now answered the question of whether they ever clean the walls. Construction on the University-- still ongoing. The post-it notes that I'd made for everyone with their names on them in calligraphy-- still there. Given all that I shouldn't have been surprised that my username still worked, and that my Linux desktop still had funny pictures from the internet saved on it from a year ago. I went to the cafeteria for lunch, and I ate the same food I'd eaten every day for 2 and a half years. It was as if no time had passed at all. M had me over to dinner to see his new apartment and to hang out with his girlfriend and his roommate. He bought and made all of the classically french things that I liked, so that I could be properly welcomed back to France: galettes with cheese and ham, camembert (my favorite cheese), a baguette, Breton cider, etc. I tried to impress his Spanish girlfriend with my new Spanish-speaking skillz. And as I walked back to my temporary apartment through abandoned cobblestone streets, I started to remember what had felt so charming about this filthy old city. Ah well. Still a week and a half to go.

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De retour � Paris
Sunday. 1.25.15 5:26 pm
I'm back in France... wooooo!!!

I dropped my bags off at my hotel and went straight to church. THERE WERE ALL OF MY OLD FRIENDS!!! It was great to see them. The sermon was pretty interesting, too. The pastor started out with an anecdote about how nice answering machines are because they let you know who has been trying to call you. Then he made the link that maybe God has been trying to reach you (give you a call), but He hasn't been able to get through.... luckily He left a Message. It was clever.

I told them that it had been impossible for me to find a church like this one back home. They said that almost everyone who leaves says that-- they say that not only are the churches elsewhere not "the same", they're not even close. Ain't that the truth. I'll be back in church on Tuesday.

After church my job was to stay awake, so I took off across town. I walked from close to the Eiffel Tower all the way back to near Bastille, which is waaaaaaay completely across town. My feet and legs ached by the time I arrived at my apartment. The jetlag seized me at last and I collapsed on my bed and woke up some four hours later dying of starvation. What's open at 10 pm on a Sunday in Paris? MCDONALD'S. So I darted out for some Mickey D's.

It's strange being back. After being in the US for a while, Paris looks like a very dirty city. (After being in Naples, Italy for a while, Paris looks immaculately clean). The tourists are all walking around taking pictures, but it's all so familiar to me that it seems strange that they would take pictures of things that are so prosaic.

As for me, I take pictures of pigeons, because every pigeon is beautiful.

Tomorrow I get to see all of my office friends and start work on my coding project. Yahoo.

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Barbed Wire Fences
Friday. 12.12.14 12:49 am
There are a lot of things that I like about working for NASA, but there is a big one that I didn't expect.

I like having a big huge fence with barbed wire around my workplace that is guarded by security guards.

Why?

Because I really like walking to my car late at night and not being worried that someone is going to murder or rape me. I guess I didn't realize how much of my time and energy went into being thinking about this until I didn't have to think about it anymore. When I used to walk home from work in Providence I would spend the whole walk imagining exactly how I would karate chop potential attackers, from the moment I left my office to the moment I arrived safely home. I used to walk home while it was still light outside, get my car, and drive back to work so that I wouldn't have to walk the 15 minutes back to my house in the dark. Nobody in Providence would have told me that that precaution wasn't necessary.

The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man dies but one.

Maybe it's cowardly to enjoy hiding behind a barbed wire fence, only hanging out with honest, straightforward people who've all passed extensive background checks, but it's very relaxing. I wish the whole world could be like that, no fences required.

Now the only thing I have to worry about while walking to my car at night is being attacked by mountain lions.

Because apparently we have mountain lions here.

And bobcats.

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My Boss
Wednesday. 12.10.14 5:10 am
One of my many bosses calls me, ostensibly to schedule a meeting for tomorrow, but he's actually just waiting for his wife to finish working so that they can carpool home. He fills the time by telling me cool stories about old space missions, and what clever things they managed to do to squeeze every last drop of data and power out of the old Martian satellites. Nowadays they've been inventing technology so that we can launch things that are way heavier and more power-hungry than before. It has changed the way we think about things... before, we were always trying to get the mass down first, then the power consumption down. These constraints led to a miniaturization revolution... just in time for the people on the rocket and spacecraft bus side to relax the restrictions. Now we're in a whole new world, where we're running up against cost constraints and data-rate constraints before we ever hit our mass constraints. I relay my line of thinking to my boss.

"What I want," he says, his excitement bubbling through the telephone, "is for the scientists not to say, 'Those jerks at JPL, always limiting the amount of data I can take!' but rather, 'stupid physics! Limiting the amount of data I can take!"

"Curse you, speed of light!"

"Maybe that will be the next barrier that we'll break," I say. "Maybe we'll find a way to overcome cost constraints and volume constraints and data-rate constraints, and then we'll overcome the speed-of-light constraint by passing data through quantum entanglement."

He agrees, but he thinks that he'll be retired by that point.

"You know what I feel constrained by?" I say, "Having only three spatial dimensions! What if I was like, 'hey boss, I found a new way to Mars--- it's really fast-- it's through the 4th dimension.'"

"Yeah, you'd be like, 'I found it in the library! No need for rockets, just go right through these books into this hypercube of time and space!'"

"Yeah!"

"You're going to put me out of business! Unless... what if you did just transport a satellite through the 4th dimension and then put it instantaneously into Martian orbit... it would just fall straight towards the ground because it wouldn't have any velocity! We'd have to give it so much delta-V!"

"We'd have to blast the rocket sideways!"

I spend some time telling him about the science fiction novel that I am writing with my friend, and how we'd like him to model some satellite trajectories for us so that we can have realistic satellites in our novel. He says that if he put his trajectory guy on it we could have our trajectories in less than an hour.

An interruption: the third guy we are supposed to meet with is calling on the phone. He hangs up and then calls me right back.

"We're going to have our meeting on Thursday," he reports, "up in the guy's office, which is very far away at the top of the hill. I don't know where. He wasn't sure if we'd be up for walking that far. But I told him, 'if I know anything about this girl, it's that she's going to be up for an adventure.'"

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Fishing
Wednesday. 12.3.14 1:34 pm
There is a happy hour after work today. I decided to dress up today with the idea that I might catch a man.

On my way into work from the parking lot, I got trapped in the little turnstile for a moment and met "Raul" from finance.

THIS IS WORKING ALREADY.

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Argentina I
Tuesday. 11.18.14 8:53 pm
I've only been in Argentina for three days, but it feels like a thousand.

I burned the fuck out of my tongue while eating an empanada. I mean that literally: I burned my tongue, and the word "fuck" just fell right off of it.

Apparently the entire field course that I am attending is in Spanish. I got the suspicion that it might be a month or so ago when they never made an English version of the "field camp arrival information packet", but it never really hits you all the way until you're in the middle of Argentina with a group of 30 people and all of them are from Latin America. Ay caramba. Chile�os are especially impossible to understand.

Chile�os: Can you understand?
Me: I can understand him [pointing at Spanish guy]. But the rest....
Spanish Guy: That's because I'm the only one *actually* speaking *Spanish*

The Spanish Pimsleur CDs that I checked out from the library and studied intently for four or five weeks before I left helped a lot.

The fact that they're all geologists also helps. We understand each other in mysterious ways, including knowing, without the aid of language, when someone wants to take a picture of some random rock and whether or not they'd like to use you as a scale.

Yesterday we had an entire day of lectures about different kinds of volcanic processes, and today we went into the Andes to see them in the field. Tomorrow we take off deep into the Andes and we don't get back until next Tuesday. Yeehaw. There will be a lot of staring at my food and nodding my head blankly around the dinner table.

My fellow workshop-mates have kindly adopted me as their token English-speaker, though. They look after me and ask directions for me and order food for me. They make sure I don't get lost. They turn to me after a few minutes of talking and say things like,

Person 1: "What is 'culo' in English?"
Person 2: "Ass?"
Person 1: "We are talking about the word 'Ass'"
Me: "Thank you."



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