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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.
Elegance Therein
Wednesday. 12.6.06 6:28 pm
I'd like to take this moment, at the end of a semester of cratering classes, to admire my planetary cratering professor. I really like him. He thinks the same way I do, and this is how...

He was in Hawaii for some conference or something, and he was watching a field of pineapples being watered by sprinklers. He suddenly wondered why the sprinkler is designed so that it doesn't water continuously, but that it is designed to shudder, thuk thuk thuk shrrrrrrr thuk thuk thuk shrrrrrr... the reason it does that is because if you had water coming out of the sprinkler head continuously, it sticks together due to the surface tension that water has and would follow an arch as a cohesive column of water. The effect of a column of water is to jettison the water droplets further than they would normally go (because they are effectively being pushed from behind) and to get a ring around your sprinkler where the water does not land. To stop this from happening, the sprinkler sends out spurts of water, a jerky jet, and is continuously moving. This causes the column of water to be interrupted. Then, depending on the size, angle and velocity of the drop, it follows an independent ballistic trajectory and comes down at any radius from the sprinkler head, from right next to it all the way out to its farthest extent. A single drop can't water as far out as a stream of water, but it does water so that you don't get huge dead circles of grass or pineapples right around your sprinkler head. My professor likens this to trying to throw a single drop of water to a window on the 10th floor of a building. You can't do it. The kind of energy that would have to be applied to the drop would simply vaporize it, or the atmosphere would pull it apart. However, you've seen firemen's hoses that can reach up to the 10th floor.
Anyway, after communing with the pineapple field, it occured to him that the spray of the sprinkler was not unlike the outward moving ejecta curtain that forms when a meteor impacts a planetary body. The curtain goes from being one, solid stream of rock with tremendous energy, to suddenly becoming thin enough for air to flow through, causing the curtain to suddenly be porous enough that the solidity of the curtain is ruined and each piece of rocky ejecta suddenly acts as its own body and falls to the Earth ballistically.

Pete sees science (particularly cratering) in everything. He watches waves, beating against a shore. He once dug a crater in the ashtray at a hotel and then tapped gently on the side to see how a crater could be made to subside over time on a planetary surface.
When I walk along the streets of Providence, I see that the sidewalks are totally broken up into all kinds of crazy jagged pieces. No one ever fixes the bricks, the cement, anything. But the cracks!! Each one tells you something both about the stress that the sidewalk has been under and the structural weaknesses of the cement. When I look at the clouds, I see how two air flows of different densities have made the clouds form waves, long sets of parallel linear clouds like sets of waves at the beach. There is a bulge in the linoleum on the way to the restroom at work. I know if I could dissect it I could learn something about planetary wrinkle ridges, I just know it.

The way Pete thinks, it reminds me of that quote from Life Of Pi (best book ever) which says, "Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims."

The part of the quote that reminds me of him is the "The way they see God in everything" part. Because seeing order, structure, patterns and similarities between all types and scales of life, people and the natural world is my way of seeing God in everything.

Peel back the layers of God's elegant creations, and all you will find are additional layers of elegance therein.

Comment! (2) | Recommend!

The Last Day
Tuesday. 12.5.06 11:19 pm
Tomorrow is the last day I will have a real excuse to see my secret crush.

Will our nominally one-sided pretend relationship last after we can no longer see each other for 50 minutes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday?

Stay tuned to find out.

Comment! (3) | Recommend!

RAGE!!
Sunday. 12.3.06 7:42 pm
Let me tell you about the time when I became full of rage today.

Well, how shall we begin this quaint tale of mankind's uglier emotions, unfolding suddenly like an out of practice yoga participant on this second of two bitterly cold jours d'hiver?

Well I suppose it can begin with the grading of exams, the more difficult part having been left to two-thirds of our tidy trio by He-Who-Chose-First. I bear him no more ill will for this decision than I normally bear him, the quantity of which grows more substantial daily. Un joke!

In the course the mindless repetition brought about by such tedious activities, I came across two papers that were exactly identical. In fact, one seemed to be simply the typed version of the other, and they were turned in right next to one another. Furthermore, the written paper happened to be the paper of one of our brightest students. Further furthermore, the paper which was typed was of a student whose grade in the class is more than 10% less than that of our hero. In her facebook picture she can be seen kissing the cheek of none other than her apparent magnanimous geology-class helper. GET A CLUE, GEOLOGY STUDENT OF HIGH STANDING! YOUR LIFE COULD BE RUINED BY SUCH A JEZABEL! Do the students who thusly take their futures in their hands stop to think what a grave manner of sin they are committing? For it takes two willing parties for this sort of connivery, and my anger is fueled more by he who allows another to cheat from his work than that lazy and ignorant fool who cheateth by him, for his or her ignorance and subsequent failure of future life will be punishment enough.

What price, student, is your honor?
How large or small must the point value be before it is worth its weight in integrity?
May I borrow your work, says the corruptor, the "friend"?
"NAY!" sayeth the student of mighty righteousness, "I worked hard upon it, and thou shouldst complete it thine own damn self!"

That's really all you have to say. Any friend worth having will not sever the bonds of friendship over such a statement as outlined immediately above.

But lo, revenons à nos moutons. This was the first step toward the ever-spiralling emotions of rage.

Second in this toppling torrential tumid tower of terrible RAGE came when I, aware of how desperately I needed some cookies to cheer my darkening mood, opened the drawer wherein my Reynolds Wrap normally lies, only to discover that my ROOMMATES (DEMONS!) had USED ALL of my Reynolds WRAP! Alack! how many times had I used this wrap? But few! How many times had I assured my roommates that they were welcome to use my Reynolds Wrap? But NEVER. I had in fact my Clingwrap hidden as they seemed particularly inclined toward its use when they spied it newly bought among my grocery bags. GAH! But why buyest one her own box of Reynolds Wrap if not so that when she wishes to make cookies there the Reynolds Wrap lies, awaiting its purpose?? Had she but known that the Reynolds Wrap had been perniciously purloined she would have bought a new box the other day at the Stop N' Shop!

So what, may you ask, stopped me from flying into a most unstoppable rage, not unlike a hurricane of catagory 5 about which I recently learned from Dialated's hurricane project? Well, as it so happened, the evil roommates about whom I've spoken just now and previously, make it their aim to use everything up to the very last morsel... but not the last morsel. In doing this, they attempt to make it my folly to use the last of whatever we have, making it then my implicit responsibility to replace it (see: the plaintive wisps of toilet paper that cling to a half-naked cardboard roll which greets me each week in our common bathroom... as an aside, I had a social experiment whereupon I did not replace the toilet paper at all, instead shuttling my own roll back and forth from my bedroom... at the end of two weeks, the empty roll still remained perched upon the dispenser, leaving one to wonder at both the sanity and the sanitation of my coinhabitants). SO, the roll around which my full and seeming endless sheet of aluminum foil used to coil had a scrap still clothing it which my roommates had left for me to use up, which just barely covered enough of the pan to make my cookies after all.



In my blind anger, I did something drastic......


...I tossed the empty box and roll in one motion into the trash barrel, with slightly more force than was necessary.

...may the Lord forgive me my momentary loss of control.

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Lost and Violent Souls
Friday. 12.1.06 9:54 pm
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

-- T.S. Eliot

I really like this part of this poem. Actually I like most of this poem, "The Hollow Men"

But I really like the idea that we could be "trembling with tenderness". Sometimes I feel like that. Trembling with tenderness, forming prayers to broken stone.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms


In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river


Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
....


Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

ahh. what a poem this is.

Think about how many of us like to think of ourselves as lost, violent souls. Ah, but how shall we be remembered... if at all? As hollow men... headpieces stuffed with straw.... leaning against one another.... how amazingly depressing is that, non? We can't even be granted the vanity of thinking of ourselves as lost and violent souls.

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Esophagi
Friday. 12.1.06 12:05 am
Yesterday I got to talk to my secret crush for hours. go. me.

Sam said, "So, it seemed like you two were getting a lot of important classwork done...."

In other news, I have sooo much work to do! And for some reason my work station smells like some kind of pungent bread, if bread can be pungent.

I only have two ballet classes left, and it's sad because I feel like I was just getting the hang of this ballet thing. Almost... today in my post-ballet euphoria I tried to do a little sous-sous on the sidewalk but it's Providence and I tripped on a crack and almost ate it. Hahaha. I'm trying to decide what I should take next semester. Right now I'm deciding between hip-hop dance and breakdancing. I used to take breakdancing and I liked it. However I really like working out in the middle of the day, and breakdancing and hip-hop are likely at night. But then I won't have to miss it all the time because of my planetary-responsibilities like I've had to do with ballet this semester.

You know what's a great word? Syzygy. It's the alignment of planets (I think usually it has to be at least three). Generally it just means the alignment or correlation of anything, but it's used most for planets. It's also a great hangman word, and the shortest word in the English language with three y's. That one goes out to sjcswank, who appreciates words.

My friend Seth was little sick over the break so they gave him some anti-biotics. The night before Thanksgiving, he swallowed one of these pills and then went to bed...

The pill did not go all the way to his stomach. Instead, it got stuck in his esophagus part of the way down and opened there. Whatever was inside began to burn its way through the wall of the esophagus. He awoke to intense pain that he thought must be heart burn or something, but it didn't go away and it was suddenly incredibly painful to eat and drink. Good morning, Thanksgiving. Seth forced himself to eat Thanksgiving food, but the pain did not subside, and only got worse as he returned to Providence and got back to work. He went and saw the doctor who refered him to another doctor, who told him he had to get an endoscopy, where they put him under and feed a little camera on a long hose down his throat. They found FOUR ULCERS. FOUR HOLES in his ESOPHAGUS. Apparently the sides of the pill had burned two holes in his esophagus and then shifted a little bit (perhaps when he woke up?) and burned two more holes in the esophagus before finally becoming dislodged and going to his stomach. He has pictures.

But luckily they're getting better already, so he should be able to eat soon. Not soon enough, considering he hasn't eaten a real meal since Friday of last week. He's been surviving on a diet of pain and Ensure. He's been flying high on pain meds since Tuesday but he made Wednesday's test today anyway so he wouldn't get behind.

Aren't you glad that you aren't Seth?

Moral of the story:
1. Take your pills with enough water.
2. Don't take your pills directly before bed.
3. As the sunscreen song says, "The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday." Yeah. Like who is going to lie awake hoping that his anti-biotics don't burn holes in his esophogus? But it happens.

Ugh, I just looked up "ulcer" on google image, and that is just gross. Thank heavens Seth's is inside his body where we can't see it.

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The Balancing Act
Tuesday. 11.28.06 9:06 pm
An aside:

Wouldn't it be cool if you had a room that rested on one central pivot point, and you had to arrange all of your furniture (with no two pieces the same) perfectly so that it would remain balanced but still be aesthetically pleasing, and in order to walk through it you had to control a weight (or bring another person to enter from the other side) and perfectly counterbalance the whole time to get whatever it was that you wanted from the room?


I wonder what would happen if you failed? There should be some way to set the room aright again. At least, while you were still practicing. Maybe you practice and then once you were really good you could create the "real" room on a pinnacle in the middle of a vast abyss only accessible by one really skinny pathway on either side and you could put your precious jewels or computer chips or ancient artifacts or deadly viruses in there and no one could get them out besides you. (and the hero, of course, who has been studying center of mass problems in physics class... you didn't think of that, did you! You fool! ALgggh! your beautiful wickedness!)

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Monday. 11.27.06 11:07 pm
I just finished an awesome book called "Darklord of Derkhelm". It is hilarious. It manages to be a book about magic while actually being a book about bureaucratic nonsense and human relations (even while a large percentage of characters are not human at all!) Before that I read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" which is kind of like a mix between 1984 and I, Robot, but just as famous in its own right and written by Philip K. Dick. Ok, well, I'm going put in my "favorite" (read=most awful) part of the book- it isn't crucial to the plot, but it's the part that touched me about it. The part that made this book real to me. For anyone who's ever read this book, you know what I mean.

Ok, really if you haven't read this book you should go and read it right now and then come back. It's only 244 pages.

At one point one of the human characters gets hold of a spider. This is a special occurence because there aren't very many wild, living creatures left on the Earth. There aren't really that many left in captivity, either. The wild spider could bring in as much as $100 for the guy who found it. He brings it back to the apartment where there are a bunch of androids hiding out from the police. This is what happens next:

_________________________________________________________________________

"I've never seen a spider," Pris said. She cupped the medicine bottle in her palms, surveying the creature within. "All those legs. Why's it need so many legs, J.R.?"
"That's the way spiders are," Isidore said, his heart pounding; he had difficulty breathing. "Eight legs."
"Eight?" Irmard Baty said. "Why couldn't it get by on four? Cut four off and see." Impulsively opening her purse, she produced a pair of clean, sharp cuticle scissors, which she passed to Pris.
A weird terror struck at J.R. Isidore.
Carrying the medicine bottle into the kitchen, Pris seated herself at J.R. Isidore's breakfast table. She removed the lid from the bottle and dumped the spider out. "It probably won't be able to run as fast," she said, "but there's nothing for it to catch around here anyhow. It'll die anyway." She reached for the scissors.
"Please," Isidore said.
Pris glanced up inquiringly. "Is it worth something?"
"Don't mutilate it," he said wheezingly. Imploringly.
With the scissors, Pris snipped off one of the spider's legs.
.....
Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none.
.....
"How's the spider?" She bent over Pris's shoulder.
With the scissors, Pris snipped off another of the spider's legs. "Four now," she said. She nudged the spider. "He won't go. But he can."
"It won't walk," Irmgard said.
"I can make it walk." Roy Baty got out a book of matches, lit a match; he held it near the spider, closer and closer, until at last it crept feebly away.
"I was right," Irmgard said. "Didn't I say it could walk with only four legs?" She peered up expectantly at Isidore. "What's the matter?"
....
Pris, with the scissors, cut yet another leg from the spider. All at once John Isidore pushed her away and lifted up the mutilated creature. He carried it to the sink and there he drowned it. In him, his mind, his hopes, drowned, too. As swiftly as the spider.

__________________________________________________________________________

I know some people who've done that to a spider before. Plucked off its legs, until it only had one leg, one leg to try and drag itself along... one leg, and still a desire to escape....

The funny thing about this book is its ambiguity, and the confusion that it stirs inside of you. There are some androids who are amazing additions to society and completely harmless to it. They must be destroyed because they have no empathy. The problem with having no empathy is manifested in the not-so-harmless androids like the ones in the apartment. They look at a harmless spider like the one from the hallway and they don't feel with it, they can't take its pain and make it their own.

We're human. We CAN empathize with the spider.

But yet there are humans, children, (who have grown into adults whom I like and respect) who did not empathize with the spider. Who stood above it, torturer above the tortured, and laugh gleefully as the spider died in agony. Why should these people be spared while the androids die? Why should Rick's depressed wife continue to live without enjoyment or appreciation, while the opera singer who takes full advantage of all life offers must be found and immediately retired?

WHY do we feel empathy for the spider? WHY is empathy a virtue?

For my part I would kill all of those androids. In the next model I would include empathy and then I would give them equal status to human beings. And to be quite honest I kill spiders (but as quickly and painlessly as possible). I guess I could try not killing them- I could toss them out the window. But which would be worse, a quick and painless death, or a fall from a three-story window?

Good thing I haven't had any spiders in my current room. After the death of the spider, though, J.R. Isidore goes to the wall where he looks upon all of the stains from spiders and other insects that were smashed upon it... they could have been the last insects of their kind on the entire Earth, and someone mindlessly smashed them against the wall. That's pretty much like my room in Germany, only they were mosquitos and they DESERVED IT!

But I suppose I would think twice about killing them if they were the among the last living things on the Earth.

What a conundrum... why do we feel such tender pity for the spider who crawls away on three legs, but smash it with so little thought on a regular basis?
If there were a being much larger than me into whose realm I mistakenly strolled, I would hope that he would kill me outright, in one terrifying, sudden motion, rather than torturing me for the better part of an hour before leaving me to die, rather than burning me slowly with a large magnifying glass, rather than pouring water into my ant hill until all of my friends washed away as in the biblical flood, rather than rolling over me again and again with a bicycle tire, filling up my hole with driveway salt, etc......

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The Queen City of the Plains
Saturday. 11.25.06 10:54 am
Well I'm now home in Denver for the Thanksgiving holiday. Denver Denver Denver, how lovely. I got to drive up to Wyoming for a touch on Tuesday to pick up my poor ailing sisterling, who's got a nasty cold. Ah, to drive 80mph across the blessed prairie... the bimodal color scheme... icy blue firmament, tan grasslands... herds of antelope... beautiful, with the sun setting over the equally icy blue mountains, crowned with mantles of white snow.
I felt like I could finally breathe again.
Not that I don't like Rhode Island. I really like Rhode Island, more than I ever expected. But here the very chord of inspiration that reverberates softly inside my being is struck each time I lift my eyes to the West.

Though it is a bit dry, I must admit.

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