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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.
Amplitude
Saturday. 5.18.13 4:47 pm
Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

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Conversations with Mimes #2
Friday. 5.17.13 11:21 am
Mr. M: I have cockroaches in my apartment. They are pretty gross but I only find about one per week.
Espagnole: So the rest of the cockroaches must be somewhere else nearby.
Mr. M: Yes, I think these ones are the explorers. The others are saying, "Yes, it's been a quite a while since anyone's seen him... he took off in that direction, never to be heard from again."
Espagnole: So you kill them, then?
Mr. M: No... I heard you can get their eggs on the floor if you smash them... I catch them and I throw them out the window [3rd floor].
Me: How do you know that it isn't just the same one, and it takes him a week to get all the way back up to your place?
Espagnole: Yeah, maybe you should mark the next one before you throw it out.
Me: He's probably coming back each time, saying, "Why don't you love me?" He might be a very loyal cockroach.
Espagnole: Yes, maybe you should have a chat and learn about his life, his motives.
Mr. M: Or not.

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Writing Club
Saturday. 5.11.13 9:16 pm
"Do you have a fianc� yet?" asks the old Tajik woman across from me. She is wearing a black t-shirt bearing an American flag and a large fleece jacket with faint stars and stripes on the sleeves.

No, I tell her, not since last month.

"Why not?" she says forcefully. "You are young, beautiful, education, why you not have fianc�?"

I shrug. Same reasons as last month, I guess, and the month before.

"And dog? Why you not have dog?"

This one always seems too complicated to get across in English, so I just shrug again and go back to petting Liszt the dachshund. Liszt was a great composer, and a crazy man, the Tajik woman explained to me last month. He had many women, and sometimes he composed pieces for the piano that were physically impossible to play, just to be difficult. Liszt the dachshund shares many personality traits with his namesake, she says. The pup lets out a startling yelp.

"Waff waff, little dog," she says, speaking in rapid Russian to the dog. She tells me that I can borrow the dog while her daughter is out of town to see how I like it. I can come and live in her apartment at the senior center for a few days, too, to try out her cats.

She returns to the subject of my fianc�. She is looking for a fianc� for her daughter, too, who is some six years older than me. She wants to find an American man for her daughter to marry, because she says that American men are serious, ambitious and puritanical, just like her.

"First I knew nothing of America. Then Gorbachev, I read many American books, and I think, 'I like this people. I like this country. This is my country." I remark upon the rather American outfit that she is wearing. "Yes," she says, "I am a vrai patriote today." All of her sentences, and sometimes individual words, are mixes of French and English, which gives a mysterious and lilting quality to her speech.

French men won't do, she says, because they are not serious. They just want to go out with friends, go to bars, she says. Last month she said that her daughter's french ex-husband was "jogging, yoga, homo, like most french." Russian men won't do: "Lazy, too much drinking vodka... very... brutal." I'm still wondering what happened between her and her first husband, who was Russian. She suggests perhaps a Scandinavian. I suggest a German. She tells me that one of her daughter's friends came back from Dubai with news that Dubai is full of serious, ambitious, marriageable men of all nationalities.

"I don't know if I would marry an Arab," I say.
"Oh no," she says, "Arab is brutal, woman is always second place. Like Slovaks." I don't know anything about Slovaks.
"But no... there are men from all nationalities in Dubai. French, Italian, everything. The Arab is stupid but rich. He bring smart men from all over world."

I ask her if her daughter's friend found a fianc� there, but she shakes her head. "I ask same question of her. She say she didn't have enough time, too short period, etc. etc. She is journalist. She work too much, not realize that journalism is #2 priority, fianc� is #1 priority."

She tells me that she thinks about getting me and her daughter a fianc� at every minute during the month. "Are you racist?" she asks. It isn't an indictment, just a question, posed so that she can better tailor her search for my fianc�.
"Um, no," I answer. She mentally adds men of other races to my list of possibilities.
"I am not racist, but I love the face of my daughter, and I worry that if she make child with man of another race, the face of child will look like other race, and not my daughter. I don't know if I could love this child like I love my daughter."
"I bet you would manage," I say.
She shrugs. "Maybe." A man of any race is better than no man at all, after all. A mulatto grandchild, as she calls them, would be better than no grandchild at all.

She says that she looks for men all the time during the church service, but in the 10 years she has attended she hasn't found a single one that wasn't already married. I suggest that she try the later service, since young single men have a hard time waking up early.

She says that these days men aren't so romantic as they were in the past. When she was a stewardess for Aeroflot, she had a pretty nice figure, so men were always saying, "Hey you, pretty girl, come back here. What are you doing tonight?" etceteraetcetera. Very romantic.

"WAFF!" adds Liszt. She says that he came from Milano, he is an Italian mafia dog. She says that these days men are more likely to say, "Oh! What a gorgeous dog!" instead of saying, "Oh, what a gorgeous woman!"



Yet another reason why I need a dog, she adds.

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Grants and Friendship
Friday. 5.10.13 3:09 pm
I'm writing a bunch of grants. It's kind of fun. I get to ask for money and then tell people what I would do with it if they gave it to me. Each time I could win tens of thousands of dollars, plus free trips to conferences around the world! Sure, my colleagues don't really see it this way. I guess it's hard to see it that way if you have people who depend on your income. I'm just so surprised and delighted that anyone would offer to give me money for doing what I do that it's difficult not to be grateful.

French A moved to Colorado. From the sounds of it, he is very lonely there. His roommates aren't too friendly and there aren't many young people at his lab. I told him to go and join some clubs on Meetup.com. I think it's hard for a lot of French people though-- in France it's pretty hard to move further than 3 hours from home; and if you move to any big town you usually have a bunch of childhood or university friends who move there with you. Most of them have probably never been a situation where they have to start from nothing.

When I came to France I didn't have any friends for quite a while. I'd say that it was a good 6 months before I had any real friends. Even then I only had the Canadian for many months. But I don't mind being alone: I didn't even really think of it that way. I just thought of it as one stage in a familiar progression of stages. You move somewhere new; you are completely alone, you hang out a lot on Nutang; you make provisional friends with really weird people who you would never normally hang out with; you slowly make good friends; you bond deeply with people-- then you leave.

I was a new kid in middle school. I moved far away for college. I went abroad. I moved far away for grad school. I moved to Paris. For a while I was kind of addicted to moving away. I liked making friends and then leaving them and starting over again from nothing. When I went on Semester at Sea I was utterly delighted by my rash and drastic decision to leave completely alone on a voyage around the world. The only part I hated was the very beginning, when I took a taxi ride by myself from the airport in Vancouver to the cruise terminal. I've always hated taxis. I hated the weird, dark Day's Inn that I checked into-- the first hotel I'd ever stayed in by myself. But I reminded myself that I wasn't going on this trip despite the fact that it was going to be hard-- I was going on the trip precisely because it was going to be hard. I do things that I don't know how to do precisely so that I may know how to do them. I do things that frighten me because the next time I do them they aren't so frightening. The world gets bigger and bigger. I left the Day's Inn and immediately got lost in downtown Vancouver. I ate at the American Embassy:

and immediately felt better about my choices.

Anyway, I hope French A finds some friends in Colorado. And I hope that by writing my first grant that I learn how to do it properly.

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England's Last Dinosaur
Wednesday. 5.8.13 7:27 pm
I'm in England at a meeting about the surface of Mercury.

M1: Yeah, we made a Facebook page for our mission and we were sharing photos of our meeting in Japan on it, but then they made us take them down because they said that it would look bad if people saw us spending tax payers' dollars doing things in Japan.
later...
M1: Yeah, in Japan we went to this place where they gave us sushi but it was completely coated in gold leaf.
Me: So you're saying that the pictures that they made you take off the Facebook site were of mission scientists using European tax payer money to eat food literally covered in gold. I can start to see why they made you take it down.

We are at a lovely country estate about a half an hour from London by express train. There are peacocks here on the grounds. I can hear the male calling out even now. It sounds like a dinosaur. If you watch it carefully, it *looks* like a dinosaur. Having live peacocks at your science meeting might feel like the height of luxury, but apparently they are from a nearby zoo and they are always escaping and coming to the estate. The estate people put them in a truck and drive them back to the zoo, but they always fly back over to the estate as soon as they can.

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Conversations with Mimes
Thursday. 4.25.13 1:42 pm
Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

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My Invisible Boyfriend
Wednesday. 4.24.13 1:06 pm
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Dandelions
Tuesday. 4.23.13 10:40 am
We are loping along the sidewalk in a part of Paris that I have never been. On our left there is high-rise building after high-rise building. On our right is a set of dirty train tracks and broken metal fences, bordered on the far side by the river Seine. The Eiffel Tower is at our backs, exploding out of the pavement at the end of the street. I turn around every five minutes to make sure it's still there. I am trailing behind my friends by a few feet. They are talking about unimportant things-- movies, books, astrophysics. Every ten feet there is a tree surrounded by a square of lush, unruly grass overflowing with bright yellow dandelions. My gait feels cyclical: dandelions, pavement, dandelions, pavement, Eiffel Tower, dandelions, pavement. The sweet cadence of my beloved friends discussing astrophysics in a language I struggle to understand provides a rich harmonic. For only the second time in months, the sun shines brightly and warmly upon the pavement, illuminating the bobbling dandelion heads.

I haven't thought about work all day, it suddenly occurs to me. I've barely thought about work all weekend. We spent an entire hour today just sitting by the edge of the Seine, watching the water flow by and talking about fantasy novels and the Higgs Boson. We just hung out, full stop. I didn't think about anything but the warm cement against my skin. When was the last time I did that? Is this what life is like outside of grad school-- just strolling along the sidewalk on a sunny day, talking about nothing, celebrating the bursts of green and yellow vegetation exploding with life from the cement? Where was the ever-present cloud of guilt and agitation which has hung over every moment of my free time since God-knows-when?

I nod back at the dandelions. Yes, dandelions. I'm bursting with life, too.

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