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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.
Excerpt 1
Saturday. 11.6.10 10:15 pm
Trips to Father�s office were normally one of Anna�s favorite activities. First of all it was on the 29th floor of an office building, which would have looked out over the entire city if it had been on the other side of the building, but which still looked out over a multitude of tiny houses and buildings that faded away into what Mother called �Kingdom Come�, which was generally a place she had to drive all over when she was doing her errands. The window stretched all the way from the floor to the ceiling, and you had to be very careful not to press your hands against the glass because Father said you might get fingerprints on the glass, and, as Anna often privately told Elizabeth, the glass might pop right out and there would be nothing to stop you from falling 29 stories to the parking lot below and breaking every single one of your bones. The office itself was a square room with a large wooden desk and a handsome leather office chair with twenty-eight identical indentations filled with brass buttons, which were perfect for using as a cash register or an elevator, as long as Father wasn�t sitting in it, and sometimes when he was. The chair sat on a smooth piece of hard plastic that allowed it to roll around on the thin gray carpet. The bottom of the plastic piece had a million tiny teeth which held it to the carpet. Anna liked peeling up the side of the plastic and pressing the teeth into her skin to make little indentations, but it was sometimes dangerous to sit behind Father there on the floor where he Can�t Even See You.
In a little room just around the corner from the office was a copy room filled with office supplies, which Father always let them use, even though Technically It Was Not Allowed. There were Post-It notes and paper clips, and little creatures that Father called �staple removers� which had spring-loaded jaws with pointy metal teeth. Those little Staple Removers, they liked to eat everything, like important papers or pencils or Elizabeth�s hair. One of their favorite foods was tacks, and if you accidentally opened a box of tacks around them you would absolutely lose control of them and you could barely hold on as they flew towards the tacks and then started gulping them down. �MUNCH MUNCH MUNCH, OH WE LOVE DELICIOUS TACKS�, they would always say. That�s how they kept their teeth so sharp.
Since the conversation she had had with Maximillian, Anna had begun to notice mathematical operators everywhere. The copy machine, for example, was a great big multiplication operator, because you put something in and then you told it how many copies you wanted and it multiplied your original papers by the number you wanted until you got a product. The paper shredder was a division machine which took one big piece of paper and divided it into little fractions of a piece of paper which you could weave into coasters for Father.
Father always let them type things on his very old typewriter, which was an addition machine because it could make letters, but it couldn�t take any of them away. The typewriter made a satisfying �clackity-clack-clack� and Elizabeth could type five hundred words per minute as long as nobody tried to read them.

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Discovering Holes
Friday. 11.5.10 5:56 pm
"Well, I've been writing it for a long time, and I had a bunch of characters, and they were doing things, but I couldn't really see where it was going, and I wasn't sure what the characters were doing and why they were doing what they were doing. And then, suddenly, I realized: the whole story takes place in Lebanon during the Israel-Hezbollah War in 2006!!! Of course! And then everything suddenly made sense!"

--My Awesome Friend Bronnie
__________________________________________________________________________

I attended the kick-off party for Nanowrimo (National Novel-Writing Month) last Saturday. I knew immediately upon entering the bar which people were from Nanowrimo... there were only two of them, but they were wearing bland grey t-shirts with slogans on them and ill-fitting jeans or stretch pants and they had glasses and really long, unstyled hair. In short: they had an air of D&D about them that was unmistakable. Especially compared to everybody else who comes to bars at noon on Saturday.

They proved to be just as socially awkward as I had expected them to be, but we managed to have a pleasant conversation until everybody else showed up and we were shown to a private room for lunch.

Our awkward introductions and brief chats about what we all do for a living when we're not writing novels quickly segued into discussing what our novels were about, what our characters were like, and what anime and comic conventions we were planning to attend in the upcoming year. I asked one fellow about what he was writing about, and he said, "I don't really want to go into it too much... I find when I tell people what I've been writing about, I lose energy to actually write it." We all nodded in complete understanding and agreement. Some people had no real idea what they were going to write about, it was just going to start going down on paper November 1st and they would see where it went.

These were people who had a multitude of characters living in their heads simultaneously. These were people who imagined situations, relationships, stories... whole WORLDS... and probably never got to talk about them. These were people who always want to begin sentences, "Yeah, that story about your friend really reminds me of something one of my characters is going through..."


But the weirdest realization was that these people were MY people, and even though I didn't know them I was ELECTRIFIED just by hearing the way they thought and knowing that I think the same way. I hadn't hung out with people like that (outside of the family) since high school. Even in high school I only had a couple of friends like that. I've been spending so much time with geologists, and they're a great bunch, but they drink beer. That's what geologists do. They look at rocks and they drink beer. They're affable, smart, and quick with a joke. Some of them think deep thoughts. We appear to connect on deep levels.

But they have a well-established standard personality type. And it isn't mine.

The Nanos all bid each other farewell, and each of us went off to begin the crazy social experiment that is Nanowrimo, but I realized that even though we were from all walks of life, ages, levels of education, jobs, social circles, fashion sense... we were all so much more like each other than we are like anyone else we hang out with.

Having lunch with them made me aware of this great big hole that had been inside me for a long time which I had forgotten all about.

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Leaf
Sunday. 10.31.10 12:57 am
I am almost to my car when I realize that I have forgotten something back in the gamelan room. I run back into the music library to the desk where I had just returned the key.

"I.... forgot... something... in the gamelan room. Can I borrow the key for just a moment?"

It takes her a minute-- in the thirty seconds I had been gone she had already completely forgotten who I was. Then she produces the key and I rush to the gamelan room.

I don't tell her that what I forgot was a leaf.....

...would she have understood if I told her that I found the prettiest leaf I had ever seen, green and yellow in the middle with a ring of flaming red, supple like well-worked leather, and if I left it in the gamelan room until Tuesday, it would have turned brittle and brown and died? That I HAD to run back and fetch it, so that I could try to preserve its colors between the pages of a heavy book?

No.

She wouldn't have.

So I didn't tell her.

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Obama visits Little Rhody
Wednesday. 10.27.10 7:38 pm
We know it's the smallest state in the union... but we're real proud of Little Rhody. So when we get a very rare visit from the President of the United States of America? People get excited.

He was making the stop to stir up support for the democratic candidate for the senate (none of our other elected officials would be important enough), and his visit involved speaking at the big convention center downtown and then having a $7500-per-plate fundraiser dinner at a the house of a local couple near Brown University.

All week in the papers all we heard about was how the meal was going to be prepared with all Rhode Island ingredients, the lobster, the cheeses, the chocolates... Little Rhody was going to make a dinner fit for a president! Even the chefs of our most famous restaurant, Al Forno, decided to cook the meal even though they were originally supposed to be out of town. They spent weeks preparing, and people from around Rhode Island contributed the state's best flowers, invitations, pumpkins, and hors d�oeuvres.

From community gardens to a vineyard, the state�s culinary community has grown to the point it can feed a president from its own backyard.

However, when it came time to eat, the President said that he couldn't stay, that he had to get back to Washington to "tuck the girls in, walk the dog, scoop the poop." So they got $7500 out of each of those people (50 were in attendance) and then off he went into the night.

And my heart broke for America's Littlest State.


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Etc.
Sunday. 10.24.10 6:09 pm
I always feel like writing an entry, but I have nothing I feel like writing about.

So, an entry of miscellania:

1. I've decided to become a goth temporarily. Only not a real goth, more like those "vampire kids" in South Park who act very dark and buy things from Hot Topic without actually doing anything self-destructive. To begin, I have painted my nails black. One hand is drying now so I am typing with only one hand. It is difficult.

2. We went to Pennsylvania last weekend. It was weird, we had to get used to the fact that you can't just turn left in front of oncoming traffic. We also had to get used to waiting for people to turn or parallel park, instead of careening angrily around them the moment they looked like they were considering slowing down. One time in Providence there was a person who started slowing down in order to make a right hand turn, and someone three cars back decided that it was all proceeding too slowly, so they pulled onto the left side of the street, passed all three of us, and then turned right in front of the slow car. Rhode Island: 1/3 traffic laws; 2/3 boldness. It'll last until Google starts driving all of our cars for us.

3. Target takes all my money. I had to buy a lot of necessities, like a new furnace filter, toothpaste, a compendium of Janet Jackson's greatest hits, that kind of thing.

4. I'm going to be a corn stalk for Halloween. I'm contemplating wearing a string of bullets and carrying a fake machine gun and being a "Corn Nut"... corn GONE WRONG.

5. I saw a live performance of "King Lear" today.

6. There's a guy named Travis. He lives in Florida and he was lamenting the lack of seasons there, so I collected a bunch of pretty leaves and sent them to him in an envelope with no note.

:]



The End.

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Nanowrimo
Tuesday. 10.19.10 9:46 am
Gonna do Nanowrimo this year.

WHO IS WITH ME???


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The INTJ's Achilles Heel
Monday. 10.11.10 12:30 am
Inspired by Middaymoon to revisit my personality profile:

"Personal relationships, particularly romantic ones, can be the INTJ's Achilles heel. While they are capable of caring deeply for others (usually a select few), and are willing to spend a great deal of time and effort on a relationship, the knowledge and self-confidence that make them so successful in other areas can suddenly abandon or mislead them in interpersonal situations.

This happens in part because many INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals; for instance, they tend to have little patience and less understanding of such things as small talk and flirtation (which most types consider half the fun of a relationship). To complicate matters, INTJs are usually extremely private people, and can often be naturally impassive as well, which makes them easy to misread and misunderstand. Perhaps the most fundamental problem, however, is that INTJs really want people to make sense. :-) This sometimes results in a peculiar naivete', paralleling that of many Fs -- only instead of expecting inexhaustible affection and empathy from a romantic relationship, the INTJ will expect inexhaustible reasonability and directness.

Probably the strongest INTJ assets in the interpersonal area are their intuitive abilities and their willingness to "work at" a relationship. Although as Ts they do not always have the kind of natural empathy that many Fs do, the Intuitive function can often act as a good substitute by synthesizing the probable meanings behind such things as tone of voice, turn of phrase, and facial expression. This ability can then be honed and directed by consistent, repeated efforts to understand and support those they care about, and those relationships which ultimately do become established with an INTJ tend to be characterized by their robustness, stability, and good communications."

The Scientist, I'm sure you're all surprised.

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Tu vuo fa l'americano
Saturday. 10.9.10 10:45 am

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