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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.
Pizza Delivery Woman to the Stars
Saturday. 8.29.09 4:01 pm
Near my middle school there is a large property where it is said that the guy who owns Pepsi lives. The complex consists of five separate houses, including a boat house, a pool house, a guest house, etc. It is set on a parcel of land so large that it is difficult to even see the main house from the road. At the gate there is a little plaque that reads, "Private Property: No Trespassing. For Deliveries, Ring Bell". When I was a kid we'd always talk about how some day we'd be pizza delivery guys and we could deliver pizza to that house.

Yeah, it seems weird looking back that we didn't say that someday we'd live in a house like that, or that we'd be invited over to that house as guests or anything, just that we'd be pretty pumped to someday deliver pizza there.

I've had some similar experiences since. One time we went to a fundraiser for our university at a highrise apartment in downtown Houston, and the whole time I was there I could only think, "I've helped cater events like these...." I was treated with professional detachment by the catering staff, who were just my age. I wanted to take them aside and give them a wink and say, "Don't worry, guys, I'm actually one of you!"

Today I went down to Little Compton with my friend to check out her parents' summer house down there that they are massively renovating. As I passed all of the mansions and the perfectly manicured lawns and gardens I mentioned to my friend that I'd always wanted to be a gardener at a house like that. She gave me a strange look and I could tell the thought had never crossed her mind.

New England is a weird place where people actually have "summer homes" and "diving platforms" and yachts and sailboats... I guess I had had an idea that these people existed from movies, I just had never met any of them.

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AWESOME
Thursday. 8.27.09 1:40 pm
For people with cervical spinal cord injury, brainstem stroke, ALS and other neurologic illnesses, current rehabilitation options are inadequate. In severe cases, both the ability to speak and move are lost, creating a �locked-in� state of being awake and alert but unable to communicate. But new neural interfaces being developed at Brown could revolutionize our ability to restore lost function to people with neurologic disease or injury. Exciting clinical trials have shown that those with neurological injury or illness can control a computer cursor via their own thoughts. Brain signals are now being recorded, decoded and tested with the hope of not only re-establishing communication, but also restoring movement to paralyzed limbs.

----Brown University People, making telekinesis possible since 2006.

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Less than two months...
Friday. 8.21.09 10:28 pm
...til Antarctica.

We've finally got our deployment dates, and it turns out that I'll be in Antarctica from October 19th until January 20th.

Just me and nine guys in a couple of tents for three months. Priceless.

Let me introduce the cast of characters:

Jimothy: My advisor. Approximately 69 years old, still running around in Antarctica.

Bruce: Mid-thirties. Principle investigator (PI). Easy going, loves to have fun.

Merc: The other PI. 50s? This will be his ~33rd? season in Antarctica.

Mark #3: Fresh-faced, ~23ish, lots of fun. We are trying to get roomed together.

J: ~29, loves gadgets and things made by Apple.

Sethifus: 25, an old friend of mine. Hates the cold and doing most physical activity.

The Welshman: 27, Needs no introduction.

Sean: Late 20s, early 30s. As I do not know him, he must await a pseudonym.

Doug: Ditto for this guy.


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Attempts to Meet Guys: Act I, Scene II
Thursday. 8.13.09 5:21 pm
So Angle met these guys on the street who told her to come to their show at this crazy place called the Mardi Gras. The Mardi Gras is a super-awesome dance multi-plex that I've been trying to get someone to go to with me for about 2 years. One room line-dancing, one room live bands, one room kareoke, one room discotheque. They also have tons of black lights, air-hockey tables, inflatable dolphins, mannequins dressed like pirates, and neon palm trees.

Me: Can we dress like scene kids???
Angle and Cheeky: YES LET'S DO IT!

So we rummaged around for our very best poseur gear and I ended up in ripped jeans, a black band t-shirt, a motorcycle jacket, and a shock of bright blue hair that I'd bought from Hot Topics. Angle had ripped jeans and a black tank-top, Cheeky had ripped jeans, a band t-shirt, and a shiny pink bomber jacket. John came too, he had a Jet Propulsion Lab t-shirt on, but close enough.

One of the guys in the band came to talk to us and we revealed to him that we were at Club Mardi Gras just to see his band, which made him ecstatic.

"You guys are our first FANS!" he said, "Before this the only people that were there were our friends that we dragged along!" He gave us a group hug to commemorate this occasion and asked us if we all wanted autographs. We didn't have anything for him to sign, so we told him maybe later. He was very enthusiastic to meet me, and he immediately asked what kind of bike I had.

"Uh... a Schwinn?
"You have a motorcycle jacket on though, don't you have a bike?"
I leaned in so that he could hear me over the kareoke.
"I'm actually a huge poseur," I said, "I bought this jacket because it was on sale."
I decided last week that honesty was probably the best policy.
"Oh!" he said, "That's cool!"
"No," I said, "it's not really that cool, but thanks anyway."

Turns out that he was originally born in Russia, and that his dad was a geophysicist. We wanted to know specifically what his dad did, and he said that he invented some kind of machine that evaluated rock specimens to determine the abundance of a certain kind of mineral, but he didn't remember which one. Tough luck for a guy in a band with a motorcycle to meet a girl who looked like the kind of girl who would like guys in bands who had motorcycles only to find out that she actually liked geophysics and probably has more in common with his dad.

We soon decided that I should go out man-trapping wearing my handy unix commands t-shirt (printed upside down for easy reference), thinking that in this way I might actually attract the kind of guy I would be attracted to.

I'll report back on that later.

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French People, Roller Coasters, and a Menorah
Monday. 8.10.09 10:12 pm
So a couple of french people put an ad on the listserve that asked if anyone with a car would like to drive them to Six Flags, which is about 2.5 hours away.

Naturally I emailed them immediately to volunteer.

So Angle and the french people and I trundled off to Six Flags and had a most hilarious day riding every single roller coaster and water slide we possibly could in the shortest amount of time. We had a break for eating Panda Express. We left Providence at 8:15am and returned at 2:00am.

After we got back our new friends invited us to a dinner party at their house for the next day. We ended up meeting a large part of the computer science department and playing a wide variety of hilarious games. Cranium was a bit difficult because we had a chinese person, two french people, a Belgian and a German, and they didn't always know the famous people they had to act out or the songs they had to sing or the items they were supposed to draw (e.g.: action, cartwheel). Sometimes someone from another team would look at the card first to make a determination as to whether the item on the card would be comprehensible to a foreigner. One of these instances:

German: Is it something I would know?
Us: Hmm... [the word is "menorah"]... maybe you wouldn't know it.
Them: Well, give it to Yuri then [an American of Russian birth].
Yuri: Oh. I don't know what it is.
Us: WHAT?! How can you not know that?!?! It would be so easy to draw, too!
Us, aside: And the other two people on his team are Jewish!
Them: Can you split it up into parts?
Yuri: I don't think so... uh... I could try...
Them: Just DO IT! HURRY!!!
Yuri attempts to draw "men"
Them: Uh... people! Uh... a mob! A large family?
Us: Time's up. It was a menorah.
Them: A MENORAH! YOU DIDN'T KNOW MENORAH! How can you not know a menorah! We're all JEWS! AGHHHH!
My partner: Well, it would make sense that the German wouldn't know it, because there aren't many Jews in Germany...


...extremely awkward silence while everyone refrains from saying "ANYMORE!"

I also refrained from mentioning that there weren't quite as many Jews left in Russia anymore, either.

...awkward...





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AUSTRALIA!
Friday. 8.7.09 10:36 pm
Email from the Antarctica People:

This e-mail is being sent to all science and technical event participants and alternates. If you started the Deployment Process early, you may not be aware of all the changes for the 2009-2010 season. Please take a moment to review these late-breaking changes:
SYDNEY
Most of you will deploy through Sydney this season instead of Auckland.



HAHAHA!! Apparently we're connecting through Sydney, Australia this year instead of going through Auckland on the way to Christchurch, New Zealand (where they prepare us for deployment to Antarctica). Why are they doing this? No idea! But what it means is that I'll get all 7 continents before I turn 26! (Technically I'll have visited 5 of the 7 while I was 25!)

How lucky can you GET!?!

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Why Zanzibar and College Health Services Personnel Will Never Understand Each Other
Friday. 8.7.09 8:59 am
So yesterday I marked the momentous occasion of my first GYN exam*. The squeamish should stop reading here.


*It should be added that the only reason I even submitted to this exam in the first place is because it was absolutely required in order that I might go to Antarctica to study rocks.


One of the first questions my wise doctor asked was how many fingers I could fit in my vagina. I didn't ask what was to me an obvious question, that is, "Why in God's name would someone want to stick their finger up their vagina?"... instead I told her that the thought had never really occurred to me before. After exam, the details of which I will spare you out of the common decency for mankind, the doctor told me that she was a little concerned that I wasn't "in touch with my vagina enough". She suggested that every woman should take "ownership" of her vagina, since, after all, it was another part of your body just like your ear. She suggested that maybe if I had some down time (after Antarctica, perhaps) that I should sit down and just try to see how many fingers I could fit in there, perhaps working my way up to more fingers over time, and just generally be curious about how it looked and operated. I should have informed her that my hoo-hah and I are in close cahoots, and that it told me that as long as it appears to be working, it should probably be left alone. Incidentally I have the same theory about how advisors should deal with their grad students.

Later in the day we talked about volcanoes on other planets for a couple of hours, had a teleconference with the commander of the Apollo 15 mission to the Moon where we talked about what it was like to walk on the Moon, and then two hours of discussion the future of space exploration and all of our ideas for missions to Mars with the chair of the Mars Exploration Planning Agenda Group.

Forgive me if I would rather do that than sit around in my apartment with my thumb up my ass, or any variants thereof.

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In the Parlance of Our Times
Monday. 8.3.09 7:20 pm
Yesterday I went to the beach and went boogie boarding. AWESOME.

Today I went to the doctor's to have my physical to qualify me for going to Antarctica. I got the most thorough doctor we have, and she asked me a million questions all about my health and the health of my family through the generations and my entire medical history whilst in grad school.

I had to have tubes and tubes and tubes of blood drawn and then they gave me a TB test and a tetanus shot. I have to come back on Thursday for more of a physical and an EKG.

Tonight I am going out to celebrate my friend's birthday. It was a bit awkward because clearly they are also going out to dinner but I am apparently not invited to that part. I was driving the friend who was planning the whole event to Michaels so that we could sign up for a cake decorating class, so she kept talking in vague generalities about how she had to get back to her apartment by a specific time for an unspecified event. Meanwhile people kept calling her phone to get directions to the restaurant.... awkward.

This entry has nothing to do with its title.

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