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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.
Hot hot heat
Thursday. 8.9.07 12:35 am
If were to write a series of books based on my friend Toku and his adventures in America, the first one would naturally be "Tokuhiro Comes To America" and there would be one called "Tokuhiro Goes to New York City" and of course "Tokuhiro Goes to the Beach" and maybe "Merry Christmas, Tokuhiro!"

But the book that would be about today would be called

"Tokuhiro Saves the Day"

because that is precisely what he did.

It was after work, around 6:30 or so, and I was still working as I often am, between checking the rates of U-Hauls and reading the Onion, of course, and Toku came down into the lab. He was so sorry to bother me, he got across, but the RELAB was very hot. The RELAB is a laboratory run by some of my favorite professors which measures the spectra of small objects (oftentimes meteorites and lunar rocks and soils). It is very expensive and delicate. In fact, in order to enter the RELAB you must don little white booties and spin yourself in through one of those darkroom doors. The fact that it was hot was a little disturbing-- after all, some of the instruments in there are dedicated to measuring things in the near IR part of the spectrum... heat! Toku indicated that it is usually not hot in there. So Toku found the closely guarded code to the door and we booted up and spun around into the lab, where it was about 79 degrees, even though the thermostat was set with a minimum of 50 and a maximum of 60 degrees F. There was even a humidity guage... I began to think that someone liked to strictly regulate the heat in this room and that something had gone quite awry.

So I called. I called everyone I could think of. The head of the relab was on a ranch in New Mexico for the summer. The second in command is in Japan. We called almost every professor in the planetary department with no success. Then I called all of the students who had ever worked in RELAB. No success--- they were all supposed to be playing frisbee until 9 pm! Then I called all of the technical staff. Then the administrative staff. I finally got one of the secretaries who was like, "What? I don't think we can do anything. I'll call someone tomorrow if you want. But write me an email, because I'm definitely going to forget about whatever it is that you said was going on by tomorrow." I got a hold of some random students, who suggested some other people to call, but I couldn't reach those people, either.

We went back up to the lab, where in a half an hour the temperature had climbed to 83 degrees.
Surely there was an emergency number? Toku said that he emailed the second-in-command in Japan, since he checks his email a lot. I had no idea what time it would be in Japan. Toku thanked profusely me for my help accompanying his words with a series of short bows but worried that I worried too much. He told me that he would attend to the problem himself from now on because he hadn't meant to disturb me when I was busy. I looked at him dubiously but I agreed that I'd go home and since he works late I told him to check on the lab later tonight and call me if it was "very very hot".

As a last effort, I sent an email out to everyone that I had called and some people who I hadn't (namely the Professor in Charge of Everything), explaining the problem. It was she who finally wrote me back (the only one out of the lot to respond at all). She called the emergency number that had been escaping me and a crack team of the building maintenance team was dispatched to fix the problem immediately. Her email was littered with exclamation marks.

So as far as I know, everything is going to be ok.

And all because of Tokuhiro, who Saved the Day.

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Radishes
Tuesday. 8.7.07 10:02 pm
When she opened the tiny door the flood of noise that had been heretofore muted sprang into lively eddies of echo throughout the small shaft. Her way seemed blocked once again, this time by several large, dusty barrels which had been pushed up against the opening. Through the barrels she could just see little flashes of color as people milled about outside. A marketplace!

She could hear a multitude of strange, rasping voices like thatch on burlap, hawking their wares. Birds this way! Here, some fish! Five! said a woman, Not a penny less!

What a relief to be in a marketplace! No more sneaking about, a real crowd of people out in the sunlight, friendly people, going about their business like nothing at all had happened! She pushed at the barrels with her hands. They were very heavy. Smoothing the bottom of her jumper under her legs and sitting back on her hips, she braced her arms against the frame of the door and pushed heavily with her legs. The barrel slid a little way out. She gave another push, and it gave another inch, turning slightly along its rim. She slipped down from the door and into the space behind the barrels.
From here she could see the marketplace. There were a great variety of tiny carts and shops, each shadowed by its own awning and obscured by its own mass of customers. The were carts selling great heaps of vegetables, including a cart selling only radishes. There were so many radishes they overflowed onto the ground and the shopkeeper was angrily defending the edge of his domain with a broomstick from a group of little urchins who squatted in the dust nearby.

But this is not what she noticed about the marketplace.

The people... if they could be called people... were not people at all, but only the clothes of people, animately moving about the scene as if filled by flesh. But they were glarely empty of anything like living bodies. Why, but they must be invisible people, she thought, a wave of fresh sweat breaking suddenly across her brow.

The shopkeeper at the radish stand was nothing more than a study brown work apron, a pair of coarse brown trousers and a stiff white shirt. He wore a key round his upper arm on an elastic band. His cuffs were wrapped around the broom, which he continued to wave erratically at the young... rags... that's all they were, a pile of dirty rags and faded t-shirts, darting out and fetching radishes, which disappeared into the folds of their clothing. That's all they seemed to be, her mind said, checking itself. Invisible people!

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Everyone (Helena) was doing it...
Tuesday. 8.7.07 8:08 am
Ravenclaw!

Sort me!

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Your mom has a nice wand
Monday. 8.6.07 6:07 pm
Everybody was doing it....


Your Score: 9 3/4", Oak, Phoenix


You scored 47 wisdom, 27 bravery, 10 emotional, and 27 martyrdom!


Oak signifies wisdom, endurance, protection, and authority. The phoenix tail feather as your core means that you have the capability to be an extremely powerful wizard or witch and that you will defend those you love at all costs.
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 99% on wisdom

You scored higher than 99% on bravery

You scored higher than 99% on emotional

You scored higher than 99% on martyrdom





Link: The Harry Potter Wand Test written by sputnik845 on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

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My life, or a soap opera???
Sunday. 8.5.07 8:10 pm
"I have a lot of things to talk to you about," said my roommate as I came out of my room. "First of all, where were you for the past three weeks? I thought you got in an accident or something, I thought you were only going to be gone for two weeks!"

Me: I was only gone for two weeks.

Him: Oh..... Huhn.

So apparently while I was gone my landlord asked him if he would move out a month early. It might be because the kid that wants the room needs to move in at the beginning of August. Or, suggests Chris, since the landlord asked both of us to consider moving out early, he just knows that he's charging the new tenants $200 more dollars a month for Chris' room and $100 a month more for mine and charging both $50 extra for parking and $10 extra for internet and he wants to start making that kind of skrilla as soon as possible. "Well... he is Jewish...."

Apparently my landlord said of me to Chris: "Hey, will you make her move out a month early?" to which Chris replied, "Why, yes, seeing as she's under my magic spell, she will do anything I command."

In other news, our house was ROBBED. And when I say robbed, I mean that Patrick, the medical student from downstairs, is also a stripper at a (gay?) club in downtown Providence and he had a huge drawer in his room filled with $1600 in ONES and someone came into his room, bypassing his laptop, mp3 player, and other valuable items and went straight for the drawer, emtpying it of its contents. Patrick was so angry at the theft that he punched two holes right through the wall, meaning that Pedro, (an immigrant from Western Africa who later converted to be an Orthodox Jew as well as our creepy handy-man (once I woke up from a nap and he was in my room, just standing there-- "looking for Chris", he said; once Sarah woke from a nap to see him looking in through her window)) had to come and fix the holes in the wall on the first floor and then come up to the third floor for no reason at all.

Meanwhile, Chris moved out on my landlord's orders, but as it turns out the kid moving in can't come yet anyway. Oops. Then my landlord asked Chris if he would sell his bed to the new kid because the last time they had to get a bed into his room they had to put it in through the window. Chris can't say no to anyone, so he's selling his $800 mattress to the kid for a somewhat unfairly reduced price. My landlord furthermore asked Chris to do a little carpentry work in the basement, which isn't very convenient because he just moved out.

So now Chris is sleeping in his own room again (unbeknownced to our landlord) with nothing in it but his mattress and box-springs and his computer on the floor and fixing up the basement (I haven't noticed a difference, besides the fact that someone apparently removed all of Chris' clothes from the washer down there and threw them on the incredibly, incredibly (like the dust and dirt from several construction projects and like 100 years) dirty floor.

Then Chris noticed that his fan was missing from his room. He had seen Sarah up here stealing random dishes from our kitchen (she's taken whole rolls of our paper towels before, too), and decided that she was the only one who could have taken it. So he calls her and he's like, "Sarah, did you take my fan?" And she's like, "Yeah." and he's like, "WHY did TAKE my FAN?!?!?!?!" And she says sorry and that she'll bring it back. She didn't say why she was in his room, of course, which is two floors above hers with the door firmly shut. And people wonder why I lock my door.

So... the police say that they think someone in the house stole Patrick's thousands of dollar bills from the drawer. Patrick thinks it must have been one of the many little skanky girls (Chris' description: "For a gay guy, it's amazing how many little skanks he has parading through that room. But I guess that's what gay guys do") that Patrick always seems to have over, since they know where he keeps his stash of ones. Everyone else in the house was out of town except for Sarah and the incredibly nice girl on the second floor. Hmm... need a little extra money for your many drug habits/art projects, Sarah dearest? Maybe you had to buy a new fan? Some paper towels? A large glass mixing bowl, perhaps?

Chris: Ones, huhn? You're a stripper, aren't you?
Patrick, smiling guiltily: Well I'm trying to be a model.
Chris: But you're a stripper, aren't you. I saw your furry handcuffs.

Patrick says that he really wants his modeling career to take off because he's tired of going to medical school at Brown University.

Chris: I don't mean to be catty... I mean, I'm not a catty guy or anything, I don't do that... but, I mean... his body isn't that good. I mean, it's ok, but those stripper guys have to have really good bodies, and his... ehn.

Me: Maybe the whole "medical school" thing has been getting in the way of his workouts.

MEANWHILE meanwhile, this company that Chris might work for has offered to pay for the rest of the medical school stuff that stands between him and his MD. In return, they want him to move to a small Caribbean Island in the Dutch Antilles off the coast of Venezuela and tutor kids at the med school there and work in an AIDS clinic, all while preparing for his boards. They're going to pay him, too, in return for agreeing to work for their company for five years afterwards. They don't always do this, he says, but "apparently it's because of [his] transcipts... straight As all the way though, you know, [he's] not bragging, that's just the truth... apparently that like NEVER happens, so you know."

But that causes a problem because he just signed a year's lease for this other house, and he already moved in because my landlord kicked him out (if he hadn't, he would have been able to move directly from our house to the Dutch Antilles). So now he has to find a way to get out of his lease, find a replacement, or sublet it. The problem is magnified because he does need a place to stay when he comes home for the month of December.

He says I can come down and visit him and we can go snorkeling in the crystal clear waters.

So between that and someone having a medical emergency on the plane on the way home from Baltimore and getting sick AGAIN, I'd have to say that my life is almost as interesting as Southern's! Hoo-RAH!

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Mary got to find her baby-daddy
Saturday. 8.4.07 7:29 pm

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There are Plenty More Voyeurs in the Sea
Tuesday. 7.31.07 9:42 pm
So I was surfing on tehfacebook and what should I find, but the engagement page of some guy I knew back in high school. Let us call him "Matt". Apparently they're going to be honeymooning in Bora Bora after their wedding in 2009. Here are some pictures of where they intend to stay:



"How cool is that!" I exclaimed to my sister, "You could look through the floor of your hut and see the fish!" My elder sister, in her wisdom, mused, "What if someone went snorkeling under your hut?" She made a face that such a snorkeler might make as he or she swam under your hut and looked up through your floor, and it was very hilarious and troubling, indeed.
So perhaps a glass-floored cabana isn't the best place for honeymooning activities, not to mention the difficulty in going to fancy dinner parties when the only way out of the cabana is by wading through 5 feet of water. Your rolley-suitcases wouldn't seem to do you much good either. Perhaps they outfit the place with a small rowboat or gondola. Hopefully you'd get a singing gondolier in the bargain, because I dare say if they didn't I'd make my husband do it, and I don't really know how well he'd like that after the fourth day of singing. Not to mention he probably doesn't know that much Italian. That's only a guess though, as I haven't actually met him yet.

I've also heard talk about some completely underwater hotel rooms (specifically in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, see: 'Hydropolis'). In some of these the bathtub is made of clear plexiglass so that it will feel as if you are bathing with the creatures of the sea.

Now the question here is: At what point do you begin to feel uncomfortable- like, when do you start suspecting that instead of watching the fish, the FISH are watching YOU? You really want all them fish watching you with your body awkwardly pressed against the plexiglass bathtub? You wouldn't sit in your room, gazing starstruck at the passing schools of fish, but then awkwardly jam yourself into the closet to change, lest the fish with their wide, blank, unblinking eyes seem to be staring at you? I wonder how long an alien could charge you to stay in a plastic bubble in the middle of his alien starship before you realized that you were the one in the zoo, and not the other way around?

What are the fish really up to??? Are they in league with THE ARABS??? Are they just a whole society of voyeurs, luring us to build hotels in their midst so as to get a proper look at us? Sure they always seem to be frowning, impassive, those fish, but you know they're smirking at us on the inside!
If I lived near the underwater hotel in Dubai, I would perhaps build a pair of underwater binoculars... and charge a fee for a little look-see beneath the surface. And you can bet my customers would react with a face not unlike that of a sub-honeymoon-cabana-snorkeler.

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I'll Always Remember Montreal
Sunday. 7.29.07 8:46 pm
I had a dream that I was in Montreal. No, I've never actually been there. But I was there in the dream, and I was playing a video game. Or shall I say, living a video game. Luckily I was playing a level that I had already beaten once a long time ago.

It consisted of a room much like a messy basement or attic, with many random items strewn about. I recalled from when I'd last beaten this dungeon that the first trial was a terrible high pitched screeching whistle, which laid most people flat on the ground. I was immune to it of course, for reasons I could not fathom. However, I knew that once I made it through the other dangers awaiting me in the room, I would encounter The Shroud. The Shroud was not a particularly difficult monster, just a ghostly apparition that erupted out of the floor in a manner reminiscent one of the booby-traps that the children encounter in Number 12, Grimmauld Place... if you know what I mean. Anyway, I knew that my own inherent weakness was this monster and that alone I could not hope to defeat the dungeon.
I knew I needed the help of ranor, who, while greatly affected by the high whistle, was immune to The Shroud. I sent for him and he came forthwith. We entered the room, I first, to dispatch the source of the monstrous noise. We fought forward into the room. Random junk went skittering across the floor as we whirled on, back to back, slashing at the monsters who attacked us. One victorious kill followed upon another. Dusty boxes, parasols, piles of books, old board games, nothing in this attic/basement was innocuous; each pile hid another vile attack. But none was a match for our deadly skill.
At last we reached the back of the room, and The Shroud. I was instantly rendered powerless as it erupted from the floor, but ranor turned upon it and ran it through, punctuating the kill with two slashes to its blackened hide.

We had won. We stumbled back into the busy streets of Montreal, with its merry people completely unaware of the battle we'd just fought. I knew that I should suggest that we visit our beloved friend J, since she lived in Montreal. (Montreal also happened to look a lot like Boston, where she actually lives.) I think both of us knew that I should suggest we visit her. But for some reason I suggested that we find a pair of good warm soft pretzels to eat instead. So off we went, arm and arm, eating pretzels and exploring Montreal.

I mean, after all that, was I wrong to want ranor all to myself, just for a little while?

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