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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.
Lanzhou
Saturday. 9.13.14 8:40 pm
"This part of the campus is only for graduate students," Professor Yang explains as we stroll through the shady trees dotting Central Lanzhou University.

"We had to put all of the undergraduates in on a new campus outside of town. That's the only way we can keep them safe."

"Keep them safe from what?" I wonder aloud. Lanzhou is surrounded by huge mounds of dull brown silty dust for miles in every direction.

"We have problems," continues Professor Yang, delicately, "with suicide." He explains that after a rash of suicides, the University placed each professor directly responsible for the safety of his students. If one of the students hurt himself now, the professor has to answer for it.

"I can't possibly keep track of all of those students," he says, resigned. The university decided that the only way to keep them safe was to essentially imprison them in their university, far away from the dangers of the provincial city of Lanzhou.

"If I were imprisoned in my university campus," I said, "I think I would end up more likely to try to take my own life than if they just let me walk around free."

Professor Yang shrugs. He knows. There is nothing he can do about it. Last year they lost two of his close colleagues to suicide. They threw themselves from the window of a tall building, just like all the others.

"Are they under as much pressure as the students?" I ask.

"That is the strange thing," Professor Yang says, "they were successful researchers-- both of them. At the top of their fields." Of course they were both divorced, also, with high child support payments. Not all of life's stresses come from the University.

The town of Lanzhou would be considered a large city in any other country. It has more than 3 million people. In China it is something of a provincial backwater. As far as a provincial backwater can have an 8-story mall. I am staying at the Lanzhou Hotel, which is classically communist in that the lobby is over-the-top in its extravagance while the rooms are barely acceptable habitations. Professor Yang says that when the hotel was first built in the 1980s, it was the finest building in Lanzhou. He remembers when people used to come from all over the province to have their picture taken in front of it.

The Lanzhou Hotel is now shadowed by the tall hotels that crowd all around it. There are several nicer hotels on the same block. Dozens and dozens of 30-story buildings are in the midst of being hastily constructed.

I wonder if all the windows on the highest floors will be sealed shut.
4 Comments.


wow
» middaymoon on 2014-09-13 11:04:40

So... they built a new campus instead of like, maybe trying to invest more in mental health services...?
» randomjunk on 2014-09-13 11:13:37

Dang, zanzi. That is dark. The windows on our campus are all sealed too, because of suicide risk, but then our numbers really don't support that particular fear.

Being a professor there must be very tense and very sad.
» Unicornasaurus on 2014-09-15 04:25:35

--at times, that is.
» Unicornasaurus on 2014-09-15 04:26:04

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