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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.
Future Plans
Saturday. 12.22.12 2:33 pm
Well, we all know what I would do if I didn�t have any children. I would become a desert explorer like the great Brigadier General Ralph Alger Bagnold. There isn�t an aeolian scientist that exists that doesn�t worship R.A. Bagnold. He literally wrote the book on the physics of sand dunes. He was a pioneer of desert exploration back in the 1930s, when if you were an officer in the British Army it seemed like you could do anything you wanted at all.

I would be a professor at a university, of course, and I would have a large and comfortable office with a leather arm chair with a high back. On one wall I would have a giant map of the Sahara, and on the other wall I would have a giant map of Western China. The Lop Nur. The Taklamakan. If I had room I would put the Peruvian coastal desert or the Australian outback or the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. On the African map I would make important oases, old trade routes, and important geological features. On my desk would be a brass compass in a mahogany box, a large brass magnifying glass with a wooden stand, and one of those jars with a fake butterfly inside that flew around when you tapped it. There would also be photographs of all of the friends I made in small, remote villages while I was in the Peace Corps. On the walls I would have a collection of fine, leather-bound books. Naturally the most boring book of them all would be a secret lever that would cause the bookcase to swing around to reveal my secret laboratory, complete with petrographic microscope. In the corner I would have a large, old fashioned four-legged globe of the world. It would open up to reveal bottles of cognac and brandy and a pair of tumblers, none of which I would actually ever use. Obviously I would teach classes and publish scholarly works, but I would spend every spare moment flying off to China and Mali and Antarctica to wander ever farther into the world�s greatest and most mysterious deserts. I would supplement my terrestrial studies with studies of the great Martian deserts, about which I would be a renowned expert. I would hardly ever be lonely, of course, because who could be lonely when they were flying over sand dunes in a jury-rigged para-sailing apparatus pulled by my research assistants in a Jeep? Ok, I would probably be lonely. Every year I would plant a garden in the spring and then I would never be around to see it bloom. My neighbors would tell me how lovely my tulips were and how the deer got into the vegetables. I would always mean to be around for the harvest, but something would always take me away. I would give them some money and thank them for collecting my mail. Christmas and Thanksgiving might be difficult, when I went to hang around with people with normal husbands and children and lives. I would remark upon how fast the children were growing up because I would have nothing in my own life to mark the passing of time. I would entertain the children with stories of my adventures, but I wouldn�t really know how to connect with them. But it would be ok, because in the imaginary "no family" scenario it couldn�t have been any other way.

I know what would happen if I did have a husband and children, too. I have planned out this life trajectory as well, though it is necessarily murkier as it depends on a variety of factors inconveniently outside of my control.

I met a psychology major once who said that we all had a series of negative and positive future selves. When we go to college, we might imagine a positive future version of ourselves as a success with a good marriage and happy children and a satisfying career. We might also have negative versions of ourselves, where we fail out of school, become broke and start living on the street. Our course of action, she explained, was determined by our striving after the positive future selves and actively avoiding the negative future selves.
�But I don�t have any negative future selves,� I told her at the time. She didn�t believe me, so she tried to make herself better understood.
�It�s like when you run a race, or give a speech� she said. �Some part of you can imagine winning the race, while the other part of you imagines having lost it. Some part of you imagines having dazzled the crowd, while the other part imagines seizing up at the most important moment and being unable to continue, or having your speech rejected.�
�But I don�t ever imagine that I will lose the race or be rejected by the crowd,� I say. �It isn�t because I overestimate my ability, I am perfectly happy to concede that there is a good possibility that I will lose the race. There is a lower possibility that I will give a speech to a hostile crowd. But I don�t spend any time imagining them.�
I thought of a time when my friend wanted us to promise that if we ended up disillusioned and divorced at forty that we could meet up at a particular bar in southern China and share our woes. I agreed to his plan, but it was impossible for me to form the scenario in my mind. Why would anyone even spend time making such a plan? If each one of your thoughts is a brick in a road towards your dreams, weren�t bricks towards divorce and failure at best a wasted effort and at worst lowering the energy barrier for you to end up there?
The psychology student still didn�t believe me by the time our conversation ended, but it was true. If I watched a concert cellist I imagined myself buying a cheap cello from the internet, signing up for cello lessons, joining a string quartet, and after ten years of consistent effort drawing such notes from that cello that the cello would in turn draw a great sigh of longing from anyone near enough to hear its notes.
If I found a pamphlet on how to make your attic into a livable space, my mind would fill up with fantasies about my livable attic and my future prowess as a master carpenter. I would think about the garage that would double as my workshop, the smell of the sawdust and the buzz of the saw as I expertly guided wood through my jigsaws and panel saws. Why stop at an attic? I would build a tree house, and a fine wooden rocking chair, and maybe a small boat. The fact that I did not own a structure with an attic, nor a garage, nor a tree� the fact that I did not own any structure at all did nothing to stem my fanciful ponderings.
So I know what life would be like if I had a husband. Or, at the very least, I can imagine very fully one of a million different positive ways that my life could unfold. Every morning I would wake up and see him there sleeping. There was very little chance that he would wake up before me, because I was a very poor sleeper when there was someone else in the general vicinity. But there he would be, warm and alive and made of man, and I wouldn�t be able to help myself from kissing him awake, his hair, his elbow, his fingers. How could you love a man and not want to kiss his beautiful and lovable face? To hug him in the morning and to say, �I love you darling, it is time to wake up.� We could have three or four children. You never know how many children you will have, though modern people like to feel like they have closed their modern fingers around this slippery issue. Modern people are usually concerned about having too many children, and then, as time starts to escape from them; too few. They want to space them apart just so so that you can make appropriate savings schedules for their college educations. Never mind bunching them up so that they can play imaginary games together, never mind having them one grade apart so that they can date each others� friends�fiscal responsibility and the approval of the family planning authority is what is really important.
These kids will be exhausting. No longer will I be able to lounge in bed until ten in the morning on a weekday. [What kind of working person does that, anyway? I guess you have to move to France to find out]. But we�ll go on walks in the park. And we�ll have a dog. And we�ll plant a garden. And we�ll all carve pumpkins together. We�ll trim the Christmas tree together. We�ll carve the turkey together. And all of those things that would be trivial and small in my single-life future would be huge and important in my married-life future, and we�d build all of our memories around them. I randomly bought a Christmas book, once. It was a book that had a space for each year�s Christmas photo, a space for another favorite Christmas photo or two, and some lines where the Christmas festivities for each year could be described. I buy things like that, for the distant future, like some kind of little stockpile of hope, some way of building of hopeful bricks towards a future I�d like to realize. Yet sometimes I would have crises of purpose, I suppose. I would wonder what I was leaving as my mark upon history. I would imagine that my children would remember me, and my grandchildren would remember me, but after that my deeds would pass unrecorded and unremembered into the trash heap of history. But of course just by raising children at all I would have changed forever the course of time....

It's not really fair. R.A. Bagnold first married when he was 50. He had two children, a boy and a girl. I just don't have that kind of flexibility. Well, Nutang, I guess I'd better stop writing this entry and start leaving my mark upon the history of mankind TODAY, while I've still got the chance.

7 Comments.


This is straight up a block of text.
» middaymoon on 2012-12-22 06:46:21

Starting a family at age 50 sounds awful unless the person doing it is one of those people who has unlimited energy.

I imagine my negative future sometimes I guess, but I don't really see it as anything but a daydream. I generally assume things are going to turn out well, even if they're not the way I wanted them to be at first.
» randomjunk on 2012-12-22 07:30:47

Hmmm... Is it bad that I don't think much of my future..? I don't really know where I will be in 5 or 10 years because so far, things haven't much changed like really changed for me. No boyfriends, not much of a life, everything's like mundane..

If you want a companion for your explorations, I would be glad if you'd consider me!
» Nuttz on 2012-12-25 06:44:11

I was all giddy and happy
until I got to the part about stroking your future husband's hair.







;_;
» undisputed on 2012-12-26 05:12:09

My mom keeps asking me when I'll bring her some grand babies or a wife. I jokingly tell her "tomorrow."

Truth be told, although six months ago I figured I was en route to marrying shewhoshallnotbenamed, nowadays the notion fo settling down petrifies me.


Trust issues anda ll that jazz.
» undisputed on 2012-12-26 06:35:57

I still contend that you have not figured in the possibility of something wonderful and unexpected happening. Throw yourself into your passions and your hobbies and they will grow and develop into a life and a scientific career. Then, one day, you might meet somebody... on a research trip, or at a drum circle, buying a cello, or skydiving, or hang-gliding and you see that son-of-gun and you will fall so madly in love that you can't even handle yourself anymore. The solution is not as elegant, you will want to keep on with your career and he will be so handsome and successful, that of course, so he does, but you get married and before your know it you're having kids or worrying about having kids at the same time that you are trying to get another paper out and he is trying to start up his scuba diving company in Hawaii. You make compromises here and there. You miss your child's six-year-old's Christmas concert because you are staying in Antarctica that winter. You make her seven-year-old Christmas concert and the person replacing you in Antarctica does a really botch job. However, in spite of this, life continues, ignorant of your tenuous reign over it. So why choose? After all, the whole point of putting the bricks down is to create a landing strip upon which opportunity may land.
» jinyu on 2013-01-01 12:45:56

I would use the + to show that a search must have particular words. The quotes have historically been used to mean the exact phrase within them must be searched for, so the + was just for single words.

He didn't get me anything. He tried to make me something, but it didn't work, so he just ended up not giving me anything at all. Presumably he'll give me the thing whenever he finishes it, though.
» randomjunk on 2013-01-08 10:42:41

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