life in The Future

Leaving the house, I forget to grab the good rock I found at Mom & Dad's house. Twice. Getting in the car, I did not have Green Machine to play music. I turn on the radio and it's 89.5 (NPR). I switch to 94.9 (alternastream) and it's Halloran: "this is Halloran on 94.9, live from the Belly-Up, Grizzly Bear." And they launch into Two Weeks. So you can imagine how I feel. I am having a significant moment in my car. Driving to lab. Late for a show. A good show, too, goddamn, they are on. So I'm driving along because it's the same way both places and they play While You Wait For The Others. Then Halloran announces, "going to be a great show, line's already around the block, totally sold out." And so then that all kind of whacked me sideways. So THEN I'm driving up the road to lab and the lines on the street are like, playing in time with the music, and the shadows on the trees were just lit up, so quiet and crazy. So, like I said, a series of moments. The world is quite something.

I went to bed at 10:30 last night and consequently was woken up by a dream at 5:30. After tossing and turning until about 6:12, I went for a run.

The sunrise was incredible.

If there is one song that summarizes my life right now, it is probably The Dirty Projectors' "Fluorescent Half-Dome." That said, I spend a lot of time listening to Panda Bear's Person Pitch as well. When I need to focus, I am liking Flying Lotus' live sets. Word.

Kiwi and I were out having some deep-playa time after the Man burned. We saw a giant light and a forklift off in the distance, but were headed for the apex of the trash fences to see what there was to see. Some engineers from Berkeley had just worked out a hand gesture communication system for solving the giant Rubik's cube. After making a few rounds, we saw that the forklift was back extended again so we walked over. It was Spark (artists' site). It was amazing watching the reflections dance around...but then My Girls started playing.

I freaked right the fuck out.

[The] promise of the post-industrial society has been realized.

Thomas M. Siebel, addressing Stanford engineering students in February of 2009, via NYTimes.

aphelion

I was in the Bay area for 19 hours. Next week I'm going to beat that record by flying out of San Diego at 8:15am and arriving back in San Diego at 10:30pm.

Because you named me as your lover, I thought I could be anything.

Imagine yourself enclosed deep within a bamboo grove, a “living room” of green, with walls enveloping but breathing, the ceiling a cathedral of vertical stems stretching to the heavens above, the shadows delicate and swaying. You feel quiet and contemplative and calm, protected.

Graceful Grass or Jungle Giant: Growing Bamboo Indoors. I wanted to know how to take care of the bamboo tree Laurie gave me in thanks for reviving her money tree, and this is the first thing I found.

The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us [doctors] succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing this truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work."

- Albert Schweitzer, quoted in 1979.

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

"This Is Just To Say" by William Carlos Williams, 1962.

Me: "We haven't really discussed it in explicit terms, but what do you think about me graduating this September or October?"

MG: "What? Of course. You have plenty of material to tell an interesting story. Not everything you publish will be in your thesis and vice versa so we need to sit down and figure that out. You should schedule a committee meeting to go over your outline in finer detail."

So...yeah. That's happening, apparently!

There is lots of edit-checksyntax-run-watch-repeat, lots of checkbox-assay-deliver-repeat, lots of grind-bend-solder-repeat. I'm looking for patterns. The sliding window of the Fourier transform gets bigger as I age and I'm starting to see signals I wasn't seeing before. I've been reading a lot about wavelet transforms too, and have been thinking that maybe those would be a good thing to apply. It feels good. I like the new signals.

I would really really like to be in the woods with drums and other rhythm instruments, making glorious noise and singing. You can't really do it at parties. It's hard to find co-conspirators.

I woke up this morning and unexpectedly felt like going for a ride, the first in a long stretch of morning running. I went on a giant figure eight, out to Talmadge and then back to University Heights, down to downtown, up through Hillcrest, and finally home. Really I guess it was only a little over 15 miles, but it felt really good.

When I was turning north onto 5th from B Street, there were three women standing on the corner, presumably three generations of women from a family. The youngest was maybe in her twenties and had a long skirt that was dancing in the breeze. It was beautiful.

I didn't know what to do with the seven beets I had from the CSA box, so I cut them up and juiced them. They were slightly sweet on their own but I couldn't stop myself and juiced a pineapple to go in with them. The combination is phenomenal and yielded about 3/4 of a liter of dark red juice. Mostly I am just writing this entry to tell you about how great beets are. OK.

I got an encouraging note from Berkeley today. It's all still a matter of money, but it's looking good. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Finally, the divide between apes and early humans might not be as large as one tends to think. Rather than considering ancient human altruism as proof of the moral values of our predecessors, one should instead see it as merely part of the spectrum of adaptations that have made humans such a prolific and successful species.

From The prehistory of compassion by Jean-Jacques Hublin in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.