Coyotes, gardens, etc.
Jun. 3rd, 2017 06:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seahearthI have too much to write about now. It is early in the morning, I couldn’t sleep so have just finished the Ivan Coyote & Rae Spoon book.
Things:
-Tomorrow, I am having my eyebrows tamed. (This was what the shop-person wrote down, and I was rather taken by it.) I wrote a poem about this which got very out of hand, but fortunately the computer seems to have swallowed it. More or less I am pleased -- I’m looking forwards to it, but also part of me thinks wistfully of Mr. Provo saying my eyebrows would probably turn out like his eventually. Even though there will more than ample eventually left should I change my mind on that point, it seems like breaking some sort of faith in a small way, even if one that needs breaking. I suppose I mind leaving the person people used to think of me as more when they’re probably never going to meet me how I am now.
-Yesterday, I went to Tiki Taane Mahuta in the opera house with some theatre people. Our cheap tickets got us the back top row where you lose the top third of the screen where screen-people’s faces tend to go, and all of the musicians except Tiki Taane’s head – but the dancers were incredible, and they were most of it.
-Yesterday also I had an earth science test, which went quite well. (I think.) Mostly common sense and basic graphing, except for the eons and periods and epochs and so forth. I had trouble with the epochs. Going over my lab book in Espressoholic with a feta and spinach muffin beforehand did not get me up to there.
I have been wondering why I am finding physics less interesting at the moment. One thing is that I can’t work quickly enough, I think. Lately I’ve been walking in the gardens a lot, which is lovely, because you can go very very slowly and look at trees and randomly sit down for ten minutes when you find a pleasant bench. This is how I like to do physics too, I think, and at school that worked because there wasn’t much of it to do, but here not so much. Aiden on my floor can still do it like that, he’s a maths-major and brilliant, but for me to I’d have to do not much else.
That is one possible explanation. Another of a different sort is that living in families physics was a way of having something entirely mine, and here I have enough that is entirely mine.
Oh and there was a third thing. https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/1/19/14266230/empathy-morality-ethics-psychology-science-compassion-paul-bloom. Tara shared this the other day. It’s fascinating. (And, Justy, relevant to what we were talking about re imagination.) I wonder if I am trying to be more compassionate and less empathetic lately, or as I’d been thinking of it more grounded in myself – and if empathy is analogous to the practice of science, getting inside something and trying to understand it from its own perspective, even if it doesn’t have a perspective, rather than looking at it from the outside.
All of which adds up, or all of other things, to me wondering about trying more arts papers next semester and seeing how that goes.
Alright, that is fairly ramshackle as a blog post, and it isn’t all of the too many things, but they are too many, and it’s almost a reasonable time to be getting up. I will read over this again in a while before posting it and see if it makes sense. Tony: I keep starting to reply to bits of your email and realising I don’t know what I’m saying! It’s a very good email. I will aim to at least make clear what it is I don’t know about what I’m saying, sometime in the near future, perhaps once there has been breakfast.
Oh and Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon are very very neat. I want to lend the book to people. But then it wouldn’t be on my shelf for an unknown quantity of time. I will resolve this dilemma. If anyone actively wants to borrow it let me know, and that might tip the balance.
Things:
-Tomorrow, I am having my eyebrows tamed. (This was what the shop-person wrote down, and I was rather taken by it.) I wrote a poem about this which got very out of hand, but fortunately the computer seems to have swallowed it. More or less I am pleased -- I’m looking forwards to it, but also part of me thinks wistfully of Mr. Provo saying my eyebrows would probably turn out like his eventually. Even though there will more than ample eventually left should I change my mind on that point, it seems like breaking some sort of faith in a small way, even if one that needs breaking. I suppose I mind leaving the person people used to think of me as more when they’re probably never going to meet me how I am now.
-Yesterday, I went to Tiki Taane Mahuta in the opera house with some theatre people. Our cheap tickets got us the back top row where you lose the top third of the screen where screen-people’s faces tend to go, and all of the musicians except Tiki Taane’s head – but the dancers were incredible, and they were most of it.
-Yesterday also I had an earth science test, which went quite well. (I think.) Mostly common sense and basic graphing, except for the eons and periods and epochs and so forth. I had trouble with the epochs. Going over my lab book in Espressoholic with a feta and spinach muffin beforehand did not get me up to there.
I have been wondering why I am finding physics less interesting at the moment. One thing is that I can’t work quickly enough, I think. Lately I’ve been walking in the gardens a lot, which is lovely, because you can go very very slowly and look at trees and randomly sit down for ten minutes when you find a pleasant bench. This is how I like to do physics too, I think, and at school that worked because there wasn’t much of it to do, but here not so much. Aiden on my floor can still do it like that, he’s a maths-major and brilliant, but for me to I’d have to do not much else.
That is one possible explanation. Another of a different sort is that living in families physics was a way of having something entirely mine, and here I have enough that is entirely mine.
Oh and there was a third thing. https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/1/19/14266230/empathy-morality-ethics-psychology-science-compassion-paul-bloom. Tara shared this the other day. It’s fascinating. (And, Justy, relevant to what we were talking about re imagination.) I wonder if I am trying to be more compassionate and less empathetic lately, or as I’d been thinking of it more grounded in myself – and if empathy is analogous to the practice of science, getting inside something and trying to understand it from its own perspective, even if it doesn’t have a perspective, rather than looking at it from the outside.
All of which adds up, or all of other things, to me wondering about trying more arts papers next semester and seeing how that goes.
Alright, that is fairly ramshackle as a blog post, and it isn’t all of the too many things, but they are too many, and it’s almost a reasonable time to be getting up. I will read over this again in a while before posting it and see if it makes sense. Tony: I keep starting to reply to bits of your email and realising I don’t know what I’m saying! It’s a very good email. I will aim to at least make clear what it is I don’t know about what I’m saying, sometime in the near future, perhaps once there has been breakfast.
Oh and Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon are very very neat. I want to lend the book to people. But then it wouldn’t be on my shelf for an unknown quantity of time. I will resolve this dilemma. If anyone actively wants to borrow it let me know, and that might tip the balance.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-02 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-03 05:44 am (UTC)I would definitely like to read Ivan Coyote & Rae Spoon. But not yet, because I'm in the middle of too many other books. I would also like to loan you and Jack and Dylan and Tara and Ashleigh the bike touring graphic novel I just finished; but I feel the same way you do about IC/RS -- I want it on my shelf for a bit. It's a warming presence.
I did not find that post at all over-burdened with topics!
no subject
Date: 2017-06-03 08:50 am (UTC)That's a cool thought - the idea about people who will never see you again having a different version of you in their head. Even if it is something you cannot change. I like the idea of us being populated with all sorts of future versions of other people.