Strange sensation
the ground zoomed to be smaller and I can walk into the wagenplatz like it's my living room
Today, I don’t know why, but I felt that the world changed in some way.
The only differences on my end were: 4 collaboration chats, a marathon of Chinese folk songs, and an allergy.
Chat 1
“It’s more tractable to quantify scaling in animals rather than forests. You can’t take one, two, five, ten trees from the forest and make an ecosystem in the lab. You can take one, two, five, ten fish from the cave and make a fish school in the lab.”
“I am imagining taking a forest into a lab…”
Chat 2
“our test coming up is all cardiovascular and i was thinking to myself how ironic its the “problems of the heart” chapter rn.”
“are you loved only when you have accomplishments? should you take the blame for things? do you need to severely punished for every wrong thing in order to repent?”
Folk songs
I was in the dark microscope room alone for two hours. I tend to get dizzy and have too many decisions to make in this space. To calm down, I played folk songs from Moxizishi and his adjacent today.
Moxizishi is a musician. born in 1979 in Sichuan Liang mountains, from Yi tribe. The album cover is by a 12 year old classmate in my art class whose works I also like, so I feel a personal affection. In this song, In an interview, Moxizishi says he chose this image as the cover because it’s “a person coldly, quietly observing the world. that’s me!” He also shared his favorite poets because his songs are often based on poems written by him or modified from poems by Han or Yi tribe poets. His favorite poets are: “TS Eliot、鲁迅、Italo Calvino、Oscar Wilde、俞心樵、谷川俊太郎、Constantine Cavafy、金子美玲”. I read very few poems but I hope to find time to quiet down and read them well.
Chat 3
“While you wait, I have a challenge for you. Look at these two animations. What’s wrong in the right one?”
“Wow! Hmm, what are the dots?”
[ten minutes later]
“Look at this part — there really is myosin clusters on the myotube! You could only see it with the new live imaging, because it’s 30 seconds per frame time resolution now.“
“If you can get the nucleus in the background away, that would be a magnificent movie.”
“You are going home now, but show me the animation of the two waves clashing tomorrow!”
Chat 4
“i think it’s weird, retirement. why would you spend youth when you have the most ability to move and explore, to stay still then when you can’t walk you get to travel anywhere?”
“the startup/ngo/academia mode is to push your body to get back money and mission. the collective mode is to be more holistic about the reward.” — I want to understand why I was very sick when working physically and living in nature.
“what is interesting to one person, when they get to research it further, might not be helpful to everyone in the system but would most likely be helpful to at least that person and some of their people.”
Allergy
In the afternoon I was walking from the bus to the lab across the large lawn enclosed by the brick lecture halls. I was walking amidst a file of students through the diagonal path and seeing the faces of the opposite file. In my earbud was the song from yesterday’s post, it was sung by my old art teacher. The line was “perhaps because I craved eyes, and you wanted to save someone… in this sea of people, at the right time right place, you were there too.” My nose started souring. My legs slowed as if they were tensing up. My face was in tension near the edge of relaxation. So I lie down on the grass and look at the sky. My head feels softer from having the support of the patchy hill. The sound comes through clearer. The emotion comes through me. My boundary (skin) disappeared. I was a clump of leaves on the ground.
Later in the evening when I was at basketball practice my arm started itching. Redness spread on the backs of my arms and hands. My teammates told me to go home, or get ice, or get anti allergy meds, or give heads up to the teammate picking me up for the game tomorrow. I was slightly glad I didn’t have to continue in the drill that I felt unready for. As I walked back to the bus I hypothesized that there might have been pesticide in the grass.
Folk song continued
I fantasized about potential collaborations with some people I only see on videos but know by secondary contact.
“I can probably work with _ who was my art teacher, or _, or _ and those field researchers, or their friend _. or _ on a graphic novel that is complex. or _ on music and instruments and learning. or startups from _’s circles. feldenkrais method and body awareness from _. math from _ (who knows my idol _) and complexity from _ (who is connected with _ and I can defnitely do summer school there) and animal behavior from _ and _. they are an email away. i can maybe reach out to _’s adjacent, that is farther. I could learn from _ and _ at their land if I make the time to go.”
I recalled promises of ideas to work on with the primary contacts.
animation of dungbeetle song
interview reflection of the songs our team archived
general reflection as post mortem to _ and _
questions about learning music to _
animation/zine of not necessarily mushroom but something with _
being with noncity people with _ who is from there
I feel like the world suddenly shrunk and the distance between people closed in. that is the strange feeling from today. I felt it last time on the last week in berlin:
April 25, 2022. a new sense: I was sitting in the cafe. I felt like the distance between me and strangers shrank. like I can make eye contact or start a one off exchange without expecting a job offer or a prolonged penpalship. like the ground zoomed to be smaller and I can walk into the wagenplatz like it's my living room, or I can walk into a group of friends and act like an old member waiting for one of them to finish showering and go knock on the door of a son of a friend.
The only obstacle in our ways is time. “you are proactive about talking to many people about the project, unlike the researcher who put their head down and isolate and work until they emerge with a work after six months.” — my advisor prof told me at graduation. I think I took it as a bad thing because it meant I was not focusing on the execution of a single idea in quietness. but perhaps it was just my tendency and I could use it to my best, as well as improve the maladaptive parts: to realistically allocate time for executing and translating the idea or intention to enough maturity that it can be interfaced, as a gift, to my team.
