I am a fresh reblochon… where is my parisian baguette?

This is how I will be able to survive being a vegetarian: I will go only to fine Frency bistro cafes when I go out for dinner, which happen to be adjacent to the best cheese store east of Doheney, and I will order the wine flight and cheese board while everyone else indulges in lamb chops and hangar steaks, and long after they have swallowed their last fleshy mouthful, and collapsed back into their chairs in post-parandial exhaustion, desperately ready to order tarte tatines and sorbet trios and little cups of espresso with a lemon-peel twist sunrise next to the paradisal sugar cubes on the saucer with the shining tiny silver spoon of Grace, I will still be savoring another bite of unpasteurized cow banon paired with pouilly-fuisse, or a reblochon with the 2004 pino noir from languedoc, perhaps with a smudge of guava paste against the crust, and I will portion out slices from my cheese board like a magnanimous medieval queen to whomever asks most nicely.  Dining out is an event for taste, not nourishment.  That’s what rice cakes and peaut butter are for.

In my match made in heaven, are we the cheese or the wine or the bread?  Is he my roquefort or am I his cabernet?  Or is he my parisian baguette–an essential, stable, ubiquitous staple, that nonetheless must always embody utter perfection in all of those facets particular to fine bread if it is truly to be able to uphold, support and enhance the flavor of any good cheese?  In which case am I that cheese, which must also attain its own facets of perfection if it is to fully realize all of those secret flavors and characters to be found only in commensality with its natural partner, bread?  Or am I the bread, thinking I am a cheese, searching in vain for a support that only I myself can lend to another?

Oh where are you my chewy, tangy, cripsy, nutty baguette?   Where are you my rare unpasteurized castelmagno?  Ah I shall search and search.  Maybe one day our flavors will merge in perfect harmony but until then I will wait on my little shelf, biking my bike and labbing my lab and wine shopping my wine shop and avoiding blogging my blog and singing my songs and being PERFECTLY FUCKING FINE WITHOUT YOU!!

No.  I am a bottle of soju that I buy with my friends at 1 in the morning with a six-pack of modelo from the liquor store downstairs because we’ve already burned through eight beers and a bottle of sake and five cigarettes and then we all go to the 4:00 yoga class the next day because none of us have jobs.

Choice Overload

I should know better than to look at graduate programs online when I’m tired.  I wonder: with a little ingenuity, could I have gotten placement in the UCLA urban planning master’s or PhD program?  Should I be working on that now instead of pursuing a career in biology?  I want to advance quickly, but I can’t do that without knowing what I want to study and I can’t figure out what I want to study without putting the proper years of work in.  I have to be careful of my interest in ecology and evolution: how seriously can I take the lasting influence of an old flame?  Maybe I should be focusing on economics courses and working towards an econ PhD program!  Would I be happier if I were in a geography graduate program?  What if I just got a job as a script reader at a studio and worked my way up to fantastic wealth and fame?  Would my time be better spent if I just enrolled at the musician’s institute and wrote songs all the time?

Like Coyote said: “Some things are easy for some people, but those same things are not easy for me.”

Also relevent: “You keep same-ing when you oughtta be changing…” but I think the opposite is true of me.  Not so much “I made my bed now I have to lay in it…” but there are SO many things out there that I could do well and be really happy with.

I’ve chosen one for now.  I MUST follow through on it.

But what if I’m only motivated because some cute guy told me I’m smart?  I need to learn to separate my interest in the guy from my interest in the subject.  I’m only attracted to other subjects because then the relationship is totally unambiguous, not because I’m actually more interested in those subjects.  SCIENCE!  Just the sound of the word makes me smile.  Not so much URBAN PLANNING!  or ECONOMICS!  MUSIC! does it for me too.  SONGWRITING!  I can unequivocally say I am passionately interested in each of those subjects.  I wish I had a hundred times to be in my 20s.  I wish I had millions of dollars so I could be a full-time student and not have to have a job.  I wish I had the kind of mind where I could learn independently and not have to be enrolled in school to keep going.  I wish we lived in a society where we don’t need a letter on a transcript to prove that we know enough about something to talk about it seriously with other people.

But none of those parameters apply to my reality so I have to keep on living, and honoring whatever song my heart keeps singing.

Zen and saving money

Brad Warner said that the thought process never goes anywhere.  We can cogitate and cogitate but when it comes time to act, all that thinking will turn out to have been totally irrelevant.  And if we follow a train of our own thoughts, we can’t expect them to lead us anywhere interesting, like a book would, because we’re just making them up.  (of course, the author is just making up the book.  Meaning and structure are relevant in fiction, require thought.  Why should this not apply to our lives?)

This has caused me to think a lot.  And every time I think I’ve got him foiled, think that there is a circumstance where musing or mulling imagining hypothesizing hypotheticalizing will get me somewhere, Brad turns out to be right after all.  All those thoughts are just running me down.  Yet thought is absolutely crucial to the practice of zazen, because understanding is its ultimate goal (I think).  How can we understand something if we don’t think about it?

The key difference is in following your thoughts versus exploring your thoughts.  A product of the practice of zazen would be a greater skill at exploring the currents of thought that come up naturally rather than damming them before they enter your mind and calling it a day, which is maybe how some people might interpret Brad’s comments on the issue.  Memories intrude, my heart pounds, a schedule pops up, plans are wrought and re-wrought in my brain, all without producing any action in the best cases but a lot of times in fact impeding the action of the tasks immediately in front of me, which have nothing to do with the deluge in my mind that’s keeping me from doing them well.

So if I only have a limited amount of money, and several trips I want to go on this year, plus I’m sure many others that haven’t even occured to me yet, how do I decide which plane ticket to buy except by thinking about it?  This is especially difficult because here “thinking” really just means elaborately daydreaming about what I’ll do in all of my potential destinations, even though I know that daydreams never come true, the reality always ends up forgotten, but I mean really forgotten, so that we don’t even have anything to compare our experiences with, if we’re lucky (and have been practicing zazen).

Books here, books there.

Oh, what a pang of homesickness I got when I went to check out ecology books at the SMC library and found out I could only have them for two weeks at a time! I miss you my old pal the Ivory Tower of yesteryear, with your term-long loans and virtually no penalties for flakiness. On the other hand, with you I spent four years fucking around, finally learning nothing more than that no matter what grand policy any government may enact in the hopes of making people be nice to each other, it never will work. Which I guess is a pretty good lesson to have learned by 22.

The real challenge for today will be studying for my bio exam thursday. Because even though I can read and enjoy and understand, like whatever evo-devo morphometrics levels of selection complex system wave action vertical zonation math science gobbeldygook, I’m still like “duh, what’s an energy activation barrier?” Those damn little molecules are just so TINY and I don’t understand where their capacity to do work comes from! Like, when ATP is converted into ADP all of a sudden I’m able to go on with my day? And not that I’m questioning the truth of this, but feedback inhibitor proteins and the production of certain psychoactive hormones in my pituitary makes the difference between me sitting in a chair crying all day and me getting up at five a.m. three days a week to bike 13 miles to school and back and LIKING IT? (Actually, what makes all the difference there is the coffee, though I’m trying hard to lay off that one).

Even a protist–all of whose chemical pathways has been or can be understood down to the last disulphide bridge in the rarest pathological quaternary structure protein–is in the final summation an unpredictable, spontaneous, dynamic, alive creature, whose existence is inexplicable and without logic. We can read the length of its entire DNA, we can map its cytoskeleton and track the motion of its motor proteins. We know about feedback inhibition of all sorts and we know that recognition and communication between them depends on nothing more than the shapes of their glycoproteins. And we know that these pathways and these structures are in their essence constant for every form of life on planet Earth, with only slight modifications and additions, yet there I am standing at the register at pinkberry, spending $10 I don’t have on soft serve with fruit for myself and Kelly, and there is no explanation for why. I understand that all life is, is the increasingly complex obedience to chemical signals. These chemical signals are math, they make sense, they are easy to model, and even to link to one another in a web, but somewhere down the column of figures there is a break, the system is no longer computable, the reasons are lost, the strings are cut and we start maybe wondering if this God person isn’t such a ridiculous idea after all.

I know I’m not going to get an A in my class by getting hung up on mystical questions, but for some reason I can’t get myself to understand molecules without them.

44 Kindergarteners have no future.

Have you ever looked at your kindergarten class photo, and wondered what all your little classmates are doing now, grown up as you are? They are all doing something. At this very moment, each of them is engaged in one activity or another. And as you look at each of their tiny faces on the paper in front of you, it is almost with a sense of clairvoyance. There you are, in the picture, with your teeth all a-scramble, grinning out at the you of the present moment. Did you know who you were smiling at back then? And as you think about the things you’ve done over the course of the day, the week, the last few years, you realize that your past right now is the little you’s future, and you are seeing it! You know it’s the same story with each one of the beings who were present at school on that day, too. This one is in med school now, that one works at Costco. You’re still best friends with that other one, but she’s been drinking too much lately. You can see everyone’s future and everyone’s past and you feel omnipotent.

Now look at a group of live kindergarteners, standing in front of you, shrieking, touching each other, staring into space. It is easy to conjure the same omniscience you felt when looking at that 20-year-old photograph. Is there a concert pianist standing in front of me? Which one will be a drug addict? These questions seem answerable, tangible, because you yourself were in kindergarden once, and now you are grown. Your future (which is now your present) seems to have revealed itself to you, seems always to have existed as it does now. Sometimes it even feels like it had been there waiting for you, and you walked into it, as you would walk into a room. So you wonder, What awaits these children? And you think, this is something it is possible to know, even if you yourself may lack the clarity of perception required for such knowledge. But it is not possible. Nothing awaits these children. There are no tasks they must complete, no lessons set for them to learn or people born for them to fall in love with. There is simply life, which is created completely new at every moment. It spills out into time like plumes of dye into clear water, with no path or sluice or aim. It is not only that the future cannot be known, but that it does not exist.

Immediate doubts, immediately

Dear Professor Everything,

This is so typical of me. I have really been enjoying your classes so far, and been looking forward to participating to my utmost ability in all seminars. Really, I have been looking forward to being an extraordinary student. Because you are such an extraordinary professor, and this is such an extraordinary class. However, as you may have noticed, my class attendance has been flagging. I feel that an explanation is in order, and maybe you can even help me sort out some of my thoughts (if it is not too much to ask). You see, I enrolled in this particular program under the impression that the material it contains would be of some importance, both to me and to everyone else in the world. I attended to the assignments and to the class materials with a sense of urgency–almost emergency! My ambitions (if I may call them that) to become a high school biology teacher, and to sharpen my skills as a critical thinker and observer of large-scale patterns of human strife, contained within them a conceptualization of the world as in need of, and as capable of recieving and making use of, the skills that I would actively develop over the duration of this course of study. Off and on for a long time now, and especially recently, I see that I may have been laboring under a mis-conceptualization. Is it too extremely naive for me to say that the people of the world simply are and that any “help” I think I may be able to give to them is in fact no more than a balm on my own conscience? And if what I am saying is the case, does that mean that my profession as a biology teacher is no more than selfish striving, a flaccid effort to brink the flood of hatefulness and ignorance that seems to be englufing our nation, our world? Is that flood even real, Professor? Or maybe, as Regina Spektor says, “people” really “are just people.” And, as says Eleanor Roosevelt, “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” All these people suffering in poverty, dying of AIDS, starvation, war, human trafficking, etc. are in fact the only people on Earth responsible for, and capable of, relieving their own suffering.  I project that they are suffering, because I myself would suffer were I in their place.  I strive to understand their suffering because it makes me feel better to do so.  But do I bring them any solace with my efforts?  No one can account for another person’s happiness.  It is only with the broadest strokes, and under the simplest understanding of the human mind that we can paint a picture of suffering on a massive scale and imagine what we can do to relieve it.  I pursue my studies with a sense of urgency, as I said before; I pursue them with a sense of obligation.  But it is an obligation that I bestowed upon myself.  I have chosen to act out my whole comportment, my sense of place in the world, based on this obligation.  I suppose that what I am ultimately asking is, is it right or necessary or possible for me to exert agency over my future, which I have thus far sculpted with an eye to exerting agency over my world, which is really our world, everyone’s world?  Please advise.  If you have any further questions, I am at your disposal, day or night.  Thank you.

Respectfully,

Theadora