Home Sweet Mansion

The best part about getting out of L.A. is how incredibly beautiful it is everywhere else...



As you drive down the open highway the lights disappear, then the billboards, then all the noise, then all the people, and the world becomes so much bigger than you could possibly imagine. After growing up in one of the biggest cities in the world it's easy to lose sight of nature, of roots, of organic existence. But driving out here you see the raw, bare, open of the Earth and it altogether becomes a living thing, as it always has, but perceptively for the first time.



I loved my city life. I grew to appreciate the conceit, the noise, the crowds, the angst, the incessant dictation of the media. But out here, in this nothing, is peace, is civility, is calm and slow.




Over the drive out here my muscles released one by one into a pleasant looseness, weights of metropolitan tenseness built over 24 years, trickling off with the sweat of 110 degree heat. It was a purge of anxiety, of pollution environmental and subconscious. This is where I will find myself, where I will grow, where I will heal, and where I will become a better version of myself... far far away from the seething city lights.




Out here is everything I imagined bliss to be... that is, except for one thing...

When charting our route out here I decided to visit a place I've never been. Being great lovers of road trips my family's trekked over much of this half of the states but in the middle of that hot mess is a place that spelt disaster but I just had to see if for myself... just once...

..........

Take the worst crazy of LA, remove all the class, crank the temperature up 20 degrees and you have Las Vegas. You know you're there when through the car vent wafts a curdling stench of cheap hotel rooms, cheaper perfume, and cigarettes. It's the smell of sweat and desperation. Underneath the tacky lights and escort ads is a strict outward denial of and unconscious internal conformity to the illusion that is this city. Built on false hope, Las Vegas turns weakness and vulnerability into obscene profits. But the people, they come like little moths, tantalized by the flames, answering the call of a siren to the feeble minded.

And if the heat doesn't get you, the casino-hotel will. Lost in the labyrinth of our hotel as we twisted around dead ends in search of our alleged suite on the fifteenth floor, two similarly vexed and perplexed Scotsmen in matching kilts cried out, "How do you get out of here?! We've been here for three days!!!"

S: is that a hooker?
L: no, that's what over compensation looks like.

..........

After one short but much too long night in LV we hit the road again and just three days ago I finally arrived to cowtown USA, the great heartland, where I'm living in an old co-op style mansion. It's creaky and falling apart but the place has soul and you can't really beat $400/month for rent utilities and food.

So many elitist city folk (myself admittedly included not three years ago) have such narrow, harsh eyes for this land and its people. I hope in the next few years I can paint the real picture of life out here for all of you, from the converted eyes of a cosmopolitan girl attempting to wrangle the mid west country.

I can say for starters everyone here is every bit as nice, polite, and courteous as the word on the street, and it is doing wonders for my disposition. I almost feel it's illegal to get upset here, and I rather like that pressure to be good.

School starts in a week... we'll just have to see how long this peacefulness lasts...

Sequoia

Driving around with my grandmother today running errands she turned to me, after several wrong turns and swapped names, and in heavy breaths remarked how heartbreaking it would be to lose your memory, as hers makes its inevitable slow decline...

As my time here in my hometown comes to a close I have been preoccupied with the move that I have hardly given a moment's thought to what I'm leaving behind, as I make my dreams visionary. I am thrilled to be disappearing off into the great, exciting, and above all terrifically new world of medical school... but I find it curious. All I've ever wanted since I can remember is to go far far away from this place, to get away from constant reminders of lives past -- and now I'm leaving with the fantasy of blazing trails in neuroscience, with a specific aim at making a dent in the treatment and prevention of Alzheimer's.

Nothing terrifies me more than losing my memory. I do not believe in an afterlife, I believe in here and now, in legacies and footprints. What I cherish most is my mind and the entire capacity therein -- which means all my memories, good, bad, pleasant and painful. All I have is my catalogued experience of this world and I am a bit ashamed to have desired so strongly to erase, to run and deny.

I hope I may have the courage one day to grow roots, really plant myself, and embrace all the emotional costs that I am of the luxury to bare.

--

I will miss this tired place, but I look brightly to what lay beyond the great wide open before me...

Blue/Boo-boo

Some clean their slates in ocean tides, some wipe them clear come the new year chime, but for me I blow it up in gun powder clouds, illuminated by fire lit skies. This Independence Day we caught a stray, chasing shadows in circles, but always homeward bound, bound by collar, bound by name. Scared perhaps, or better, freed, we trapped him and carried him back to his private prison paradise.

Home can't hold me anymore. I've out grown this place. My memories track me everywhere I go, a face, a heartbreak, a promising innocence crushed by elusive truth. I'm throwing mine up to the dragons in the sky to burn my slate, dry it up, crumble and toss. I'm not running this time, I'm spreading my wings. It'll be in the wind, silent, reminding, a trace of dissolving bread crumbs. I'll find my own way. I have no home, I have no name, no face to be remembered by, just a life, a dream, and a will to succeed. The stuff legends are made of.

Full of emptiness, yearning to be filled, I've lit the fuse to a long goodbye. This is a new door, a new faith, a new life. And this one is mine. This time I'll learn to fly.

THE DOCTOR IS IN

It was one of those moments where time stops for a minute and you're convinced this can't be for real because things don't just fall into place like that, you don't get what you want just because you want it badly enough. That stuff doesn't happen. That stuff is for dreams and fantasy.


Well,


Welcome to my fantasy.


There was a message on my answering machine and I thought to my rejection-weathered self how great it would be if it were for me.... and... well... it was! I'm now officially a member of the Cowtown med school class of 2014!

and cue the tears. ok now stop. I had worked my ass off. Ya damn right I got in! Just two days prior I was talking to MC on the phone about how you just gotta laugh at the madness of the world, and also how beautiful it is that nothing is assured and there are no rules. Things just happen the way they happen. She had told me how she was so upset with life, that of all people I wasn't getting what I'd be working so hard for -- so you can imagine the joy I felt to talk to her again two days later with such life changing news. Finally! A breakaway! Like the fates had fallen asleep and someone had slipped me an ace by accident. Was I really going to get away with this? With having my dreams come true? Is this supposed to happen?

Ya damn right.

Next stop: MED SCHOOL, BABY!

This Sentence Is False

Apparently people have been slowly pulled off that dreadful waitlist in cowtown, none of whom have been me, yet. So the agonizing wait continues... and while my academic future hangs in limbo for going on a year now, the things I thought I knew certainly and surely, about myself, about human nature, about life, have had time to crumble a bit under the pressure. The boredom with this in-between chapter of my life, this intermission of will and want so to speak, has plagued me with my old mischief. My concentration has been subject to a drive by shooting of misery but being a veteran of this blurred vision of reality I know better than to succumb to its wrath. Instead of clawing the dates off the calender in vain hope, I thumb through pages of research papers and contemplate things like the liar paradox entitled here. Acceptance is key. My mind has never been quiet and I've stopped fighting the flood of thoughts, instead tending to them, ordering them to fetch far reaching theorems of concept and query, and poke it back with that same painstaking vigor with which it keeps me up at night.

On my numbing and nerdy quest for distraction I came across two things that thoroughly tickle me pink. The first is the WMC followed by Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

As a kid, born in the bloom of computer technology, I was heavily influenced by this growing dependency on electronics. And when I say influenced I mean gently horrified. The way my father appeared to keep his memory in the sim card of his PalmPilot unnerved me. It wasn't long before I was convinced that the more we used our technology, the less we used our brains and that they'd just sort of shrivel up from neglect, a little pruney marble rolling around in that hollow chamber resting on our necks, with little googley eyes bobbing around aimlessly. I became obsessed with my memory. Alzheimer's to this day is the worst disease I can think of, for without your memory what are you but a lump of uncertain bloody flesh with a bland and colorless personality? It is the worst nightmare. At some point in grade school I had this idea that if I wrote anything down my brain would get lazy and fat and I'd be totally useless, until dementia rendered me finished. So I stopped writing things down. I thought, if I forgot my homework assignments well then I'd just fail out of class, and I didn't want that did I? Then freshman year of college I remembered a story about this girl who didn't take any notes, just would sit there and listen, absorb, and after getting over the initial competitive jealously, I thought to myself, I can do that! Of all my classes to test this out in I chose Anatomy and Physiology. I sat in the second row, put my feet up on the first, and for an hour, funneling sour gummy worms into my eager, gnashing teeth, I would be the best sponge I could be. I cannot take full credit for the success of this venture and must admit I owe much of my A in the class to Dr. S who was a comic genius. Certainly he offended half my classmates, but to me he was a hero of science. I remember our cumulative final was just 50 true and false questions citing that he could hardly tolerate reading half-assed short answer essays from 60+ amateurs. While everyone was pissed by this announcement I on the other hand, with no notes from which to study, was totally enthralled. I think if I had failed that class my perception of brains and memory would be entirely swayed but I rocked that class and found the allure in testing my limits... It is doubtful I'll ever be up to the World Memory Competition level but the idea is inspiring to say the least.

Next discovery is Gödel's incompleteness theorems. I will not pretend to know a lick about mathematics, a subject that comes second only to history in my worst area of academics, but I have a great appreciation and respect for this field (as I do history, and pretty much everything else I can't master). Gödel is just one reason why. Given that math is a tool for measuring and understanding our world, it follows in logic that philosophically, mathematics explores deeper questions about space, time, and in a sense, spirituality. Take his theorem. In over generalized, layman's nutshell of terms, Gödel proposes that in math there may be some axioms or propositions that are true and yet, unprovable. The implications of this in just the realm of faith alone are outstanding. Sure you can argue that there is not likely a cross over of disciplines with this particular theorem, but it does make one wonder. Just this past weekend I was tutoring my student in quantum mechanics in chemistry and had to explain to her why we can't know both the position and momentum of a particle, and that it has something to do with the dual nature of matter (both wave and particle). This too leaves me flooded with questions, questions about human duality of nature, conscious versus subconscious, instinct versus reason, and so forth.

Though art is at my core, science is my muse. And when I can keep out of trouble long enough I find such incredible treasures in both.

**inspired by RadioLab's Limitations episode**

Rush Like Water

While waiting for our trial subject to finish her psych/cog evals, my research partner showed me this video piece by Bill Viola. Though I didn't want to mention it at the time, I found something eerily familiar about this image.

"Acceptance" it's called.

It reminds me of all those dark, twisted parts of me I've tried for years, to no avail, to cut out. It evokes that sickly gut feeling I get when I'm approaching my limit but keep a straight face and just keep on going, pushing myself, almost senselessly, and always out of fear of admitting weakness. This stubbornness has been a blessing at times, leading me places I never dreamed I'd go, but then again, I've got the scars to prove it. Much of how far I've come has been an uphill battle, and mostly with myself.

What about weakness is so terrifying? What is so wrong with being flawed, being human? What's funny is I just wrote my personal statement about exactly that, what it means to be human, redefining it, and yet, what terrifies me most is accepting that I am just human, nothing more, nothing less. I said I believed we're a strong animal, and I do believe that. I believe a little determination goes a long way, but oh what I would give if I could just fall down sometime, turn over, expose my tender underbelly, and not fear that some fanged monster's going to swoop down and rip my guts out. I'm exhausted, and have been for years. But I fear it, as I suspect many do. We fear vulnerability. We carry our bitterly scorned pasts into every new venture, an overly generalized explanation or warning, when it's already gone, tucked away in its own absent context. But fool me once, right?

What of this other thing I wrote about in my statement, this interdependence part? Taking that idea out of my academic essay setting, what of the beautiful thing where two people are vulnerable together? What of that beautiful thing where two people turn over and expose their tender underbellies, and aren't eaten alive, but accept each other, scars and all? It's never a promise, always a risk, and a huge one at that. And a resurrection from a broken heart doesn't happen over night. I mean, we're human after all...

But one can only hope that one day that quiet, internal, obtrusive wall, whatever it may be, in whatever realm of our lives, will just rush over us like water and we'll finally be done with it, free at last, free at last, free at last.

For the Sake of Your Infinite Abyss

Knitted Brain by Psychiatrist Karen Norberg of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts

When does knowing something with purely emotional conviction transcend the crazy that it is to become sheer brilliance?

When is stealing a brain on a hunch that it'll reveal neurological secrets worth losing your job, your credibility, in the very same field you're stealing it for? I guess that's a question for Thomas Harvey. This rogue pathologist high tailed it out of Princeton with Einstein's brain believing it to tell the fortunes of the brilliantly minded... perhaps he was mad with genius, or perhaps he just got lucky, but his partners in crime eventually found something.

They found something big, that made big waves in the neuroscience community, the very same I've managed to get myself tangled up in, and blissfully so I might add. But it is things like this, big discoveries like this that can happen in a moment's time that... just... change... everything.

In anatomy, the thing we know least about is our brain, our powerhouse, the home of our identity. It makes me wonder, how can we possibly know as much as we do about all the rest when the thing that controls all these other squishy, bloody parts is such a great mystery to us. Our brains are this infinite abyss of secrets and magic right now. There's so much there to learn and explore, leaving so much behind to be redefined, corrected, transformed.

I have this love hate relationship with this science. It's this immensely passionate and rewarding relationship but I can see it completely consuming me. But maybe that's ok. Actually, maybe that's the best part. It feeds my brain, it intrigues my soul, and it gives my life a purpose. It also teases me, it builds me up to break me down again. I trip over my eagerness, I wonder if my love is in vain, if it'll throw me a bone. It owes me nothing. There are plenty of scientists in the sea, but the chance of a breakthrough, of progress, of change, of something so much bigger and better than what it or myself has now keeps me going, keeps me chasing that impossible dream.

For me too, I suppose, some things are worth losing yourself over...