Vic's Letter to Julie [housemate] in Her Interest in STAGE competition

https://www.cnsi.ucsb.edu/stage/index.html
My Goodness! I am ELLIGIBLE!

Hi Julie! I'm confused. Is it Julia or Julie?

Ya, I just checked it out. This competition is like a perfect match for my brain. Sometimes I feel like my mind finding the right university program is like a dating game. Mental compatibility, in this case, I suppose.

Thanks for telling me! I am so excited, I am going to do this STAGE competition, or so I am claiming right now. Cross my fingers I follow through this time.

I'd love to talk to you about it, if you have any time, I know you are busy. I think I'm going to scoop out an outline this weekend. I am talking with the film studies prof for my class, and it looks like I'm going to shove back the crab project a little bit, and work on a "script" for my last chapter of my book on the ecology of size. The basic point is that when you look human systems and all ecological systems in terms of biomass and energetics, "it all starts to look the same, even though it seems different." But it will basically continue this mental/car trip journey that I started in my long book, with Terra the biogeek and Buz the geobum, who explore the qualitative meaning of universal scaling laws in biology from early biological ooze to dinosaurs to now... and how fractal-based mathematics may actually serve as (not as predestination) a guide to optimally constructing and managing human-environmental ecosystems for the long-term. But the cool thing is that this conversation and series of epiphanies will all be done through dialogue, combined with a series of images/pictures I will design. I think this competition--though obviously I'm not going to win anything--will give me an excuse to FINISH old ideas. Amen. More on the graduate student psychology of arbitrary deadlines, woohoo!

I have another option for a script called "The Elephant and the Oak Tree," which is a "children's story for adults," that questions whether science is all about blind men feeling the parts of the elephant, or whether if you put all the parts together again, and take a step back to see the big picture again, whether it actually is an elephant after all. Because somehow, after all this writing, I am seeing an oak tree.... But then again, perhaps one script at a time.... Then back to the rock crab....

I must thank you so much for telling me about this. You really made my day. I even woke up my dad to tell him, I am so hyper! Sorry for the long email. ~Victoria