394. Generic Question Reality / Stokastika Banners for Anything in Particular

I am so energized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Conference in Chicago, Illinois that I am huffing and puffing out some generic internet relativistic identity artwork for all potentially future purposes.

265. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Lulu Logos and the Blank Sheet

Lulu Logo from the http://www.lulu.com website I used within the Question Reality manuscript.
Lulu Logo from the http://www.lulu.com website I used within the Question Reality manuscript. Black and white version.
Lulu Logo guidelines sheet from http://www.lulu.com. PDF file is below.
http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/4.Lulu2007StyleSheet.pdf.

The Infamous and Symbolic Blank Page. I used a blank page pdf file frequently in order to place sheets on the right page. I also added a blank page at the end of the manuscript, as requested by Lulu book formatting guidelines.

264. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Final End Credits, Discovery of Gyorgos Nacon, the Tipping Point to Publication

Some names in this blog had to be changed for the protection and privacy of certain individuals.
Final End Credit Image for Question Reality manuscript.

Ancestral Storytelling. Final End Credit Image for Question Reality manuscript.
Poem. Final End Credit Image for Question Reality manuscript. LeMisEncin means "Boy-of-the-oak-tree-mind-world."
Terra and Buz. Two "free-and-easy-wanderers" under an oak tree in the forest. Living in a dream, dreaming a Reality.

PDF file of above Poem: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/6.livinginadyingworldPOEM.pdf.

"Living in a Dying World." Written in April of 2008. The Paradox of Living Today to Create a New Tomorrow, but Living Today as if it were your Last. Human beings are creatures of survival who live day to day... but some have the capacity to design alternative Realities and Futures in their minds, because they have lots of free time beside worrying about resources and housing and disease and other basic necessities.

A subliminal thought in April 2008. I finally worked so hard. Struggled so hard to finally get where I wanted to get. It has been a struggle since 2005. And now here I am, where I need to be, and I have no one to share this with.... Soon enough, I made a discovery.

The poem was not included in Question Reality.

First page of short story: "Living in a Dying World: Encounters with a Human Plasma Lamp." Had not finished, though it was a "bam" of a start. Please see pdf file of the first four pages of the story: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/8.livinginadyingworldsubsetsharedwta.pdf.
The story was not included in Question Reality. I first started writing the story upon meeting

I have come to learn that the human mind did not evolve millions of years to adapt to the chaos of modern university bureaucracy. I have come to realize a core central organizing principle upon the organization of the human mind lies upon coming to acquire and care about another "random" human being for an arbitrary stretch of space and time. In short, your mind does not marry the university. That is impossible and psychologically destructive. I already tried that. Your mind marries one or a very few select number of people. And somehow, on a surface value label to society, you are affiliated with "the university."

~*~*~ My final dedications of the publication of QR were toward the respects of Gyorgos Nacon, another Tipping Point of my life (major tipping points include Wendy "the angel" who was the first environmental indicator towards beating anorexia, and others already mentioned, Seth, Dayton, Jackson, even Armand, essentially people who have shocked me into an altered trajectory of my life).

It is so weird upon encountering Gyorgos. "You will only perceive unless you are ready to perceive." There were so many environmental conditions and life experiences that NEEDED to have happened in order for me to perceive and appreciate and grasp the existence of Gyorgos--I had to know multimedia art (including music and film), I had to get into graduate school at UC Santa Barbara (acquire some bureaucratic stability). In a semi-frightened manner, I told Gyorgos one time, "It's a good thing I didn't meet you, even a MONTH ago (before April 2008). So much environmental conditionality, I probably would have not had the capacity to mentally perceive and appreciate you.

It was a strange Sunday night in May. I think that day he had a conversation with someone by the name of "Noga" on the phone. But that night, either I called or Gyorgos called. No, Gyorgos called. We hung out the day before and he was very worried about the future. But that night on the phone call, it seemed like he was telling me these things that were rationalizing his brain out of Future Worry into living in the Present--we mentally meandered through concepts of zenning out, free-and-easy-wandering in the forest, accounting for all factors and taking the best possible routes is the best and perhaps only way how to learn in a holistic sense. Otherwise, the specialized linearity of universtiy tracks does no service to true "education." Go CCS! Then we discussed issues on Truth and Reality, and that in the end Reality is all relative in terms of who knows what and who perceives what and how--whether in colors and blurry eyes and strange interpretations of light by the optic nerve. He used the words "Question Reality" without even knowing that my manuscript was entitled Question Reality.

I was literally in a state of SHOCK. Gyorgos Nacon, INDEPENDENT OF MY THINKING AND MY WRITING, came to the very same core conclusions and questioning deeply embedded within my decaying three-year-old manuscript. In the middle of a stressful quarter, I had managed to listen to over the phone some of the most beautiful things I had ever heard. As if this internal locked, core Reality of my mind had been unleashed and projected as an External Reality that took form of the mind and form of Gyorgos.

Okay. I'm done.

I'm over it.

It's no longer a mystery.

I have been figured out.

He figured me out.

Gyorgos figured me out.

From the core to the tips.

I am no longer a mystery.

Gyorgos questions reality

and he was doing this before each of us knew the other existed.

Talk about independent origin of thought!

Question Reality is so old news.

I need to get rid of it.

Right away.

Oh shxt.

I need to move on.

Oh shxt.

Oh shxt!

As if my mind invented "Buz" as a fictitious, conglomerate character in my life.

And then to discover a Buz that fits all the parameters in REAL LIFE?! That's a bit...

voodoo to me. I didn't get all the details down. I didn't think Buz would be so into Chinese philosophy. But now it also makes sense why I got along SO WELL with my Chinese friend Talei (my other "soulmate," someone who inspires me to write and do art). Even though she was a business major from China (and me a Greek-American school geek, what striking differences in life experience!), we both ended up coming to the same conclusions when I was writing QR. I think I can now describe myself as a sheltered, Greek-American bombarded with and education fragmented Western Thought, then re-organizing and synthesizing this "western science-knowledge" with the holistic, philosophical matrix/frameworks of "Eastern Philosophy" (e.g Chinese medicine and integration of mind-body interactions, Feng shui and integration of human-environment interactions). Eastern Thought still has some lore and superstition and and strange stuff in it, but I took the "reductionist, tangible, scientifically-derived" data from fragmented Western Thought and then pigeonholed-plugged it into the Eastern Matrix. I guess my evolution professor is philosphically Eastern. It's like my most influential CCS professors as an undergrad are super-systematic, secularized versions of Eastern philosophy/religion. Isn't that a kick?

Wow. It's nice to start finding the generic context of my QR habits.... (Gyorgos tells me there also needs to be a synthesis of practices of Western Medicine and Eastern Medicine, reductionist, bandaid oriented practices versus holistic cures?). Chinese medicine is a major set of "alternative" medical practices....

I also find it ironic that I devised Question Reality, and then I RETROACTIVELY discover the references to the components of the holistic way of how I think and solve problems.

Hmmm. I also got along very well with a professor of Anthropology at UC Riverside who studied Chinese cultures and human-environmental relations. He told me of the analogy of the landscape as a "dragon" or "tiger." When there were earthquakes or landslides, it would be thought that the holistic "dragon" was "sick" and "upset."

Back to getting on track from this epiphany. That strange, unexpected Sunday night, I went over to Gyorgos' house and told him that everything he told me on the phone the last half house was so beautiful, it should have been voice recorded and placed on the radio. Same for all the things he told me about human consciousness and phosphenes at the Painted Caves up in the mountains of Santa Barbara. I stared at Gyorgos in awe. I was stripped mentally naked. No one had ever done that to me before.

That night, in the middle of May, in the middle of the Chaos of my own Mind--stripped away to its purity, I made a firm decision. I need to publish Question Reality. I am done.

Before this random Sunday in May, Gyorgos and I would talk a couple of times a week, either on the phone or in person. He would peel these layers--ever since we met in late April--and he started resurrecting every dormant aspect of my mind, piece by piece, until my entire Reality had been altered and reborn and activated. A mind had remained stuck and dormant and uninspired for the last three years. I can't help thinking of the film "Awakenings" with Robin Williams. Ya. That's how I felt.

After the first week of meeting Gyorgos, I started writing a story called "Living in a Dying World" but I had to stop because I started realizing that every conversation wtih this guy was rapidly expanding my oak tree. The short story ended up being like the Question Reality manuscript. After that, I resurrected the rock crab film. Which I am in high anxiety because I started realizing I need to do some writing before I can resume film-making. I have too many demons that need to be laid to rest and I can't focus right now on a subset of demons before the other demons are placed in their appropriate context.

So, essentially, every single conversation I had with Gyorgos, he kept peeling my layers of rot and chaos... until that night. He hit the core. And exposed the pure stuff. The multi-faceted prism.

A month later, I self-published Question Reality on Lulu, and my final devotion was to LeMisEncin, the-boy-of-the-oak-tree-mind-world. My mind slowly started converting chaos back into its organized context... one small step at a time. One word, one line segment of a drawing. One scan into the computer. One small step at a time... till even today.

Whoa.

I feel like I'm living an enchanted, mystical Isabelle Allende House of Spirits novel. I'll immerse myself in it while it lasts.

I still think to this day this whole experience has been out-of-body. I have accumulated so many chaotic layers in isolation and I didn't know a single human being on this entire planet could have the capacity to strip me mentally naked and start helping me organize my thoughts, piece by piece, through mere conversation and "hanging out."

I remember encountering a quote stating that the most ultimate and difficult and treacherous, yet rewarding task is to convince someone to trust you (to bend and take a dip in the dance, to some degree). Trust came in form of the word "love" in this quote. I could agree that finally the accumulation of my last three years of failures has led to the discovery of one success, the finding of a REAL, living, external manifestation of Question Reality: Gyorgos Nacon.

At one point, he mentioned that Albert Einstein said you couldn't use the laws of physics (gravity?) to explain two people falling in "love." Whatever "love" means. Let the system of interaction manifest itself organically without any pre-existing conceptions and definitions and stereotypes. Let it be what it is and what it flows and on-going manifests. Start blank slate and let the order be perceived retroactively. Welcome to the College of Creative Studies in ALL aspects of life: "Don't put me in a box. I'll create and define my OWN box. We'll create our OWN box."

I thought the practice of caring for someone else was a "selfish" practice (the "Sith), but I didn't know that caring for someone else would be so SELFLESS (a more "Jedi" way). I guess it depends on how big the bower is for the person's brain you latch onto. Caring for another person can be a very selfish activity, especially if this person is self-absorbed and net-self-destructive.

I am grativated towards people of "chronic inspiration"--heavy concentrations of unaccounted-for ideas. People of immense "intellectual wealth." Hence, I love geologists in general.... I suppose I measure intellectual wealth by quality and quantity and choice of ideas in one's brain, combined with the structure of the connectedness (and degree of connectedness) of the mental fabric. How big is the bower of the bowerbird? And how structured and sturdy and organized is it? I take organization over surface-value aesthetic. Any day.

Gyorgos and I live in a state of paradox. We live for the day, but we both tend to live to build a greater reality beyond our own selves. Both the same mentality and perception of space and time. Amazing.

I decided that writing my brain out is most important. It is futile for me to focus on "marketing" and "mass producing myself" because the chances that people will discover and appreciate my work are much greater when I am deceased rather than being alive. So the most important thing right now for me is to maintain my own self-sanity of my mind. So it is important to stick to my principles and spend my time writing over marketing. And to think the presence of someone could extract the purityof my thoughts from the chaos!

Then again, you only come to truly know and understand and appreciate a Substance on the condition of its Absence and Loss--temporary or permanent. Absence and Loss is a recipe of pain and withdrawal that requires the necessity of growth--to fillling our mental constructs of Void--living and rejoicing in ephemerality.

I almost lost everything. I almost lost my own life. I had to grow... out of my own fight for survival.

Even those experiences allow me to appreciate the presence of Gyorgos in my life.

Just with Talei (who returned to Beijing, China and who I have frustratingly lost touch with), I am expecting and anticipating Loss once again. I will embrace and celebrate and thrive in the ephemerality of a mental niche space of Gyorgos to which I can exist in and allow me to become what I was truly internally meant to become.... There are such few places on this planet for me to live anymore.... And it is in the mind of another human being....

Through the premise of freedom, I (we?) have found some degree of bondage. If I lost Gyorgos today, I would be forever changed to know there existed a human being besides my own Self who lived by his principles--and not out of his own convenience. My own memories of him and knowledge of his existence would forever change me and remind me that every single day I need to just go one step at a time, move forward one step at a time... based on my INTERNAL PRINCIPLES OVERPOWERING EXTERNAL FORCES. Gyorgos made me feel like a human again, not a lost bean caught in a pre-existing bean fight since the day I existed on this planet. Let's just go wander in the oak trees while everyone else resumes this pointless bean scramble.

I cannot help to flashback to the end of Fight Club, "Where is my mind?" soundtrack. Amidst destruction, of the human psyche, the human soul, the human environment, there is a possibility to find construction, to find bonding amidst chaos, to find resurrection and the illusion of some form of reconstruction. At least in my mind. It all starts with ideas. It all starts in my mind. And maybe one day it will manifest as an external Reality. At least through Gyorgos Nacon it does.

Poem flashback, "It takes a great loss / to make a great find. / Through this tragic death / I found my gracious life."

And who knows what is next? That is where Fight Club was left off.

I write a lot about absence, loss, resurrection, addiction, withdrawal. The Blank Slate. Reconstruction. On Death and Dying. Proximal and Ultimate. The multi-factorial Addiction and Withdrawal and Re-assorted Addiction. Life and Death and Life and Death. The Universality of Order of the Human Mind. The Universality of Shifts of the Environment. The Death and loss in immediacy of my own life. A friend. My grandmother. Cat-Kat my most favoritist cat in the whole universe. New theories replacing old ones in science--metabolic scaling laws in biology and sustainability. Death and loss in terms of environmental and human-induced disasters. Death and loss in terms of mass accumulations and mass extinctions of Pimp Fyzzle T-rex. My mental pet megafauna. I have a theory that T-rex was coated pink with purple pokadots. We just don't have the data for skin color otherwise.

It is apparent there is a universal formula toward the shifts of the human mind, individually, collectively (human groups, scientific intersubjectivity), the human environment, Life on Earth... drastic or subtle, wiping the mind and the environment blank slate through shock and complete environmental overhaul (or through gradual shift, which is a lot more subliminal and psychologically undetectacle due to habituation and repetition). And recolonizing the mind with an entire new coral reef/bryozoan fabric of ideas after this shock. It's a matter of choice and chance environmental circumstance as to what thoughts re-colonize the human mind? Individually and collectively. Why in the hxll Milton Freedman? Why don't people just Question Reality for themselves? Other blips: environmental problems are a mass-accumuation-effect of individual psychology. environmental psychology and mass accumulation effects. human ecology.

I will manifest these ideas of the Blank Slate through a collection of poetry as well as an essay for a proposal of a non-profit group called Alternative Addictions. Making a non-profit group will make my theory instantly practical and applied to daily life--in a satirical human sense. It will wipe out AA, OA, FAA, Disastroholics Anonymous. You get the point, eh?

263. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Initial Disclaimers and Open Peer Review System

Pdf File of Introductory Disclaimer can be found here:
http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/2.disclaimeropenpeerreviewFINAL.pdf
The official certificate of Attempting to Achieve Commonsenseology: individuals finding a consistent way of thinking and living in this modern world. Included in the QR manuscript. On the promotion of preserving individual uniqueness and Individual Intellectual Identity (III) in a society of mass production and homogenization and standardization. A concept that is emphasized at the College of Creative Studies (CCS) at UC Santa Barbara and perhaps even overlaps with the philosophies of the Montessori schools. It seems like the philosophy of the Montessori school is essentially my basic philosophy of film-making: "Teaching people to teach themselves."
Terra's mind (Victoria's extroverted fictional self) is Institutionally Unincorporated. In a megascale society with bureaucracies riddled with corruption, being IU might be a good thing.

Buz the "geobum" has got an Fud in Commonsenseology, a pun on the Ph.D. Essentially a mockery in what does a "Ph.D" actually mean anymore nowadays: knowing more and more and less and less of nothing?

A Question Reality rough draft banner requesting help as "open peer review." Placed on the IQR website, but might soon be taken down.
A Question Reality rough draft banner requesting help as "open peer review." Placed on the IQR website, but might soon be taken down.
A Question Reality rough draft title page requesting help as "open peer review." Placed on the IQR website, but might soon be taken down.
A Question Reality rough draft title page requesting help as "open peer review." Placed on the IQR website, but might soon be taken down.

It's ironic to think that these three written pages represent three years of pre-meditation. Scary, huh?! And finally, with the help of my friend, I had enough clarity of thought to extract the pure, orderly thoughts from the chaos that has accumulated in my brain.

I had to write this Introductory Disclaimer because several factors were concerning me:

(1) I was overcoming the whole "perfect book" editing and formatting. I started to think about the works of other great philosophers--Plato, Descartes, even Darwin--and I bet even THEIR manuscripts weren't even perfect in publication. I found a typo sentence in the manuscript earlier this morning! Ooops. Anyway, author Robin Kilgore additionally encouraged me to "publish with imperfection." The most important concern is to communicate with others and get your ideas out.

(2). I have been struggling with the lack of intellectual promiscuity across industries, which may be in part due to the "immense size" of systems and individual humans reach "saturation points" in terms of the number of other humans they can network with. For example, the old story goes that the university remains within the "ivory towers" without meddling much with society. Additionally, the New York publishing houses have their own community networks and it is very difficult to get into their ingroups. To think that I was being peer-reviewed by New York publishing affiliates and a small group of university professors frightened me. I thought the audience I was trying to convince, or moreso "please" was too small and their perception of Reality may not be that accurate (let alone them projecting their perceptions upon my own work just to get a stamp of approval on my forehead)!

I feel that my intellectually creative output (writing, multi-media art) should be accessible to a wider, "alternative audience" that spans across narrow, specialized industries and professions. It will help "objectify" the peer-review process. As a professor epically stated in response to the publishing of a faulty biomarker article in the journal Science, "Who peer-reviewed this paper? A monkey?!!" At one point in a dinner with Dr. Oran Young's lab, in attempt to describe or identify myself, I labeled myself, "environmental media, environmental philosophy. No, using environmental media as an excuse to do environmental philosophy. No. Okay. Environmental psychology." My roommate, Julie, finally approved. "Yes! You are using environmental media as a way to do environmental philosophy." I am essentially covering my xss with an "alternative audience" since my research is going to be more holistic in its properties--which is a head-butting problem when the university is largely riddled with specialists.

(3). The last issue is the concept of "interactivity" in media. Is communication a one-way or two-way street when reading books? When getting a book fresh from a printing press, it seems like the writing is static and authoritative and set-in-stone. Having websites to compliment the book makes the work more interactive. In addition, I am advocating an "open peer review process" and asked the reader to be a part of the collaborative process--also to be an editor and criqituer (I did this additionally because I "Victoria the poor graduate student" didn't have enough money to hire an editor).

Don't get me wrong. The Commonsenseology Certificate is not about promoting people to "think like Victoria" (people can absorb my work, and take it or leave it) but is emphasizing the concept of being skeptical and thinking for oneself.

In a world of globalization, homogenization, standardization, and mega-bureaucracy, it is increasingly difficult to pursue individual, independent endeavors uninfluenced by political and bureaucratic forces! The pursuit of science is corrupted to some degree merely because the individual scientist is inescapably embedded within a university political matrix. I know I am repeating myself, but I wrote Question Reality on LEAVE OF ABSENCE, aka "GRADUATE STUDENT SEBATTICAL." I had the opportunity to pursue whatever I wanted to for an entire year without the expectations of the university in my head. The true pursuit of science independent of mega-bureaucratic influence is close to impossible now.

So, in conclusion, these are the above thoughts and concerns that drove me to write the initial disclaimers and suggest and open peer review system early on in my Question Reality manuscript.

262. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Universal Devotions Page, Poem

PDF file for http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/2.devotionsfinal.pdf.

Original version of the Devotions poem.

It's amazing to think that nearly several aspect of life has layers and layers and layers beneath it. For example, I was writing Question Reality to piece together the barebone "matrix/structural" elements of my fragmented mind in concern of human relations to the environment. But an additional layer was the EXPERIENCES and ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS of writing QR. Plus, three years of events have passed by since the actual widespread public distribution of the writing. Even more layers!

Considering the environmental conditions of writing this Devotions poem, I think I started writing parts of it when I was at UCLA in 2003-2004. I submitted a set of 100 poems to the University of California Press, which obviously was rejected for publication. I looked back at my poems and realized how childish and babyish they were. I do say the first 100 repetitions of any activity are probably crxp, but the 101st repetition might render something VERY cool. I think my better poems started routinely cranking out as soon as I hit poem 101. Though in the very beginning, I wrote some very powerful poems without even realizing it. My first best poem I ever wrote was "6 Billion Ways on How to View a Moderate Cube of Space" which accounts for the Prism of Place Effect. I submitted this poem to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and was informed that this poem reached the "finalist" pile. Which is just hippy dippy for me being a scientist writing poetry (sounds sinful, doesn't it?).

Coming to think of it, whenever I come to achieve something that is outside the realm of my parents' value systems or knowledge regime, I don't seem to get the same satisfaction of completion. For example, when I created art for an entire year outside the context of my father's research, I only derived self-meaning. It was then until I was able to associate this creative science writing and art with my father's research (as well as returning to the university), an upwelling of satisfaction and motivation and desire and willpower arose within my depths. I felt the same way with 5k and 10k runs. I kept winning awards in my age division (when I was 18 or 19) but I somehow received no satisfaction from it. Maybe it was also because I was kicked out of high school as well. I guess you can call this behavior as "intellectual homing behavior." Thanks Bub. I'm addicted to my parents' value systems. Thanks a lot!

To get back to the Devotions poem, I had to come back to the piece about three times before I could complete it. I know I had major segments constructed before I started writing QR in the summer of 2004, but I remember coming back to it during the 2004-2005 year to revise the poem. I think Devotions is one of those poems that kept inspiring me to write the book.

It is definitely a cumulative appreciation poem: "from my self, to my environment," which essentially thanks everyone I had come to know at that point in my life. The first segment of the poem represents my family, friends, and teachers, and those few people who made me go through the final "tipping point" convincing me to write Question Reality--most notably Dr. Paul Dayton, Dr. Jeremy Jackson, and Seth. The Tipping Point People, I shall call them. Getting burned made me stronger, "No one can truly get to know me, unless they have questioned reality." Getting burned forced me to put myself together, to package my mind and its perception of reality. Wow, maybe that's why Tariel understands my brain, another questionner of reality. Hmmm. Tariel was the final tipping point. And then the wave crashed over and QR was published.

The second part of the poem is trying to identify the potential audience: the Listeners, the Skeptics, the Openminded, the Desperate--and hopefully QR becomes "a synthesis that might make sense to someone out there." The Discovery and the Order of the Obvious. Well, dxmn it, someone's got to do it. Order the Obvious!

The Devotions poem was a great way to start a manuscript--at least for my staying inspired to write it.

260. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Introductory Comments, Why Question Reality

Here is the pdf file: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/1.whyquestionreality.pdf
The Starbucks coffee cup I always wished I had published, but of course, I am a nobody so MegaStarbucks did not consider what I had to say. My Ph.D. thesis is called "What's the point?" aka Question Reality. It's about time somebody asked that question!
Here is the pdf file: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/2.universityoaktreefragmentation.pdf
The next thing I have to do is overlay an aerial photograph of the UC Santa Barbara campus with a unified and broken Rubik's cube. Anything that represents fragmentation! Julie Ekstrom's diagrams are beautiful! Representing spatial fragmentation of ocean management!

Pdf file for the query letter: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/3.shortestquerylettersever.pdf
A very short one I wrote. I will discuss this more when I talk about how to write a "book proposal" in a future blog.

Pdf file of the poem: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/4.importantakemomentconsiderfinal.pdf.
It's ironic that this poem is so dense, but I only ask to "take a moment and consider." The question is "how long is the moment?" Question Reality is not a light, sleezy airport novel you read in a distracting airplane while being mooshed in the middle isle. Question Reality is dense and is one of those books you read straight for a week in isolation. Much like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. Writing the above poem was also a very low moment for me in the fall of 2005. I just got off the phone with an editor from the University of California Press and basically the guy was telling me that "I was too young" (24 at the time) and that I needed to wait and get some credentials if I wanted to consider publishing anything. He was absolutely discouraging, and that was the last thing I needed to hear, especially after a year of very hard work in relative isolation. It was the first time I was discriminated opportunities by the University of California based on age. I am still upset to this day.

After this phone call, I was alone in the house in Riverside, California, and I started crying out everything I had in me. All my tears. I must have lost at least 2 liters of salty fluids from my body from this incessant wailing and moaning. While I was crying, I started writing this poem, in one of the most intense emotions that I have ever felt. It was definitely a form of "organized yelling." It was of lament and torment and shock and feeling trapped and wanting to scream, "Don't you understand?" Everything became unfair, unfair, UNFAIR! All the rules of the game of society started to change and I didn't understand. At first. Like publishing rights goes to seniority. I need 25 more years to suck up to the system before I hve the right to say anything. I sucked up till age 17, and if I sucked up any bit further, I would have been literally DEAD. I am figuratively DEAD from the experience. And I am not WAITING for the system.

Besides, if Paris Hilton can distribute her easy read Hieress book, then I myself, in similar age, can publish and distribute Question Reality. Talk about society's priorities!

It's ironic, I went to my good friend Lauri Green's wedding in Los Angeles soon after this painful incident with the UC Press editor (and I was even very politely rejected by the University of Chicago Press, publisher of Claude Combes' parasite books) (anyway, at the party, I really hit it off with Lauri's brother from Texas!), and this guy at the wedding told me that I was lucky that I am so young and figured all this out thus far. I have a lot of time to kick and scream. Lots of other people figure things out late in life... when it's kind of too late....

Anyhow, there is a LOT of pain behind the poem above. A LOT. I had to convert my mind from being "getting-A+-savvy" to "how-to-send-a-message-to-society-and-make-a-buck-while-I'm-at-it" mentality. From school geek to economic freak. Whatever.

This sheet of quotes above was not included in the Question Reality manuscript, but I created it after an acting session with a very kind actress, Barbara Niven, at the Scientology Center in Hollywood. It was a sheet of paper that served as the hub of potential "taglines" for QR, in which some taglines I used. That experience at the Scientology Center was perhaps my most favorite time there, when everything was at first new and exciting. I had just signed up to Central Casting to become a Hollywood extra (which means I sit on a big movie set all day and get paid 100 bucks for sitting around and eating junk food while Patrick Dempsey occasionally passes by).

Some additional key words: (1) epistemology, the study of the organization of knowledge of humans relative to the environment, (2) ecosystemology, study of relationships between system components and overall systems, invented by a professor at UC Berkeley, Julie Ekstrom (post doc at Stanford) has an original book, (3) double bind, denial, confusion, multiscale bind, cognitive dissonance, koan in Chinese philosophy, Ecology of the Mind, Gregory Bateson, a series of contradictory statements that shock the mind into thinking (e.g. "catch 22" situations), paradox, oxymoron (e.g. spacetime order of university disciplines, fragmentation and inconsistency of the university in term of logic of human-environmental relations is a "double bind" or "multi-scale bind," overall inconsistency in the summation of knowledge, leads to several high schools students having a "ritualistic bonfire at the beach" burning all their schoolwork and summarizing their education as a "pile of crxp" or a "pile of shxt" and walk into adulthood in a state of gestalt confusion. Technical term is AMERICAN EDUCATION OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE. Nontechnical term is the SCHOOLWORK BEACH BONFIRE. I am a biologist epistemologizing, "I collected my schoolwork just like Darwin collected dead organisms from all over the world." Computer model abstract knowledge or pragmatic, practical knowledge.

259. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Sample Table of Contents

New Table of Contents for Question Reality. Part 1.
New Table of Contents for Question Reality. Part 2.
Old Version of Table of Contents. Constructed in 2005.

The pdf file of the new Table of Contents for Question Reality is available below.

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/questionrealitytableofcontents.pdf

One of the last components of the manuscript sandwiching I created and edited was the Table of Contents. I could say ToC is perhaps one of the last layers to touch in book formatting. You have no choice, considering that you don't know the exact name and order of the manuscript, let alone what page numbers the chapters start, or where the fitures are located. I suppose the Table of Contents can be considered the organizational "site map for a website" except, that Tables of Contents are for books.

258: Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: The "Part 3" That Was Never Implemented

When I first started formatting the Question Reality manuscript through Lulu, I thought that I would need to partition this essentially 1000-page manuscript into three parts. It ended up that Lulu had a soft-cover book that could bind up to 700 pages of writing, so I ended up only needing to partition the manuscript into two pieces. The first section contained Chapters 1-6 (around 300 pages) and the second section contained Chapter 7-10 and Conclusion (around 600 pages). I am glad that I made "Part 1" significantly shorter because it's basically a hook to get someone interested in reading QR. The second part is sooo thick that it looks like a textbook, I embarrassingly admit. I didn't consider formatting the manucript to a 6x9 tradebook format, but I will consider this option upon my second publishing. My first round of publishing is an opportunity to make "minor mistakes" that I can get away with and pass off, but will NOT consider doing again!

257. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Sample Freedom-of-Speech-Disclaimer-Page

Pdf of above. http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/3.disclaimerpage2.pdf

Revised version of Disclaimer included in the pdf above.
Older version of disclaimer I made during the school year 2005-2006.
Older version of disclaimer I made during the school year 2005-2006. Inverted colors. I showed this image to Ann Aasen, a social worker / psychology counselor at the UC Riverside Student Health Center. Ann helped me make it through the year. I joked, telling many friends and family members that Ms. Aasen was like my Ph.D. advisor for the year. We talked about the problems of universities being overspecialized nowadays and not providing interdisciplinary avenues for students whose brains don't fit nicely in one departmental box (at least for UC Riverside). Back in the day, Ann had a more generalist education within the university. In the end, Ann recommended that as a graduate student, I shouldn't harm my own health and psychological health by fighting bureaucracy of the university. Maybe in the end, I should just transfer back to UC Santa Barbara, which I did.

Ann Aasen was a single light of hope, but takes my mind back to very dark places of my past that need a bit of reflection. Just a little. I won't elaborate too much. In fall of 2005, my first quarter at UC Riverside, I recorded on my Olympus digital voice recorder a panic attack in the car. My primal brain was going out of whack and I was rationally aware of it. By winter quarter of 2006, I started seeing Ann routinely, for necessary psychological reasons. My advisor at the time was juggling 500 balls in a circus act of being department chair, and I was one in 500 balls just kind of thrown in the corner and picked up every once in a while. It's not my advisor's fault at all. It's the position of being chairman. I saw my dad go through it. Even Dr. Pete Sadler, a very inspirational professor. But I was neglected psychologically and became pushed more and more and more into a corner at multiple fronts until my mind froze and I could not physically move. At one front, going to grad school in your home town is not a brilliant idea. It's like trying to continue to biologically grow on an overgrown, sick, bleaching coral reef. Too many strings attached in one place. Secondly, exploring the scope of the field of geology freed me to some degree, but I also felt chained up once I knew "the geological box." I was outdoors but in a prison. "I don't want to stare at JUST rocks all my life! I need to account for ALL environmental data! And the human perception of it! From a holistic point of view!"

A low point of my university experience was in June of 2006. I was bawling my eyes out to one of the Associate Deans of the Graduate Division and she flatly told me, "I don't change the rules. I am not in the position of change the rules. Maybe you should just transfer back to UC Santa Barbara." So much for being Dean of Anything. I thought Deans are supposed to spearhead rule changes. Contrastingly, Dr. Oran Young (my new advisor) supports the concept of greasing and bending rules, especially since pre-existing rules are not working in terms of environmental management. One of the Assistant Deans of the Graduate Division and frankly told me in fall of 2006, "I am sorry but UC Riverside is a more compartmentalized university. Everyone fits in a departmental box. It just is." I was stunned, just as one of my CCS advisors was stunned when I told him this about UC Riverside. It seemed like no one was willing to change or budge. I was in a psychological wreck. I felt trapped in my mind and trapped in my environment. Ann Aasen helped me get through some of these dire moments of entrapment, but in other occassions, educating myself in multi-media art was the only way out to being trapped in my mind.

I am not ashamed to return to UC Santa Barbara, the birthing grounds of my own intellectual freedom and independence, which spurred the writing of Question Reality in the first place. UCSB provided me the holistic environment and intellectual community that spurred and built me to who I was today, so it seemed like coming back, UCSB was taking responsibility for their anomalous undergrad creation who ended up becoming obsessed with creative science writing and multi-media art.

In my mind, I envision myself psychologically and physically abused and beat up by the world for four years. I came knocking on the door to UC Santa Barbara on my hands and knees, completely humbl-ified by the constraints and compartmentalization of society, and I needed a return to marrying intellectual freedom and the CCS environment. I have experimented and failed enough, four years straight, and now I am ready to succeed. I was ready to finally do something right. I came crawling back to my CCS advisors and undergrad mentors, my eyes so torn and in pain by what I have seen and experienced, it ws almost as if I visited hxll and came back. It was good that I outsourced, because now I have something to contribute to UC Santa Barbara, just as UCSB had shaped me up as an undergrad!

I am sad the thoughts of Ann Aasen had taken me to gloomy memories of my near-recent past, but at least she was a light of hope amidst the chaos.

I found this on the internet. My eyes sparkled with glee. This was a MiltonLoveism. I need one of these, and I need to stamp it on my forehead.

The reason why I state the above disclaimer is a MiltonLoveism is because when Milton gives his rigs-to-reefs presentations, he presents these hilarious slides reminding people of the First Amendment of the Constitution, and that he has the freedom to state whatever he wants, even if the Truth hurts. Hence, the creation of my own freedom-of-speech disclaimers. The crux of some of Milton Love's jokes is the mixing of fish biology, science, and politics all at once. It works beautifully and parsimoniously. Milton is one of those rare scientists who acknowledge that science and politics inevitably MIX and you can't separate the two... unfortunately. Then you can't even divorce politics with psychology, like the whole cognitive dissonance effect. Oh, dude, Milton Love and I talked a lot about that. I even discussed this phenomenon with Dr. Young.

No, Milton Love is definitely not one of those denial scientists: "I am an ecologist but I am a scientist, so I don't want to get involved in politics." He's an active player, as much as he can be. The best part is that he makes dxm good jokes out of the situation.

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, the greatest theorists on human behavior I have ever encountered ended up being my biology professors--who end up making social commentaries as their "aside comments" in their lectures.

"Every professors' joke has become my research." Milton Love, blurts out "uh-oh" as he admits he is smelling some trouble. "Good trouble," my new advisor calls it.

I have been shunned as interdisciplinary at UC Riverside. UC Santa Barbara embraces it and welcomes it to some degree. In short, UCSB is like temporary placement in "heaven on earth" after the last few years of "hxll" I've been through.

Wow! I didn't know my Disclaimers had so much emotional and memory baggage behind them!

256. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Sample Copyright Page

Here is the pdf of the above image: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/copyrightpage1.pdf.

I also included the image "Terra's Dreams" on the copyright page. I was largely influenced by Robin Amber Kilgore's copyright page in her book, In her Bathrobe She Blogged. Robin included a little image of a "martini" on the copyright page, so I decided to include an image as well.

I have more detailed instructions on the copyright page on the ChemLab Protocol to Book Publishing on blog post #251. For example, I have some pointers on how to get an ISBN code, as well as discussing the process of copyrighting your work through the United States government and the lengthy process of acquiring a Library of Congress number.

In the fall of 2007, I remember completing the above image "Terra's Dreams," which make up of two separate images: Terra sleeping happily in bed and the fractal collage of images inspired from geologic and biological drawings. I vividly recall being along in my room, crying, bawling my eyes out, upon completing the above image. Terra and Buz were fighting to survive as a creative, abstract concept in my mind that was surrounded by an oppressive environment. My situation with graduate school was unstable and uncertain. I ended up writing in my IQRquestion reality website: "Sometimes, dreaming is a matter of survival. Please help Terra keep dreaming!"

Man, was I bawling my eyes out. I think I gained a lot of weight those months of October and November. The whole-what-in-the-hxll-am-I-doing-with-my-life type of syndrome. And who knows whether I was going to make it into grad school at UCSB--let alone which department. Fortunately the drama ended happily. I am back at UC Santa Barbara, through the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.

As I have said time-and-time again, "Life is a bxtch to go through, and a kick to reflect upon." I should make a t-shirt, eh?

255. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Dr. Milton Love's Ultimate Satire on Book Formatting

Book by Dr. Milton Love, inspirational biological subgod and life-saving scientist-in-humoris-body to many uninspired wannabe marine biology undergrads (and grad students) from UC Santa Barbara.




Before I proceed any bit further to provide sample pages of my Question Reality manuscript sandwiching process, I must make note of my reference book for manuscript-formatting: Dr. Milton Love's Probably More Than You Ever Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast. The ultimate satire on book formatting is available in pdf format below:

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/miltonlovesatireformalitiesbookpubli.pdf

I have already devoted quite a few raving blog entries to Dr. Milton Love. If (and when, on the condition that I am still alive somehow in some arbitrary point in the future) I create my Biologically Incorrect satire on university dynamics, Milton is first on the list for the screenwriter think tank.

Milton's book, in addition to Robin Amber Kilgore's book, In Her Bathrobe She Blogged, were the two most influential reference books that helped me format the Question Reality manuscript.

This is what I wrote in my journal this morning: "Most of school is a drab. Milton Love is a life saver. His integration of humor and science have spared many undergrads from shooting themselves and dropping out of biology programs, let alone drop out of the University Cow Herd all together. Thanks for being a human, Milton. The world really needs it."

Coming to think of it, I might be saying thanks to Milton Love a million times in my blog. I'll be seeing him a lot the next few years. And I am seriously considering him to be a part of my committee. Hopefully I can work it out somehow. It's very crucial to marry brains that you absolutely love. I adore Milton's and Dr. Young's brains (even Dr. Nancy Kawalek's), so I have no problem for marrying them, just as I had married my undergrad CCS advisors' brains at UCSB. If you give me CCS freedom (and not arbitrary bureaucratic constraint), I can latch onto profs' brains like a medicinal leech.

Milton sat down with me a couple of hours early on in the school year of 2007 and trained me to sell myself on campus. He was jiving with my thesis: "The problem is not the environment itself, but the human perception of the environment. Therefore we must investigate the way how humans think." I have to have this thesis and present it clearly within a few minutes to a diversity of professors. And now I have to sell myself in an elevator pitch with New York publishing agents only within a few seconds! We ended up talking about Milton's pioneering films--I was supposed to help him on a film up in Santa Cruz, but it never ended up happening because I was crunching to finish a rock crab flick for the Blue Horizons program. We started talking about how university departments are like "subcultures" in an anthropological sense, and they have created their own language systems, networks, values, and perceptions of the very same systems, which when you take a step back, are all fragmented, conflictory, full of gaps and overlaps, very messy in short. Gregory Bateson calls intellectual conflicts as "double binds" but I could call the university itself in a "multi-layered bind" in concern of establishing common grounds of perception of human relations to the environment. Thanks to Milton's help, I was able to create some pioneering salespitch documents I was able to show to professors around campus, including the new Dean of the Graduate Division (Gale Morrison), who was VERY nice to me. Milton also told me how he was able to be on the radio with the producer of Sponge Bob Square Pants. They were doing some commentary on a sporting event in Los Angeles. I wished Dr. Armand Kuris and Milton could just hammer that producer and ask him, "What were you thinking when you were creating these ugly, abnoxious characters?" Thanks to Sponge Bob, I was able to garner an extra credit point for my invert zoology Halloween midterm on "What is the phylum for this character on this box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?"

Anyhoo, the point is, Milton Love has helped me a lot, and it would be nice to work with him. I know I would be inspired every single day, and through Milton, I would probably finally be able to fall in love with fish (a course I missed as an undergrad)!

254. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Alternate Title Pages That Never Made Final Cut

Blogs are heavenly because you are able to post all the elements of a manuscript that never made the final cut, but are too good to be buried in the "creative exhaust" trashbin of your computer. Some work needs to see the light of day somehow!

Continuing with the conversation I had with Robin--mentioned in Blog Post #253--the images above represent the original title page I designed for the Question Reality manuscript. Ultimately symbolic in the visual representation of my own brain rewiring: hence, the title: "Question Reality: An Investigation of Self-Humans-Environment." Through Robin's suggestion, I tossed out this title page because Robin was thinking more of "what speaks to the world and the audience OUTSIDE my brain" rather than what makes sense to my own internal world. It took me a year for ME to figure out and connect the innerworkings of my own mind. Now the second round is to learn how to communicate with the world outside my own reality!

I was shocked during that night's discussion with Robin and it took a while for me to wrap around the idea that my original visual inspiration needed to be tossed to the side!

In the end, I was able to place a black-and-white version of the document as the first page of the interior of my manuscript.

I actually designed this title page before I started writing Question Reality. It's good to have a few drawings and poems to motivate you to piece together the parts into a much longer--and potentially drier--manuscript!

253. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Evolution of the Bird in a Cage Cartoon

I showed an image of this Bird in a Cage to my good friend, Robin, in Goleta, California, back in fall of 2005, and instead of placing pre-existing "holistic title page" of Question Reality in the front, Robin advised me to place this bird-in-the-cage in the front of the book. Robin stated that this would be more shocking and intriguing to people because it represents where most of society is at right now (or at least how society is overall operating). I consider the bird-in-a-cage to be like a visual koan: it automatically stimulates the mind into shock and encourages one to think. The dilemma, I found out later from my mentor, Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller, that this bird-cage image that she showed to class was not her own creation. Perhaps it came from The New York Times or the New Yorker, but she was not sure. So... I ended up needing to create my own bird-in-a-cage cartoon. Please see below!
The Old Bird in a Cage. From The New Yorker or The New York Times? I sent an email to The New Yorker, thanking them for the inspiration if the source of this image truly was from their magazine. I encountered this Bird in a Cage image twice as an undergrad: (1) it was in the hallway of the Ecology and Evolution Department, right in front of Dr. James Reichman's office (a cool vertebrate prof I never was able to meet or take a class from), and (2) Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller showed this image to her pioneering Shoreline Preservation course. Miriam showed a bunch of images and shared quite a few poems that stimulated students to think about things. Another image Miriam showed was something that looked like a mountain but ended up being the tip of a safety pin. Talk about being in a scale-funk! I suppose Miriam is in part practicing Chinese philosophy, and maybe she doesn't even know it!
The New Bird in a Cage cartoon. I added a little squirrel trying to get the bird out of the cage. For me, it represents the internal turmoil and synergism of my evolving self and this environment I am in. I seem to be the bird and the squirrel simultaneously. I am the bird, seemingly trapped in my own self-constructed trap, and then I am the squirrel who thought outside the box and is trying to get this trapped bird outside of her rut. The theme extrapolates to the entirety of society: trying to get the system to think outside the box in terms of human-environmental relations. And can a really tiny squirrel really get a very big bird outside it's self-induced prison? The image ended up being on the title page of my book.
Now with the help of new friends--returning to UC Santa Barbara, participating in the Blue Horizons program, meeting my friend Tariel--it is starting to seem a little bit more feasible to get this big bird out of the cage!