368. Adaptations to Graduate School (Assessing Visceral Needs Before Quarter Starts, Maslow's Ladder, EusEcoNicheSpace)

In order to write, you first need to create a "mental buffer zone" to convince yourself to write--it's SAFE to write.

You have to be on top of things the FIRST WEEK of the quarter. WHY? The Quarter System is a NON-LINEAR SYSTEM. Just like your Mind. Just like a Film. Just like Climate Change. Just like the Colonization of an Island. Very small perturbations in the beginning of the system lead to drastically different end results. The quarter system is a product of its initial premises.

You have to be on top of the FIRST WEEK. The Quarter System is a NON-LINEAR SYSTEM: a Product of It’s Original Premises.

So, it's important to get into GOOD HABITS FROM THE START. Or the MACHINE will MOW YOU DOWN. You have to establish value in people, in courses, by the first week.

Same with AAAS. I will get out what I put in.

You also have to assess yourself and YOUR HABITS. Because during the quarter system, it can bulldoze you so fast that you can fall into vicious habits that can potentially last an ENTIRE QUARTER! It's very important to be MINDFUL of HABITS, because stress can transform these behaviors to MINDLESS-ADDICTIONS!

Every single time I am writing, I am shifting the baseline in my head. Every single time I emerge from my shell, my den of writing, I see the world in a new light, and I interact with people in a new way.

It's best never to put all your eggs in one basket, like investing all your values and love and hope and dreams into... just one person. It is best and better to come to know and love a place, not just a single person.

Getting to know a place is like getting to know a person, except perhaps a bit more overwhelming. Several more layers. It is best to come to know and love a place in its entirety, the layers of abiotika and biotika, the history of the land and the people, and the community and organization structure. It's best to have a cognitive map in holistic entirety, because you don't want to fall in the trap of embedding yourself deep in the mind of a person who ends up chewing you up and spitting you out in the first place.

A place like Santa Barbara is a mass accumulation effect of multiple characteristics, mass accumulation effect of several layers.

I must establish a solid, loving relationship with Santa Barbara--as a whole--before I return. Then I shall be safe... from the illusions of... you know who.

[I started writing an essay in the car through a voice recorder, so go find it and further elaborate it.]

I am staring at all of my vices and piles of papers on a bed and I am going to find a way to put them all away. I just made an extensive photography collage of eccentric NeoArt (as termed by my friend T) of some Vices of Graduate School Life. The fundamental Basal Components of Graduate Schoolisms. (I cannot interact with anyone who will not acknowledge my existence. I am strangled and then I am abandoned. Fxck that. Illusion of normalcy). I look at all these vices, and I do have a strange Candy-Insulin-Based lifestyle--one-meal-a-day-otherwise-pumped-with-small-increments-of-candy-and-caffeine-all-day-fighting-lion-tiger-state all the time. Eating three meals a day makes you lethargic and you hardly get any work done.

Suspended in a castle on a cloud. In academia, I am paid to think about things for 24-7 while everyone else is maintaining visceral operations of this society. And so... I feel guilty. That is why I work so hard. That is why I work so much. And my sister quizzes me. Everyone is working very hard. And so I shall do the same!

I can see the strong inter-relationships of visceral components of lifestyle: (1) breathing (2) drinking water (3) eating food (4) exercising (5) sleeping (6) making sure your family and roommates are okay--lots of HUGS, relaxation, lots and lots of hugs! (massages for replacement)--some people smoke lots of "weed" to relax... and (7) time for friends, etcetera.... If these basic needs are not met nor well-maintained, then you will have an absolutely shxtty day! Sheeks! That is what I say! And you can't have too many more shxtty days in your life, Vic! You don't even know if you will live till tomorrow! My goodness!

[This excerpt below was written back on October 31, 2008]

Some people need to make a to-do-list for survival--like myself--as if my mind needs to consciously march through some form of Evolutionary Maslow's Ladder--in which half the items on the to-do list are instinctive, and the other half of the items are actually mindful for everyone. Ideally, I would and should go through a self-checking system of basic needs once a week. But predictably, I easily forget. My mind drifts upon something else--many things else--I exist so much in my mind that I forget I have a body and that I need to maintain it a little better than I have--more particularly in the "grooming" needs (as family and friends have chewed me out on my "elaborate" t-shirt and shorts goodwill fashionware). I think I have been wearing the same clothes for a month... and scared to change....

Evolutioary derivation of Maslow's Ladder... like I need oxygen. Most organisms without oxygen are dead within a few minutes, except for a few little boogers of anaerobic bacteria.

And how human infrastructures have been built to match individual needs--from coarse to finer resolution in specialization? Like the University is some kind of External Body Plan to match the Needs of my Internal Body and intensely demanding brain for stimulation? As if the human-built landscape were like wearing a "heavy coat" or mass-accumulation-construction of a "collective bower"? (mystical character bird)

So, right now, I am proceeding to pay neglected bills, shower, self-groom, clean up spews of pink-spotted golden trash ... for Halloween purposes....

I have also reached a SATURATION POINT in term of social maintenance. I am around too many people and thewere are very few relationships I can maintain such that seems to carry and hold meaning and value to them. As a result, I have been horrible in checking emails and returning phone calls.

But I also remember before I started college--back in high school--I didn't have any emails, nor did I own a cell phone--and I was a very happy person (in some respects)--at least in some dimensions to which are now immense aggravations.

This week I wanted to shoot my cell phone. It ended up dying the day before Obama was elected.

And to all the people out there who call me and I don't respond. I just wanted to say that I am sorry the quarter system makes me mentally flipped out and overall sick in the head.

It's not that I don't care about people. I just don't have the capacity to care about them. So I must embrace myself with those of immediate proximity--my housemates, my classmates, and my membership to the Westside Lovepillows Softball Team (which ended only being a two-week stint of horrid softball--me included, made two outs!), my only mental break from language systems and viewing reality only in vectors.

I have reached "Eusocial Ecological Supersaturation," as if my own existence is part of the Physics Superstring Theory. Ha ha. That was a butchered metaphor. Or maybe not. My "lack of mannerisms with others" is merely a bypproduct of supersaturation with communicative technologies and my inability to manage too many relationships with people.

Things are slipping. All the tiny things. Like burning CDs and paying $8 back. Slipping. Shifting. Slipping.

So, now I am proceeding to pay my bills, take a shower, and groom myself, which goes as so far to hair-brushing, leg-shaving, eyebrow-plucking, and overall Body Landscape Gardening. UH, I shall refrain from any further discussion.

Not to mention that my professor Dr. Sweet made me feel guilty for not "backing up any of my work on my computer, so I am proceeding to do that as well...."

[The blips below are separate entities from the ones above, and were written at different times of the quarter.]

Victoria is a series of INPUTS and OUTPUTS. Physical and mental inputs and outputs--with flow rates of mental and physical digestion and maximizing productivity in graduate school life. 12 or less hours of the day are catered toward visceral activities: breathing, drinking, eating, exercizing, sleeping, self and house maintenance, time with housemates-friends-family, traveling (may take more than 12 hours). And the other 12 hours are ideally for optimal "work" and "productivity habits" in association with graduate school--including courses. Last quarter didn't exactly work out so wonderfully as I would like. My last month was a massive spurt of disproportionate productivity. Maybe I will operate under those types of conditions.

Vic has several vices in concern of inputs-outputs: does not eat three meals a day. Places herself in a "hungry-fighting lion-tiger" mode by feeding herself "candy insulin and caffeine" in the form of Werther's Original and Xylitol TicTacs (almost test-tube-like as I had envisioned in high school) (as well as Trader Joes and Starbucks coffee) to sustain her productivity throughout the day. Vic has one big meal late at night. The food makes her sleepy--hence it acts as a purposeful sleeping pill (though some people say it's very bad to eat right before you fall asleep). Vic finds "strange strategies" just to convince herself to SIT DOWN nearly all day--of course with bouts of exercise. And eating three meals will not allow here to do that. Famous encounter with Dolf Seilacher: "Why are you not eating lunch?" And I said, "Because it will ruin my productivity levels in the afternoon." And I saw Chris and Seth squirm, as if they suddenly felt guilty for purchasing some heavy Mexican food at the fancy university diner.

So, now, I am hyper and high strung all day. There are costs to this behavior. I don't know if they are good or bad. I could be sacrificing my lungs with cigarette smoking. I could be amplifying my health problems in other ways--overeating--but instead the body parts that are taking the greatest toll for my behavioral patterns are my teeth. Dental work is a "whole other blog" not to be discussed right now. Drama in that.

It's interesting how all aspects of life have their "own distinct individual knobs" which can organize several thoughts in one's mind, but then again, start to realize the high degree of interdependence and inter-relatedness to all other facets of life--e.g. teeth is associated with food and studying habits and consequentially dentists and American Megacorporate Dogfood lifestyle and graduate school demands, etcetera.

So, I have heard, the Bren MESM (masters) students are a "breed of their own;" such is the perception of other students all around campus.

[The blips below are separate entities from the ones above, and were written at different times of the quarter.]

I hate the quarter system. It makes me a monster. It makes me a person I do not want to be. I am not proud to be.
**To a certain individual, I had been acting like a pompous xsshole. An absorbed bigot. More so out of ludicrous defense reflexes.
**To other individuals, I had not had the capacity to respond to emails or phone calls and act like I have been dropping off the planet.
**For other individuals, I have lagged 2-3 weeks in respones to the Environmental Defense Center to get the photgraphs out for the recent TGIF.

I hate myself.
And then, I myself am trying to keep up with my thoughts?
Trying to keep up with other people? Too many of them?
Trying to "make" progress in my life? Whatever that means?
My teeth are at stake again!

The Quarter System makes me a careless individual. I can only manage and maintain so much and the rest slips through my fingers... and it's just a matter of how much slips... whether I stay afloat... or fall to my doom....

367. Industrial Ecology of Graduate School, Part 1 "Mass Produced Individual Identity" Photography (Picasaweb)

I created this photography series in Fall of 2007. The protocol for generating such images is to consume a hamburger from the ampm mini-market gas station 2am in the morning, make sure you feel sick the "next day," then attempt to clean your room and attempt to take pictures of yourself while at it. This is how I feel every single time I clean up the trash from my room: "Mass-produced Individual Identity. Self-System Identification. Am I more than just the summation of receipts? bills? credit card company mail? Am I just a NUMBER to all of you? Just a dollar bill? Just some random molecular human? "It's not that we don't care. It's just that we as humans don't have the CAPACITY to care." Why don't you create your own Mental Microcosmos of Humanity."

I suppose this can be called The State of Technological Interdependence. This is also called Physical/Mental Carrying Capacity-Saturation / Pseudo-autism / Eusocial Ecological Niche Space.

I am writing this in response to my frequent bouts of trash accumulation, combined with "purges" of this trash. I am establishing a philosophy of Accumulations and Purges.

326. A Graduate Student's Log-Log Design of Reality: A Provincialist View Embedded Within an Illusory Matrix of Globalism and Scientific Universality

A Graduate Student's Log-Log Design of Reality: A Provincialist View Embedded Within an Illusory Matrix of Globalism and Scientific Universality
[subset of an essay]

The other day I asked my evolutionary biology professor, “If I wore a pair of sunglasses that took the logarithm of reality, how would the world look like?” He stared at me quizzically and I shamefully mumbled to him that I was interested in the concept for science fiction purposes. He then proceeded to respond, in which I have come to interpret that wearing a log-log pair of shades would allow me to perceive everything in my surroundings as closer and smaller even though these elements still existed physically at the same distance. Contrastingly, all unknown elements of my surroundings would be perceived as farther away and “larger/grandiose” even though they existed at a fixed distance….

Who would have known that this absurd log-log question actually had come to be more practical and real-world than I thought?

Isn’t this how humans perceive themselves and reality after all? In a warped, log-log scale Truman show bubble? Don’t we all hold a direct, intimate Provincialist View embedded within a mass-education-and-technology-constructed, indirect, detached Matrix Illusion of Globalism and Scientific Universality?

It is as if our minds evolved to construct this navel-gazing bubble of Humanity—a conglomerate ingroup of subjects (places, resources, technologies, people) that have been assigned emotional and intellectual value—that has no particular set of physical borders, especially within a global pinball, pseudo-autistic system of chronic moving-and-shaking objects that remain backdrop homogeneous fuzzy blur to our senses.

It seems that our minds’ perception of our surroundings translate into a gradient of a few elements of highly-resolved, qualitative PCA-analyses of multi-dimensional meaning, which then upon spatial-temporal expansion from ourselves drowns within several elements of low resolution, which remain to us as mere elements—err, mental ghosts, so to speak—we pass by on a daily basis without any form of mental registration. We pass by hundreds, if not thousands of humans every single day, knowing they have beautiful, colorful, highly detailed stories, yet do we have mental capacity to register them?

The tragedy of this modern mental landscape is that it provides this illusion of infinite choice (especially in the university) while simultaneously holding unstable, fickle, ephemeral properties—a state of chronic, rapid change. These volatile environmental conditions of near infinite options and combinations forces us to chronically question and think about our own volatile mental conditions: what we think about, what we are doing, why we think and do what we do, what should we value… hold on to, grasp onto… despite this hostile world of ephemerality.
It forces me to ask the deep questions. Why me here now? What is my purpose? What’s the point? What is the point of my existence? My relative existence? What is the combination of people, resources, places to help me with the process of doing what I need to do? To help me design a Reality of Meaning? What is my bower, my warped log-log bubble of Reality? What to include in my bower of purpose? What do I tune out, dumped into the world of global human chaos of process? Why does my bower take such a shape? Was it intentional, purposeful design? Or was it an accident? Or was it chance opportunity meeting a prepared mind? The synergism of probability and seeming determinism? Ready for a collaboration? A co-evolution of progress and flow of elements?

Hence, a Eusocial Ecological Niche Space—so I call it—is slowly, generated by our minds.

In the massive pool of intellectual flesh within the university, my streamline flow of thoughts have been desperately going through a very intense sorting and filtering process, just as the human body and mind intrinsically filters the intake of resources and stimuli. What to include in my intellectual territory of maintenance and innovation? What to toss aside and disregard?

And with this the horrible notion of a seemingly ritualistic exercise of an attempt to achieve my own mental sanity, it seems like as soon as I find emotional value in some individual or endeavor, the deep bonds seem to break as quickly as they formed. The only way how I have come to survive in this world of unstable molecular human-environmental interactions of chronic fragmentation is through the constructionist actions of my own writing and art.

My mother chronically reminds me that the only vessel I will truly come to know—and am essentially stuck with for the rest of my life—is is my very own Self. I might as well get chummy with it. “Hello, me! How are you doing?”

So, to continue the formulation of a sense of purpose and existence, I need to chronically tune in to this inner world and tend to this internal, evolutionary and proximally-evolved bower that ultimately constructs this externally-warped bubble of supposedly meaningful Reality.

I am thoroughly convinced that our minds did not evolve to exist within a 6-billion ingroup human leaf cutter ant colony. This global system: is it a success, a triumph? Technologically, perhaps. Psychologically? More so a psychological turmoil and failure. The greatest war that seems to exist today is within our minds, attempting to design external meaning. Success or failure of Globalism, it doesn’t matter. I am too pre-occupied in creating my own provincial log-log world of Reality. Otherwise I will breach my mental carrying capacity.

I suppose ignorance can be bliss. Or our minds constrain us ignorance. In all honesty, an illusory, emotionally-detached global view—a.k.a. provincially warped global ignorance—is all that I can mentally sustain.