335. Middle of the Quarter Blues

It is the fourth week of the quarter and I am starting to question myself, greatly. I am starting to feel like this information overload is waring on me, making me fall apart. Last night I went to bed at "5pm" and I woke up at 7am. My teeth were starting to hurt again. I made a dental appointment for Thursday. My nerves are getting all activated.

I was internalizing... not by my swirling thoughts within my cerebral cortex, but through basal pain reflexes associated with my teeth.

For the last two weeks, I have been feeling out of tune again in space and time.

I am drowning in junk mail and receipts that only serve as distracting backdrop clutter: Sports Authority (forced to purchase a softball glove and softball), Vons and Kmart (werthers candy, my routine vice 10/18 10/19), Java Jones Coffeehouse (impulsive, expensive purchases of caffeine on and off campus that serve as moderate "therapy" buys, I do admit I will not return to Java Jones in a while, the last bout of coffee I had there seemed burned and was not an enjoyable experience with the additional street construction near by), apparently on 10/18 I purchased Good Earth Chai for the office, still in my bag, 10/18 purchased Trader Joes egg rolls chicken (very good!) fat free milk, vanilla soy milk, supply me for the deadly weekend of studying for evolutionary vertebrate morphology,

Is school right or wrong for me? Good or bad for me? School is wonderful, as long as it is in proper doses. At this moment, due to scale and volume and rate of information flow and mental digestion, I could say school is simply too much of a good thing.

I can't help feeling like this rock embedded in a kelp bed in the churning, shallow waters of the ocean, but it's as if my firm ground is being dismantled, and that I am being swept away and drowned by the university's Turbulence of Information. When will I ever be left alone? When will I have a chance to catch up with myself? To heal my mind? Piece it together? The outer world has taken me away and I don't even have enough time to hold any form of solid ground with my own mind.

Perhaps I could be more functional if I had a 48 hour biological clock. I could live for 24 hours and reflect for 24 hours. *Sigh.* Our own human biology is quite restricting!

Turbulence of Information, Information Overload, Information Crucifix

303. On the Philosophy of Receipts and Perceptual Environmental Supersaturation: "I don't know and care b/c I don't have the capacity to." [SCALE]

I need to define myself
Before society can define me.
That is why I've come to return
to the grounds of UCSB.

I am staring at a pile of receipts on my portable desk (a folding, lengthened card table), and I am trying to find a way to throw them away. A way to rationalize them out of my life. First of all, I must meditate on what these receipts mean. They represent purchases. Of final products. From stores. Mostly all over Santa Barbara (and even places all over southern California). They represent products I "need" to survive at a very basal level (e.g. milk, meat, products to satisfy air, water, hunger, sleep, exercise, roof over head), but also "need" to survive, given the context of this mega human system (e.g. supplies for a computer). Technically, I do not need a computer to survive on planet Earth. But given that I was not even asked about my terms of membership of this Megascale Gigi, I am pissed I am a part of this. Would rather be part of a caveman group in the hills. Scale is the greatest demon of human society and the environment. So, at this moment in space and time, I am part of Global Gigi. For my contextual survival in Global Gigi, I NEED A COMPUTER TO SURVIVE, simply because EVERYONE ELSE HAS A COMPUTER. [VALUES AND NEED FOR SURVIVAL SHIFTS WITH SCALE OF THE SYSTEM] And I have to match and outcompete everyone else's efficiency and productivity level. So, as a graduate student, I go to the store, and I purchase these goods, in complete emotional and intellectual detachment of how these goods were made, where they came from, and where they might possibly go when I am done with their consumption. Who was involved in the process of manufacturing the good, and what did they have to "know" in order to manufacture the product? Who invented the good in the first place? Every single product in the store has a giant, beautiful story behind it, that requires quite intense research to figure out. And it's just daunting to realize this. I cannot know all this. I do not have the capacity to know all this. Same with being selective about the people I affiliate with. I cannot know all XX hundreds of professors at UC Santa Barbara. I have to stick to a few. It's not that I don't care. I don't have the capacity to care. Due to the volume of information. So, essentially I am forced to an existence of knowledge desensitization of my environment, and always exist in a state of a selectivel / filtered perception of reality. Honestly, I am overwhelmed, and I want to cry. I don't know. I don't know anything. But I guess that's the point of getting a Ph.D. You are officializing your acknowledgement that you don't know anything.

I am forced to live a detached, removed, desensitized life. I am forced to place a mental filter in my brain. I walk into Costco and I just go in, buy the product I need with glossy eyes, not admiring how many thousands of the same products exist right next to the one I picked up, not asking where the product come from, barely looking at the ingredients... dragging my feet to the line. Just shoot me in the head.

I am desensitized from a store environment for my sanity. But the desensitization makes me depressed. If I am sensitive, I go insane with information overload. I live in a state of emotional-intellectual paradox PSYCHO-ENVIRONMENTAL PARADOX. I will never be optimally "happy" one way or another. But at least I am writing this blog, manifesting this catch 22 condition. At least that relieves and externally manifests my internal turmoil. I think that is why I am so fascinated by ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOTISM and the condition of being an ENVIROCHONDRIAC. Envirochondriacism exists also because it's a scale issue.

So, these receipts represent mind-numbing trips to stores, to mind-numbingly pay money to buy final products I have no fxcking clue what I am consuming, such that I can mindfully exist in grad school. Honestly, I don't want to live a mindless life. But in a way, I am forced to. It just represents this entire divorce between the mindfulness of school and the mindlessness of the operations of society that allows me to live mindfully in school.

I am very sad. I want to live in a caveman society in the hills. Or I will just have to create my own caveman society on the UC Santa Barbara campus.

I have been looking through the bios of faculty at Bren. I came across Roland Geyer's page, and apparently he studies Industrial Ecology, an investigation of the life cycles of manufactured products. His background is in physics and engineering. I am a conformist to the reasoning of life cycles: I call it Ecological Structure and Process Knowledge and Historical Ecological Knowledge. the Proximal and Ultimate sources of products. This is also known as "political ecology," according to Julie Ekstrom (now a post doc at Stanford). The issue is I would be more interested in calling it INDUSTRIAL RESOURCE ECOLOGY, if it is the life cycle of a product that is not invented by humans. For example, humans did not "invent" rock crabs. They invented "computers." I am also interested in INDUSTRIAL MEDIA ECOLOGY: where stories come from and where they go. How stories from the university are being translated, passed around, and used in society. What are the degrees of distortion of the story. Ultimately, these ideas came to me from an animal behavior course. Except applying animal behavior to humans. Ya, as if humans weren't animals. Come ON!

I am also creating a diagram showing the relationship of human needs with the human-built environment. The piece is called "Disconnect on Disney's Cloud: the Disconnected Self." I am writing down the names of stores and products that I use.

Okay. I think I can throw away my receipts now.