333. Warm Welcome to the Donald Bren School, UC Santa Barbara: Paradoxical Existence in Transition

Above is a Picasaweb slideshow of images I took of the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, UC Santa Barbara. My new academic home. I have close to nothing to complain about! I wrote a rough draft of an essay entitled "A Warm Welcome to Bren, UC Santa Barbara: Paradoxical Existence in Transition" but that will be another blog. This slideshow is almost like an advertisement for an Academic Resort. Essentially, UCSB is like an Academic Retirement Home for the Intellectually Rich and Famous. Aka a Sink for Nobel Laureates at the End of their Lives. I suppose that's why our school's hype has been going from stinkin' MTV party school to "The Nation's Most Intelligent Party School." The media makes me wanna puke.

I wrote a few captions to go along with the images, so here are some of the captions below:

Blurb 1: I am not particularly enthused about taking pictures of buildings--unless if they are taken from airplanes--or I consider buildings to be the "clothing" or "bower" to human creatures--much like a bryozoan colony or a coral reef or honey comb structure--but I took pictures of my new academic home at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management (UC Santa Barbara) for orientation and focusing purposes. These photographs are to compliment an essay I am currently writing entitled "A Warm Welcome to Bren, UC Santa Barbara: Paradoxical Existence in Transition."

Blurb 2: I love Oran Young’s lab! All the grad students are from very diverse backgrounds and are overall very chill people. The Young Lab is a “dry lab.” There is a Commons Table and lots of book shelves filled with interesting books on law and management and environment, etcetera. There are no strange pieces of equipment within the lab, like spectro-therma-pani-stetho-scopa-gadgeto thingamajigs that map atoms, measure protein reaction rates, record tissue metabolism, analyze water quality, design computers, map mountain ranges, or chart stars and galaxies. I guess our lab is outdoors mostly. We study human behavior… relative to the environment. If we need strange, expensive machines, we can borrow them from our friendly neighbors all over campus. I think Oran’s lab is question-driven, not machine-constrained. We will mix and match any possible machine that will give us the capacity to answer scientific questions, even a peculiar machine called the Common Sense of Our Own Brains.

Blurb 3: The Aesthetic Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, UC Santa Barbara. Hollow Interior of the Building. Optimized Space for Socializing. As if I am psychologically analyzing the Interior Design of Starbucks! Talk about intense competition for Study Niche Space!

Blurb 4 (from an email with Maria Gordon):
Hi Maria! Thanks access to the office! Woohoo! Home away from Home! It’s nice to be out of my room (in Goleta) once in a while. It was getting very stuffy in my room today. Tomorrow will be orientation to the Bren computers around 10am and I will coordinate my retrieval of keys around that time.

I do say. My first year of graduate school at UCLA I lived in “the basement” aka “the dungeon” of the Botany building. It had no windows and the fumes from the construction across the street would give me headaches all year round. At UC Riverside, my office existed within a paleontology lab extension room called “the closet.” Again, there were no windows. Roberto, a graduate student who just moved out of the closet, claimed that were potentially unsafe materials free-floating in the air and suggested I didn’t spend too much time in there. Thankfully now the whole interior of the Geology Building at UCR is being gutted.

I feel so wonderfully upgraded to the fourth floor of the Bren Building: a beautiful view that knicks the ocean and even an extra work out for the upper legs with four flights of stairs! I don’t feel I deserve this, but in the end, it makes me feel like a human to have a window and fresh, salty ocean air. And the ocean view is just a giant strawberry on top a huge pile of whip cream!

I think this environment will enhance my productivity greatly!


PDF for "Room Without a Window" is found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/roomwithoutawindowpoem1.pdf.

PDF for "Dichotomous Environments" is found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/dichotomousenvironmentspoem1.pdf.

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.