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)!
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