PDF of the poem below: This entire last week, all I had been doing is consuming chaos.
It's fun to meet new people, but it becomes demeaning after a while to be thrown into a giant room with 800 new graduate students. In my poem, I described this as a "melting pot of intellectual flesh." Your mind starts to question: (1) who do you want to know? (2) why? (3) what is your protocol for meeting people? I have probably met over 100 new people the last week--which is unprocessable to my mind, but there are a few people who have stuck out in my mind, who I am sure to resume contact with. These people stuck out because (0) they were part of the Young Lab cult--ya ya ya! go Human-Dimensions-of-Environmental-Change! Go Ecopistemology! Woohoo! (1) they were interested or involved in environmental media as well (2) they were left-handed, conceptual, generalists, and insanely intelligent (3) they had super bubbly (but by all means not sappy), enthusiastic, witty, intelligent personalities (4) they were the new incoming class of Bren students (similar programming), and (5) they were taking my scaling course with Dr. Sam Sweet--and I'll be dxmmed I found a geologist studying vertebrate fossils (WOOHOO! I FOUND A GEOLOGIST! I FOUND A GEOLOGIST! I love love LOVE geologists!), and (6) people who did not roll their eyes and give me blank faces when I told them that I invented a word called ecopistemology and that I was interesting in patterns of scale in biology and human-environmental systems. Wow. I hit a lot of walls, but I found a few who were following exactly what I was doing. I told Herschel (insanely intelligent Southpaw) that I was guilty of doing research that was "discovering the obvious," and he responded in quick wit: "isn't all of science about discovering the obvious?" And I was like "oh." So, not only was he following, he also made me feel less guilty for my pursuits of connecting psychology with the environment.
So my mind was selectively filtering the statistical pseudoautism of intellectual flesh and in the end detected and picked out a few humans out of the pile, which was part random luck of spatial proximity and frequency of encounter, but started developing molecular interactions and bonds. Emotional meaning and attachment seems to amplify upon each encounter and interaction. And hopefully soon, all the other humans just become and remain to be backdrop objects. Tuning in the necessary and tuning out the unnecessary. You can only be conscious of so much! My mind was foraging to create humanity around me while the rest just remains... desensitized backdrop....
Most people here are "starting" grad school and are infinitely expanding and exploring opportunities. This is the first time in five years (since I graduated from CCS UCSB in 2003) where all my expanded ideas have been and need to CONTRACT. Writing and compiling-organizing all acquired resources is a difficult task, and the view of my world this quarter will mostly need to be in my head and the head of Dr. Sam Sweet--among other scaling-obsessed scholars.
So I have slowly formed some rudimentary protocols of go-to people, as this macro-micro social experiment continues to unfold. And here is a poem to go along with the experiment. My emotions were uproarious this week. Thankfully the writing has kept me stabilized.
UPDATE ON ECOPISTEMOLOGY.
Oh ya. I think I have converted a few people to ecopistemology this past week. Ana Lyn implied as if this were some kind of religious cult. Come on! Isn't science a secular religion anyway? I have probably about 6 or so people who are willing to sign my petition for the existence of the word "ecopistemology." My lab-mate Jaime also is an ecopistemologist at heart. Wesley, though skeptical, has been my promoter. Same for my dad. Oscar approves of the word. My advisor, Oran, stated that he was open-minded, but he remains skeptical of neologisms. In short, he concluded that the proof of burden was in my own hands and that the word needs to exist on its own. My friend, Hector (linguist), said that inventing and propagating such a word is essentially making a "bold hypothesis," and I was like, "Really?" I told him this was an environmental media prankster joke as a satire on university mumbo jumbo lingo. I also told him that truth can only be told through the means of humor. So, is this a joke? Or is this not a joke?
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