477. The Mysterious Grant from the Bren School, UC Santa Barbara... Case Resolved! THANK YOU!!!

I bet this will happen once and only once in my life, but sometimes little magic wands and tooth fairies do exist in the psychologically barbaric, cold-shoulder universe of large-scale university bureaucracy... and bureaucracy in general....

Take for a example... a grant... I received... that I only knew about... since two days ago... through a phone call with Corlei... the graduate student liaison at Bren.... Ya, like WTF! Pardon my crass language, even guised in acronyms! Before yesterday, this is what I knew: someone in the Graduate Division waived their magic wand around September 20 or so and waived my fees and tuition. Wow. That's weird. The billing note stated it was a "graduate internship" or something. Uh-huh. Okay. What the hoo haa hay is this? Whatever. I didn't pursue this any further (I just thought maybe this was an administrative error and that ignorance should be bliss in this circumstance). I just secretly cried with joy to know that I had health insurance for the quarter.... And I still took out two loans at first... I call them "Obama loans"... both of them from the Federal Government. It's beautiful money and it's worth borrowing.... I'd do anything for Obama! Like, SERIOUSLY! Then it was down to one direct, subsidized loan....

And so, I basically had the "hxll month" of October in which I was non-stop living without any down time to reflect. I was "holding my mental breath," and in all honesty, I feel that I need to hide away and "puke" for a little while. So, here I was... in Riverside... and I called Corlei because I had a couple of concerns in terms of my interactions with certain professors... one is not an "open, transparent" relationship in which I can be completely uncensored and revelatory... and the other relationship is concerning simply because this professor is on sebatical... so I feel completely horrible and guilty for bothering him. And so Corlei pops the question, "Did you get your check?" And I was like, "What check?"And she proceeded to explain to me how Dean Haston sent me an award letter about a month ago, stating that I received a "block grant" (?) from Bren that would help with tuition, health insurance, and basic living expenses. And I was like, "WHAT?!" Corlei advised me to pick up the grant/check as soon as possible and then we set up an appointment for November 16. Huh. Weird. Plain flat out weird.

So, the first question is... how did I feel (Yes, oh yes! I am a psychologist to myself!)? I felt stunned, but in a dulled way. I didn't jump up and down, as if I received a National Science Foundation fellowship, like I did back in April of 2003 (stone ages, I tell ya). I didn't feel like I was struck by lightning, but I kinda sorta felt I won some really crooked lottery game. Sort of, that was only 1% of my feelings. The truth is, in the past year, I have been a "shadow of Bren." A rather elusive creature, one who lurks in the building at night or during weekends. One who goes in and out for brief meetings and then splits to work in the blank slate environment of Kinkos (over a festid, library). I don't know. I've been feeling like some vile, base graduate student organism, even more loathsome than any slimy or scaly reptile, perhaps equally as hideous as that vertebrate parasitoid Alien in the Alien-series movie. Why? Because I'm just this little "kicking-n'-screaming rebel from CCS," a flat out stubborn b#@* about pursuing "environmental media" or the synthesis of science and multi-media storytelling to more holistically explore and address coupled-human-environmental systems. I always saw myself as a "problem child," "a muckracker" to the Bren community, simply because I was pushing boundaries of their definitions of "interdisciplinary" (I mean, physically, not lipservice-acally). As a symbolic experience of interaction, I remember my first day of school at Bren back in the Fall of 2008, while we grad students were all introducing ourselves to each other, and when I said "I'm Victoria. Environmental Media Ph.D." I saw the eyes of Dr. Keller (water quality expert?) bulge out, his brows elevate almost as far as they could biomechanically lift. And he seemed shocked, but in a pleasant sense, transmitting a telepathic signal of 'What are you doing HERE? But here you are, so welcome aboard.' with his gestalt sequence of succeeding facial expressions. *Sigh.* By that point I felt like a timid mouse that came out to see some light, 'cuz they said they'd be some cheez for me to eat.... Now maybe I'm this rat in the shadows. Anyhow, nevertheless, my advisor Oran. "an intellectual fishermen who has beckoned me to cast my web long and far into the nooks and crannies of this UCSB campus" has been so supportive in my experiences thus far. But I know deep in my mind and my heart, that the only way I'm going to survive in this community for FIVE LONG YEARS is (1) TANGIBLE PRODUCTIVITY. "Don't talk. Just do. And deliver final projects without necessarily anyone's expectations of them. Leave a trail of tangible, physical work." and (2). EXTERNAL VALIDATION. "Seek external validation and build communities outside of Bren such that when it comes to be any form of Academic Judgment Day, Bren faculty cannot deny that I had received official acknowledgments from external academic parties." The goal is to leave the Bren experience accomplishing my personal goals and not having a single professor shake his or her finger and scold me "YOU CAN'T DO THAT!" simply because it hasn't been done before in such a such a new way, even though it makes complete common sense to pursue it (I have dealt with that mentality for close to 6 long months last year, and I am FED UP with that!). It's the most HORRID, wretched experience for a professor to tell me "you can't do that!" Professors, especially those on your committee have some level of mastermindful control over you and the contents of your head, and so it's really important for the professor NOT TO PUT YOUR MIND IN A PRISON. Your committee needs to guide you, let you grow, and if they need you to specialize, they need to be expert tricksters to make a graduate student's head become self-filtered, self-focused....

So, here I am, strategically trying to carve out an academic existence as an "environmental media oddball" with obscure strategies. And here I WAS, all summer of 2009, flipping out about 12 times, surviving through five more overt panic attacks (about 1.5 weeks of wasted time, mind, and energy) simply because (1) my NSF fellowship was about to be over (2) I've been stood up from three different departments in concern of TAships, and many TAships are being reduced to 25% (3) the University of California is financially crumbling top-down, thanks Mr. Swartzebooger, Yudolf and the executives rest (4) I was going to have to familiarize myself with the student loan syndrome.... So... I have psychologically suffered all summer... and the last month I have learned to live "cut down" and "more frugally," and suddenly... to realize... that I received a GRANT from Bren?

By this point, I was crying. Some tears in my eyes are about to appear right now. My psychology is a wreck, and I have a few more months to stay floating before I go financially on the "negative side" of student loans. Taking student loans though was a huge benefit because it made me realize (1) that I was truly motivated to the very core to pursue my road in environmental media and (2) that I will have to truly start considering the notion of "financially floating" when pursuing this Ph.D. track. It has been a good month in that sense. This whole "mental readjustment" to real-world finances.

The money I received from National Science Foundation was very impersonal. Some random assortment of scientists made some decision to give me money because I was some undergrad who already knew how to scientifically write and design my own plant vegetation experiments. I never put a face to the money; it just came flying over from Washington DC and it was coming from people's taxpayers dollars. NOTE: I want to make sure that taxpayers realize that they are truly investing in a good resource when they are investing in maintaining a minimal salary for my existence. I can tell great stories that might help them "laugh, then think," then break their routine and try something excitingly, and fearfully new.

But now, the money came from a "more local source." It came from the Bren community. And it's a much different sensation. Deeming myself as an "academic outcast," or an "academic who has a hard time being with other academics, and likes to bathe herself in the real world," I am now starting to question this identity, this self-perceived or self-constructed label of "outcast in the shadows." On a very fundamental level, though environmental media is not a mainstream pursuit at UC Santa Barbara, I somehow felt... appreciated for existing. Appreciated for pursuing this road... appreciated for whining and griping and kicking and screaming and transferring three different schools... all for just to follow my core dreams? Appreciated... appreciated.... I'm not sure about "accepted," but at least appreciated. Appreciated enough such that I can survive at least one more quarter without going under financially.

Upon learning of this grant, I went to Santana's mom-n-pop chain Mexican restaurant of the Inland Empire and ordered a $6.50 tray of chicken nachos and enjoyed 2/3 of it in the wee hours of a chilly-desert Rivesidian night. The other 1/3 went to my father's lunch the next day. I wished I shared the nachos with Jules and my family, but they were all asleep. I told Jules I will buy him a small carrot cake for his retroactive birthday (he was impressed that I received a grant and I didn't even have to catch a single fish! He works so hard wakes up 3am in the morning almost every day to go catch lobster and fish; I feel lazy and wimpy). I will take my sister on a boat ride for Christmas, and I will terrorize my mother and father with whacky presents from the 99 cents store for the holidays. My mother was terrified and she told me she will give me a list of things she wanted, just to prevent my giving her a venus fly trap or a plastic tube of candy with a twirling plastic monkey on top. I must celebrate! One more quarter without debt!

At the core of my visceral existence, there is a primal, desperate character of Victoria that screams "I am a stubborn b#@* and don't even think about trying to budge me from where I'm heading." This visceral self is an unstoppable, super-muscular, reptilian godzilla type that can't deal with prison bars or walls in front of her line of intended action. So, I've been learning to live with this visceral self since age 19 or so.... and yes, this primal, desperate Victoria has been taking the more "emotionally sensitive, rational Victoria" on such interesting adventures. Sheesh!

Thank you, Bren.

I will give Dean Haston a copy of "The Mountain's Last Flower" and inform her that I can do a small run print of my work the last year or so (poetry, short stories, novella, film), for exposure around the Bren community. It would be nice to get other people's feedback. Especially since they're a part of my school.

I need to figure out how to be notified about important issues outside the realm of email, because I truly have ECP or electronocommunicatiphobia.

This human society is Biologically Incorrect! Victoria's Mental Ecosystem to be continued... one more quarter... without being in debt....

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.

162. UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science and Management: Two Days of Playing with My Identity

Last night I was alone. My brain was fried from a nearly-entire day of orientation. It has been two days of playing with my identity. There are myriads of factors of my environment (my internal and external environment) that make up who I am, and one of them is the "social dressing," or "the social coat," because it is usually the people around me who provide competitive and collaborative drive to know what I know and do what I do. So I go from the UCR Earth Sciences at the Angels Baseball Stadium on Sunday to the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management on Monday. Plus, last night, in my freezing cold condition of t-shirt and vest with no sweater at a Starbucks, I mindlessly signed the SIR, Statement of Intent to Register, and the SLR, or Statement of Legal Residence. I wonder what Dr. Young thinks about all this university bureaucracy. Anyway. Geeze, I mean, I made my decision. Physically transferred my "strings attached" from Riverside to UC Santa Barbara. I wish I had some time to reflect upon the day before doing that.

Afterwards I was stressed and alone, and though I don't eat pizza, I ate pizza. I signed up for a credit card at Kmart, and I was approved. It is shocking that only 1/3 of all people who apply get approved for credit cards. Scary. I was supposed to get a free Little Caesars Pizza for applying, but the joint inside Kmart closed. I need to destroy the coupon. I ate an expensive Rusty's Pizza instead. It was tiny. I remember craving for cheese. Why is this important? It is important in terms of how stress can dictate your life and stress can lead to eating food you wouldn't eat if you weren't stressed.

Don't get me wrong, the day was quite fun, but I was in a state of information overload. I wished I didn't miss Dr. Sylvester's geology lecture. There were a lot of things that happened, but I suppose a few highlights stick out in my mind. (1). The day was mostly oriented toward Environmental Masters students, because there were only two new Ph.D. prospectives. Me and a guy by the name of Jaime who's also prime meat for Scripps Institute of Oceanography and a few other places. (2). I find the whole day ironic because it was a UCSB salespitch day as to why go to UCSB rather than one of the "other" big four schools (Bren, Yale, Duke, Michigan). I told everyone that I was trying to convince these guys for over SIX MONTHS to try and let me in, and you guys are trying to get conned

It is an interesting decision-making protocol as to why students choose one school over another. It is the summation of factors in a new place. Some primary factors include (1) distance from home (humans are victims of homing behavior!) (2) structure of the program (3) the people, access to the profs, student life (4) the town, the region, access to opportunity and "life outside of school" (as Hunter Lenihan said that a drawback of this place is that students surf too much) (5) financial costs. West coast people are weirded out by the gothic, ancient properties of the east coast, and the east coast people are weirded out by the west coast. It's all goes back to people's spatial baseline to when they were a kid. That baseline of environment is the foundation of comparison for all new places you experience for the rest of your life. People choose what they choose based on gestalt knowledge: people tend to go with what they know and then venture into the unknown. So, if you have a family and friend base in Michigan, it might drive you to be there, or family and friends might drive you away, depending on the circumstance!

All I can say is that changing your geographic position changes your entire point of view and world view. All variables and factors in your environment are in flux, and it would be nice if some of these variables were known or familiar so your knowledge base of a new geographic region is not completely starting from scratch.

Many students were still in decision phase, but I was adamant about attending UCSB. I told everyone that I was a UCSB promoter. I come crawling back after 4.5 years of struggle with university "red tape" elsewhere. Every single university claims they are "interdisciplinary," but the difference between UCSB and elsewhere is "practice" versus "lipservice." I warned them that if you talk to me I will be advocating your attendance to UCSB, but I am not comfortable doing it in part because in high school, I convinced my best friend Jonathan Tao to attend UC Davis with me (I pushed so hard, it was almost like a Hitler situation of repeat a lie enough times it becomes the truth), and then after one year of UC Davis I LEAVE while Jon STAYS the WHOLE TIME. Ever since that embarrassing shift in perception and change of my own behavior, every single time I offer advice, I provide the disclaimer: "This is just my advice. This is just my perception. Everyone is different, so you can take it or leave it." Which is what I will do with my films. "This is just my perception of Reality. You can take it or leave it."

I didn't have to promote UCSB much because UCSB speaks for itself. You just walk around the campus bluffs and get inspired. The landscape speaks to you on its own. You don't need anyone to tell you why this place is so great.

I know in my mind I have entered an academic position of utopia... back to the College of Creative Studies (CCS) and infinite mental freedom. Now bureacratic red tape to hold you back. Now it's a matter of "just do it." Though I am in utopia, I must remember my struggles, because it is these struggles that generate stories of environmental media. Struggle and desperation is necessary for creativity. You only appreciate what you have, given that you have experienced some time of withdrawal and absence. I think that it is a struggle for actors and film-makers to achieve "success" but once they made it, they slack off, because they no longer struggle. I must always impose self-infliction, otherwise creativity dies like an annual flower in Riverside (two week bloom and then shrivels to brown dust with the sun)

Here are some inter-related reasons why Bren and UCSB... in terms of more theoretical elements of organizational structure:

(1) small institution / organization
(2) young organization / institution (as opposed to 250-year-old east coast institutions entrenched in tradition, habits, rituals)
(3) ease of access to professors
(4) red tape? What red tape? (more for masters students, it's like two-year medical school)
(5) open, flexible, collective, collaborative, adaptive, willingness and ease of change of the program according to student and external changes, co-evolution of the university with the outside world
(6) as I would say before, most universities are like overspecialized rainforests: every creature has its own intellectual territory and guards it fiercely, and then at UCSB it's like a bacterial mat of primordial ooze: intellectually incestuous, I'd say!

**The fact that UCSB is my utopia is problematic because when I design films that are satires on the operation of universities, I must tell everyone that this is a far cry from a satire on UCSB but a satire to every experience I have had outside of UCSB. I must constantly remind myself of the emotional pain. Easy. Go to UCR. I was in pain two days ago from it.

The question is now: HOW DID THE UCSB COMMUNITY COME TO BE SO OPEN-MINDED? Relatively speaking, at least. Well, I have a couple of theories. One. Relative geographic isolation from southern California. There are no competing interests in the community, in addition no incentives to commute. Two. You are in a landscape that is chronic inspiration. I told Milton Love, "I think it's the ocean air. It keeps pumping oxygen in these people's brains. The incessant flow of the crashing waves couples well with the flow and evolution of thought of the UCSB community." Nothing is stagnant. Everything is in flux, from moment to day to years. And people feel it in their blood and their brains. The landscape becomes a part of the people, and the people become a part of the landscape. It is reflected in their art, their science, their scholarly essays, their daily lives. People also feel this way about the desert. I met an artist who said that people in Riverside are detached from their environments, and therefore detached from any representations of the Riverside environment (aka "art"). Same with the city. I could call it "limited" attachment. When you let the landscape become a part of you, suddenly you are open-minded. Automatically. By default. So, this is the quasi-poetic derivation of UCSB gestalt open-mindedness. Milton Love is laughing right now, if he were listening to me.

So, yesterday I was a FREE PROMOTER for UCSB. Ridiculous. I was a living, walking, breathing, talking commercial box for UCSB Bren. Before I have been known to be a Living Font (aka Calligrapher of sorts) and a living GIS unit (because I drew my maps by hand because I didn't know the fancy computer software).

I guess now with this crop of students I was exposed to today, I will come to see who are the people who choose schools based on... prestige or name-branding, or for everything else. I told a few people yesterday that I cannot attend any big-name school simply because almost everyone there has a heightened ego complex in their minds' hearts. Oooo. Yale. Duke. Big name schools. Prestige. Etcetera. Puke. Puke. Puke. I was at UCLA. Oh, did I feel the prestige factor. I vividly remembered a UCLA bio graduate student stating that we are grad students at UCLA because it distinguishes us from the ditch diggers. I had only been at UCLA for five weeks. It was the first day I had a thought in my mind that I wanted to leave.

When people have a tiny portion of their brains reserved toward institutional-prestige-stamping-of-their-foreheads, that automatically makes these people less open-minded. UCSB is UCSB and people are here to LEARN. People are here in the humble context of a Kant-like "beautiful" and "sublime" environment (yes, both), which just automatically spurs your thinking juices to flow. It's a yuppy intellectual community like Sebastopol, California, except that Sebastopol doesn't have a university and Santa Barbara does.

I am not sure if I am a yuppy. I thought a yuppy was a wealthy hippi. Relative to the United States, I am not wealthy (physically). Relative to the rest of the world, I am wealthy, simply because I was born by default in the United States. Besides I find more value in intellectual wealth than physical wealth. So, I don't want to be called a yuppy. Thank you for respecting me. And also thank you for not teasing me with Victoria's Secret.

Both Oran Young and John Melack (my brain sponsors) were busy yesterday, so I didn't get a chance to talk with them very much. I will be meeting with Dr. Young this week, hopefully before Thursday dinner. I was talking with Dr. Melack on the deck yesterday, very briefly, and he told me about Dave Panitz' website design class last quarter. I thought he knew that I was in that class. I was a bit sad. He did help admit me to the program, right? In the end, the only person who can keep track of your life is YOU, Victoria. Besides my resume was liks 20 pages long, so how can anyone remember every single detail of my life. Besides, Dr. Melack is a Dean of Bren. He must have so much on his plate, I don't know how he can handle that. I would go NUTS. I am already going nuts right now....

Other interesting factoids. (1) Bren only has 35 Ph.D. students, 120 masters students (2). UCSB is the retirement research center for Nobel Laureates. We have five of them now. Why not combine research and vacation retirement?

Let's see. I am mentally tapering out here. I'll jot out the order of events yesterday and call it for blogging on Bren Orientation Day. My mind can only process so much. The rest becomes... detailed nuance.

Slept over in Ventura. Woke up early refreshed. Still pissed from the Angels game yesterday. Drove over to Kinkos. Wrote a little about the baseball experience. Then jogged. Bought jacket at Kmart, which I returned. Went home. Cleaned up. A little bit. Went to UCSB. Didn't wear my beanie. Tried to be open-minded. Went to Sylvester's Geo 2 class. Implanted voice recorder. Said he was glad I was listening in. Missed the first part of Dean Ernst von Weizsacker's speech. I remember him saying that "These environmental issues are mostly our generation's fault. So now we work with you guys to create a better world." First time a senior authority admitted their fault. Wow. Sat next to speaker. Met a girl fro UC Davis. Lauren Fisher? She reminds me of Brittany Enzmann, the cool girl who sits right next to you on the first day of grad school, end up becoming best friends. I sat next to the speakers. BJ set them up. I need to help her out. Good experience with audio equipment. We ate lunch. Mexican. Halibut. Great salsa. Sat with Dr. Melack and Dr. Freudenberg. Met a cool student from Berkeley who's girfriend's into educational media. Dr. Melack joked about my condition of excessive school transferring. Good stuff. I'm staying at UCSB. Also met Sarah Anderson, new political scientist with environmental organizations. We had then a professor's panel: why UCSB. Starting to get bored. Then student presentation on modular housing. Won big prize. Didn't watch. It was a business plan. It's scary. Be careful what you specialize in because once you dig deep into the rabbithole, it's hard to get out. Eco-entrepreurship. Engineering partnership. Ran up to Maria Gordon, talked with her for quite a while. The EMI research focus group was a bit of a "dud," not much going on. Few students. Everyone is overworked. Short notice. Where is this going? Talked about Thursday's dinner talk. I have to come prepared. Questions. Collaboration. Focus. Etcetera. Maria was very busy. It's very nice she talks with me. I got great ideas from that. Ran downstairs. Met Breana Flanagan, carbon calorie counter for film production. Works with Disney. Unpaid internship. She's cool. Nice talk. Did campaign analysis for Zaca fire. Ron Rice blurb on Smokey Bear counter-intuitive to Bub's research. Must see air-quality control board campaign analysis. Give her an email when possible. bflanagan@bren.ucsb.edu. Sat in discussions about student life and programming at Bren in "steep-angled" underground lecture hall. Assistant Dean Laura Haston is Frank Davis' wife. My god. 8 Bren marriages. My god. Intellectually and biologically incestuous is UCSB! Got bored. Took notes on communication.

I'm stopping here. Can't write anymore. My brain blew a fuse from panic attack and reprioritization.

157. The Peacock and the Bower Bird, and the Presentations of the Bren Masters Group Projects, UCSB, Class of 2008

Above is a poem / song variation of the Peacok and the Bower bird. I have a series of song variations of the same theme. I was inspired to write this yesterday.

Below are some quick jots of my short-sighted experience of the Bren masters group projects.

I am experiencing a bit of mental interference here trying to finish Geo 2. I just went to presentations of Bren group projects in downtown Santa Barbara. Some swank hotel by the ocean. It is impressive how Bren is very well networked with agencies outside the university. It is also amazing how applied and practical Bren is oriented. I found out the only two people in the camera crew were Dave Panitz and Ben Botkin. I told Dave that I had my own equipment. I could have even volunteered. I don’t even know whether he even READS my emails. Geeze. I saw 1.5 fisheries talks and 1 eco-labeling Greenopia talk. Everyone practices. Everyone wore suits and ties, which kind of defeated the purpose of everything. I am wearing my usual beat-up vest and blue shorts. I feel guilty for it because “it’s the same old clothes,” but then I couldn’t return this dxm $70-vest, the most expensive piece of clothing I have, and I am going to beat the shxt out of it, and get my $70-bucks worth. The powerpoint slides were very organized and presentable, but very corporate. Everything is very formal and corporate. The presentations were “objective” but I’m just thinking… well I’m trying to do this rock crab film. Assuming that I just sat here watching this show—appropriate for these given audiences, but how am I going to take this information and make it a riot act. Science. Statistics. Models. Numbers, Mumbo-jumbo. Objective to me means unemotional. Trying to parameterize the multi-dimensionality of humanity through numbers. No emotion. Sucks. Well I guess that’s what the point is. Is science science? Or science has fallen in the habit of stamping everything with numbers and fancy verbage, and voila…. It’s objective, unemotional, and computer-dependent. Therefore it’s science. The pitfall of eco-labeling and Greentopia is that this eco-labeling caters to affluent people—particularly educated women. Maria Gordon made the point: how are we gonna get the guy on the street in the middle of the city to care about the environment? Ha! Randy Olson tactic of Sizzle. Brilliant. The pitfall of the integrated management of commercial and recreational fisheries is that the idea is brilliant—networking across fisheries with different value systems—but the question of “Where did the data come from?’ and “How was it collected?” Properties of the data set remained largely vague to me, and they were all economic models… which is all on the verge of science, science fiction, and voodoo representations of reality. Shoot me for saying that. I talked to BJ quickly and then I left in the rain. Could have stayed for hors d’oevres. Didn’t want to. Michael Hanrahan was there. Didn’t have a chance to talk to him.

104. A New Song Called Good Trouble, Inspired from a Vivid Conversation with Dr. Oran Young, Bren, UC Santa Barbara

Good Trouble

[chorus]

ah-goooood trouble

ah-goooood trouble

everything i thought

was a failure

the professor saw

ah-goooood trouble

everything i thought

was a disaster

the professor saw

goooood trouble

we need to experiment

we need some change

it may not work

but yet we tried

it's better than

staying the same

it's not by the books

but yet we tried

and shook all the static pain

[chorus]

i have some

properties

that may seem

quite quirky

in one place

that's negative energy

in another

it's thriving novelty

in one place

it's self-destroying

in another

it's breaking all boundaries

[chorus]

is there

a place for me

where i survive

spare my sanity

in the world's prison

to box your being

the freedom lurks

in the nooks and crannies

in the world's habits

down spiraling

the freedom reigns

in microcosmal humanity

[chorus]

[chorus]

It's amazing to think that two people can have two entirely different viewpoints of the same experiences! One professors views my years outside UCSB as a "failure" and an "inability to finishe" and another professor views my trials as experiences to learn and become more well-rounded! In the end, it's all relative. It's all a matter of perception.