113. Biologically Incorrect: The Body Count Attendee of University Guest Lectures

A Cartoon and Five Points.

#1. Above is an old cartoon / art piece I created during my time at UC Riverside, spring 2006.

#2. The Origins of Victoria's Cartooning. The free temporal niche space during a busy life of learning ecology / evolutionary biology / geology / environmental sciences was only during (a) a few boring undergraduate courses (e.g. a required "diversity" course during my senior year, which as a class on ecology and religion), and (b) a series of guest lectures for the UC Riverside Earth Sciences Department that had a mandatory attendance due to the small size of the department (and hence I was more of a "body count" rather than an intigued and engaged audience member) (though ironically, if the "body count" factor would have not been an issue, I probably would have gone to several of these lectures out of my own free will... *sigh*).

#3. In this particular geophysics lecture that featured some prospective candidate for professorship, this lady was by far superbly boring, outrageously technical and jargonesque, and to add the final stain of rust and force vector to make the whole ragged bike fall apart (this was no cherry added to the whipcream of a cake), ths lady had a chronic twitch on her shoulder, which placed me in this extreme mood of high anxiety for most of the talk. Not that I blame people for their internal biological issues--I have my own problems as well. It's just this case, this factor was the "tipping point" to my aggravation.

#4. What do you do when you reach a tipping point? Well, you need to dissipate the energy build-up either through (a) yelling or (b) doing something quasi-constructive, even though you are trapped in a certain location for... let's see... another 40 minutes. I chose (b) and in the back of the class, I slumped in my chair, observing her powerpoint slides, stripping the art components from the words of each slide, drawing the art components to form an impressionistic collage of random artistic geogphysics jargon. And Voila! Another piece of biological incorrectedness. My dad was at that lecture to, and one time I had to wake him up because he was snoring in the back of the classroom! (To remind you, my dad is a professor... snoring in the back of a guest lecture... and I thought I was bad). I showed him my artwork, and he busted up laughing, completely understanding my pain for sitting through that lecture when I could have been doing something productive with my own work.

#5. I think this would be a superb art series called "Biologically Incorrect: The Body Count Attendee of University Guest Lectures." All I would do is create an art series that involved conglomerations of random technical visual jargon of different fields. Great. I think this would fly. I have an idea in my pocket for a future to-do list.

Oh no, I have a couple of additional points. Oh well. This here represents run-off flow of ideas.

#6. There were a couple of "biological" components in the image: the back of Chris Rhinehart's head, top left), and the bottom of the bubble collage has two hands curved concavely toward each other, symbolizing how people were giving this lecturer an artificially enthusiastic round of applause... please... man... is this a joke?

#7. And back to the man theme of all this, the ultimate Ph.D. question for Biologically Incorrect is "What's the point?" and this applies very well here.

Shell Patterns, Organic Art, Failure-Survival, Not as Clueless as a Freshman

This collage above is seemingly random and out of place, but in a twisted way it is not. I took these pictures in the Blue Horizons post-withdrawal aftermath. There are these chairs in this remodeled classroom in the second floor of the Geology Building at UC Riverside that actually have this material pattern on the chairs. They look like bivalves or brachiopods. More like bivalves. Take your pick. I wonder whether my advisor, Dr. Mary Droser, had a say in the interior decorating of this room. I stared at these chairs all of two years ago, during a year of great internal depression and turmoil at UC Riverside. I would be blasted with information about geology during weekly guest speaker talks. I was there because I was a body count. I wasn't there out of choice. Such is the dilemma of being a part of a small department. The Body Count Effect. Show up to events not out of choice. Sucks. Things were a bit tight that last year of graduate school. Communication skews. Yet, out of stress, in this environment of failure and high anxiety, in the room of endless talks and my presence of body counts, in this very room, I had the ability to focus, and partly erase failure with success: such was the sight of my filming big parts of my film: the plasma lamps, the intro in the graduate room. It was a document of history: a history of personal meaning and positivity as a child, a history of mental chaos in a most recent year of graduate school, and now most recently, a time of initiating completion, a time of progress. A time of self-discovery and releasing the chains in my mind, to continue to explore as a CCS student once again. Or I have this false illusion of this feeling at this very moment. Watch that be erased Monday afternoon. Nah. Things should be fine. I was creating a song in the car that goes as such:

I'm not as clueless as a freshman

but I'm clueless nevertheless

random energy channeling

question values, meaning of society

the same a freshman in a grocery store

in endless choice and indecisions' core

trying to survive mentally

when the system's in mask and crumbling

I stare and beam at my elders' eyes

and back a knowing smile or look of despise

yet oh yet, I shake my head

for I have a right, I have a right

to question all you have built upon

for this system beneath my feet's falling down

and I need to know why and how

as a clueless freshman and a curious child

to survive beyond the death of your failure of now

to survive beyond your death, to build a new tomorrow

and so I knock on your door

in fear that you may know

I'm not as clueless as a freshman

but I'm clueless nevertheless....

Hopefully professors may appreciate my presence. At least I'm not as clueless as a freshman. Good luck to me