In development

I wanted to put some new photographs on here because I think they are some of my best I've taken in a while. Or to put it another way, I feel that my photographs are getting better and are more frequently so. I also recently received a really nice new tri-pod and I am learning to use it. The initial conclusion from some indoor studies I've done is that I need a better lens. Someday. So many of my hobbies require new gear and I can't really afford it right now, so I will get by with what I have until I can do better. I think it'll be that much more sweet.

Recently, one of life's many passers-by asked me a good good question: Why do I like science so much? I kind of initially thought about it being in my blood, and that was my answer, but it really has been plaguing me off and on for over a week now. What is it about science that I really love? There are so many answers and I want to document them on here as the ideas come and as I am able to get them down in my journal. I finished my old squared-paper marble-journal that I bought on March 28th, 2009 and went out on Saturday to buy myself a new one. I almost bought a Moleskin with graph lines but instead found this cool company:

http://www.whitelines.se/

Its a nice white notebook and I am proud of finding it.  To be honest, I haven't finished my old one quite yet because I still need to write one more page.  I hope it is devoted to this exploration about my interest in science.  I actually want to go work on that right now.

Pictures and a hello from me!  I am realizing that I do not have too many pictures of me smiling.  Thats a good thing to work on.

I don't know what I have done

First Aid Kit | Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (Cover) from RADAR MAKER on Vimeo.

I'm turning myself into a demon

A past life; revisitation

What a funny place I am from.  To say that I am from there is to say that I am also from St. Petersburg, Morgantown, Michigan, Cincinnati or Boston.  It was just a place I lived for a period of time when i was a kid.  6 years in Martinsburg has certainly shaped me.  However, all of the people that I celebrated Christmas with this year would also agree that its so funny any of us ended up having roots in that town.  Driving around the little downtown with my mom I think its great she still knew so much about it.  I, however, realized at the dining room table that I had never looked at a map of the town.  Ever.  It surprised me where the house I grew up was located relative to downtown, my elementary school, the highway.  I pointed this out to my mother but she didn't even seem to look twice at the Google page. Sometimes it seems that she makes things up as she goes along but it certainly is convincing.

We moved there in 1992 and while I ran off to watch cartoons with Alex and Leah upstairs in the great big house, I wonder what exactly my mom did as soon as she got there.  She must have instantly become busy, tied up in something, walking around, moving, having an objective.  I think I might get that from her, because it is hard for her to not sit still when she feels out of control.  Anxiety, our friend. How different hers and mine experiences were in Martinsburg.  Me attending elementary school just down the street and she probably just struggling to find something to do while I was at school.  Actually I don't know if that is true at all.  I always assume that she just found it so miserable.  I think she often thinks things are incredibly miserable, or is dissatisfied or is displeased.  This is my impression and I have experienced the evidence to support it.  I can certainly understand these emotions, they are no strangers to me.  What advice could I give you having grown up my mother's son?  Life is full of terrible moments.  It is difficult, disappointing, lonely, unsatisfying, frustrating.  But there are also moments in a person's life when things are beautiful.  A sunrise over fall dew-fields, warmth in your apartment during a New England snow storm, a beautiful reunion, a friend's ears and heart over coffee.  Those moments are the meanings of life.

And you can wait for them to happen or you can go out and get them.  The search lasts your whole life, your collection of greatness accumulate in your treasure chest.  Those are possessions that cannot be taken away from you, they are truly a form of education.  So on one of the last days of this infamous, most complicated of decades, my mother set out to find some adventure.  We drove through Martinsburg.

(I used to be a little boy actor at this theater. It was a lot of fun.):












And then, out on the highway, into the mountains. My mom was at the wheel and quickly slipped out of town.




































When I was in 4th and 5th grade, 8 and 9 and 10 years old, my mother and I would travel a lot on such roads. And here I was again, we were on these roads again. My incapacity to take control of the wheel, the lack of knowledge about our direction or our destination, my fondness for Garrison Keillor slowly developing. It took me a lot of time to realize that this time, too, Mr. Keillor, alive and still at it himself, was softly playing his part on the radio for us this nostalgic day. I wonder if my mom thought about the strange days 15 years ago as we went around those bends and over those bridges. Perhaps she thought about the overwhelming number of changes that have occurred in her life since those times, and that nothing stays constant and expected. These minds and bodies have changed, these roads are new, these mountains are smaller and more close together, I don't play team sports anymore. New lives, new homes, new friends, new interests, hobbies, jobs. What does stay constant is beauty and that what we see around us. An adventure's ability to throw off the cloak of doom and dread. Wow, my mom exclaimed at the rock formations with water pouring down them from the snow above. Wow, I whisper, as the church steeple of Harper's Ferry pokes through the brown branches on the mountain-side.


I hope everyone also had wonderful Christmases. And Happy New Year!

Some days are really low

Last Minutes with ODEN from phos pictures on Vimeo.

but fuck those days. that's why there are new days.

Liquid Wednesday

these aren't photographs but I think they are beautiful. Elegant, no?

Y.Z. Kami

I lay in bed this morning for a long time. Sometimes I lay in bed and wonder what is coming of me or what direction I am going. I think about love and what i've done to people, I think about how my body feels without touching it, I think about how long i can stare at the same spot on my wrist. Dead period. I usually feel good when I make myself get up, when I make a cup of coffee for myself, when I eat, when I put my clothes on I feel short sometimes, and other times I feel tall. Sometimes my stomach is big and sometimes it is not. My legs are surprisingly slender even though I ride my bike to work everyday. Today it is a windy day, as I can see looking out my living room window, the leaves are pouring off the trees. Red and yellow droplets are flowing along the sidewall lines of my house, snaking down the windows, pooling in the street, collecting in the storm drains, drowning the rats in the sewer, collecting in my bicycle fenders... Beautiful. My trip to work today will be full of resistance, it will be me thinking about the fluidity of the atmosphere, of my volume displacing the volume of the air infront of me, around me. It will be me thinking through myself as a knife, cutting through in linear fashion. Cut Cut Cut. right? Stay out of my way!

I think i'm going to go see Jonathan Safran Foer tonight.

Bicycle Diaries,: Boston

One of my favorite gifts that I received for my birthday this year was a book about cycling by the musician and artist David Byrne.

Bicycle Diaries chronicles Mr. Byrne's travels in different cities around the world and exploring their unique characteristics as be sees them. His perspective is that of a casual cyclist, perched slightly higher than the average person. From this perspective, he explains, not only is vehicular and pedestrian traffic more easily observed, but so are cultural nuances, urban characteristics unique to each city he visits. Perched on a bicycle, the view licensed to him allows a very free flowing commentary beginning with street layout and urban planning structure and continuing on to local creativity, history, music, art, behavior, customs, societal problems and idiosyncrasies. The theme is quite inspiring. Sitting on a vehicle that is self-powered leads one to harness his or her own self-powered mind and ideas.

If you are unfamiliar with the experience, long-ish distance cycling is quite an affecting experience. Mr. Byrne has experienced a feeling that is experienced by many choosing a bicycle as their usual mode of transportation. Riding around Boston, there are many people on bicycles that undoubtedly are each experiencing their own mini-conclusions, -questions and -epiphanies. In the past 3 months living in Boston and Cambridge, I have discovered a little bit of interesting unique touches to this area. I live in east Cambridge, across the street from a large park and a 5 minute bike ride to M.I.T..

Many many things are accessible by bicycle from here and so this makes life very easy. Cambridge, and to some extent Boston, has many bicycle lanes on their streets. While not perfect, they are a great improvement to what I am used to. In a way, I believe that I am going to be quite spoiled, they are so abundant. Riding down southeast through M.I.T. is how I usually get to the Harvard Bridge to ride over the Charles River into Boston. I love that ride over the bridge so much. At night it is particularly dramatic. If Andrew (my roommate) and I ride together over the bridge, one of us usually manages to exclaim "I can't believe we live here!". Usually the yelling is drowned out by the cars and busses buzzing by amid a dazzle of city lights in the near distance to the left and right. Most days of the week I would expect to not cross over into Boston. Usually I am spending most of my time either at home or at work. The bike ride to work contrasts significantly from the ride into Boston. I work in Belmont, a township that is west of Cambridge. In recent weeks the trek (ha, I ride a Trek bicycle) has been decorated by fall foliage with leaves littering the sides two-lane roads through small neighborhoods. I really enjoy the fact that I pass two lakes, one of which is belongs to the local high school and is ringed by a park. Belmont is in a county that pays the most taxes in the state. My workplace, Mclean Hospital, is situated on a large hill in the middle of the town and as seen from a distance as I slowly approach, is covered in brilliant trees.

I think the end of this weekend is one of the most appropriate times to write about cycling in Boston. The Daylight savings time change that has occurred over the past night has resulted in a much earlier sunset and when combined with the extraordinarily good weather that we experienced in the past 2 days, I am reminded that bicycling season is over. Yesterday was Halloween Saturday and I managed to use all 3 of my bicycles extensively during the course of the day. Beginning in the morning after baking chocolate-chip scones in our oven, I took my commuter cycle to Jamaica Plain southwest of Boston to visit the Bikes Not Bombs co-operative. This organization has been operating for 23 years and after receiving donations from the community of unwanted cycles, packages them to be shipped to Africa or other countries that have their own exploding used bicycle market like Guatemala and Ghana. I enjoy volunteering there and there exists of course an entire network of people around this shop. It also reminds me my bike co-op I helped start in Ann Arbor, MI. The types of bikes that are commonly encountered and also the programs they do are all established and mature versions of ideas that we had back in Michigan. And they have a ton more space and even multiple buildings that are used for their operations.

Andrew was running errands while I was gone and we agreed to meet up in the early afternoon to go on a long-delayed roommate bike ride. So we put on our cycling shorts and mounted our road bikes to ride to Mclean so I could show him my hospital and then we took a turn south through Watertown and Newton to pick up some craigslist purchases: Backpack, wooden cutting board, iron, glass measuring container, french press, espresso maker, two espresso cups and saucers. Everything but the backpack was 20 dollars. Many of our purchases made for the apartment in the last 2 months have been from Craigslist. We are voracious consumers through that website. The beautiful thing about Boston is that by bike, nearly everything is accessible. And it is also likely when you mount your bicycle that you will take less time reaching your destination than a person stepping out his or her door and walking to a bus-stop. This is the best reality there is when you are using your body to reach a destination. My trip to work takes 30 minutes by bike and 50 minutes by public transit! So not only are Andrew and I reaching our places faster, we obtain our purchases of nearly all of our goods from within Boston, using a system of bicycle lanes and our own legs. Unfortunately this isn't true with food (yet…). Traveling home we rode through more small towns that run into each other (Brighton and Allston) on our way into Boston, stopping to check the dumpsters of some bike shops for treasure and also for some coffee.

The beautiful evening continued as I came home to put on my bright red union suit and took my fixed-gear back into Boston. Being Halloween, there was organized a spectacular parade of costumed cyclists to travel through the squares of Boston and Cambridge. I missed the beginning, which was starting back down in Jamaica Plain, so I crossed the River and sat down in Kenmore Square near Boston University, waiting. I observed several bus-loads of costumed ghouls and sexy-maids filing out of and filling up buses, costumed young people moving up and down the street. And then! A bright announcement of that which I had been waiting fore: A cycle with a large stick pushing out of the back of it, brightly lit and driven by a cow. The parade snaked through Kenmore square to the chagrin of taxi drivers and to the delight of pedestrians and I joined in, a perfect rendezvous. Bicycles carrying speakers and stereos joined in playing Ramones songs and disco music, people were yelling and whistling, moving slowly enough so that the parade would not thin out and allow cars to weave dangerously in between the riders. Even after the front of the parade moved out of Kenmore square, the tail of the snake had not even entered! It was quite a site and I was proud to be part of it. With so many people out on the town, we had a permanent croud cheering us on. Quite dramatic and quite fun.

The parade could be interpreted as a canary for bicycle transportation culture vitality. With such a diverse turn out last night it made me feel really good about being a regular cyclist on these streets. May there be more reports about Boston and Cambridge bicycling from this blog. Maybe this kind of direction is what this website needs in order to keep going. Change might be in good order and healthy for a blog that has lasted this long.

“Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.”

The CERN Large Hadron Collider creeps me out. Really interesting article about its fate in the NYTimes this morning. Truly fascinating.


I met a new friend here in Boston named Kawan and this is his uncle!

Libra

This is an excellent time to celebrate the pleasures of emptiness . . . to extol the virtues of the blank slate . . . to be open to endless possibilities but committed to none . . . to bask in the freedom of not having to be anything, anyone, or anywhere. Are you smart enough to need no motto to live by? Are you resourceful enough to rely on nothing but the raw truth of the present moment? If so, you will thrive in the coming days.

Inside to Outside

Have you ever gone to a museum and seen an exhibit or a work of art and felt like you were in love with the world? That is a silly question? Does it happen to you? I feel like I empathize with creativity. It triggers in me a response that makes me want to rush out and express myself.

Here are two thoughts to bring that big thought up there into focus.

1. My mother is a psychiatrist and with older individuals that struggle with drug abuse and addiction. It is interesting that in this city and in the environment I find myself socially sometimes, people are quite fascinated with why I am here in the first place. ("Whoa, what a name! I've never heard one like that before...") "Where is that name from?" and so I explain. I've had to explain my history many times to strangers in recent weeks... a lot. And it forces me to confront my history. Why am I here? Things more often than not spiral back to my mother and her efforts to become a doctor in this country. People are confused, though, amazed. What happened in Russia around 1992, something with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Huh, what did happen there? What does a sponsor family do? Why did he lose his language? What is West Virginia like? The questions that I am confronted with, directly and indirectly, eventually force me to re-evaluate them, too. I have a history that I seem to lose sight of at times. If I stand in a museum like I did on Thursday at the ICA in Boston , I become separated from those questions. My emotions are universal, inspirational. I am lifted out of my body! I float on the beauty of two artists I learned about. philip-lorca diCorcia and Damian Ortega[see above].

That is the emotion where I feel endless love. I want to rush out and create. My mother told me a story about one of her patients. She had him deconstruct the word ExPress. Ex has latin roots and means to go out or away from, out from within. Press could be loosely associated with pressure. Expression is the release of pressure from within. Art makes me want to release that pressure that I have after a long day of silence and observation and frustration, after a week of wide-eyed ferocious labor at the lab, 10 things on a check-list, marked off one by one. It is amazing how much I can store inside of my body. I am but a speck in the universe and, like an atom, can release much energy. The task: find creativity.

2. empathy. A theory on empathy, the significance of yawning. Yawning when someone else yawns is a good sign. Can you feel the feelings other experience? What does it mean to feel what others feel? Does everything in my mind, my subconscious, have a structural, cellular correlate? Yes... I do believe this is true. The mystery of neuroscience is the elucidation of how protein and voltage potential and physical change at the cellular level results in consciousness, art, expression, emotion. Why do I yawn when you yawn? Mirror cells exist in our brains that activate when we observe others doing an action or feeling an emotion. And these cells activate in the regions of our brains that would be active if we ourselves were doing the action or feeling the emotion. I seem to recall that the level of activity when we are empathizing is at about 20% if we were doing it ourselves. Yawning could indicate that you are an empathetic person. If I see a work of art that moves me, do I activate my own creativity? Is it then surprising that my mind spirals off into its own creative processes? No... but how do I harness that? Strengthen that desire to create? I believe it is possible. Practice. Where to start, huh? Well, I decided to begin bringing my journal to museums and writing as I experience the situation. I think that would be fantastic. I will see where that leads me.

---
Also, I want to have a small exhibition here of my own. I wanted to explain about patterns. What patterns do I see in my life? What negative and positive patterns happen to me that I perceive and also that I fall into. Fall into indicates a sense of negativity and I do believe I have negative patterns in my behavior. When I was little my mother explained to me how my nail biting gets wired into my brain to a ferocious degree. So from then on I had quite a concept of behavior being structurally based in the mind. Yes. This is reinforced by continuing the behavior and if you want it to stop, it seems logical that you must practice the opposite, to really reorganize your mind. It is quite healthy, I think. Expound, expound, posit, posit.

to patterns:























to chaos:



















and to a fellow explorer of both: