It was quite a day today. It's already past 7 pm right now and I've locked up myself in my bedroom to breathe some solitude air before our Halloween Party starts. My brother came over last night and I made him stay overnight. I made a potato salad in the morning to give him some to take home and after it was all ready he told me he never eats potato salad! We had a good brunch at Pekara and against all my expectations I was the one who had "La Parisienne" crepe not my little Francophile monster. Man! I feel our relationship is getting better and better day by day and now we're even enjoying the time we spend hanging out with each other. It's interesting...

After the brunch I could make it to one session of the tango workshop and boy, the instructor was great! I can't believe she was dancing with such an ease in those tango shoes with that baby belly she got. She was just amazing. I didn't see her actually dancing, with a partner I mean, and I have no idea how could one dance close embrace tango while being pregnant. I gotta watch her dancing probably tomorrow night if I can make it to the milonga.  Man! I really love tango even though I'm not good at it at all; well, at least not yet. Too much confidence, I know! :D Just watch how beautiful and graceful today's workshop instructors dance.

I was done with the workshop ~ 2:45 pm, so I ran to the town's children museum for the annual genome day. So thanks to M, I learned about the event and that I could volunteer to teach kids about cells, ... We had to walk them through making a collage of one type of cell with all it's major organelles. We had three different patterns, for three different types of cells, for them to chose from: muscle cells, macrophages and nerve cells. Here's the confession: I learned about what macrophages are just today! I also had no idea what the functions and rules of golgi, endoplasmic reticulum, lysosome and phagosomes were prior to today. There was this kid who knew really too much about the cell. I was really shocked. At some point she said that the mitochondria (mitochondrion) had been basically a bacterium and it has evolved over time! Can you believe that?! I still can't! I don't think she was older than 9. There were a considerable number of shy kids, a few hyperactive ones and some that at least seemed to not give a shit. It was cool, I really liked the experience. Teaching is really fulfilling and depleting at the same time for me. I guess when I teach I put too much of myself into it that I wanna die afterwards even though I feel really really good while longing to die! 

I guess a part of my fatigue and headache and not being in the mood is due to the fact that today is the second fucking day of my period. The party is supposed to start in less than half an hour and I haven't dressed up yet and I'm not sure if I even want to. The thing is that I hate being a party spoiler. "Rosie the riveter"?! Boy! I really don't wanna do it. The problem is I know, actually with every fibre of my being, that even with all this reluctance I got, if I dress up and join the people in the party I'll have so much fun. That's the thing. Without even thinking about it I kinda find a way to enjoy myself in almost any situation but I always have an enormous inertia before doing, hmmm..., almost anything?! All I want right now is to sleep. Good night!

Every now and then, all I want, and I really mean all, all the all I want from my life, from the whole universe, is to crash on my couch and stare at the ceiling; ... no, actually not even that; it is to crash on the couch and be; yeah, do nothing else but just be. That's what I have been craving all day today, all the "labor day" * ! 

* Tell me life is not just a huge irony!

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P.S. Wrote the above post yesterday but got to publish it after midnight. 

Have been away forever, I know. Moving and being homeless for a while and then having my brother move to this town for grad school and trying to help him out with basic early stuff totally occupied me for the last say one month. Also since last week I have had to work like crazy for a collaboration. Anyways we have settled in an extremely beautiful and adorable house now and by we I mean my roommates and I who have been living together for the last two years. I can't imagined if we could have found a better place than here to live. Seriously! 

Yesterday we went to watch this movie "BoyHood", and boy! You gotta watch it. It's truly amazing.

In case you didn't recognize the director, Richard Linklater is the director of the trilogy Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight. 

28 years and still counting ...

Here I am, at the age I have always wished to be.
Wish me a good year. I really need one! I want one! I got to make one! Hopefully I will make one!

"The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supreme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities. Aureliano sympathized with the Liberal attitude with respect to the rights of natural children, but in any case, he could not understand how people arrived at the extreme of waging war over things that could not be touched with the hand." -__ From "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

The Allerton Park

I haven't been seeing aspects of my spontaneous self for quite sometime. Very recently I've seen some sparkles of it and I'm so damn happy that it's not dead, the spontaneous self I mean. I was going to accompany my friend, who was visiting from Iran, to Chicago. A few days before he arrived here he said something in his text messages that implied he has been assuming that I will go to Milwaukee with him and I thought well, we'll see and I ended up going to Milwaukee with him and we stayed with a mutual friend and it was hysterically fun. Thankfully I didn't hesitate to go. Also a few days before going to Milwaukee this other friend of mine called saying a few friends have rented a cabin in the woods near Asheville and it will be cool if I could join them. He generously invited me to go to his place in Atlanta, spend a day or two with him and another mutual friend and then we drive to Asheville and join the other two friends with whom we were planning to stay in the cabin?! What did I do!? Got a plane ticket from Milwaukee to Atlanta that very night, a few hours after my friend's call! 

Today?! I was sitting in my office not doing shit and it was too cloudy and depressing; I was down and all of a sudden I decided it's such a shame that I've never been to Allerton Park in nearly four years that I've lived in this town. Fortunately I had a friend's car borrowed for today and I simply drove to Allerton. The best thing I have done in quite a while. Isn't it pretty?!  The interesting thing was that once I got to the park it stopped raining and it got quite sunny and beautiful as you can say from these two photos:

And below is the same scene but this time from the top of the white folly in the Fu Dog Garden. 

Look at the photos in this blog post so you will get a better feeling what a heaven I've been to today. I would recommend reading the post as well; she has written pretty well about the park and Robert Allerton. The white folly I talked about earlier is captured in the first photo of the post. 

On my way back I was so charged that once I got to Champaign I realized I had driven 28 miles in 17 minutes! 

I just learned today that Robert Allerton has donated a substantial number of artifacts to The Art Institute of Chicago. Such a shame I didn't know this person before. 

"You can't plant wheat and expect to harvest oat" said L from Milwaukee!!!

I can't believe I have done this. Today is the second day I'm on this low carb diet. If you think two days are nothing, I invite you to try it and see how terrible you will feel in the middle of the very first day. I had a very bad headache yesterday. Today my headache was way milder. I read a lot and realized the headache is due to the decrease in blood sugar and its consequences. I am not taking the insane diet version of under 30 gm daily intake of carbs. I've had 100 gm a day so far (I mean in the 1.75 last days!). I will write more about the diet once I get to the rewarding stage which is when I already lost a few pounds. I have had this obsession with desserts forever and I always thought I got to do something about it before I will need to deal with its terrible consequences especially as I get older. Also it has been a while again that I am not happy with my weight and I am tired of too many failed trials to lose weight. I need to get rid of the 10-15 pounds I gained since last summer. The weird thing to me yesterday was that I didn't have the daydreamings I usually have when I try to cut down on desserts. I usually find myself in the middle of fantasizing that for example I am walking to Panera Bread to get a croissant, or I am at Mia Za's buying a tiramisu,... I guess yesterday I had so much headache and nausea to deal with that I didn't get luxurious problems like fantasizing!

Meeting L and hanging out with her in Milwaukee was really inspiring. She's super cool, positive and funny. It was interesting to hear it from her, whom I always thought is more or less an easygoing person, that "One shouldn't flirt with one's goals!", she laughed before finishing the sentence herself. Apparently she has bet with a few colleagues on growing six pack abs and she has started a serious bodybuilding program since February. Her body is just perfect. It was amazing to me how she wasn't even tempted to take a bite of any sort of desserts. Her determination was really admirable and made me think "C'mon girl! If you really want something, you gotta pay the price! If not then drop it!". I'm thinking of starting power yoga maybe; weightlifting is a bit too boring for me to be honest.

The spectacular thing is that I automatically have been eating fish and drinking green tea since yesterday. I used to avoid them as much as I could. Again L had this priceless statement that "It's only 50% about work out, the other 50% is about what you eat and how you live"; then she continued that "Bodybuilding is an art. The major difference with other forms of art is that the masterpiece you are working on is alive! You literally build your body". We again laughed at her deep philosophical statement and analogy together. I guess she has really changed something in my conscious as well as my subconscious. I mean it! We'll see where this whole thing goes.

Gimme back my nights!

I have totally forgotten about nights; about the peace, the calmness, the desirable loneliness they bring along. I used to be a night owl throughout almost all my childhood and teenage years. The reality of a grown up life imposes itself on one's lifestyle sooner or later. The later one starts to acknowledge it, the harder it becomes. I have been trying to practice a disciplined daily lifestyle for the last 3-4 years. The result?! I haven't enjoyed staying awake all night just getting lost in my thoughts, writing, reading,... for such a long long time. I even haven't realized how much I have missed staying up all night witnessing the dawn. 

Recently I have been seeking to be alone more and more. I have always liked spending time with myself but for the last few weeks I literally have had an intense craving for being alone. I feel I am going through a transition phase, a major one I guess. Looking back I see how all of a sudden I started to change and become a totally different person at about the age of 21 and how going through changes once in a while has become a part of my living since then. Man! I am going to be 28 in a few months and I still change with a high frequency. Changing has always been desirable to me, it still is. Last night C told me that I seem to be pretty comfortable outside my comfort zone. I started thinking about it. I told her it's not just about being happy or comfortable, it's about the fact that I kinda need it once in a while. That moving out of my comfort zone by itself is such an exciting challenge for me that if I live without it for a while I start realizing the lack of it. I thought about it more since last night. I have become way calmer recently. Less extrovert maybe as well. I am more in peace with myself. I feel more fulfilled maybe. Is it a sign of growing up?! It scares me if it is a sign of settling down, getting old,... I hope not!

Tonight C and I watched Zeitgeist. It was great for me to watch it again. With all the critiques the movie and the movement has attracted I still like it very much. Planning to watch the second and third movie sometime soon. Here is the ending part of the movie:

The second quote, the one which says:

"I think I spent 30 years of my life, trying to become something, I wanted to become good at things, I wanted to become good at tennis, I wanted to become good at school and grades and everything I kind of viewed in that perspective. I'm not okay the way I am, but if I got good at things. I realized I had the game wrong, because the game was to find out what I already was..."

has been attributed to Richard Alpert a.k.a Ram Dass. I am not sure really. The voice is really different from the voice that says the third quote which is certainly by Ram Dass. The third quote is taken from an interview he had discussing the side effects of LSD. Maybe his voice has changed a lot when he has become older, I don't know. I couldn't find anything on the web that refers the quote to anyone else. Anyways the aforementioned quote and similar sayings kinda scare me. People usually say after the age of 30 you start to accept yourself the way you are, with all your limitations. Well, it sounds great and fantastic to admit your limitations and brace yourself the way you are but on the other hand it can also be very scary and disappointing in the sense that you might be already so satisfied that you would cease any effort to change or improve anything about yourself and your life; a change which might in long-term bring you more happiness and satisfaction. I don't know. Growing old is always a bit frightening...

La grande bellezza

"To this question, when we were young, my friends used to answer always the same way: "Pussy". I instead used to answer: "Old people's houses' smell". The question was: "What do you really like in life?". I was destined to sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella."

  

This is how the movie "The Great Beauty" starts.  It is followed by a quote from "Journey to the End of Night" by Céline: “To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.”

Don't miss the movie. I feel I need to watch it at least one more time. IMDB counts it in comedy/drama genre. Although there are so many funny scenes in the movie by no means I'd count it as a comedy. 

"Are we designed to be sexual omnivores?"

I loved this talk. Take a few minutes and watch it. This guy, Christopher Ryan, is quite an interesting person. 

There are a few sentences in his talk which I really like to quote:

"To argue that our ancestors were sexual omnivores is no more a criticism of monogamy than to argue that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism. You can chose to be a vegetarian but don't think just because you made that decision bacon suddenly stops smelling good."

"It's time we move beyond Mars and Venus because the truth is that men are from Africa and women are from Africa."

I also liked the quote mentioned in the video by E. O. Wilson:

"All that we can surmise of human kind's genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as binding devices and only second as means of procreation."

I didn't know much about Female Copulatory Vocalization in other primates. Ryan doesn't explain much about it in this talk. I read about it after watching the video and realized wow! It is really interesting how correlated FCV seems to be with promiscuity in different ape species. You might find this article by Ryan in Psychology Today informative. 

Well, I will end with this quote by Arthur Schopenhauer that Ryan mentions answering the question at the end of the talk: 

"Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."

I liked this quote a lot. I finally found a saying to convey what I generally think about free will through it!

I have started to read about this whole concept of Victorian morality more. I might write about it in future... 

her

Such a great few months it was for movie lovers. I really liked American Hustle as I did like the previous movie by this guy David O. Russel; Silver Linings Playbook I mean. I just lovvve both Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. I've only seen these two movies by Russel so far but thinking to watch some other ones. Anyone in!??! In this post though I'm going to write about her. 

Well, I guess almost everyone knows the premise. A guy falls in love with his OS. After all it is sci-fi and you can find some scenes that seem really too unrealistic or superficial. Some people might find some scenes a bit creepy too. I agree the scene the guy and his OS named Samantha, "had sex together" to me was a bit stupid maybe. He could have worked more on that scene or even could have totally escaped from putting his foot in that puddle. For example he could let them talk about some last night that they had sex without showing anything, just dialogues and then leave the rest to the audience imagination*. 

Something else is also interesting to me. So before having sex with the OS, one night the guy can't fall asleep and all he has to do is take his phone and find someone random online and they would talk a bit to turn each other on and then masturbate. Something very similar to what some people do in online chatrooms these days. I doubt if anyone finds what happens in that scene very weird. It's not allien since we have been exposed to something very similar for quite a while. Interactive porn websites and channels are there to turn people on... Later in the movie, almost the same thing happens with the OS. They talk and have sex. The OS is way more normal and believable than the girl he talked with on the phone a few nights before. Samantha won't ask him to "choke her with the dead cat by the bed"!!! 

It's interesting and weird at the same time that we find it important whether the female voice talking to the guy belongs to a human or an OS. It's all about our mindsets, right!? It's ironic how calling someone totally random and talking to them is not alien to us just because we have been practicing something very similar for a few years now. It's amazing to me how our moral and social paradigms can change over the course of a few years but it's hard for us to foresee and connect to a small perturbation to the imperatives we have at the moment.  

Overall I really liked the movie. It was a bit long for me. Though I have this problem with most of the movies! Joaquin Phoenix did a great great job. He almost carries the whole load of the acting for the most part of the two-hour movie.  

I talked with a friend afterwards and he mentioned an interesting point. The fact that you never know how technology is changing human relationships, intimate and sexual relationships included. Then he gave a good example. That there are people these days who argue having a pet** is what many people need not having a baby. That if you don't want to continue living through passing on copies of your genes for whatever reason you've got, you still can meet some of your needs with less work and effort. You can still love a creature which would love you back and would depend on you. Some emotions are going on there between you two and after all you don't have to send them to school or college. Maybe one day human emotional relationships change in a way that they would be more fulfilling to us while less time and energy consuming comparing to what we are used to these days. You never know what future brings mankind or maybe the other way around, you never know what kinda future mankind creates or both! 

Watch this video. I really really liked it. They talk to public figures and ask them about their thoughts on the movie and emotional intimate relationships in general. It's interesting to hear what they think. You can find a comedian, an author, a psychotherapist, a producer, ... Don't miss it!

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*/ Maybe a little bit out of context and maybe not, Abbas Kiarostami, the international well known Iranian director has a great quote which I really love: 

"I want to create the type of cinema that shows by not showing. This is very different from most movies nowadays, which are not literally pornographic but are in essence pornographic, because they show so much that they take away any possibility of imagining things for ourselves. My aim is to give the chance to create as much as possible in our minds, through creativity and imagination. I want to tap the hidden information that's within yourself and that you probably didn't even know existed inside you."


**/ On a different note I remember how I was impressed by a part in Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", where he describes the emotional relationship between a human and a dog. There is a very nice movie based on the book, which I strongly recommend. As always at least to me the book is way more interesting but one cannot deny the good quality of the movie.  

I Have a Dream

I have a dream today, well actually tonight! 

I have a dream that one day all grown up people around me will be communicable. That all of them, at least the ones that I have the most interactions with, will already be in the "adult ego state". 

I have a dream that one day the very presumption of every human interaction will be "I'm OK, You're Ok". 

I have a dream that one day we all will be trying our bests in "staying Ok" and we will be helping each other in getting more than OK!  

I have a dream today!



P.S. This is insane! I realized Google's Doodle just now, like half an hour after writing this post, and boy! It's Martin Luther King Jr. day tomorrow (probably will already be today once I update the post with the postscript). I was kinda imitating his format of "I Have a Dream" just cuz I thought it was cool. Such a coincidence! 

The Trimates

Today's* google doodle celebrated the 82nd birthday of Dian Fossey, one of the three ladies famously known as Leakey's angels or the trimates, the name coined by Leakey himself. These three ladies were encouraged and supported by Louis Leakey to study primates in their habitats. Jane Goodall is the first one of the trimates who studied chimpanzees for over 45 years. The second one, Dian Fossey studied the mountain gorillas for about 18 years and she is not alive anymore. The third trimate, Birute Galdikas studied orangutans. Previously I just had read about Jane Goodall's work. I've learned about her probably in one of Robert Sapolsky's lectures. I used to follow his course "Human Behavioral Biology" online. I guess I had already given links to some of his lectures and interviews in one of the previous posts. 

From left to right: Birute Galdikas, Jane Gooodall and Dian Fossey

*/ Yesterday's since till I'll publish this post it'll be already past midnight. Dian Fossey's birthday is on Jan 16th.

I really can't resist sharing some of these fantastic photos here:

Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees

Dian Fossey and her gorillas

Birute Galdikas and her orangutans 

and once again "The Trimates"

From left to right: Jane Gooodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas

Long Distance Parent-ship?!

Today I was taking a break between reading two scientific papers to read this article. Later my officemate told me one of the postdocs in our group has his family, his wife and two kids, back in Hong Kong. His daughter is three years old now and the son is just two months old. He has been away from his family for the last three years. Then he told me this story which was extremely shocking and sad. Apparently he had gone home when the daughter was just born or a few months old and then he didn't go home for a long long time until she was like about two years old. Almost all the interactions the kid had with her daddy till the age of two, at least the ones she could recall, had been through the Skype and the laptop monitor. He gets home and realizes that the kid doesn't recognize him. The kid thinks daddy has to be in the laptop. It takes the parents a few weeks to make her understand that this human being next to her is the same daddy so that she stops calling the laptop daddy!!! 

Recalled this video. I'm not going to argue how insane I think what this parents did is. Just to get an interesting video (!) which would be watched and shared a lot?! Why would you do that to your kid?! Anyways the kid in this video doesn't recognize her father after he gets rid of his huge beard and she really feels unsafe and insecure when he hold her. Imagine how hard and complicated was what our postdoc's daughter went through. She has seen daddy as a face on the laptop for at least one year and now this guy wants to hold her and asks her to call him daddy. 

The Heavy Burden of Secrets; Would you carry it for me?!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Please don't expect other people to carry the heavy burden of keeping your secrets absolutely to themselves, if you already failed to carry it yourselves. 

Thank you very much in advance! 

Yours sincerely,

Wisher Writer

To her and the intense sweetness and sourness that her friendship brings all along! *

Intense friendships are like sandpapers I was thinking. Dealing with intense people is not easy at all; So much conflict, so much friction most of the time. In most cases though I feel interacting with intense people results in one getting kind of polished, you know. It's like a sandpaper which softens your roughnesses, refines you, makes you glossier in your social interactions. The less abrasive you are, the less conflicts you are going to get into with other people, the smoother your friendships and relationships go on. In retrospect I see how much I've changed in my life through interacting and befriending intense people despite the initial inertia I have always had towards getting close to these type of characters. I guess this inertia comes from the fact that after all I really try to avoid drama and dramatic people as much as I can. Although it is inevitable and almost impossible to avoid drama completely but I've realized the less drama I am involved in or aware of, the happier I am. On the other hand the other day I was telling C, I feel like intense people live more. By "more" I mean they experience higher levels of joy as well as higher levels of pain. The amplitude, the peaks and valleys of the feelings and sensations they experience is usually bigger than what non-intense people do. What is life after all!? How would you squeeze more out of life?! I really don't know but sometimes I think maybe, and just maybe, a gauge or meter can be one which measures the number as well as the intensity of the emotions and sensations someone goes through during her/his living.

Is it just me or is it a typical Iranian thing to think immediately of pomegranate and only pomegranate when thinking of sweetness and sourness together?! :D

*/ This is what I thought of and wrote under a photo of mine, taken by N, which I shared on Facebook. I kinda like this sentence and my view especially since it happened to me so spontaneously. So proud of myself, ha?!?! :P