What am I doing

Reading an article about science, struck about this point about neuroscience in particular.

Or look at neuroscience. Only a few decades ago, scientists were putting forth confident conjectures about "the bridging principle," the neural event that would explain how the activity of our brain cells creates the subjective experience of consciousness. All sorts of bridges were proposed, from 40 Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex to quantum coherence in microtubules. These were the biological processes that supposedly turned the water of the brain into the wine of the mind.

But scientists don't talk about these kinds of bridging principles these days. While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain--we are a strange loop of kinase enzymes and synaptic chemistry--these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don't experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.

I don't know... maybe the biggest miracle will be to prove that this is what we cannot find. It might be religious, even.

Pensive puppy

School has started. I'm taking six classes. Not much time for thoughts.

Trust

I've started these last two school years with training for discussions on consent culture. I find the actual discussions awkward and a little forced, because the first-years are never fully engaged and the material is so important, and also because as a society we're still not prepared to talk about intimacy and respect. Of course, you try to change this, but you have just one hour.

But the trainings for the workshops, to me, are among the most inspiring and visionary experiences I've had the fortune of being part of. I've just finished my second day of this year. I've reached a lot of conclusions before today or yesterday, I think. That socialization imprisons one's body, mind and soul. That we deter our own happiness when we don't treat others with humble, giving love. That battles aren't won by villianizing the people who aren't fighting with you.

The training this year is twice as large, at almost 160 people. There are only five people (two undergraduates) conducting all of it, and it is a testament to their skill, brilliance and power that they succeed as they do. Still, a little control is lost when a guy who just wanted free housing for a week with his girlfriend contends that women find reasons to accuse their lovers of assault even after consent has been achieved. Triggered members of the movement shout him down, and his damaged ego defends a falsehood he is still unsure of.

I spoke up. We like to believe that truly loving relationships are built on top of the most basic rocks of human ideals: trust, respect, the like. Trust your partner at least of fair dealings, and the rest need not be discussed. Trust...

Quickly my plea for honest dealings was dismantled by some more wary people. Love's logic doesn't, has never conformed to neat foundations. Assault, as it happens most with acquaintances, overwhelmingly depends on a trust that may not even be false. And you cannot blame these feelings over those who exploit these feelings. I should've known that before I even spoke.

Trust is loving. But trust is also violence.

I sat nervous and pensive. I felt terrible, it sucked, and I was not okay. Not because I was corrected (I really love learning), but because I realized we as humans can be abused even when we surrender to love and lovers with an open heart. There is no safety in trust, most nurturing of emotions. God, it can't be.

I struggle a lot with love. There's too much out there, everywhere and I just don't know what to do with all of it. I'm going to post later about an article I read in the consent reader about jealousy. Guess what my post will be called.

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the praires and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Edit: Wild geese... they fly south.

Visiting my grandmother

After eating with my parents today, my dad coaxed me to go visit nai nai with him once before school. My mom offered to take home the leftovers from lunch, but I gave her a confused look, so we all went. I never knew what the deal is with the two sides of my family.

We ran into her on her afternoon walk, outside the Selfhelp building she lives in. She smiled such a big smile, the kind that consumes your face from the eyes outward. I don't get moved the look; I think about how I'm going to inherit her protruding eyelids. She said it's so nice to see us. And that I never seem happy seeing her. I feign a smile and say hi.

She's so happy. She lives alone, but is not lonely. I don't think she's seen her spouse in years, maybe at least decade even. I don't think they talk to one another. For most of my life, she's been around my neighborhood, visiting us and our cousins, being warm and saying nice things. She brought me and my sister to church every Sunday for a several years when we were young. She bought me my first Bible when I had to memorize the names of all the books for Sunday school. I think she's not lonely because God is with her all the time. She brings Him to her when she chants the (Chinese) name of Christ almost every minute.

She used to babysit me. We would go around Flushing, and she'd put quarters in the rocking Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck because my parents thought those games were too pedestrian. When I grew up, she'd remind me of those adventures literally every time she saw me. Recently, she does it less because I made a note of it to her, but she still brings it up self-referentially. I don't think it comes from senility, we just don't have that much to talk about. She told my dad to visit ye ye when he's in China, but ye ye passed away a few months ago. Never really knew him.

She asked me if American schools teach me how to treat one's family, beyond worldly matters like history and politics. She warned me about high maintenance girlfriends. She reminded me about my dad's temper, and how he's gotten better. She said my mom was very frugal. When she chanted Jesus Christ, my dad brought her a chair to sit on. She said that God was giving her a chair because she loved Him, but my mom just laughed, derisively.

I know more intimately what my other family members mean to me. Not her.

Moments

Moving back in two weeks

Things I'm going to do before then. Consider this self-inflicted public humiliation.

• Apply for driver's permit. Vision test and written test on Monday.
• Swimming classes. To, uhh, relearn how to swim.
• Driving school. Pass.
  
• Road test.
• Read some books. Now including Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook.
• Learn some more MATLAB. Cry.
  

Excellent.

Writing like Hemingway

I noticed a book at Barnes & Noble yesterday to teach people how to write like Hemingway. I sat down with it for a while. It spoke a lot about how literary devices, his writing style, sentences structure, Iceberg Theory. Then I noticed I really don't want to write like Hemingway. Aside from our subject matters, I don't think it's cool to be evasive, indirect and short. Words already fail us so often, I just don't have the patience to create something out of other people's imaginations rather than the ideas that I already struggle with transmitting. Better pick up some Fitzgerald or Poe.

And speaking of writing, I just read John Richardson's piece in Esquire: The Last Abortion Doctor. One might think this is an article about abortion, but it spoke so truly about related topics such as medicine, politics, gender and pain. It's really hard to read. It's probably the best thing I've read in a long time. I do think that all feeling human beings need to read it, especially now, just to understand a little bit more about what life is.

Superhero fantasies

My sister used to say that I could turn any object in my hands into a spaceship. Ballpoint pens turned into rocketships and wristwatch buckles became dragons. I had a collection of beads that I'd sort by color and have them wage war upon each other on a shaded political map of the world, Risk-style. Even the holes in these beads played cannon mouths in my insanely militaristic daydream games. My family members know that I have a rich collection of sound effects for jets, guns and explosions.

I had absurd superhero fantasies, like every boy between the ages of five and thirteen, I'm sure. I had one in particular that involved a sword and a Superman-style Fortress of Solitude. The way that it goes is a twelve year old me would find a sword in the stone in some remote mountainous region near where my parents are from in China. (Swords were important to this, ever since Crouching Tiger.) I would be on a quest to imbue this weapon with magical abilities, a la Cardcaptor Sakura. (One character specifically. I adored that show.) I drew broadswords on sheets and sheets of paper. Then I created my Fortress of Solitude. There were a few versions. One version was a domed platform floating in the sky. Another version required another dimension, accessible by a closet. They would all be foresty, full of wildlife and waterfalls.

My paradise was designed to be eternally and emotionally sustainable for my immortal superhero self. I considered whether to bring in family and friends into my immortal oasis, but it seemed an arbitrary privilege; I can't bring in everyone.

It became one of few complicating factors that brought my fantasy to the ground. I thought about creating people in my world. (Of course, I could select for physical characteristics and personality. Omniscience over bioethics.) I knew I need people, but I also couldn't decide whether ultimately I could tell the difference between a community of many conscious, sentient beings and a self-centered universe populated by characters that may or may not exist in their own right, but only seem to be. I hope my friends aren't scared of me yet.

The other complication that brought my Fortress down was what I saw outside the window. Superheroes don't grow up in Flushing. I had yet to attribute meaning to my location. Without a location, I could be anyone. I guess this is why people leave this place. I don't think Flushing has been home to anyone more than two generations at a time.

It's funny. My sister asked Chang-Rae Lee why he wrote about Flushing. He said that this is a magical place. In my life, I've thought about magic the most in middle and high school, commuting to school on the 7, dreaming about getting out. Now I get homesick when I'm away.

Wow. I need to think about this.

On Facebook, wonderful thoughts take people and hold them still.

Following Virginia activist/filmmaker Annabel Park's posted item about very personalized ethnic conflict in China, a thoughtful someone writes:

heart wrenching... but the equivalent of this is an equally heart wrenching story about israeli settlers in palestine or even us settlers on indigenous american soil... ultimately, the chinese shouldn't be in xinjiang, and the israelis shouldn't be in palestine.

i tried to read the story understanding my privilege as a Han Chinese, and as a settler in N. America occupying Native American lands. It's hard.

Goddamn. Something a lot of people (like me) need to think about. The privileges of being Han Chinese are extensive, and I've only begun realizing this. You have a cultural history that won't be washed away. The numbers of your ethnic population are not under threat of extinction. I've been thinking about the "concentration" that I have to do within my concentration. I think I'll do it on internal colonialism.

Concentration is such a word. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.