Symbiosis and Darkness

Last night I had a fully functional conversation with a taxi driver in portuguese. It felt great. Much better than the really awful cheesecake/strange drink concoction.

In a week we leave to do our ISPs. There is a lot of work to do before then, but its all very exciting.

Tonight is a Halloween party, so I'm taking the rest of the day off to chill, read some more of my Amitav Ghosh book, and lay in my hammock. Possibly go shopping later.

I think this is the coolest quote ever that really hits me right now: "You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star"-Nietzsche

I'm figuring my ish out. I want to one day have a boat, work within the field of environmental epidemiology/community health/disease ecology, and creative science writing. Perhaps live in the Northwest for a while, or anywhere near a port. And thus, here's a reading list I've created for myself. I have a bunch of books at home I've bought under impulse, so I figure selling those on Amazon.com will give me enough money to buy a lot of these books used. It's a very tentative list, but most of it incorporates to some extent travel diaries and personal reflections on place, biology, disease history, symbiosis, mixing fiction and reality, the dark side of human nature, ie, everything I'm interested in. I feel like I could be perfectly content with my life working on environment and health issues while on the side enjoying life on a boat writing books. With coffee of course.

• The Vortex: Jose Eustasio Rivera
• Cosmicomics: Italo Calvino
• Invisible Cities: Italo Calvino
• The Teachings of Don Juan: Carlos Castenada
• One River: Wade Davis
• A Golden Age: Tahmima Anam
• Underground: Haruki Murakami
• Kafka on the Shore: Haruki Murakami
• Risk Society: Ulrich Beck
• Politics of Nature: Bruno Latour
• Ocasiao The Marquis and the Anthropologist: George Marcus
• Street Science: Jason Corburn
• The Ghost Map: Steven Johnson
• Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective: Ann McElroy
• Biography of a Germ: Arno Karlen
• Man and Microbes: Arno Karlen
• No Safe Place: Phil Brown
• Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: Frank Fischer
• The Plague: Albert Camus
• Heart of Darkness: Joseph Conrad
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Paulo Freire
• The Great Transformation: Karl Polanyi
• The Invisible Pyramid: Loren Eiseley

Everything looks quite promising. Life in general, to be honest. Has its downs, to be sure, but the present is too beautiful to leave to worry. It's not so much running from life as it is searching to find that something inside myself, or at least finding a way to just finally let it all out. All the searching is paying off. I feel that if I just start doing some sort of physical activity again, such as ju jitsu or some form of fighting where I feel very much me, everything will fall into place. I'm trying to look into somewhere around home for winter break. Although, if I get accepted into the winter ecosystem class, I'll be up in NY for most of January. I'm pretty into water/wind vortexes right now. I feel like they sum up my existence. I can't wait to read some of these books above. Will said he would lend me One River by Wade David is he finishes it before ISP, and Karina said I could borrow Murakami during ISP as well. However, I think it's Biography of a Germ and Cosmicomics that I am most exicted about. I love actually reading books that incorporate biology, fiction, and reflection. Back home I have The Invisible Pyramid, and right now I'm kind of kicking myself for not bringing it with. It was written after the lunar landing during the celebration for space exploration, yet he writes about how there isn't much reason to go study "the cosmic prison of space" when there is so much mystery right here in front of us on Earth, whether it by phenomena of a physical, chemical, biological, or cultural nature. It's dark, but only slightly so. Subtly. But that's my favorite type. Funny enough, he was an anthropologist, ecologist, science writer, and poet. Could I want anything more? Ha. He's known for his writing style called the concealed essay, which basically merges together scientific language with literary style. Sounds great.

From Wikipedia..."Instead of simply seeing the world as a set of scientific facts and figures, Eiseley used science to look for the deeper meaning of life, even while freely admitting that science could not answer all of the mysteries of existence."

Calvino is supposed to be amazing as well. I need to get into literature more. I'm kind of done with theory, for now at least. This is much more interesting. Like Eiseley above, theories, facts, and figures aren't the world. The people who make meaning out of them are. It's those little meanings that make up culture, and thus I like my track right now. Somewhere between out there in space, and grounded in here. I like that. Symbiosis in general, and how different life forms impact human culture and vice versa to some extent, whether its plants and humans, diseases and humans, or the discovery of space, is so cool. Or wasps and fig trees. I think I just need to embrace being a little out of the box at times.