listening to the smiths, i always get thinking. its the melancholy waving throughout the air, that kind of dark damp musty mood that i seem to come most alive at. im always looking for more, aren't i? something to push me further, never quite content in the current situation, simply because theres always so much more to see and do and feel and explore and find and embrace. i find myself constantly buying new books just to learn more and open the doors further. one day im sure ill push on through.

its funny, because sometimes as a person i feel i make no sense. but then every once in a while ill find somebody who also makes no sense and can be completely illogical and rational at the same time; its those contradictions that i think i strive to find most in people. not to open them up and expose them, but just to relish how fucked up we all are. im here at bard for the week, mostly alone, and i enjoy just accepting the loneliness and going with it.

this semester has felt like a feeble attempt to hold on and control life. attempting to hold on to the things i felt in brazil, only to realize that the circumstances and context at bard is completely different, and like all organisms, i need to adapt.

adapt. im my microscope history class, which im starting to love for no practical reason whatsoever, we've been talking about how, due to the complexity of the natural world when scientists (that word didnt exist until the mid 1800s!)began looking at it through the microscope, people turned to analogies of the human-built world to describe nature. even though to most of them, the human world was a flawed one that depended on sensory data, and of course, there is so much of the world that our senses cant show us. microorganisms are so fascinating. ive been trying to explore the opposite side of the coin. not so much how we relate nature back to our sensory world, which often translates into describing nature as a machine, but instead relating the obscure complexity of our world back to the microscopic world. ive begun to read Michel Serres' The Parasite. in French "parasite" means biological parasite, guest, and noise. hmm. Serres relates the way humans operate with one another, and with the rest of life on earth, as the relationship of parasite to host. how culture has seeped into the language of parasitology, how the parasite can really be nothing more than a predator, or an unwanted guest in hospitality.

"what does man give to the cow, to the tree, to the steer, who give him milk, warmth, shelter, work, and food? what does he give? death"

"the same one is the host; the same one takes and eats; there is no change of direction. this is true of all beings. of lice and men"

"let's retrace our steps for a moment, going from these habits back to those manners, reversing anthropomorphism. we have made the louse in our image; let us see ourselves in his"

always looking for something more. someone to talk to. something to light me up. something to do.

next week i get to talk with my advisor about epidemiology and public health graduate school.