Patterns

Posted on February 9, 2012 by ofurhe

While I was in Atlanta last week I found myself looking down at the ground a lot, with new terrain I’m always afraid I’ll trip on an unexpected bump and I was afraid to look up at the buildings because people would think I was a tourist (turns out I gave myself away by calling it ‘Hot-lanta,’ like the small town jokers in Young Adult who refer to Minneapolis as the mini apple). Looking down turned out to be great though, I started to notice patterns in the sidewalk. Sidewalks aren’t the same everywhere, we walked in a neighborhood with big hexagonal tiles instead of rectangular cement, some driveways are brick, others downtown were that unmistakable chevron pattern (chevrons always make me think of friendship bracelets and gas stations). The houses seemed to have thin walls, which made them look naked, like houses in New England with their small windows that make it look like they’re squinting. Though the patterns of the sidewalk were familiar, they were not the same.

When I came back I started to look for other patterns that were similar in California and Georgia. I saw a lot of chevrons, stripes and bricks. These are the building blocks of a city. Cubes are made of lines which are made of dots, so really the most fundamental pattern is the polka dot. There’s been a lot of fog in the bay which seems to diffuse everything and break it up into it’s fundamental component; water droplets. This screen is made up of tiny pixels. Not to sound like a total stoner, but patterns are everywhere.

Especially in our behavior. A friend is trying to change the pattern of a dysfunctional relationship, another friend is trying to kick a habit, a pattern unchecked will continue forever.

How many repetitions of something does it take to make a pattern?

P.S. The Simon and Garfunkel song Patterns has been stuck in my head all week, well the entire Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme Album. Classic.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard

Posted on February 2, 2012 by ofurhe

I’m out of town for my brother’s graduation, which hasn’t stopped me from participating in a month of letters. I’ve said previously that I like letters best. And it’s true, I love stamps, and fountain pens, calligraphy, stationary, envelopes, and as you probably know by now, babbling about minutia. Letters are one of my favorite types of future garbage. I’m not going to rant about how kids these days can’t write in cursive, or how sad it is that the USPS is going out of business (oops, too late?), I just hope the letters speak for themselves.

Access to Education

Posted on January 27, 2012 by ofurhe

Lately I’ve been thinking about education, the Russian and I had a heated discussion this weekend about it, she’s starting school again after winter break and I’m applying to a masters program. Also, it has been in the news because of President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech. Lack of access to education, I feel, is one of the biggest global problems. I don’t have any solutions right now, but I wanted to express my gratitude towards the people and institutions who contributed towards mine:

My mom is the one who filled out all the financial aid forms growing up, and taught me how to make the system work for me. She has worked, and continues to work tirelessly to make sure her children get the chances she didn’t get. My mom’s (now) husband started this blog for her which is probably worth checking out (if you didn’t grow up within earshot of my mother): Zen of Folding

The branch of the Oakland Public Library by my house was influenced by the Black Panther movement and the Black Muslims in the neighborhood. Without all those books about little black girls I am sure I wouldn’t have the confidence to achieve what I have so far. (Bill Cosby explains what can happen when you don’t get this kind of enforcement: A Boy Like Me)

Addendum 5-27-12: This branch was the African American Museum and Library which later moved to downtown Oakland. Explains a lot.

The Crowden School was my first summer camp. I met the Russian there and I learned that I could make music too (it wasn’t just for big kids like my brother).

A shoutout to A Better Chance (ABC), for paying for my testing, my first trip to a college campus (USC), and helping students of color get a fair shake.

The East Bay French American School
was where I learned the French language, French culture, and as my mother says, where I learned to hate French people.

Head-Royce
Middle School sucks. It sucked for me, and it sucked for a lot of others, but without it, none of us would have any soul. And if I hadn’t hated middle school so much I never would have ended up at my high school.

Interlochen Arts Camp
was awesome, my first sleep away camp. I won the ‘Honor Camper’ award and played in piano quintet, piano for 10 hands. My first experience of a humid summer where I got stung by all manner of mosquitos for the first time. My scholarship there was sponsored by Kellogs. Thanks for the corduroy knickers!

Walden
a music composition camp in New Hampshire. I got the best music theory education, made some great friends and wrote a couple pieces of music. Not bad for a 12-year-old.

Putney
little Putney, my hippie farm school. When I heard that Seventeen Magazine came to do a profile on the school and the students protested their body image perpetuation, I was sold. I couldn’t really have gone anywhere else.

Center for Talented Youth
really should been called Center for Privileged Youth, if I remember correctly you have to take a pretty expensive test to get in. But the scholarship I got there was all-inclusive, they told me if there was a pair of flip flops that everyone had, and I couldn’t afford (Havaianas anyone?), that they would help me pay for them. I had been at Putney for a few years though, so I was pretty anti-consumerist.

Summer Intensive Language Study
(SILS) at Northfield Mount Hermon; it looks like this program is now defunct, which is a bummer. By now you can probably tell that my mother believed that summers were a time for learning, not lazing. If we weren’t taking a class over the summer, we were supposed to get a job.

University of Chicago
Where fun goes to die. I was cold, miserable and well educated.

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
When I went in to interview I went on a long rant about how I didn’t believe in affirmative action and I hated teaching, how did I get this fellowship?

After finals in Chicago I began calculating how much money I had been given by these institutions over the years and it came out to over $500,000. I don’t have enough money to pay it back yet, but hopefully the things I learned will help me earn enough to pay it back soon.

There are many ways we rationalize the bounty we all receive in our lives but first and foremost I’d like to say just say “Thank You”. I feel very lucky to have had these opportunities.

That said, I hope these institutions feel lucky to have had me as well. All that money I got for being a poor black girl doesn’t negate the fact that I am a poor black girl with all that entails (though I’m working on the poor part). A friend once suggested that I’ve repaid the money I was given in unpaid diversity photo-ops and other marketing. In addition, I worked hard for my scholarships, maintaining a GPA, trying to be a model minority since I was the only black person for miles, and being the only black person for miles, these tasks aren’t easy for anyone, especially a young person.

I tend to think that someone’s sex, race, socio-economic background, religion, age, etc. is about as important as their shoe size, but I wouldn’t think this way if it weren’t for my education, which I got because people thought otherwise. We should live in a world that doesn’t need affirmative action, but we don’t.

p.s. I also like to think I got into some of these places because I’m smart, but who knows.

10 posts

Posted on January 20, 2012 by ofurhe

Congratulations to me! I’ve lasted for 10 posts! I once read an article about all the blog posts that begin with ‘sorry it’s been so long since my last post.’ I’m going to take a second to pat myself on the back for 10 weeks of consistent blogging. In the past 10 weeks (in chronological order):
-I was burgled
-I lost touch with a friend (z) and found an old one (a)
-I celebrated 3 winter holidays with my family in unconventional ways
-I came close to solving a lifelong ailment
-I was generally preoccupied with the failings of others (punctuality, decency, and reciprocation)
-I started an online Java course (learned about bits and bytes)
-I was laid off
-I participated in an anti-SOPA protest (using this very site)
-I endured

In the next 10 weeks I will finish my application, watch my brother graduate, visit Afghanistan (after 8 years of thwarted efforts), apply for work and unemployment, and I will finish my course and start another. I may have a new roommate, I may finish my book, I hope to fix some bugs on the blog and successfully plunge myself into the future.
Here’s to 10 more weeks.

Visages

Posted on January 20, 2012 by ofurhe

I’ve been reading a book about provincial life set in the mid 19th century and became curious about the descriptions of peoples’ faces. To me, Byronic locks and a noble chin don’t give me a good picture of someone at all. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a world with pictures and movies and internet and I’m not used to using my imagination. Maybe words are just not the best medium to describe the human face. Maybe it’s because there is more variation in face shape in 21st century California; in 19th century England, most people looked fairly similar, so a description could easily conjure up the type of face that this person might have. But lately I’ve been toying with the idea that description says more about the describer than the described.

To a disturbing extent we see what we want to see. In college I took a class in which we talked about the Portuguese discovery of Africa and America. The most advanced maps that the Portuguese had were based on world travelers, who were fairly accurate about the places they were familiar with, and less accurate about the communities on the periphery. The borders of these maps were full of fanciful monsters (one of whom used his extra large foot as a parasol to shade himself from the African sun). The explorers were so willing to believe that Africans and Native Americans were not human because they were expecting monsters that when they found people who didn’t look like them, they assumed that they must have found these monsters.

On this week’s Culture Gabfest, Stephen Metcalf recommends a genre of poems where the narrator is a person who sees someone else and fills in what they don’t know about them with their own imagination.

What is the best way to describe someone’s face? How do we use other peoples’ faces to project our own beliefs?

“Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.”
–Middlemarch, George Eliot

“You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions.”-The Breakfast Club , John Hughes

Update 1/28: a great description of a face

“To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.”
–Middlemarch, George Eliot

Update 2/4

more monsters

Social justice

Posted on January 13, 2012 by ofurhe

In my constant struggle for moral clarity and social justice, I have lately been reminded of a troubling fact; justice is as much about lifting people up, as it is about putting (or pulling) people down. It’s not all about rising tides lifting all boats, and bringing people up to the tall bridge (Hanna Rosin’s version of the glass ceiling), it’s also about yanking people down from their pedestals and reminding them what it’s like to feel pain and to be hated just for being who they are.

Obviously you don’t need to be a minority to know what it feels like to be ostracized, we all went through middle school. In adolescence, it seems like everyone’s unbalanced, and sometimes the way you are unbalanced exacerbates someone else’s imbalances. But you can’t seem to help it. Life isn’t fair, and neither is divorce, or sexual harassment, or war, or poverty, or racism, or addiction, or psychosis. It’s not fair that some people are beautiful and others are ugly, that some are born rich, and talented, when the boy you like likes your best friend better, when you’re fired due to budget cuts, when you can’t seem to find the words to say what you want to say, and everyone seems to be speaking a different language altogether.

Everyone feels this, including white people including the beautiful and talented (like Joan Didion), including the 1%. Sometimes I think the occupy movement is mostly about revenge. As much as I crave revenge, there is a certain amount of injustice we just need to accept. And acceptance takes time and patience. And some pain will never go away.

Scattered

Posted on January 6, 2012 by ofurhe

I try to write a new post every week, to keep me in the habit, but I don’t really like writing blogposts, what I really like writing are letters. Today, instead of writing this post (or working on my personal essay for grad school) I wrote 4 postcards using my new christmas gift from the Russian (Pantone postcards) and a letter using stationary I made in a workshop taught by Barbara.

Here is a piece from the notes for my personal statement:

I once got into a debate with a friend at the University of Chicago, he was a couple years younger than i was and deciding on a major. He said he had decided on economics because it helped ‘explain the world’, I laughed and said, George, everyone says that about their major, you talk to a French lit major and they’ll say, ‘I really think French literature is the best way to help explain my world’. My mom used to say ‘it all comes down to Geography,’ but after studying it, I disagree. You can’t tell everything about a person by where they come from (I’m not a huge believer in the idea that Californians are lazy and dumb), but it does explain a lot. Tobler’s first law of geography, that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things does still seem to have many applications.

Can someone tell me if there is a second law of geography?

Sounds of ourselves

Posted on December 29, 2011 by ofurhe

I took an anatomy class in high school and was amazed by how much my body was doing without my knowledge. “Thanks body,” I found myself repeating, after learning about the workings of my heart and lungs, my toes pulling up, my esophagus pushing down, and everything in between. Like so many other things, we don’t seem to understand or appreciate them until we start to lose our faculties. The fact that our bodies seem so silent and symetrical is a testament to how cleanly our body is functioning, every day.

I talked to a neurobiologist friend today who said that brains sound like a low clicking, and that the ringing in our ears is the sound of hair cells dying and our hearing range diminishing. In quiet moments I’ve been thinking lately about how the pitch of the ringing in your ears creates the harmony that you hear throughout your life. In moments of pain, when all you can hear is your body it seems to cry and scream, like a child demanding attention. Other times it is quieter, but no less busy. The breathing, pumping, generating, destroying, reinforcing, exploring, it’s not silent, nor is it forgettable.

Does aging have a sound? Does the voice in your head grow older as you do? Who else can hear if your bones click and creak? Do men sound different from women?

There is a season

Posted on December 19, 2011 by ofurhe

The Russian and I did some canning this weekend. Why? We hate shopping for Christmas gifts, we’re poor, because it’s cool, and because this is what our lemon tree looked like AFTER making 30 jars of marmalade.

We started by harvesting a big bag of lemons, about 20 pounds worth

Then we peeled them, and diced the peel

Leaving us with a pile of big, naked lemons

Don’t be fooled by their size though, the lemons from our tree are mostly pith

Then came the hardest step, juliene-ing 40 lemons. This was also the point when we realized we wouldn’t be finishing that night. It was hard work, we were tired, and while reading the recipe we realized it had to sit overnight in order to create pectin.

This is the flesh

this is our compost

and this is what we pulled out in the morning.

We added sugar

Boiled

And canned

And boiled

And canned some more

Don’t you wish you were our friend?

This year we celebrate the Joy of Cooking, what are you celebrating this winter?

The things that will kill us

Posted on December 17, 2011 by ofurhe

Cigarettes, mercury, and radium are just three examples of deadly things we once thought were healthy and even medicinal. What are the things we do today that will kill us?

Sci-fi futurists have often imagined an iteration of the future wherein a machine can predict the way you will die, Ryan North and co. have pondered this question recently with the Machine of Death. While he and the Twilight Zone focus on the somewhat absurd, machines in movies like Gattaca focus on the more mundane probabilities, like heart disease. (I’ve always suspected that someone will accidentally lean on the keyboard of such machine, thus spelling my name, and learning my life story)

The big scientific breakthroughs always seem to come as a shock, so I don’t think it’s anything people suspect, TV, cell phones, microwaves, gmo corn, gluten, coffee or sugar. My guess is that sitting and staring at screens all day is a very unhealthy thing that most everyone does; but this is common knowledge. What everyday thing do you think will prove to be a silent killer?

…the Britannica has systematically, relentlessly, eroded my faith in doctors. That’s what will happen when you read page after page of bloody and bloody ridiculous medical history. I knew about leeches and bodily humors but that’s just the start. I’m still unsettled by trepanning—the primitive practice of drilling a 2-inch hole in the skull to let out the evil spirit. I’m sure during the heyday of trepanning the chief resident for trepanning at the Lascaux Grotto Hospital was very authoritative and assured his patients in a condescending tone not to worry about a thing. We’re professionals here, he said, as he smashed their skull with a rock.

Okay so that’s too easy. But medicine here in the postscientific age isn’t much more heartening. Here’s a quote that took me aback: “I believe more patients have died from the use of [surgical] gloves than have been saved by their use.” That’s one of the leading medical experts of the 20th century weighing in on the surgical glove controversy—a controversy I didn’t even know existed. In my encyclopedia, I wrote a little note in ballpoint pen next to that quotation: “Doctors don’t know shit.”

That was an overreaction of course. They do know a little shit.

A. J. Jacobs, The Know-it-All