MUSINGS
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HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY!
AUTHOR: The Memorist // CATEGORY: Everything, Life, Musings, The Future, The Past
3 CommentsIn everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
-Albert SchweitzerLast week, this blog turned 1 year old. 1 year older, 1 year wiser. In so many ways, the blog has helped prep me for what already seems to be a year of incredible change.
Life has been strange these past ten years. The cusp of my 20′s never prepared me for the turmoil of my 20′s themselves. The cusp of my 30′s made me feel like I’m prepared for anything. Continue Reading
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LOVE POTION #9
AUTHOR: The Memorist // CATEGORY: Life, Magic, Musings, Technology, The Future, The Past
No CommentsThis is hardly the first time this blog talks about love. Nor will it likely be the last. Love is that mysterious thing, elusive and difficult to grasp, even when you’re in it and especially when you’re out of it.
But being that this blog is all about the past, present and future, about change and technology and ranges of intangible human emotion and ways in which they’re all connected, love and its ever-changing rituals (and therefore our ever-changing attempts to understand it) seemed an apt topic. Continue Reading
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POLYMATH, POLYGLOT, POLLYANNA
AUTHOR: The Memorist // CATEGORY: Life, Musings, Psychology, Religion, Science, Smart Girl Shit
2 CommentsScience and I go way back. Take for instance my very first pick-up line.
In 5th grade, I had a crush on a boy with black hair, a widow’s peak, and freckles. I was tall for my age and he hadn’t had his growth spurt yet, but he’d thrown the ball to me in a game of classroom catch and we were friends. My limited 10-year-old understanding of romance said that this was meant to be.
I was a curious child – I asked a billion questions and knew my way around an Encyclopedia Britannica. So when my dad told me that yellow mucus indicates an infection, the information stuck. When, one day in class, the boy came to throw something out while I was blowing my nose at the trash can, I sought to dazzle him with science. I blew my nose, looked at the tissue, grinned at him and said “Look! My snot is yellow! That means I have an infection!”
(Epilogue to this story: despite his disgusted look and the fact that we never really became a couple, my approach to boys is the same as it was in 5th grade. I try to dazzle them with knowledge and then verbally push them over in sandboxes.)
Here’s the thing: most of the people I know end up choosing in life. They choose love or practicality, passion or comfort, fight or flight, the pull of one identity over another. And in most cases, they choose either science or religion.
But what if you’ve chosen not to choose? Continue Reading
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MOVIN’ ON UP
AUTHOR: The Memorist // CATEGORY: Everything, Life, Musings, Space, The Universe, The World, Time, Travel
2 CommentsThe last time I moved away from home, I knew I was eventually going to come back.
That seems like an innocuous enough statement, but one that I’ve been thinking a lot about this past week. Mostly because of Mars.
OK let me backtrack to preface this in a way that makes sense. There are two pieces of pertinent information here, one a sort of general human thing, the other a more ethnically specific one: A) my life has unfolded like a series of Russian dolls coming apart and B) a South Asian life timeline can be very different from the norm. Continue Reading
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Last night, I watched a ladybug circle a light in the kitchen. I’ve seen insects do this before, but something about the way the ladybug whirled about the light was mesmerizing. It would fly in ellipses like a planet around the sun, and every so often, touch lightly upon the light, get singed for a moment, and return to its orbit. Repeat. Continue Reading
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BEWARE THE AUTUMN PEOPLE
AUTHOR: The Memorist // CATEGORY: Musings, Nostalgia, Space, Stars
3 Comments“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
― Ray Bradbury, “The October Country”Autumn’s come early this year, fitting after what’s been, for me, a truly Bradburyan summer. This was the year that commercial spaceflight took off with the successful first mission by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, news that registered barely a blip on people’s radars…but this may be the year we look back on as redefining spaceflight and I want to remember it, to capture it the way Bradbury’s Douglas captured moments in “Dandelion Wine,” like fireflies in summer jars. Continue Reading
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LET’S GET (META)PHYSICAL
AUTHOR: The Memorist // CATEGORY: Books, Everything, Musings, Smart Girl Shit
1 CommentAs a writer, the search for perfection ends up being the bane of our existence. A while back, after a steady two years of writer’s block, I moved to Germany. At the time, I believed the change of scenery helped unblock me, that new experiences gave rise to some of the best writing I had done in a long time. But it’s more about giving yourself the time and the room to write, and being consistent in your writing. I was writing everyday because I made myself write everyday – I look back on the old blue journal from this time period, and yes, some of it is crap, but some of it is not, and all of it is a perfect time capsule of that period in my life. It serves as a reminder, if nothing else, and as a source to plumb material from. Continue Reading
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13 GOING ON 30
AUTHOR: The Memorist // CATEGORY: Everything, Life, Musings, Smart Girl Shit, The Future
4 CommentsIn exactly one month, I will turn 30.
See, you’re doing it too! I can practically hear you doing it. Something as subtle as one raised eyebrow or a slight widening of the eyes, an uncomfortable shuffling of the feet. Or something a little more vocal: “The Big 3-0!” you’ll boom. Or “wow, the dirty thirty!” My turning 30, it seems, holds more weight, more momentous heft for everyone else than it does for me. Continue Reading
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MAD MIDNIGHT MOMENTS
AUTHOR: The Memorist // CATEGORY: Family, Grief, Life, Musings, Psychology
No Comments“This is one of the things I’m afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?”
- “A Grief Observed,” by C.S. LewisGrief is the unexpected, uninvited guest – the one whose arrival you bear with a smile full of gritted teeth. It won’t do to throw a tantrum at his presence, nor to peaceably ignore the way conversation stops in awkward pauses when he enters the room. It doesn’t matter to him that you’ve come off a recent, rare high, or made giddy, wondrous connections with others in your human tribe. There is no predictability – he visits on a sunny day, cast in light and shadows, or a gray day, with the smell of rain and newly-washed earth lingering over the air like some bittersweet perfume. Continue Reading
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INTERNET BANG THEORY
AUTHOR: The Memorist // CATEGORY: Musings, Technology, The '90's, The Future, The Past
No CommentsReading Brian Christian’s “The Most Human Human” makes me think not only of what it means to be human, but how technology is ever defining us as a species – the more technologically advanced we become, the deeper we delve into questions of the soul, of human nature. Christian talks about chatbots and the effort to randomize chats with programs like Chatroulette – but I remember the age of random chats with real people. Which of course took me back to the early days of the Internet, to the serendipity that seemed to define the ’90′s. Continue Reading
