The latest book to have found me

In 2007 I heard my first English college professor hype up a book called The Color Purple during a lecture in my first semester at community college. He always spoke of his favorite authors with all the lovingness and none of the snobbery that come with a carefully cultivated literary taste. We never covered this novel in class, but I registered the title and Alice Walker's name and put them in the back of my mind. Someday, I thought.

Flash forward to 2013. I'm strolling around a flea market in Santa Fe, NM on a Saturday morning, 45 mins away from the small studio I was renting for a semester long internship, and I spot neat row of books at the end of the dusty lot. Now, if you're in the habit of fishing inside bins of clearance and used books, you know I didn't get my hopes up as I walked towards it. I raised my eyebrows within seconds. John Updike, Orhan Pamuk, Saul Bellow. And there it was with the others: Alice Walker. I looked up to find the owner of the table. It was a middle aged man, donning what some people call strawberry blonde hair and looking slightly disheveled. The dusty hours he'd spent that morning sitting in the sun were apparent.

-This is quite the collection, I said.

 

I guess, he said sleepily. These were my mother's. She read a lot. Passed away a couple months and, well, I can't say I read much myself. Didn't know what else to do with them. You can have as many as you want for a dollar. The thicker ones for two.

After a brief conversation and transaction, he gave me a tired smile and I carried a short stack of his mother's books as I strolled and looked for my mom, who was visiting and already carrying all kinds of small treasures.

 

It would be a year before I would actually read it.

First, I would have to go back to El Paso, write a thesis while job hunting, accept an offer (yay!), do a little travel for work to Houston, Cleveland, and Hampton, VA (the edition I bought is a hefty volume that also includes another two of Alice Walker's works: The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian, and doesn't lend itself to be carried around that much), and move to Alabama. Yes, 2014 has been pretty crazy. And it wouldn't be until I was curling up a reading chair at my new home to I picked up this book and read Celie's first prayer.

Celie broke my heart. Better said, her story made my heart break along hers. But as I told a friend of mine the morning after I finished reading this book, it proceeded to mend it and wrap a blanket around it.

The Color Purple is not one of those titles that wear a tacky golden sticker thanks to the efforts of the publishing house's marketing team. Its acclaim was well-deserved as is the place it earned among the American greats. Why? Because the author can deliver a shock-full of human experience that is alien to you and your lifestyle with a single line. No detailed explanations, no fool-proof contexts. Just the truth of one person, one character, that resonates with you and maybe humans everywhere.

"I know what I'm thinking bout, I think. Nothing. And as much of it as I can".

It had been a long time since I'd felt found by a book. And like every single other time it's happened, I'm grateful and a bit more bountiful than I was before it reached me.

Thank you, Alice.

Sing in my stead, please

Much has been going on lately (hence the lack of time to post a carefully crafted post) and I find that the time in life that teachers in middle school warn you will be the beginning of a succession of crossroads has arrived for me. Decisions, decisions, decisions... I will not bore you with the details- it's okay if you're sighing right now- but let me just say that maturity demands a lot more than I thought it would. You know, you hope it might be one of those things that people dread when they shouldn't. But it is indeed pretty nerve-wracking.

I was considering writing about some of the thoughts that great thinkers have shared about these things, deciding what you want, whether each choice really is as crucial as it seems at the moment, and why is our need for self-fulfillment so overbearingly present all the time. But!! Lo and behold I am writing a term paper on the dynamic failure of materials, and as much fun as snooping over other peoples' research has been, it has left little time for anything else. It will be some other time...

For now I wanted to share my... what should I call it? Let's say my therapy soundtrack. No, I don't go to actual therapy, but I find myself going back to the same songs for a moment of soul searching, for a place to heal, for someone to suffer my insecurities when I am too tired to carry them anymore. Sometimes I need to hear someone sing from a place of uncertainty, or about whatever it is that lifts their curtain of doubt. Would you care to share some of your songs? You do this sometimes too anonymous reader, right?

1. Let it Be, The Beatles

2. Gran Torino, Jamie Cullum

3. Hang On Little Tomato, Pink Martini

4. Cry Freedom, Dave Matthews Band

5. Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley

6. Moon River, Frank Sinatra

7. Sam's Town, The Killers

8. Caruso, Andrea Bocelli

9. The Professor and La Fille Dance, Damien Rice (lots of Damien Rice when I'm feeling blue)

10. Yesterday I heard the Rain, Tony Bennett/Alejandro Sanz

We may never be lost again

My memories of math classes involving the Cartesian coordinate system are probably much fonder than they need to be. The first time I grasped the concept of coordinates, playing with single-digit pairs of numbers to change to location of a dot, made me feel for a naive minute that the world would always make this much sense.  Drawing my first hyperbola, as the teacher said "don't worry, the first one always comes out ugly", and jotting down coordinates of places I wanted to go to from an atlas -I figured that knowing their latitude would come in handy someday- were simple activities that, though limited, allowed me to really savor the crispness and the lucidity of an idea.

Last month I came across an article in the Atlantic, one of my favorite periodicals, titled "The Places You'll Go". It discussed the marvelous advances that technology, and more specifically a user-friendly interface approach to GPS applications, has brought to mapping in general. People are interested in locations, distances, alternate routes, and changes in landscape. Geography has succeeded in going mainstream, and is now, much to the envy of Geology, almost as cool as Gastronomy. Why? Because it's no longer about the geography of somewhere else, an obscure mountain or acres of sand that extend on and on sometimes without even so much as a whisper. Now it's about the geography of your life.

I want to imagine the conversation with Rene Descartes as someone breaks the news of what GPS does for us in the 21st century. I can imagine the curious, eloquent, morning-hating mathematician asking why would we need a head count of all the places within a two mile radius that serve lattes. I can almost see him cringing at the flat voice that dictates every single turn like a neurotic drone and lets out something suspiciously similar to frustration when you ignore its command, but I can also see him marveling at how his two intersecting axes made zooming into a Brazilian neighborhood possible.

There is much that could be said of the genius of Google, of the service that cartographers throughout history did for a world that once upon a time could not fathom the other edge of an ocean. As a scientist, I applaud and encourage everything and everyone that seeks to responsibly stretch a good idea beyond its obvious means. As a user, I'm glad I was not left to depend on my own sense of orientation as I drove across the deep South looking for a Hilton- and yes, at some point I was even grateful for the neurotic drone.

But here is a confession. I worry, quite unreasonably maybe, about this very possible, almost imminent future, in which we, the human race, will cease to experience the feeling of being lost. And feeling lost can be a terrible thing. We are confronted with fear and uncertainty. But feeling lost, both physically and metaphorically, led us to finding things and places we were not looking for and drove us to try harder to understand the vastness that surrounds us. More than just being nostalgic about the notion of being a nomadic wanderer, I wonder about the future humans, those individuals that will perhaps have a facebook account created upon their birth and will use MapQuest to find the principal's office on their first day of kindergarten. I wonder if they will forget where these accurate, high-definition maps came from. If they will ever imagine or experience what it is like to not know what lies in a far away land, to feel anxious about this, to gorge the answer when they find it and never take it for granted. I wonder if they will take pride in drawing their first hyperbola.

How wonderful is it going to be having a world with its doors open to the curious. I just hope that the wanderers can keep stumbling around it, to then see it for what it is, and never cease to be in awe of it.

A vignetted recollection of 2012

In case you haven't been bored to oblivion by talks of new year's resolutions, last year's recaps, and good wishes... here's my post welcoming 2013.
Because this is a brand new blog, and therefore you know nothing of me at this point (unless you are my friend or relative and you're being kind), this might not be particularly exciting. BUT!- you will find that I have a knack for finding buts- this was truly a year full of milestones for me, and it might fill you in on what I've been up to lately (or even better, spark an interesting conversation)
That being said, I will confess that I attempted to post a version of this on facebook, only to find that, as I had feared, a fb post short enough to not be obnoxious would not do my recount justice. So here it is...


Highlights of 2012:

♣ Got my bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering!
♣ Began an amazing relationship ♥
♣ Skydived for the first time
♣ Went to work on a project at NASA :O
♣ Traveled to 10 states in the US, most of those in the company of very smart and fun individuals (aka  MSFC Propulsion Academy)
♣ Learned how to properly run (after 20+ years of briskly hopping at an odd pace)
♣ Had what was probably 'the' most expensive meal of my life
♣ Climbed my first mountain and my first tree (with a little bit of help :P)
♣ Lost weight (woohoo!)
♣ Learned how to knit and knitted way too much
♣ Got a fellowship... *score*
♣ Overcame my irrational fear of insects (for the most part)
♣ Won two awards for research presentations
♣ Went to space camp!
♣ Stopped being a vegetarian after almost two years 

♣ Laughed a bunch, read good books, drank some very decent coffee, tasted great beer, loved to my heart's content, and still managed to sneak in a couple days of blissful idleness.

Clearly, I learned and grew a lot. Now I know that I want to learn and grow much more than I ever thought I could. And maybe... just maybe... if I'm lucky enough... I'll do it in the company of the incredible people that I managed to cross paths with and some new ones that I am yet to meet. You, maybe? :)


Seize the year.

V.