Brownian Motions

Motherhood, mental health, whatever else

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Business opportunity

Carbonated coconut water.

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Perspectivizing

There is a quote that changed my life, but when I google it, it doesn’t exist. “I believe in miracles because I can lift my arm.” I don’t know who said it. Maybe I did. But it changed me because it contains the power to remind me that just being alive is shocking.

The galaxy is spinning. As are millions of other galaxies. This image and explanation are a short cut to awe. <img src='http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-1996-01-a-web_print.jpg' alt='Hubble Deep Field Image Unveils Myriad Galaxies Back to the Beginning of Time' /><br /><span style='font-size:10px;color:#686868;font-style: italic;'>Source: <a style='color:#686868;font-style: italic;' href='http://hubblesite.org'>Hubblesite.org</a></span>

Several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in this "deepest-ever" view of the universe,  called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.  Besides the classical spiral and elliptical shaped galaxies, there is a bewildering variety of other galaxy shapes and colors that are important clues to understanding the evolution of the universe. Some of the galaxies may have formed less that one billion years after the Big Bang.

Representing a narrow "keyhole" view  all the way to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of sky 1/30th the diameter of the full Moon (about 25% of the entire HDF is shown here). This is so narrow, just a few foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy are visible and are vastly outnumbered by the menagerie of far more distant galaxies, some nearly as faint as 30th magnitude, or nearly four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision.  (The relatively bright object with diffraction spikes just left of center may be a 20th magnitude star.) Though the field is  a very small sample of sky area it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks the same in all directions.

My cells are humming. My RNA is transcribing. Millions of miraculous processes are happening without my guidance or conscious input.

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Destination

I want to live somewhere that...

1. No one moves to after college.

2. No one is writing articles about.

3. Has un-ironic softball leagues.

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Name tests

So we are trying to pick a name for our boy, which is actually a really fun process when the parents have as much subjective aesthetic overlap as Scott and I do. There are some "name tests" out there, and we've been devising our own. (I'm intentionally using sample names we are not really considering.)

The Playground Test - Imagine calling out the name across the playground to your child. Does it feel natural, or do you feel a little sheepish? "Anton, time to go!" (Sheepish.)

The Blind Date Test - Read this one on the Cup of Jo blog. Imagine in the future one woman saying to another woman, "Do you want to meet my friend [name]?" Do you feel, based on the name alone, that she would want to meet him? Seem like a good way to shortcut right to gut-level associations about a name.

The Sports Cheering Test - Who knows, our kid may hate sports, but it's fun to imagine yelling, "Come on, Miles!" from the stands to try out a name.

The "Cool It" Test - Just what it sounds like. "Nolan, cool it." Scott and I just like saying "cool it," too. This is akin to the well-known Disciplinarian Voice Test, which often employs the middle name.

The Signing the Holiday Card Test - "Happy Solstice from Carson, Scott, Ingrid, and Dean." Does it fit?

What other ways do you have of test driving a name?

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Grooming = love

I love brushing and braiding my daughter's hair almost too much. It activates the monkey momma inside of me.

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Worry = love

I'm having a hard time letting go of this equation. Worrying is how I show I care.

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Curious Origins

So the Man in the Yellow Hat poached George from Africa? Fully stole him from his home to put him in a zoo in New York City? You don't have to be an ethnic studies grad student to see some slave narrative in there. The books are super dated, with George like smoking a pipe and multiple references to "the pretty young nurse" in Curious George Goes to the Hospital. The cartoon does better, with brown people represented and women doctors. But the origin story haunts it all. 

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Overheard at the Noe Valley farmers market

1. "Pluots are kicking all kinds of ass right now."

2. Woman: "Let me get this straight. You're going all the way to Portland to make a dumb joke?"

Man: "Yep."

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Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

Thanks to Caitlin for sharing this John Muir quote the other day. I want to visit the trees and the stars. And I love the concept of "practical immortality."

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Guiding question

What is the guiding question to your life? Really, I'm curious. Mine is, "What is it like to be you?" Which I think explains my attraction to literature and psychotherapy. It's the closest I will ever get to finding out, though the painful part is that we can never really, fully know.

It's similar to asking what a person wants to be remembered for, or wants to leave behind. Scott says at the end of his life, he wants to be able to say, "I made beautiful things," and I find that noble. I want to be able to say... I helped people. I contributed to the field of human understanding. I expressed the things that only I could express. I explored the farthest realms of the psyche. Something like that.