California Dreaming

Greetings from San Francisco and happy thanksgiving! These past few days have been filled with gorgeous landscapes under the beautiful sunshine. I am here in San Francisco, wondering what I am doing with my life living in Chicago and its terrifying winters.. Why couldn’t my school have been located in a much more comfortable and funner place like San Francisco! I love it here and I’ve never wished for something than to move here. Ahh, I love San Francisco and its people, shopping.. I’ve only heard great things about San Francisco, but the city definitely exceeded my highest expectations of all that I had heard about this city. It is really depressing to think that in two days, I will be flying back and gearing back on my winter coats and scarves. But on a brighter note, I will also be going home with my very first purchase of Tory Burch! Also, school ends in a little over two weeks. Done, done and done! Quick post from San Francisco, see you back in Chicago

Fall Semester, 2009

1) I finally started learning to bake yummy stuff! I am so excited and can’t wait to try out more muffins and cakes…..
2) Yes, I am alive – and only three weeks away from winter break! This blog should be back and much more frequently updated again once winter break is on.. My Thanksgiving break starts on Wednesday this week, and I will be visiting San Francisco for the first time! I am really looking forward to seeing a new state and of course, reuniting with Malvina! Honestly, I can hardly wait – I’ve been so desperate for a nice break out of Chicago, and the school atmosphere. I haven’t been at my best, the past weeks honestly have been awful. But hopefully, this 4 day turkey weekend will help me get back up on my feet and finish the semester off, clean cut with no fail.
3) To-do list before departing away from the school stress: Buddhism Art History final paper, Art Therapy final paper, wrk work work and make lots of monies, ceramics plaster molds and glazing and beading as many pieces as possible, video, blah blahhh this #3 is really just for my own purpose to therapize my mind – is that even a word..!?
PS. So my blog got a little more colorful.. Like or no like?
Some photo updates:

The Botany of Desire

• The Botany of Desire By Michael Pollan
  A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

I took a break from my attempts in understanding the skeptics’ point of view. I found a new book that taught me deeper on our freedom of thought and where we direct our desires. This book is a scientific, creative writing by Pollan which thoroughly explains different kinds of botanic that link our aesthetic preferences. He divides the book into four kinds of desires or pleasures that we crave for: 1. Apple (Sweetness) 2. Tulip (Beauty) 3. Marijuana (Intoxication) 4. Potato (Control) This book so far has strongly reminded me on how to think more selflessly and to realize how nature does not make an impact in our lives but we make an impact in theirs. However, that does not make us have the bigger authority over them at all; in fact, it is the contrary. They make us survive according to their needs. We have evolved from planting and eating vegetation into finding beauty in them. We have helped them to evolve, by cooperating their existence as our necessity to survive. We have evolved for them, much more than an apple has, over the centuries that we have lived. Apples may have increased its species but only because we gained more need for tastes, and we gained the need to travel and grow population. This book is very educational and not at all challenging for a girl like me who barely passed Biology in high school. It teaches even more than just the scientific evolution of botany and I truly enjoy reading it..
Just like how Paulos explained in Irreligion of the cycle of certainty (probabilities that expand into more possible solutions, which then are eliminated into more intricate probabilities, expanding into even more possiblities..), Pollan’s chapter on The Apple, Sweetness talks about a similar theory. Human cultures experiment with all kinds of possible genetic effects in apples – sweet, sour, bitter, variety of skin colors, softer texture, and so on; the variety are endlessly available and frankly unstoppable. Even without our intention, apples will eventually travel and breed on its own pace of evolution. This need for variety, grows more ideas and newer desires for our taste buds. But our world today suffer from globally dwindling environments. The only way we can continue to have ‘preferences’ for aesthetics is to simply preserve variety whether or not the variety will suit our preferences. As long as variety is still available, apples will continue to evolve, which then eventually, we will find ourselves enjoying. Our need is the richest source for apples to survive. It is not at all too difficult for them to survive, thanks to our needs and preferences. They feed us and demand us to support them, we have obeyed them for centuries and we most definitely will for centuries more! “‘In Human Nature is the preservation of the wilderness.’ – Wendell Berry.”
I don’t know whether it is fictional or simply fate that Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry (an author Pollan mentions at the end of the chapter on Apples, as quoted above), both have names that are so botanically relevant, haha.

Mathematics and the Divine

Here is the big question: Does God Exist???
Irreligion by John Allen Paulos proposes some intriguing mathematical facts that reject the concept of religion. Reading through some chapters was a bit startling for me at first, because he disapproves on a couple of things that I refer to as my spiritual guidance, such as coincidences and miracles. But the book was definitely a good read, and helped me to deepen my thoughts on spirituality much further.
Paulos uses algebra in order to prove most of his theories. His first theory states is that every cause exists because it has a creator. This theory applies validly for everything which exists today however, except for the existence of God. Religions claim that God does not have a cause/creator. As Paulos says, “If something doesn’t have a cause, it may as well be the physical world as God or a tortoise.” – We do not necessarily need to believe in an extraterrestrial being to the whole existence of our world, when our world itself can be the cause of every existence.
Nozick’s self-subsumptive principle demonstrates how we would define the world, if God had been the creator. Here’s the excerpt on the theory: (Suppose we substitute C with God, and P with religion: this explains that we simply reflect our ideal divination for what we want to claim as the truth)

P says that any law-like statement having characteristic C is true. Principle P is used to explain why other, less general laws hold true. they hold true because they have characteristic C. And what would explain why P holds true? A possible answer might be that P itself also has characteristic C. In short, P if true, would explain itself.

The next argument is the reasoning behind coincidences. People like myself, believe that coincidences or chances do not exist, but all causes exist with a reason or purpose. Paulos argues that this is merely a wishful thinking. “Note that there are always a fantastically huge number of evolutionary paths that might be taken by an organism (or a process), but there is only one that will actually be taken.” Our entire existence is simply a minuscule of the billion possibilities of this universe. A slight difference in our existences’ minuscule outcome would definitely have made us all different, like what religions claim. However, that does not necessarily mean that our world today is a form of miracle if we have billions of other ways to exist. This theory can also be applied to the concept of natural selection. Possibilities and outcomes are tautological (my new favorite vocabulary, and it means:) “in order for us to exist to observe the universe, its laws and constants must allow for observers to exist.”
In order to find more answers, researchers logically hypothesize possibilities. When bizarre hypotheses are brought up from studies, religions like to stir them up into mystical conspiracies. When these studies are answered, they are in mini, tiny steps but surely cutting down the many possibilities out of the billions they refer to, when investigating their hypotheses from. Therefore with answers discovered, the more probabilities (the guessable answers) there will be. However, to exist in this universe, we are all created and formulated out of all the matter that are available in this universe. Therefore we all share the same matter. Then it would make sense to say that all probabilities are also made up of the same matter. This opens up another wide field of possibilities under the probabilities that researchers study upon. Each answers divide into more branches. The more possibilities researches eliminate, the more possibilities they are creating.. This is the pessimistic, Doomsday Argument; as Emerson is quoted in the book, “No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.” Near the end of this chapter, Paulos states a really good point, which is now one of my favorite quotes: “Certainty a strange Ferris wheel of a statement!”
Last but not the least, Paulos points out that religious people are not capable of logically proving their faith. God is omnipotent and omniscient – can God create a dinosaur bigger and much stronger than Himself? Religions rely on assumptions, the wishful claim of universal truth. If these two alone can prove that God is real, how does religion explain their paradox in their unchanging truth?
   ”I am lying.”
   ”This sentence is false.”
By reading these sentences, we are given two answers which neither are correct. This again, brings us back to the idea of the Ferris Wheel statement of Certainty. Both Mathematics, and religion come down to an endless search for the answer, back to uncertainty. Paulos is not an atheist and he believes in the power of love (which I’m relieved about, haha), however he also believes that religion is not necessary. Here are two letter A’s of different colors A, A. To study the two, we would first classify them as the red A, and blue A. Why? Because we need the convenience to distinguish them every time we refer to them despite the fact that both letter A’s are equally the same context. This concept applies as well, on either believing in a religion, or simply that this world exists under a cause of uncertainty. Either decision, we will be searching.
Here’s one final note for a positive ending to the faithful ones! Paulos pointed out on miracles, which did somewhat support his point of view, but it also supported more of what he refers to as wishful thinking. It made my day! “If a miracle is simply a very unlikely event, then miracles occur every day.”
NOW that all being said on Paulos in almost 1000words (possibly worth an essay to submit for my future classes I hope), I personally prefer to believe that if math can only accept truths from proven calculations, then there is one thing that cannot be calculated and that is 0. Like Paulos said, Possibilities are limitless, endless, forever. And if every answer we find eliminates these possibilities, then it sure has never been, nor will it ever be able to eliminate 0. Can 0 be the certainty? 0, like the existence of Divine, does not physically exist. The Divine is therefore 0, Nothing, but an uncountable figure. Bite me, Paulos but I am still not convinced after reading your book! Although it did take me a lot of scribbling around my notebook arguing with myself while reading your chapter on Paradox…..

URGENT

I have one bizarre news to post today.. Eeriness was all over the sky all day today since the morning, when a huge orange butterfly flew into my balcony. Not many bugs can make me feel so odd and curious over their visits to my bubble – this butterfly was definitely a creepy one, not like the usual scary ones (I hate bugs and I will never be able to accept and love them unless maybe if I get trained to do so, at a temple spiritually). I tried to look up some meanings for butterflies but I got sick of going through silly superstitions on Google so I gave up and headed for work. Again, my walk to work was unusual and perplexing; a man ahead of his time, formally dressed up 6 or 7 months early for St. Patrick’s day walked up to me from nowhere and complimented my nail polish, then walked off to wherever he was heading that required him to wear such ridonkulous outfit. Then I saw a whole crowd, yet again ahead of their time, dressed up a few months early for Halloween, in Hogwarts uniform with the craziest make up. Note: this was all encountered at around 8 AM… (is this post not weird enough yet?) These surprises did not end by morning. They only got worse – later in the afternoon on my way back to work from my lunch break, I witnessed policemen and two other men shooting at each other, and a few collapsing like birds flying into a glass wall.

CBS2 Chicago, Chicago Breaking News, Chicago Now
This happened on State st. and Randolph st. by the Chicago Theater, right across from the SAIC Dormitory, Jamba Juice and ABC News station – literally right across the street from where I was standing with my Potbelly’s sandwich. One of the two men carrying a nice, leather briefcase fell on the ground, but I remember he was still conscious; while the other fell motionlessly and fortunately without a bloody show. Either of the two, (none of the articles specify which) was carrying a knife around the Chicago Theater, attempting to mug people in the city in daylight. I remember hearing the police yelling to drop the weapon.. It got scarier when I realized, weapons can kill! I couldn’t move; soon my ears exploded over seven or eight gun shots as the police ran around all over State street. Police then tried to get a hold of this crazy person and his knife, but the policeman almost got slashed just when another policeman shot several gunshots towards this crazy razz matazz. One of the bullets hit the policeman who was holding the crazy. This policeman fell on the ground for a while but got back up because fortunately and miraculously, he happened to be wearing his bulletproof vest! As I watched this, I looked at the book I was holding – The Devil in the White City (history on Chicago’s architectural development for the World Columbian Exposition in 1892, and its many hidden stories to all the crimes that took place during the event.. mainly about H.H. Holmes’ razz matazz). Then I contemplated on how extraordinary this Thursday was. The happy, eventful downtown Chicago was now, almost as thrilling as the 1890s.. On this one insanely extraordinary Thursday afternoon, my respect for policemen went from 2 to possibly 9 out of 10, and I gained a reality check that living in downtown Chicago is just like living blind of common sense, because we never know what goes down what goes where and what in the hell to expect!… Of course, when one doesn’t know what to expect, he secures himself and, his bike. But just a simple mistake as forgetting to lock a bicycle on its wheel together with its tube can lead to his garage left with only two wheels and entire tube stolen and astray. My best friend Cecca (whom I’ve mentioned a couple of times on this blog!) just got her bike stolen while the policemen were shooting around on State st., because she had only locked her wheels around the pole, and without the tube. I really need to find a way to somehow cheer her up even though I can never transform into a bicycle for a day. She was so upset when she called, I almost cried just listening to her! I am known for having emotions like a baby, when I hear someone cry, I start crying. And clearly this does not help, it confuses the situation instead. “Why are you crying?!”