let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

Okay, so mirror neurons (neurons that fire the same way when you engage in a behavior and when you observe others engaging in the same behavior) might be involved in empathy. There's not a ton of research supporting that yet, but I think it makes a lot of sense.

I also think it makes sense for mirror neurons to be integral to the phenomenon of contagious yawning. (Apologies in advance as everyone reading this starts feeling that urge.) Kids develop theory of mind around age 4, and start yawning in response to videos of yawning around age 5. Tons of potential third variables there, I know. Just a thought.

Now I really want to go find some sociopaths and yawn at them to see if they yawn too. Or autistic people, I suppose, but there are even more potential third variables in that population.

It's weird, how I don't really realize at the time how much stuff I'm learning in my classes. I was just thinking about how I was getting about seven or eight hours of sleep a night this past semester and it never felt like anywhere near enough, whereas for the past week, I've been sleeping in four- or five-hour snatches every thirty hours or so--not because I'm stressed out or have to be awake for anything, just because I'm not tired.

And this makes sense! Because this past couple of weeks, I've mostly been hanging around the apartment doing nothing. During the semester, I was constantly going places and doing things and worrying about things, and that wears out my body in ways that I understand. When I'm spending hours at a time focusing on a single aspect of biology, like you do in classes, it's easy to completely fail to notice my awareness of the entire organism improving.

But it has been. I can't even explain it, really. I just have this sense of myself as the combination of all the bits of me, this understanding of who I am that's built from all the various little understandings I've had throughout my neuroscience and cell biology and physiology and signal transduction classes.

I am so glad to have the education I've had so far, and so eager to keep going. I'm incredibly lucky.

If you say something sexist or racist or heterosexist or whatever unintentionally--if you honestly had no idea that there was anything wrong with what you said--then I agree that it's not a reason for people to get mad at you. It's an acceptable reason for people to avoid you, if they don't feel like trying to educate you, but it's not reasonable to get angry if you truly had no idea. Obliviousness is not necessarily your fault.

If, however, someone says, "Hey, dude, that wasn't cool, and here's why," then appropriate responses are "I disagree, and here's why," or "oh, I'm sorry!" If someone calls you out and your reaction is, "You're being oversensitive and not understanding my intentions," then you are being a jerk. Ignorance is only an excuse when you're still ignorant.

I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes, watching the world go by and thinking about its physiology, how insane and wonderful it is that everything works so well, that existence has come as far as it has and that it has the potential to just keep getting cooler.

Every time I say something like that, my friends start getting all nostalgic for college. Does that mean you grownups never get caught up in the sheer awesomeness of everything anymore?

So, there's something I don't get.

I've always looked forward to turning eighteen and moving out. My family rocks, but I never had a choice about moving in with them. Besides, moving out is what you do when you grow up, right? You do your own thing, you make your own way in the world, you get your own physical space as well as the space to make your own decisions.

I know I'm not the only person who takes this approach. Sure, there are plenty of people who stay with their families into adulthood, and that's fine if that's how you do things. But there were also plenty of people alongside me throughout adolescence, chomping at the bit to get out of their houses the day they hit eighteen. And some of them--not all, but some--did.

This is not unexpected, is it? As a country, we grant people legal adulthood at eighteen. It shouldn't be a surprise that some of us grab that and run with it. And yet both socially and bureaucratically, it's assumed that young people have a "home" with their parents. Clark refused to accept my college mailbox as my current address; since I now have an off-campus apartment, I called to change it to this one, and they initially refused to change it because it's a "summer residence, not a permanent residence." Financial aid is impossible to get without taking parental income information into account until the student is 25, even if the parents refuse to pay a cent; I know several people who have been thoroughly screwed over by this policy. I can't count the number of people who have asked whether I'm "going home" for a school break or for the summer, and telling them that I live here only gets a confused "I thought you were from California?"

It's not just college students, either. I hear real grownups with houses and kids and everything referring to visiting their parents as "going home." I don't understand. I visit my family members, and I enjoy those visits, but they're visits. When I go to Davis, where I was born and spent my childhood, it's pleasantly familiar as the place I grew up, but it's not home. To me, home is where I go at the end of the day. That was my parents' house, once. Then it was my grandparents' house. Then it was a dorm room. Now it's an apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts, with a couple of near-strangers who seem pretty nice. In the future, it might be my own place, or a place I share with people I love; it might be P's couch in Lyon, if I ever manage to get my butt across the Atlantic; it might even be an actual house of my own someday, unlikely as settling down feels to me now. But "home" doesn't mean someplace far away that I only see once or twice a year, and it seems very strange to me that that's what others expect it to mean.

I think one of the most important realizations that push the transition from adolescence to adulthood is that failing to express affection for the people you care about does not make you cool.

It's not universal, obviously, because people are different (some have the opposite problem of expressing affection indiscriminately and thus making people who don't know them well uncomfortable), but that aloof demeanor is definitely one of the things I see most in teenagers, and in people who aren't teenagers anymore but haven't gotten their shit together enough to grow up.

"Consistency in the midst of the search is no great virtue."

--Howard Becker, Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You're Doing It

I just picked up my mail, and it consisted of a bank statement, a check, a medical bill (more than $200, ouch), and a letter about a loan. This is the kind of stuff people warned me about when I was a kid and said I wanted to grow up. Bills and taxes and responsibility are no fun, they said. Well, y'know what? It's totally worth it. So far, the positives of adulthood far outweigh the negatives.

I've been dwelling on a flaw of mine, and then realized that several of the people I admire most share that flaw. So I feel a little better about that. Mom always says you become who you admire, and that's really true, I suppose. That was the basis for the essay that got me in here, actually.

I seem to have made a good impression on the dean of students and the head of the psychology department. Someone said on Facebook that it's because I actually care about what I'm learning. I know it's beneficial to me to stand out in that regard, but I wish I didn't; I wish more people cared.

I miss Ava.

I had a crappy day today. I was going to post about it, but then I went outside to put an envelope in the mailbox at the end of our bazillion-foot driveway, and I sort of forgot about the crappiness.

I complain about living in the middle of nowhere, but sometimes this area just overwhelms me with its beauty. In the near-pitch-blackness of midnight, feeling the cool air on my skin, listening to the silence that just doesn't happen in cities... all the drama and worry and physical discomfort faded away.

This area really is gorgeous. I wouldn't want to stay here, but I'm glad I got the time here that I did. I'm glad I got to know my grandparents as people rather than as the free vending machines they seemed to be when I was a kid. I'm glad I got to know myself a little, as is inevitable when spending so much time alone. I'm glad I got to know what it's like to not live within ten blocks of everything I need in my daily life.

It's beautiful here during the day, too, when there are animals and clouds and incredible views. But it's at night, when I go out to the mailbox, that I fall in love with this place. It's dark, and it's quiet, and I'm alone, and for a few minutes, the urgency of to-do lists and daily life just doesn't exist.

I'm going to miss that.

I just read a surprisingly interesting article on highway fonts, linked in 530nm330hz's journal. I had trouble telling the difference between Highway Gothic and Clearview until I read the part about the shape of the words, and then I totally got it. Clearview places the letters closer together and narrows the gap in height between capital and lower-case letters, and that really does help form the shape of the word. Looking at it from that point of view, I could immediately tell the two apart.

I had a conversation a while ago with Mark and kat_nano about word shapes. Words have always had shapes in my mind, but I wasn't at all conscious of it until I tried to describe it. They're very definite shapes, but I couldn't express many of them to Kat, who seemed fascinated by the concept. "Shapes" might not even be the right term. They're not three-dimensional, and they move. No, not move. Flow. A sentence, if I focus on it, is like a complicated dance in my mind. When there's a spelling error, or even sometimes a grammar error, I know that something is wrong before I process the specific mistake because there's a skip, a misstep, in the dance.

Kat wanted to know if the shapes had color; to me, that was like asking whether wind has color. It's not an applicable question. I can't see them, exactly, nor feel them. I just know them. I tried to show her a few by waving my hands around, but I felt like an idiot more often than I felt like I was getting the sense of it across.

She asked if a movement ever reminded me of a word, and I said yes, but couldn't think of any examples. The next day, bagging groceries, I realized that the movement my hand makes when I open a freezer bag is the shape of the word "pot." It's the word that has the shape, not the meaning- the shape is the same whether the word refers to marijuana or cooking. Most word shapes don't correspond with actual body movements, though. The dance isn't done with a body, imagined or otherwise; it's a dance of words, and words only.

Some of the shapes correspond to their meanings, and some don't. The shape of the word "dress" feels like pulling up a handful of fabric in a swooping way, with a quick upward movement (leaving loose pleats in the swoop) on the right-hand side. It has to be the right because the "ess" part of the word is on the right, but that's not the case for all words; "over" moves to the left, and the center of the word (the part the movement is passing over) is the "v". I don't really think any of that makes sense outside my mind, though, and even if it does, the shape you're imagining probably isn't the same one I'm imagining.

"Does" is like a horse's neck facing left, with the "s" as a sort of fringe of mane, but only in that pronunciation. If you're referring to multiple female deer, it's a different shape, with more of a break between the "o" and the "e". The neck is more horizontal if the D is capitalized.

By becoming aware of these shapes, I've realized why I can't learn words without knowing how they're spelled. Sounds don't have shapes to me. (I suppose sound must have some bearing if pronunciation affects shapes, but words that are spelled differently but sound alike are also differently shaped. "Affect" and "effect" are not the same shape.) This is also probably why I have difficulty remembering words in languages that don't use the alphabet I'm familiar with.

I'm very curious about what you all think of this.