Ca va bien, et toi?

I was sitting in the UW Archaeology lab looking down at a small selection of soil gastropods from some ho-hum site in Wyoming, my mind instantly classifying them into different groups based on their shell morphology. Some sunlight drifts in past pine trees, reminding me of spring. Books on various obscure subjects surround me, a couple of human skulls are cranium-down on the shelf behind me, the shiny enamel of the molars refelcting the sun, the dull dirt staining across what should have been a white bony structure reminded me that these bodies had been buried under ground for longer than England's existance as a nation.

It struck me at this moment that I was content. I know this sounds a little mundane, but I had never felt that sensation before. Usually I am a wreck of crashed ambitions or in the spring of a new hope, a new screenplay, a new, even cooler theropod. But this time, it was just a nice lab, some small gastropods, and a couple of skeletons that made me realize that at that one moment, I was happy. Everything seems so bloody stable for the moment that I can't help but relish it.

Well, so maybe the soil gastropods don't quite measure up to the dinosaurs. In the off chance that my SWAG (Scientific Wild-Assed Guess) is right, the evolution of these little soil gassies will be fast enough due to their low generational time that I will be able to date a stratigraphic sequence on the presence of specific species alone, which would save Archaeologists in the tri-state area lots of money in the comming years (who needs Electronic Spin Resonance or Radiocarbon dating when you have diagnostic shells?). But, we'll see.

For the moment, I'm cool with just about everything.

I've finished 5 scripts, and another two should be done within a few months, or risk becoming eternal projects. I've got my foot in the door for a Velociraptor, Oviraptor, and a couple of Ornithimimisaurs. And the Allosaur is mostly finished, except for a couple of odd little bits that need clarification.

Human OS

Yesterday I skated down to the Science Library, an underground labrynth under the cold mountain ice that holds everything. I'm not kidding, every issue of Nature, everything Darwin wrote, it's like a hard-drive backup of all scientific knowledge. Let me keep a box of Cliff bars down there and I'll never come back.

Anyway, I wanted to grab a copy of Darwin's Descent of Man, and ran into an old friend/complication that I haven't seen in a while. Turns out she was looking for the book too. We found a couple copies in the back of the library, both published before the second-to-last turn of the century. The thing is exactly what you'd expect from Darwin, yellowed pages, refferences to scientists that have long been discredited, and wordy as all hell. All his books are brilliant tangents.

43 pages into it and I realize something fundamental about humans, how incredibly brainwashable we are. This isn't a slam on the media in any form, because the media is a product of this innate tendency within humans. Ultimately, we need an OS system, Christianity, Naturalism, Islam, Fox News, something to fill all of our values and tell us what to think. It's easy to shrug this off, but the very ability to do this is a result of existing methods of testing what information is worth retaining, and what should be discarded.

Grab a human when they are born, and throw them to the wolves (preferably from a competing tribe). If they will survive, they will act in ways condusive to their survival (a.k.a. conformity). If you grab them before they turn six, they will be able to be re-assimilated into "civilization", however if you wait a year, they are forever lost. They can't learn english, they can't grasp what we are trying to do, in many cases, they actively resist this (Davis, 2003). A neurologist independently came up with an explanation. The development of the human brain is not so much in building new synapses as destroying old ones. You start out with a pretty crowded brain, capable of recognizing many things. But, as certain stimulants (faces, foods, noises, etc.) are presented more, those neurons are strengthened. The unused ones simply atrophie. A couple of guys decided to test this out by torturing kitties. They would cover up one eye, and let the otehr one receive light. As predicted, the unused eye thalmic cells sucked it up and fell unused. The stronger parts not only were not just used, but actually grew in place of the unused eye! (LeDoux, 2002) Apparently, just as a gene tells us to stop growing adult teeth, a genetic clock is inplace that puts a stop sign up at 6 years of age.

But what this does mean is that we are not so independent and individual as we think, and that when we argue with each other we can't change each other's mind precisely because we can't rearrange ourselves biologically. Sorry, but radical change is just not plausible based on this data (I dare you to disprove it).

So what does this have to do with Darwin? He was just as entrenched as we, and I shudder at thinking of how much we've lost. This genious is defining between civilized and savage races of man (though he isn't as bad as most, and he often questioned those assumptions). But still, without evidence, without a testing mechanism (which he is famous for establishing), he fell into it. Do we do the same now?

If th is is true, then what is written history doing to this process, is it driving change or forcing stability in human OS systems?

Well, real people are showing up now, goodbye Mr. Pixel.

Refferences:
Davis, Kingsley, 2002, Extreme Isolation, in Down to Earth Sociology, 2003, pp. 133 - 142
Ledoux, Joseph, 2003, Synaptic Self, pp. 76 - 77

Descent of Man

May 13, 2004

The twelfth was day seventy five. I sat talking to Natasha, a Ukrainian exchange student. She kept on talking about New York, New York. It was a place where she felt like she belonged, like she wasn’t different. She batted her heavily eye-shadowed eyelids down as she talked, words occasionally hard to pull from her otherwise melodic accent.

She went their over Christmas break as part of a hostel, and toured the city. She says this is where she burst out of her shell. Before this point she was very shy, after this point she was very open to meeting new people, myself included. She told me that when she first saw me she knew I looked Ukranian. It is the side of my family that I know little to nothing of.

As she spoke of New York, my mind switched back to that town. It was March twentieth, the sun occasionally peaked from the clouds. Around Alyssa and I were over a hundred thousand protesters, packed tightly between police baracades. It was cold, I draw my light jacket around me, the same that the Riverton goths used to pet because it felt “cool” to them. Alyssa stood, looking up at buildings, flowers attatched firmly to her peace sign. Her mother’s necklace hung loosely over her light blue windbreaker, it stated “War is unhealthy for children and other living things.” Around us stood members of the black bloc, black scarfs drawn over their mouths. A man stood, wearing an Uncle Sam outfit with ducttape straped across his lips. He starred accusitorily at the podium, where disjointed speakers spoke of various liberal causes.

I look around me, and I feel like a creep, like there is something bad inside of me. Dennis Kucinich begins to speak, causing the crowd to explode into acivity. We then begin to march, we are at the front of the line, It is spread out, the sun peaks out, warming us all up with just a light touch of UV radiation. It sneaks between skyscrapers that reach toward the sky like carefully built fingers. It reminds me of every movement I made around Alyssa, constructed as if to eliminate any possibility of us falling apart. Even then I knew that we would no longer be friends, that it was just a matter of hours until we would force ourselves apart.

A man taps Alyssa on the shoulder, and waves to me. It is Dennis Kucinich, we both freeze in amazement. Then I take her hand, and we dart further to the front of the line, past the statue of George Bush II that is being torn down.

“McBeal!”

“Alla Hoikba!”

“What do we want?”

“JUSTICE!”

“When do we wan’t it?”

“NOW!”

“NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!”

The chant is led off by a Palestinian, Alyssa, and I at various intervals throughout the march, until all our voices are cracked and broken. The crowd pushes forwand, and hour, two hours, they pass, and I do not even notice, I am swept in the march.Up ahead, I can see a mass of demonstrators… it is the back of the line, I am the front. Over 100,000 protesters looped around 42 square blocks of downtown Manhattan.

An hour later I dive into a drum circle, trying to evade Alyssa. She sticks to the outskirts, brandishing a Wyoming sign high into the sky. We stay there for awhile, then make our way back to our bus, parked underneath the Empire State Building.

I sit outside, underneath the building, writing. Alyssa comes out, and sits next to me, and leans a little forward, in my mind I know she is leaning in for a kiss. I lean a litle closer to her, and she gets up and walks back onto the bus, her notebook firmly in her hand. When I finish my writing, I walk in to see her sitting next to another guy…

SNAP!

Natasha has just taken my picture, and my eyes are a little dazed. I stumble next to her down the stairs, and walk through the tunnels below the university, and hug her goodbye before I leave for the Honors House, my mind plagued by Carissa.

I walk in, and sit down upstairs next to the green couch. Alyssa walks by, pathetic and sick as a dog. I have her sit down, and begin to massage her. I don’t want to be nice to her, but I don’t want to be an ass. Alyssa moans a little as her body goes limp, my hands completely undoing her muscles.

I had learned earlier that day that Carissa had cheated on my, most likely with Chris. This was after she dissed all my friends in the peace movement, quite maliciously. I took her aside and kissed her, telling her that I couldn’t sit by and listen to her bash my friends.

I gave her a long massage while we watched Interview with a Vampire, occasionally meeting her lips. Kristin sits on the bed next to us, pissed because her boyfriend Ryan had left that night to just go driving, escape his own demons. Lindsey sits below us, and Kristin begins to take her rage out on Lindsey a little, telling her to open her eyes on the scary parts. Carissa and I try not to betray laugther.

The next day I walk in, and cuddle up next to Carissa as she is studying. She says that she had talked to her mother, and that she said that it was rare to find someone like me, who will forgive political differences and frienship disses. It almost sounds like Carissa is trying to justfiy something to herself.

She shows me a book that influenced her in her career choice, a forensic anthropology manual that she had picked up when she was fifteen. I tell her that one day a litle fifteen year-old girl will pick up her book.

The next few days, something goes wrong. She becomes distant. Then finally, on Friday, she axes it between us.

This all comes across my mind as I am up all night studying for my remaining finals, feeling completely weak and wasted. Later that day I would rapidly pack everything up with Laura, racing to return to Thermopolis. Olivia would come by and hug me goodbye, we had grown close as we had both been dumped around the same time. She then departs, walking out of sight.

I wave goodbye, as I get into the car that will lead me to the computer that I now write at. I just finished a conversation with Dave Trexler, who is absolutely beat. His plane crashed, his water plan for Bynum Montanna is falling through, etc. However, his mom won the lawsuite against Jack Horner and the Museum of the Rockes. I had been hard on Horner for what he did to Trexler, but tonight Trexler tells me that Horner had a turn of heart, and helped them to win the lawsuite.

Our conversation turns to the Allosaur bones that I am showing him, the beautifully preserved specimen. He tells me of interested people in digging, and I brag about some of my volunteers. As I speak Carissa sits in the back of my mind, a frightful challenge that I will have to deal with sooner or later.

Yesterday, the 75^th day, I stood in the elevator leading to seventh floor Mac, where I wanted to make amends with Carissa. I suck in my breath, and walk to her door.

It is empty, devoid of the decorations I had placed upon it. The room is dark, nothing is there.

She was gone.