[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindumps on things Mel Chua has found shiny lately.

Me: Good morning.
Body: Good morning! You’re up early. And – oh, water. Thanks.
Me: *glug-glug-glug*
Body: That was good. What’s the agen- wait, what are you doing?
Me: It’s called running.
Body: I’m moving.
Me: I know.
Body: I don’t do running.
Me: You do this morning.
Body: I’m supposed to read! At a desk! I – what’s going on? AAH! Respiratory system! Respiratory system!
Me: It’s called homeostasis. Get over it.
Body: But what’s this stuff that’s coming into my lungs?
Me: Oxygen. Remember oxygen? It’s much less efficient to be anaerobic. Ever heard of something called ATP?
Body: I can look it up on Wikipedia.
Me: You do that.

Body: Done reading. You’re still doing this “running” thing. I’m going to make your legs hurt.
Me: Yeah, I know.
Body: They’re not used to this. You’re going to have to stop.
Me: Eventually.
Body: Lactic acid! C’mon, my little H+ friends!
Me: Eh, mild discomfort. Lactic acid actually doesn’t cause muscle soreness, you know. That’s a common misconcep-
Body: MORE! MORE! BURN! BURN!
Me: Oh, come off it. I’m not going to overdo it. I’m just running at a bit of a clip for 20 minutes, with occasional walk breaks. I’m out of shape – spent the last month far too immobile. Remember how you sprinted 3km through the streets of Taiwan to get your suitcase without getting out of breath?
Body: Yes? Almost? Distant memory?
Me: Could you do it now?
Body: No?
Me: Exactly.
Body: Why do you care?
Me: Because taking care of yourself is good. And not-moving has correlated with me feeling really scattered and sluggish for the last 5 weeks. And because I want to learn tai chi, and that’s a lot easier when you can, y’know, do more than 50 squats in a row.
Body: So you’re going to do this again?
Me: That’s the idea. Right, so we’re done. Shower, lunch, some reading, and then let’s do some crunches!
Body: …
Me: Let’s go!
Body: *grumble* I know I’ll be happy about this in a month, but I really don’t like you right now.
Me: Aww, I love you too.

Quickie: “The Unplugged,” a short story by Vinay about a (hypothetical?) future movement towards individual self-sufficiency in terms of environmental footprint. Interesting. Possible? Well, that depends on whether you’re speaking technologically or sociologically.

Arrived in Chicago last night. On the way to the house, we stopped by the newly constructed Whole Foods that was along the way. This thing is a marvel of modern commercialism and a food lover’s heaven. $150 bottles of wine stood behind a glass case with little rubber tubes sipping into them, dispensing $8 tasting samples. Heaps of hot garlic shrimp, bright red beef mixed into patties with expensive cheddar, four restaurants! inside the supermarket!!! shelves of spa products and – oh, you could buy everything. And all I could think was “expensive! expensive! expensive!” and “how is so much abundance possible in one place?” and then “when the store closes in a few hours, I bet they throw all these heaps of perfectly good food out.”

Ignoring that depressing note: All four of us (mom, dad, brother, myself) have been wanting to try heirloom tomatoes for… well, years. So faced with them in the market for the first time, we gave in and got four small, twisted heirloom tomatoes this morning and one tiny tub of mozzarella (total: $14 – ow) and sliced them up with a sprinkle of salt, nothing else. Holy cow. It was exploding tomato flavor – four varieties, four tomato tastes – tart and beefy, light, fruity, richly acidic, crisp… and then the cheese was just sweet and white and soft in between, and then the tomato exploded in your mouth again. Ohh.

And so I’m finally sitting – fed and hydrated – in a room of my own (!) in a big house with a nice new kitchen and a fully-stocked fridge (!!) and a mattress that’s mine (!!!) and free laundry (!!!!) and relatively stable internet (!!!!!) and I feel incredibly out-of-place because after a summer of doing things like walking 12 miles to save $2 on train fare so I can buy spaghetti, suddenly I’m living in a really expensive, super-nice place that’s supposedly the house where I grew up but doesn’t feel like it.

The house I grew up in had a non-working dishwasher we used as a drying rack, an oven that kept on sputtering out, a rusted-through Chevrolet. Not a Lexus and a flatscreen TV and the ridiculous beds that have a remote control to adjust the firmness. In some sense, we’ve become a “normal” family for our area; Glenview is ridiculous, and median household income is nearly twice the national average ($80,730 vs $42,148 – both numbers in 2000). Four blocks away in Northbrook, it’s $95,665. (Northbrook is the 85th richest town in the United States with a population of at least 10k.) My classmates in middle school had huge homes and chandeliers and two-story Christmas trees. We had garage-sale furniture and a house we could only afford because it was purchased and inhabited by nearly our entire extended family to begin with.

So I considered myself a lower-middle-class kid growing up in an upper-middle-class town. But slowly, when I went away for school, my family’s apparently migrated to the upper-middle-class as well. My parents and brother think this is normal because they’ve been living here for the past 7 years as the house evolved, but I come back and find a swimming pool where I used to ride my bike and feel very, very strange – and guilty for having it and even enjoying it, a little.

But this is good. I have a bed and internet now. So if that holds constant for today and tomorrow, and I don’t have to worry about food, then maybe I can actually get… stuff… done, instead of “Oh, yeah, food. Do I have enough pocket change for bananas? Can I walk to the supermarket and buy bananas?” and then there goes the afternoon, walking back and forth with a bunch of bananas at the grocery store. Now I can do things other than figuring out where I’m eating and sleeping. Novel concept, that.

Futon vs floor: there is no contest. My spine is a happy spine today, and I’ve slept in too late.

Today: Moving out of my aunt’s house. This is a more involved process than it sounds, since I have to pack – in one carryon suitcase – equipment and clothing for business meetings in San Fransisco, winter gear for Chicago, formal dress for a Christmas party in the hot, tropical Philippines, and everything for a jaunt through China… plus research books and all the junk I’m schlepping back to my parents’ house to return to them and/or leave there. And then I have to take that suitcase and the associated stuffed backpack through several miles of walking and an hour of public transport and changing trains…

By the way: the four most useful things I’ve learned this summer are how to steal, drink, lie, and cheat – and I highly recommend you learn them, too. Here’s why.

Steal. There are a lot of great ideas out there, many of them free for the taking. Why duplicate work? Take advantage of what others have done – thousands of people standing on the shoulders of those who have come before create giants in their own right. (Corollary: Make your own stuff steal-able – open-license or public domain your work when you can.)

Drink. It doesn’t need to be alcoholic, but it needs to not be alone. There’s more to life than work. Getting to know folks is fun, makes it easier to work with you, and spurs plenty of random ideas for new collaborations. You get more done if you’re not thinking about productivity all the time. (Corollary: Stay spontaneously grab-able. If someone announces they’re going out, you want to occasionally – not always, but occasionally – be able to pick up and waltz out the door.)

Lie. A better word for this might be “just-in-time truth.” If someone asks you a question, it’s not dependent on a physical law of nature, you don’t know the answer, and you’re pretty sure nobody else does, then make it up – someone’s going to have to eventually. “Do you know where we’re supposed to meet for the party?” “Ah… Harvard square!” Improvise. (Corollary: Publicly. Invented truths don’t do any good if they’re not spread.)

Cheat. In the video games sense – the fact that your character can jump only so high is an arbitrary line of code you can punch in a few symbols to modify. Most rules aren’t actually. Know which “oh, we’re not supposed to!”s or “but we can’t!”s are actually “most people don’t, but nothing actually prevents us from doing so”s. (Corollary: Publish your cheat codes so others can take advantage as well.)

The Oliners have gone back to school; life continues as usual for them, with slightly different roles. Classes, projects, hanging out in the lounge, late night conversations in the lounge, work, clever furniture arrangements, chaotic solidity, wide-eyed frosh who haven’t gotten bags under their eyes yet (they come chattering in excitedly from ice cream instead). My old suite is occupied by Liz Kneen & Co. and sports an even more spectacular sound system, the total cubic footage of which utterly dwarfs the full-size fridge in the corner. I stayed a night and slept in Yrinee’s empty room (Jon’s room last year) and drew on Matt Crawford’s student handbook; campus felt comfortable but faded, like an old shirt you’ve loved but wore through and outgrew. It still feels familiar, but you don’t quite fit it any more.

Chandra came. We went to dinner with the two dozen Olin students who responded to Boris’s spur-of-the-moment email. Chandra lives in New Hampshire now, in a proper apartment, with a little patio, and carpet, and a bedroom with a walk-in closet. We assembled furniture, sat in boxes of packing peanuts, lit the wall sconce in her apartment for the first time (flickering red candles; lovely), and spent too much time at the outdoors store picking out a traveling pack (glory, backpacks are expensive) and travel towel (amazingly absorbent) for my treks around the world. She agonized over floor lamps at Bed Bath and Beyond and compared frying pans. I browsed through quick-drying underwear wondering which ones would dry out fastest on a hostel clothesline. Our lives are taking very, very different paths right now.

Kristen’s at a post-Olin house by Central with 3 other alumni – Chris, Susan, and Pearl – and some MITers. She cooks excellent spaghetti and introduced Chandra and me to the Super Bomber Man video game over raspberry beer floats. I also live – for this last week before travels, anyway – in a post-Olin house. Maker House. A reasonable-length walk from Porter and currently stinking of paint, meaning I have a roof over my head but it’s the kitchen’s or the workshop’s or whatever the room with the softest floor is that hasn’t recently been attacked with a roller and I’ve yet to sleep in the same place more than two nights in a row this month and we don’t have internet there either but might start sharing wireless with the Ryans (two people, first names, both genders, upstairs) soon but not yet so I’m at my aunt’s house one last time so I can get ‘net for a night and pack my books for Chicago.

It’s a scary thing when Gui and Jenn are the most stable people in your household. With Not in Zambia, Matt sleeping on a couch on the back porch of an MIT coop – quite nice, actually. I took the second back-porch couch once, and the sun filters through the upper deck before the chainsaw from next door wakes you – and me without any space to actually call mine, we’re a house of bohemian transients… definitely not “proper adults” as I was taught you were supposed to become. I spend a couple hours a day now scrambling for a place to sleep and transportation to get there (walking is slow). I’ve considered claiming a corner of the dance studio with my sleeping bag, but I think they painted that tonight. Sleeping in a different spot every night means I need to find a different spot to get ‘net every night – and that some nights I don’t, since I’m largely staying in friends’ apartments that haven’t quite been set up yet. (revelation: houses don’t come with internet. Someone has to come out and install it.)

Also, houses don’t come with furniture. You have to get it and build it and put it in; until you do, you get to eat pancakes and scrambled eggs cross-legged on the floor, or last night’s orange-glazed chicken stir-fry while balancing on the arm of the single sofa which is the only seat in the room. Stability? I think I used to have that, used to sleep in pajamas instead of my clothes, under comforters instead of in sleeping bags. I’ll be glad to return to Boston in 2008 and have a room that is mine, that I can bike home to every night, where I know I’ll get wireless, food, and friends. When I can spend my day thinking about fixing bugs, closing tickets, reading books, starting businesses – not where am I gonna eat, sleep, find a shower. (I’ve never worried about not being able to find one. It’s just a matter of where and how it’s going to turn up.)

Then again, that’s homeostasis speaking. I want to learn how to keep an inner compass – something I don’t have so much, I rely on externally imposed input, structure as a scaffolding. I need to learn how to consciously preserve certain habits even when the rest of my life is unstable – something I hope traveling will teach me. How to keep up little rituals of productivity that require minimal infrastructure. How to keep walking towards my goals in the absence of someone telling me what they are. How far can I let the reins go on my hyperactive attention span before I slip over the edge of not making sense to most of the rest of the world.

I’ve never missed school as much as I do tonight. There were professors there, and even if I rebelled against classes in the end they at least gave me something to push against, and I miss the people – and I miss living in a world I knew how to run within. The ocean’s so much wider than the ponds I’ve been, and I haven’t even begun to fathom how far out it goes.

I keep telling myself I chose not to take the easy route – a job, an apartment, a car – because I’d wonder for the rest of my life what would have happened if I didn’t. But they don’t tell you how terrifying adventures are when you’re actually living them. I’m the happiest I can remember being, and I’m learning at an amazing rate… and I am always – always – afraid.