Records Department: January 2015

1/31/15

1/25/15

I happen to be reading Orwell and Bachelard while researching a particularly advanced Asian city. It is weirding me out and resonating in particularly funky ways with my childhood, of times I dreamed to trade my soul to Caltech in order to become a sleepless engineer who cared for nothing more than to invent the most efficient car engine ever. Of course, my dreams were littered with endless flights of stairs and thinly scaffolded steps.

"This is a 100-story building built on an extremely narrow foundation but piled deep and structured in such a way that the winds won't blow it down. To do that you need a people with a drive and a leadership that anticipates the future." - Lee Kuan Yew, 2009

and

"A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house... Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic. A roof tells its raison d'etre right away: it gives mankind shelter from the rain and sun he fears... As for the cellar, we shall no doubt find uses for it. It is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of depths... The fact is not enough, the dream is at work." - Bachelard, 1958

1/20/15

Resolution

In Miaoli, there was a woman in her eighties that walked the block outside my grandparents' house everyday. Five times in the morning, five times in the afternoon, with slow steps and saying hello to all the neighbors. She stood with good posture and would give you a real smile if she saw you.

So I'm putting it out there that I intend to practice discipline (and public speaking) in this manner.

Discipline not in reference to the Middle English translation, but in the sense of self-instruction and commitment given in sincerity. And public speaking in that I hope it feels better than mortification by scourging oneself, someday, o some day.