Loose Leaf Notes

1. On Sunday, I briefly got lost in a labyrinth. “It’s just like me not to follow the path,” I said to a friend who was also walking. She replied, “You make your own path,” to which I answered, “No, not really. I think I’m pathless.”

2. I felt that the way we walked the labyrinth (about 10 of us) – fast, slow, determined, getting lost – said a lot about our overall personalities.

3. I’ve come a long way since working in the parking lot, selling my wire wrapped crystals and hoping for a miracle when I couldn’t afford a ticket, but those years were magical and formative, and once a Dead Head always a Dead Head. – More from Still Grateful HERE.

4. This is not a scene from Orange is the New Black.

5. The day after the Dead & Company concert, we went to a Korean Spa with public nude bathhouses segregated by gender. The pools featured jets and waterfalls, hot and cold tubs and massage tables. After the spa, we were provided with uniformed shorts and shirts, which reminded me of old school gym uniforms, to wear before entering the communal unisex area, where there were snacks and a café, saunas, a heated salt room, a heated clay ball room, and ice room and more.

6. I had to google bubble tea, which they sold at the spa counter, and learned that it is a tea drink with chewy tapioca balls in it. As a hot black tea drinker, I wasn’t impressed.

7. That’s me in the heated Salt Room.

8. And Joe in the hot clay ball room.

9. The long and winding road / That leads to your door / Will never disappear / I’ve seen that road before / It always leads me here / Lead me to your door – Beatles

10. The dream of a woman with black hair and long fingernails / who lies when she says “only good things happen to good people” / The dream where I ask another woman for directions / I believe her when she says “there are no turns” / “It’s all the same long winding road”  – Listen to all of Dream Inventory read at the 2017 Little River Poetry Festival HERE. 

11. As someone with dyscalculia who had a hard time reading analog clocks as a girl, I loved this story from This American Life: “Carl Duzen got a graduate degree in physics. He studied motion, electromagnetism. He spent a lot of his life deep in the study of space and time of numbers. He taught physics and mathematics for years. Carl was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a year and a half ago at age 79. So, after decades of adulthood, it is suddenly appropriate for a 40-year-old doctor to ask him questions like, can you tell me who the president is? Or, can you “draw a clock?”  “So I got a piece of paper. No matter what I– I just– I couldn’t– I couldn’t do it.” Why is that so hard? It’s clocks. Why is that so hard?” Carl said. To be clear, it’s not necessarily how to draw a clock that is difficult but figuring out why he couldn’t draw a clock.

12. Carl sat with his tools and his paper and his physicist’s desire to decompose the problem before him. He draws a very precise circle, split it into twelfths, and scrawled the words “superposition of three types” in tiny letters in the corner of the page. He explains, with Susan’s help, there are three layers of information here. There’s the hours that are represented from 1 through 12, even though there are 24 hours in a day. But then, there’s the second layer, which is the minutes. And a 1 represents not a 1 anymore, but 5 minutes. And a 2 represents 10. But Carl adds, after that layer is the second hand, which is now measuring 1 through 60 seconds. By the end of all this, I can’t believe this is the system we have for telling time. It’s insane. It’s a miracle anyone can ever just glance at their wrist and capture information, something Carl works very hard at…” This American Life

13: NASA Administrator Bill Nelson described the image from James Webb Space Telescope, saying all the stars and galaxies it encompassed were located in an area of space the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone standing on Earth. “We’re looking back more than 13 billion years,” he said. “That light that you are seeing has been traveling for over 13 billion years, and by the way, we’re going back farther. This is just the first image. They’re going back about thirteen-and-a-half billion years. And since we know the universe is 13.8 billion years old, we’re going back almost to the beginning.” See HERE. 

___________Thirteen Thursday