Current outline

It's a story about a granddaughter who's trying very hard to find her grandma's fav flower before grandma lands (she's trying harder than what's earthly possible, with math and climbing and fighting) (fav flower is a lotus) (prerecorded voice memo grandma is helping her find it) (daughter is compensating with gift and effort, grandma is escaping her agency by caring for other people) (different frustrations with overthinking and hesitating instead of doing)

science part: currently there is lotus as a plant, there is sam doing math, there is the effects of weather, there is some thinking about the dynamics of their relationship attached to their relationships to their communities. maybe I want to just focus it around social and lotus — like, maybe some mathematical model of flower petal order. that contains physics since it is first principles. that contains statistics since it’s life history and evolutionary. that contains social thinking as always.

  1. Prologue:
    1. Recipe that uses all parts of a lotus (no prologue) — roots, petals, stalk, centre beans.
    2. Grandma’s Visa application to come to Sam
  2. Introduction:
    1. Sam is in third-second supermarket. She’s looking for lotus flower. She can’t find it.
      1. it’s the last day stores open before New Year Eve, very crowded
      2. It upsets her because she really wanted to make this soup with grandma.
      3. It’s really hot. She’s tired, because this isn’t the first store.
      4. But most importantly, she’s upset because she hasn’t seen grandma in a while.
      5. also she has only seen lotus when she was very small, she forgot what it looks tastes smells like. she is just depending on grandma’s descriptions. grandma loves lotus very much. loves making food out of it, cultivating it, copying scriptures about it, drawing it. make silk out of it!
  3. Sam gets back on the bike, intending to go to the forest.
    1. No thorough emotional explanation is needed; let the reader see the story.
    2. She arrives at the forest entrance and starts walking on the chip grounds. It was a hilly new growth of bushes and young pines. She picked up a tulip as a backup.
      1. she’s upset because the hurricane was picking up. you can see lightnings over the lake. ominous and dangerous.
      2. She’s upset because if she doesn’t find it she doesn’t know how else to show grandma that she cares about her, so much that Sam has been escaping grandma’s affection and control for the past how many years. Yet when she considers getting back and finding an easier gift, her stubbornness makes her persist.
    3. She arrives at the lake and starts circling it. She sees some lilies at the centre. She takes off clothes and swims to the centre. She picked up a lily as a backup.
    4. She gets back to the forest exit to the road drenched.
  4. Cut to grandma and what she’s doing at the moment OR Sam plays voice recording of grandma.
    1. grandma is just landing at the new land. she is going through the VISA. she has to answer a bunch of questions about why she is here. she is looking every so often at some keepsakes of old pictures of baby sam and her. she is scared and excited to see how sam and her would be now — through the description of her imagination of how sam’s home and sam’s secretive work are like. home: much smaller version of their old rooted home back home. work: image of sam doing much more brain and sitting and hard thinking instead of her old job as farming and teaching in the developing hometown. more phones, more cities, more people.
    2. grandma takes the bus to sam’s home because she is strong and insists sam doesn’t waste time. grandma hates waste (see using all parts of the lotus)
  5. Sam gets back on the bike, intending to go to the library.
    1. this is the fun part: she takes the drawings by grandma. finds the formula for making the separate parts from other plants. draws a blueprint out of rotational symmetry and the dynamics it should make with the weight. designs some mechanism for how it could float. designs how the roots can grow out into the ideal shape from just some simple instructions by making an ant-maze like container mold. 3D prints some imaginary parts with food material or plant fiber. grafts them with hot glue or spincoating in the lab. sped up the system to take 3 years into 2 hours because time was running out. (Sam is always so impatient because she is optimistic of more effective ways that can also reduce amount of problems from happening (see some problem statement in the book she reads, engineering mindset)
    2. last minute, she jumps with her Frankenstein flower and bikes home super fast. rain absorbed into the flower and made it bulge. she fell down into a construction pothole and made the flower uglier. nonetheless she protected it enough to get home.
  6. Grandma arrives.
    1. sam arrives home slightly after grandma is already at the door.
    2. they get inside. grandma settles luggage.
    3. she sneaked some lotus from her porch to this planet!
    4. they get to cook the soup together.
    5. OR actually the lotus is just some kind of tulip, its hallucinatory so people see all the images of lotus when lotus is nonexistent anywhere in this world.
      1. and that makes the story be about finally being on the same page by seeing the mechanism behind how something work that you didn’t know as a child.
    6. and this is the story of how lotus because an invasive species to the meteor Oumuamua.

Previous Draft

Fluid dynamics is a simpler story than chaotic systems: Remember, nothing is ever new, no emotion or language or power. We just forget. Now I need to remember. I want to remember how to share breath — how far can you be from someone, spatially and temporally, to still feel connected? Can we walk 5 ft apart and be silent and still feel good with each other? Can we be walking 100m apart; in two cities; separated by two decades by the time the second one walks?

Water is not lonely: Imagine each person has water inside them, caged by their body. If it gets released, all the water will join each other. They would diffuse and we will finally be completely together. What’s the problem with that? (That is collectivism?) Because these debates and arguments and acts of leaving an individual mark, they are not important, they are proxies. the important thing is the pure emotion. people say they want to feel happy. they mean they want to feel good. meaning feels good. finding someone next to you feels good. getting protected and loved feels good. clarity feels good. connection to everyone. connection to no one. why don’t we just talk about emotions? because they come from things? they don’t because we need things to interact with it? like things are argon, root emotions are neutrino, and then electrons and muons are the aftermath emotions.

Water is life: I have a friend who needs to understand how life transmits information through adaptation. He might need to learn some information theory tools. I learned some information theory in statistical mechanics class, I want to pass it forward to him. I can turn these stories into little examples to show how those methods work. Statistical mechanics wiki

Hard water: I watched a documentary and didn’t expect others to not like it as much as I did. Neri OXMAN: Nature X Humanity [creator opinion]. I wanted to make technologies like hers. How do I separate the surface fascination with eye candies and holistic ideals from the pragmatic analysis for the tractable problem and the realistic iterative approach? A cried because this is such a grand vision and he is doing such small things when he wants to think about design like this. It is similar to my tension of liking the vision but having to deal with my own beginner-ness and the world’s current incompatibility. How might we let us see the feasibility of a desirable but not yet real world? we started discussing around a concrete case of his.

Realer story, a life philosophy: I need to make this story more real AND more simple. I must get to the grounding, there is a ground for every kind of work, I need to get there time is running out.