(See chapter 1 here)

This chapter is about the 4 hours Samishi spent in the wet lab trying to get lotus for grandma to go home, and she had to steal it from an old couple resident.

Introduction. Samishi wants to bond with grandma, which requires her to get lotus root. The obstacle is the cultivators guarding the root because they don’t think it’s mature yet.

• The recipe runs as cryptic as a truism or prophecy to her—but it's useless to blame anyone now and she can't phone grandma. This is supposed to be a surprise. Over the past two weeks she has extracted all the information she could with the help of online dictionaries—of her forgotten mother tongue—and botanical wikis that are unfortunately Mars-focused. From her pile of paper scraps and notes she takes only one:
  • “Color is sky / empty”
  • “No color, sound-odor triggered”
  • “Can erase all bitterness”
  • If a question is open and relevant enough, you’d naturally think about it all the time even when you are in other places. I can’t stop thinking about you (through the story) and I feel always moving. Yet writing is supposed to be hard. I feel loving when I can fully pour my emotions and focus into a moment. The lack of distance between us, and from me to this story, that blocked me from writing a good story. Good story requires some cold distance, removal.
    • PS, I am encountering a problem in my short story. I realise it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell your stories in simple words. I start to use more abstract streams of consciousness instead of actions and expressions. Maybe it’s because I know more and more about you so it’s hard to leave out any details and turn you into a character? As if you are becoming part of me, or I consider you as me. I think I also have a bad habit where the more I consider someone close or part of me, I also do onto them what I do onto myself. I’ve noticed myself do that to Ellie and my mom and I had to resolve those communication problems by unlearning some ill advices. I needed to stop imagining talking to them in my head and instead talk to them in real life like a test of truth too. (You mentioned this in your first note blog. I get it too now!!) That includes shutting down ideas with negative judgment about inabilities or character flaws without checking the validity of any of these criticisms. As people say, negative comments say more about the speaker than the receiver. I am afraid to hurt you like I hurt myself, so I am more determined now to fix this problem by slowing and checking my evaluations of ideas — no plan can be perfect, so what is a good enough idea to then execute and check results? when I jump to a conclusion, what is my sources of information and are they reliable or constructive? If I don’t like a solution, do I have an alternative that can replace it for better results? Also, when I want to help someone do they want to be helped in the way I want to? And if I cannot project my principle onto everyone (I can’t even do that to all of myself) then how do I live with my inconsistencies? (How do you?)
  • From afar you might be confused why he is always changing and on the move: his field, his home, his communities. But there is something constant beneath it all. There is some generality that ties all the disparate events together. It is a hopeful energy, it’s vitality. He seems to be able to hold onto a belief for a dream, imaginary world despite things that might cause doubt or hardship. This is actually an adaptive strategy that is suitable for early succession habitats, where there is not much information about the environment so the beings must spread and vary a lot to figure out what would work. If he were to stay in one dream longer that imagination would carry him to dig deep into himself and bring all that he found in that darkness to the world, so that he may let his discoveries sink in the opposite direction, from outside to inside for others. Like an older secondary forest tree that starts a whole canopy as a home for many different creatures (right?).
  • he is really talented in emotional communication. You can see that even in his scientific explorations. The way he speaks about beech you can hear reverence and love. The way he tries out a new thing like boating or genetic algorithms, you can see he knows it’s a community effort, it’s not all just self-reliance or stubbornness. You can see that he has a large capacity to love everything and nothing, everyone and no one, and that he has the courage to face parts of himself that might be hard to acknowledge. all these things are musts in the grilling experience of searching in lots of uncertainty and digging in lots of difficulty that is research or just any craft. If he commits time and dives with full breath then it would become more obvious. He also has a lot of good friends and family and teachers and strangers who care for him, he seems to have all the sunlight and nutrients and motility conditions to grow.
  • Human-designed infrastructure and networks relying on centralized or hierarchical control are susceptible to single-point catastrophic failure when disrupted. By contrast, most complex biological systems employ distributed control and can be more robust to perturbations.
  • To understand how simple rules encoded at the individual level can lead to the emergence of robust group-level (distributed) control, we examined structures we call “scaffolds”, self-assembled by lotus leaf tissues that aid to repel water for maintenance and nutrient transportation. see microscope exploration journal
  • Informed by our observations, we present a theoretical model based on proportional control and negative feedback, which may be relevant to many distributed systems in which group-level properties can be modified through individual error sensing and correction. The mechanism is simple, and each structure unit only require information about their individual state.
• Then she opens George bra on her laptop and clicks “start recording.” A light starts flashing in the wet lab. Holding the paper and a few radishes she follows the light in.
  • the way she walks in is secretive

Methods. Samishi persuades but the old couple says nature doesn’t accelerate and refuses to give it to her. Desperate, she tries to steal.

• She enters the room. It’s about 10 meters by 20 meters big and two person tall, like a regular chemical lab. There are 4 rows of lab tables dividing the room. Closets with bottles and chambers with vacuums line the walls. One of the big chambers is filled with water. There is an out of place thing dangling by the water chamber — it’s a scrub with some scales and a bit of plant tissue on it. Biological, not inorganic chemical. if you look more closely there is a rolled up blanket and a bar of soap, also a small oil lamp and a stack of paper with hand written poems. maybe also a flute. and definitely some orchids or onions. I think they moved here to live for longer and longer. Maybe there are others who have similar conditions who are living there.
  • what is their living situation, how is it possible for so many people in a small room?
  • When she stepped inside the wet lab, the air pressure decreased, the distance between atoms seem to have came closer, not just because of some vision change. She suddenly can see the multiplicity in every thing.
  • To the left, there is a slime mold in a glass container. The mold is moving a tentacle like extrusion 1 cm per hour as far as she can tell. The mold is made of many smaller blobs that are wiggling inside the repellent surface.
  • To the right, there is a school of nimble blind fish in a lighted tank. There are cuts on the sides of each fish where bubbles emit and bounce off. The school is circling around for the moment before dispersing into several bunches that are each moving in a different directly in files.
• That’s the old couples quarters. It’s a garden. Who are they? They are an old couple who live by a river full of water lillies. One day the old woman found scales on her arm. At first the old man helped her scrub the scales to stop them but they kept appearing overnight. Over the year she started to get trouble breathing air, forgetting words, frequent need for wetting skin, and craving for kelp. The old man got her a big tub, fetched her logs to warm the water and kelps to satiate her craving. One day the old man let the fish woman into the river. the river is just the lab tank since they have moved from their old earth to the new mars. it’s a fantastical place because all the ecosystems are different and the way you make living is also new because everything is more hostile and uncertain, with no experience from previous people and often very few sheltering from sudden bad occurences.
  • Design: The sustainable community that influenced how I view and do things now is my grandmas coming from a frugal environment thus really salvaging thrown away flowers and cultivating food gardens and ensuring abundant fruits for grandchildren. I have a phantom “need to have enough” and “can’t have more than enough” plus a strong loss aversion for friends circle because of them. They also walk profusely. These things they took to the city. So it makes a lot of sense to me to live in this way. If my environment makes it harder for me to find these comfortable refuge I tend to feel lacking. When I have enough the excess happiness then goes to others who don’t have access when they want it and they ask me for help. That is the firstly personal emotional then small actions kind of backing I give when I experience things that try to separate what I see in imagination vs what I experience in reality. Given these motivations I want to be refining my interest in social systemic grounding or Side B of doing things that I need or enjoy. For example I like crafts so I do simulation design, I think vertically about who has been blocked from doing this for example people who need a tailored better combination of opportunities that they need to know, for housing or jobs or friends or solutions. Then get feedback and implicitly practice the process of iterative design to really make progress towards some wish from the people who need to solve it, most ideally yourself and those in the same boat so there is no distance between who needs it and who addresses it’s goals.
• Samishi sneaks into the chamber. She wants to get lotus for her grandma coming. Grandma is not dead by the way. But the couple said the lotus is not ready yet they can’t give her support her.
  1. I want these roots
     1. You said “lotus can be made into silk” and that was so surprising to me. Every part can be used?! I was so surprised I wrote it on the bathroom wall in a seminary basement. Now other people will learn about this too. Thanks.
  2. they aren’t ready yet
     1. Her struggles were real. “Once people had kids, they wanted quieter lives, which makes sense. But then the two guys seemed committed to their vision of what the community should be and not the vision of what it would be as connected to these people. THe vision was constant for them, and the people were transitory. For the others, the people were constant and the vision was transitory. Not sure how to resolve this debate” and even similar anticipations “Lots of illegal stuff they do that Jon wants to help balance -> make themselves a private club and take names at the door. This way they don't need to do a damn thing to get a license to sell stuff. Right now - they could be busted at any of their parties for selling without a license.”
  3. can you speed them up
     1. Research: I am interested in improving the physical modeling cycle (from evaluation with experiments to refining a motivated hypothesis) because we still know so little about what it takes to do good contextual science but now there is an increasing amount of sparse observation over complex natural systems (opportunity) that can be used well through a combination of symbolic regression and first principle simulation (technique). The simple to realistic direction requires better analytical methods that each practical researcher can then use for communication and experiment cost saving. It can be as follows: start by making a simulation model that includes internal cognitive dissonance and external evaluation of correctness, and then interpret the outcomes we observe and finally compare with observation of the two treatments. This kind of heavy methods research is done by people like Ed Munro, Risi Kondor, Eric Jonas, Mary Silber, Sabetta Matsumoto, Orit Peleg, Andrew Berdahl. long range order in a network: edge forming rule: we use Delauney. radius and window are physics informed. KNN and Delauney are geometry informed. we use Delauney because it works best. the reason we think it is it allows both short-range (which physics-informed also allows) and long-range interaction. this reminds me of the interaction network edge forming rules in my own project, with the brownian particle model. There, we also shifted toward geometry- instead of physics- informed type because long-range interaction is important for the behavior we look at. And to think about it, Cartesian Metric view is not so physics-informed, it is just the convention of how things in the classical mechanics scales and fields work.
     2. When she stepped inside the wet lab, she also immediately became angry, frowning almost out of habit. Every time she is here she had to confront the stark gap between what she needs and what she’s done thus far. She needs to figure out her relationship to her partners who she dreamed about losing which might be a premonition. So she is trying to dub her experiments in the lab which were originally meant for biomaterial company research and convert them into personal goal of understanding personal relationships as a metaphor. Basically the individual units are analogous to individual people and she is testing her current configurations of relationships on them to see what would happen, then doing different treatments of what her decisions for next steps would be to see which consequence she likes the most. Each model species (fish, mold, and there is also active colloids) is of course not very accurate description of humans and their relationships so she is running all of them to take the parts relevant from each model system. In the current stage she is facing some problems because how do you measure the accuracy of a metaphor in these thought experiments? She is trying several possible metrics of description accuracy: interaction nature, cognition level, personality closeness.
  4. we can’t speed it up
     1. Tiny Capstone. Why do I seem to have a pattern of moving around fast with little time and trace? One likely reason is that I have a large appetite for fantasy to caste away boredom and move around when I was a kid in my home and school. It was more active than reading or watching movies and easier to construct than entire projects or sports for me.
  5. you can’t speed up time (nature).
     1. “Monitoring and measuring” Feedback and the right direction. Scheffler writes good code, how do I improve mines? How do I express my confusion or defuse my confusion in social settings? Can I NOT try to get broad comprehensive worldview answer from every essay comment session? (It’s counterproductive. With a limited amount of time and the presence of expertise, it’s better to request specific part feedback. For more constructive scale to improve. And assume no judgment on the high level part in those occasions.)
  6. Foraging: They are starving. They need to find or grow things they can eat. Provide for themselves.
     1. Story. The art teacher and research teacher both say (though I don’t trust their words for my self entirely) that my story is having too many directions and not developing any fully. So I should choose and develop one fully. I Should!!!! I nEED TO! It’s not that hard. It just takes committing to fixing this issue and it takes time. Committing can be easy if I reflect on what locality or community or period I already am part of or lived familiar with. → material science, Hawaii, woman, drawing.
• Out of desperation Samishi came back to steal the lotus that is not yet mature.
  1. but I need it for my grandma
     1. Because material is important and time is precious.
     2. After 4 years of saving money and waiting for pandemics and wars to be over, I finally bought a ticket for grandma to visit me in my new home on Big Island. She is only here for 7 hours today, and then she has to go to a quarantine facility in the middle of the island to ensure that she has the documents and tests to stay here for 6 more months, with me, to take care of my newborn together. She always asks about insignificant details in this plan whenever we have our roughly monthly calls (usually I call her rather than she call me, because she is always free and wanting to call me). “Thu; I’m free late afternoon. Fri-sat: I’ll be out In the forest, sorry!”
     3. Grandma said, people are like the land they grew on, no matter they want to or not, no matter they know it or not. I think our difference comes from us growing on different land.
     4. she took me to her land. I really enjoyed Chicago; it was like the first time I went to Berlin. I liked it bc I felt like I could reclaim my natural personality when we were there (like being playful and having fun).
     5. Student: “On the window with a whiteboard marker I’ve sketched my plans. This year I plan to live three lives. From 5am to 1pm I am coding full time for a startup that makes photo apps. From 1pm to 6pm I either go to Marxist climate protests or queer boxing gyms. I have 1 hour of free time for meal prep and eating. Then 7pm to 1am I am funny silent lover, emotional support friend, godson, magical stranger.”
     6. Budget for failing = money and confidence and support. Soon I will find out the wish is a lie, as in I don’t actually want it because what it can give is not what I thought it gives and is not what I need to receive. But the Possible outcome (wish = lie) would not invalidate the current moment when I don’t yet know if it is a lie or not (wish = lie or satiety).
     7. When I reflect now in July, I think I wanted to clarify and solve some problems accumulating in me that haven’t been cleared by quantitative studies, abundant friendship and self-help novels. The problems show symptoms in having had time falling asleep, being constantly anxious and distrustful about how I eat, body feeling stiff if I try to learn to dance for the first time, feeling missing something even though what I thought I needed I got, feeling like my efforts to address my problems keep on not working, feeling hypocritical about what I want to do capstone on. keep thinking about Seoul or Vermont and not figuring out why, spending so much time thinking talking into these topics but not cutting through to the root yet. Feeling like not knowing who I am and what I value is causing me to split in many cases.
     8. Friends’ startup. I am thinking about how I might get left behind or lose things if I just stick to the safety and comfort and boredom of having the availability and possession of simple happiness such as hugging or reading. I am thinking about what if and how might I try harder to plan people into my futures, push towards a more aligned and more impactful presence if I do know I am influenced by community around me.
     9. Design/information theory teaching. I don’t like living in Krakatoa language because it is not poking at the testable points it is veiling confusion with very very broad covering but nothing at all words. I project my judgment of preferring specificity onto both them and myself. Perhaps harsher to myself. Perhaps more actionable to others. I am thinking about how we use super cool words in the design tutorial only to escape from the repetition of just do no say of jobs and after work life.
  2. what should I do, should I steal them
     1. Sharing articles. I have also been avoiding to think about what actions I CAN take to address the confusing and agitated emotion I have towards seeing other people (related to me in a solidarity way) suffer or encounter unnecessary / doesn’t have to be this way / fixable problems. Once I voiced that question (I don’t know how to face the boiling afar) I had to face it. I sometimes don’t even face the boiling right affecting me. Things affect me more than I know, through directly affecting but unconscious, through in directing affecting by touching people who affect me, so on. I tried this summer with the church chinese I can pivot and pick up that intense period into the next chapter.
     2. I didn’t know we can understand each other. What holds me back is: “Why would people aim toward life-long relationship, when there is likely so many hurt, jealousy, betrayal, deception that will arise?” I ask that to my dad, partly because his relationships seem filled with these bad vibes. I thought we would have such different views on relationship, that he would not understand me and me, him. I recall the hurtful ways he treats waiters, his coldness toward grandma, his cheating, his transactional relationship with my step mom, the cliche of the country boy turned rich man with a harem. But to me he is this really good at listening mentor figure. Back to my question —— His response is surprisingly thoughtful and liberal: assume the world is and always will be populated with problems. On that basis, pursuing your desires should no longer depend on normative ideals about a problem-less world or the potential of problems arising (the answer is they will no matter what).
  3. she decides and goes stealing at night
     1. Kid: ”I am a thief who stole everything outside of me that now I am stealing from myself — today the mission is to get an alfajores, the kind from Santa Fe province, OG from back in the 1950s.”
     2. About being an actor rushed onto stage: 1. I felt never ready. I felt that during the trip too. I see Andre by home and I wanted to go over to get my notebook. But I didn’t feel calm to hold my laughter if I were to go closer to him and see him talking to himself or just reacting to my existence. I was laughing because maybe I forgot how to react to people anymore. That was how Leo was too. So I kept on walking one step then laughing and running back secretively. I finally went back after he and Leo came over to my tree. I was able to walk fast and straight then. I had to still hold off laughing like I was doing a secret prank. But I was the only conspirator. I didn’t feel ready to talk to them when we reconvened. I wondered what if I speak and then I only speak in monologue. I had to use some will to believe that I can speak useful things to them. Like a joke or a guiding question.
     3. I run away because I have a recurring nightmare. To add another person’s world onto, into my world. To add another person onto, into me —- It feels impossible, I have a strong repulsion. I am not used to it.  Because since I was born, I have never brought a friend home. I am scared of my personal life being disturbed. When I feel even a slight imperfection in the vibe, I am anxious. To fix it, I ask the partner to teach me about something. That is a compliment. Any problem in a conversation is always my fault. To intersect worldviews, I have to not imagine how they are in my head but actually see the real them.
     4. The difference would break us, make it impossible for us to be good for each other. • Even though they want to be close to each other, they each have to be alone. What they want and become anxious without; They survive with their solitude times, their steady and particular work loops, their way of seeing themselves, amid noise. They see the ease around artificial obstacles, and train with hard work and accumulate to mastery. Those views are not fixed neither, they adapt in a special way to their frequent new experiences. Which is why they often seem to have endless time and energy, and come to excellent creations through methodic and directed work.
     5. but really is not confident I can answer my big question. “I still feel like I am sinfully flawed sometimes, like I have to hide my ugliness to not gross out other people. I thought people tend to get away from sick or bad people because they are dangerous or unsettling, and I didn’t want to disturb people.”
  4. but she couldn’t find it
     1. Research pursuing. I am thinking about how my grad application is also ultimately a vain liking and not gonna satisfy my need for meaning. Just to not feel groundless after this college description posits us. Blue hair boy said this too, he was in a crevasse where he was neither a student or a worker. I don’t want to be there it will be really lonely I haven’t had the guts to look into that hole yet.
     2. none of the systems meet her baseline. She is gonna ditch this experiment. The anger is also part of the reason. She is gonna ask her colleague for advice about what else to try. Last time her colleague already suggested (seeing her frustration of repeatedly facing this problem and her experiment clearly not solving her original goal) that she talk to them directly instead of trying to windedly gain knowledge about “nature” of interactions in a generalizeable and productive and academic facade. It’s hard to accept but she believes in right problem more than academic rigidity so she might take the advice this time.
  5. they saw her
     1. The pine pod that has a solid core stretched into a wing with skeletal feathers that are half transparent. The stretch mark of the farther away tree that melt into more distinct boundaries like you blowing away the sand. A ball of dirt in between two geometric patches on that tree that when I poke it become exploding like an egg. The initial disgust then realization that all the disgust was just in reaction of dirt which is not dangerous. The new leafs that are so juicy for lack of words but are just flat with bulging surfaces and absorbant. The straight vertical flower flowering so wildly it bends out downwards that guided me home to the notebook whenever I forgot that was my destination or whenever I got scared and started laughing at the sight of the guardian monster or friend. I wanted to have 'many people' thoughts or 'important linear' thoughts and when I became at the other place I was a prophet who said 'ok fine, let me tell you.' I had many branches but I was so focused they were all on one linear path and I always aimed toward the destination. I didn't feel the need to remember or share beyond myself at that moment, not even me in the future, but nonetheless I started writing as a part of the process not for the keepsake, out of intrigue not urgency. I wrote like the notebook's owner (), I wrote with shorthands to capture what I meant or where I need to return to, I laid things on the table and recombined them or brewed.
  6. she ran out wet

Results. Her stealing failed because she didn’t know how to walk and swim in the lotus pond.

• Samishi looks for the lotus. She hasn’t seen them before. She is swimming and grabbing examining stuff.
  • Also about fractal pervasiveness. Lungs are interesting — the volume is finite but the area is almost infinite. That is unintuitive but it says something about how the structure of a tree (a kind of small world network) means everyone is interdependent even if you are connected by a very very long path. You must be able to find a way. Lily’s sociology teacher said, how to recognize that we are already all interdependent? for example, we find ourselves through what is meaningful to us. for example, the commodity chain of sugar connects you with so many other people. it’s like a blood vessel. — this recognition of the reality is almost like fiction. knowing it might make people realize that socializing is as easy and innate to humans as learning to breathe. the problem is forgetting to breathe not learning it.
  • feeling like something has a systemic root, some problem cannot be attributed to a particular individual or component, that makes the problem harder. many problems are hard. other people can hardly listen and understand. what you really mean, that is so contextualized in your world. there is no one who, one villain. everyone is so different, no poem is about anyone else but the poet. still, there is ways to understand. thinking and willing to think about societal questions is not hopeless.
• Optionally/alternatively: She learned to swim bc She pushed bubbles into the pool making it swimmable to her. The danger of not knowing how to swim is bc she is a time giant whose one day is human one century, but she is human sized. and the continents are drifting apart so if she doesn’t learn to swim she will be separated from her relatives without whom she cannot survive that well. But that was fake news too, the continents did not drift and she could survive without them.
• Time was up and she was scared she might get found out and break the trust. She climbed out of the water empty handed.

Discussion. Getting lotus root takes more than just getting permission from people, it takes knowledge and time. Even when she can’t get the material she can still bond with grandma in other ways.

• 4 hours later, the door slams open and she dashes out of the steam-filled lab, drenched, hair full of sand, gasping as if she held her breath underwater for too long.
  • Being unjudgmental which is so rare: I am surprised by the lack of value judgment I had during the trip. I didn't think of things as problems or undeserving gifts. I felt surprise so often. The just right surprise that I was never ready for but always turned out so well. A frame: I open my eyes, there are flowers falling onto my eyeball, I feel pain (even before they fell), the leaves above me multiplied, a big raven with rectangular wings cut across the stage at a decimal angle. It was not a simple composition. I would have taken and chosen a picture with a more whole number ratio. But this is the one I focused on. I was focused. I imagine Sam felt so when he finished his second sax solo, because he sat down and smiled.
  • That was why I needed to leave her. Emotionally, I need to separate this emotional reaction from the way I think about you. Maybe articulate my values more, see if there is a special case. "Simplicity. Recursion, algorithm.... Once you get it, it is so simple. You solve one subproblem, and you recycle the solution and they solve themselves. Unlike human problem, such as your youtube. People are so complex, so difficult to satisfy."
• Shaking like a cut-off gecko tail, she splatters sand-water droplets on computer desks and textbook shelves just cleaned today. Resting no more than a few seconds, she checks on the George bra live generated results with auto-interpreted capstones.
  • Seeing human social interaction in a kinder and stranger light: I think I like the never ready but already there feeling. One strange instance is talking over each other and not listening. It was fun at the time because we were having fun sharing and singing. I realized I wanted to listen and be serious about the conversation though. The same thing happened on my last bar night with Chinese Berliner friends. We were almost debating but it was just funny from the cacophony. It was similar to SIddhartha and his friend putting their nose into Shreya and Ellie’s hitchhiking being all assertive and funny like worried but entertaining neighbors or family members. The other moments needed for listening though. The ones where I wish I shared or listened by asking and trusting what they meant.
  • Now I am ready to come back to her. I made up my mind that I want us to live together, I am ready. Because so many other people have felt this way before. Even if I don’t want to process this, this is hard, this is a universal experience, I will go through it. Yet, I experience the complex beauty whenever I spend time w you. The path of least resistance is not necessary the path that you see the most flower garden. I would love to take the same bus with you, even though you are also as gigantic as a hippo for me. Not sure if we can fit in the same bus. I forgot how to cry for the ten years I lived abroad away from her. I want to cry that hard, starting with the sudden sour. Please help me cry grandma. I’m so lonely. We don’t have to be cooking, we can dance.