“It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.”

“… it began to dawn on me that not only was I now old enough to have a baby, I was almost too old to have a baby… So all my time was spent measuring time. While I listened to strangers and tried to patiently have faith in the unknown, I was also wondering how long it would take, and if any of it really mattered compared to having a baby. Word on the street was that it did not. Nothing mattered compared to having a baby.”

“As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension… It’s not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse — but there was only one world and it really did have everything in it. Domingo’s blog was one of the best I had ever read, but I had to drive to him to get it, and he had to tell it to me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could be found only accidentally.”

“I suppose this was one of the reasons people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and then forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important — I had to believe in my own story.”

– Miranda July, It Chooses You

I just sat on my little futon in my little apartment and read this entire book, cover-to-cover. I can’t even remember the last time I did that. That last bit — and forgetting was just as important — made me cry.

Vanessa Gould: “I hope BETWEEN THE FOLDS might do a small part in helping to open up a more interdisciplinary dialogue about creativity in both art and science. It’s curious to me that we’re prone to drawing boundaries around our definitions of ‘science’ and ‘art,’ even though they investigate so many of the same basic things. Whether art, math, philosophy, religion, space science, poetry—the same intellectual questions are often at the root of it. So I hope a broader, interdisciplinary talk will grow. And I think the remarkable examples put forth by the artists and scientists in the film can really help in doing that.”

This documentary about modern origami masters of all stripes is fabulous, and it’s on Netflix Watch Instantly. I never got much farther than the crane stage in origami, though I did make many cranes, but my younger brother picked it up and has been making all sorts of more complex animals for years and even went to an origami convention here in NYC earlier this year. Origami is very cool.

The first season of Battlestar Galactica is also very cool, and available for streaming on Netflix. BSG is probably the best non-HBO television show I’ve ever seen. (edited: Oh wait, The West Wing wasn’t on HBO. But anyway, BSG is really good.)

Other things worth watching: The Social Network. I saw this the day it came out, at a matinee. It’s quite good, although Mitsu is (as usual) pissed at the lack of diversity portrayed at Harvard. A CS class with no East Asians in it! But I was totally thrilled to see someone blogging on LJ in a movie, and also to see a film about events I actually remember. The first time I encountered Facebook (The Facebook), I was visiting my high school friend Jessica at Columbia. She and all her friends were checking this site constantly, but I had never heard of it. That’s because Columbia was one of the first three schools to get access. I later got an account when it expanded to NYU.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Facebook’s supposed mission to make the world a better place by encouraging sharing and openness. I’m quite supportive of this, especially when it involves being open about things that were previously considered to be shameful by the general public or personally brought shame to the sharer. It’s not just Facebook, the Internet in general was been helping to break down these walls between people for ages, oddly at the same time that it sometimes encourages them to sit at home on their computers rather than actually going out with their friends. My friend Meggy has a wonderful blog about living well with bipolar disorder, for instance, which shows what everyone ought to know already, that having the stigma of being “mentally ill” is not at all incongruent with being brilliant, thoughtful and quite self-aware.

Yesterday my friend Cathy got married. It was lovely. I posted the first photos of them as man and wife on FB, and have to admit I checked my page for comments several times before I gave in to my other friend Isabelle’s influence, got extremely drunk at the open bar, and danced for hours. I also had some near wardrobe malfunctions involving my new black Alberta Ferretti dress (which you’ll get to hear more about in my upcoming stint as a guest fashion blogger! stay tuned!) but thankfully all the many photographers and videographers in attendance were able to document was my terrible drunken dancing, and my trampling the adorable flower girl to catch the bouquet. (Actually, she threw it right to me.)

I previously stated that there’s no such thing as being too hungover to go to Mass. That was before I’d ever had 3 cocktails, champagne, wine, and two pints of beer in the same evening. I almost fainted during the Our Father, but I did in fact make it to Mass the next morning, so maybe my point is moot. In the future I will not test the limits of my ability to withstand alcohol poisoning right after getting over 2 weeks of pneumonia.

I love weddings.

You can now read the transcript of the online chat I participated in with Jonathan Franzen last month. Again: the Rumpus Book Club is cool.

Speaking of epiphanies, I feel as if I’ve had one about my career. As usual with realizations like this, while feeling like a brand new insight, my new thoughts also seem totally obvious, as if I’ve been thinking along these same lines for months if not years already. But somehow it all just seems a little more clear now than it did before, giving the subjective impression of a really big shift in understanding (Eureka! I solved my life!), when really it’s just a tiny shift that happened to cross some sort of internal threshold. Anyway, the deal is, I want to study psycholinguistics.

How perfect/obvious this field is for me, let me count the ways. I am a hopeless grammar nerd. I was the “correct usage” champ on the literary team every year in middle school. I’ve always genuinely enjoyed doing things like diagramming sentences, proofreading, etc. When I started studying Latin in 2007, it was like stumbling into some strange realm where other people actually knew what a gerund (and, even better, a gerundive!) is too, and I immediately got really into it.

Then there’s the psychology side. I’ve been doing psychological research for donkey’s years, and been fairly successful at it, but often worried that it wasn’t really the right thing for me, partly because I was concerned it was taking time away from my other interests, namely in writing, and that I wasn’t sure the general population at vision science conferences really “got me” at all. They are, with some notable exceptions, a totally different kind of nerds, the kind that doesn’t necessarily ever read fiction or particularly care about writing well. I did a lot of work on reading (some of which is now being used to market phonics, which excites me), but it was all the context of vision/perception/object recognition. Somehow it never occurred to me that the scientists who study language primarily might be a lot more concerned with… language.

Then over the summer I discovered Lera Boroditsky‘s work on language and cognition, which bowled me over, and then I actually got to speak with her, which bowled me over even more. But I still thought it was mostly just that Lera in particular was very cool (she really is!), not that there was something particularly fitting about her topic/field. But then I got back to NYU, where there are many fine people working on language and language development and psycholinguistics, people I’ve already known and liked/admired for years: Athena Vouloumanos, Alec Marantz, David Poeppel, Brian McElree, etc. And I went to Chomsky’s talk, and I emailed him about it, and I started auditing a linguistics class for the first time ever, and something clicked. I had this feeling that, at long last, a huge conglomeration of seemingly-disparate interests I have had converged, and I had found an entire tribe of great people with similar concerns, all at once.

Relatedly, I was telling Mitsu about all this, and about my email to Chomsky, which was on the issue of thinking without words and whether language is primarily for thought or for externalization/communication. I didn’t think Chomsky really understood the point I was trying to make in my email, and Mitsu reminded me of a similar story he’d told me before about having a long conversation with “a cognitive scientist” about this issue at a Kira Institute event many years ago, and finally convincing her to modify her position re: whether we primarily think in words. This time I got him to remember who the cognitive scientist in question was, and it turns out it was, of all people, Elizabeth Spelke, whose work on language development I’ve admired for many years, and who was recently interviewed as part of the WNYC Radiolab program on “A World Without Words” that I tweeted a couple weeks ago.

It’s a small, vast world we live in, and so incredibly, richly connected.

For more on psycholinguistics/neurolinguistics/MEG/language and mind, etc, see Greg Hickok and David Poeppel’s blog, Talking Brains.