For the past few weeks I have been on winter break, spending time in New York with my boyfriend, his family and my mom. Since this was mom’s first time in New York, we spent a large amount of time being tourists, visiting all of my favorite museums and eating as many different foods as we could. I worked little, slept enough and really saw some great things. This week marks the beginning of the spring semester at my university so I am back at work, back in my usual routine and back to writing this newsletter weekly. I hope you have all had some great holidays and that 2018 will bring some cheery updates for us all. Thanks for continuing to read!
The breakdown is as follows: a short personal essay on top of the message and some more concrete life updates and current media favorites at its bottom so feel free to skip to whatever interests you. (I ate a lot during the break and I cooked a fair amount but I wrote down nothing so I'm skipping the recipe this week - sorry!)
GHOST FIELDS*
I blame my mom for everything.
I blame her for my hairy legs, for my conviction that my thighs shouldn’t jiggle, for my gut reaction to judge sorority girls in classes I teach, for my urge to ‘mom’ my boyfriend, down to the stupidest, smallest things.
My mom, on the other hand, has a reinvention narrative: there is a version of herself she has built up long after I had left home and presumably soaked up all of these bad influences. The New Mom doesn’t wear greys or browns. The New Mom is not scared of trying things. The New Mom travels and goes to wherever interests her by herself and she hangs out with people that could be her children. The New Mom does not owe anything to anyone. The past two weeks have been an exercise in spending time with New Mom, the reinvented one, and the one that I maybe should not be so hasty to assign blame to.
January is a reinvention kind of month, from spiking gym memberships and salad recipe inundation to social media posts in which stranger performatively promise to be kinder to themselves. The argument goes two ways: either needing a fixed date to change means that one is not actually determined enough to do it or the specificity and concreteness of having that date guarantees success. Either way, most people fail – there is even such a thing as official Ditch New Year’s Resolution Day on January 17th. Seventeen days is really not much of an achievement regardless of the line of argumentation you chose in favor of re-starting and re-inventing once January hits.
There are many tips for sticking to a re-invention plan: setting realistic goals, starting small, saying it all out loud, finding people that will hold you accountable. However, the biggest part of every such resolution, of every substantial change, is inevitably failing and dealing with the aftermath. Our personalities tend to be fuzzy yet inert and our habits hard-set, riding on muscle memory and a false notion of how absolute needs can be. There is just so much room for giving in, and the post-hoc justifications are just so good. Changing who you are is then a lot like studying for a math exam – if you get five problems wrong by the time you attempt the sixth you likely have a good notion of all of the tricks you might have to employ or dodge. As long as each failure comes with a lesson and each faltering is followed by an updated course correction, the net effect is worth the time.
As failing is unavoidable in each re-invention process, it is unreasonable to expect for someone to turn into a completely new person right away, even if they really want to. People change gradually even when they don’t want to and glimpses of their old selves perpetually peek through any veneer of the new. Annihilating a past self requires time and thoroughness. As an observer one then has to hedge their bets, put their money on the new even though the old – the familiar – will likely be around, in traces or taking over at times, for a while. Giving people another chance is exactly that bet. Truly caring for people is going all in on it.
I should not blame my mom for everything.
Re-invented or not, she is almost by default not the same person that she was when I was younger and clearly neither am I. A large part of my own re-invention has been questioning and un-learning. I have actively tried to be someone other than the product of my parents’ actions and the environment they have exposed me to. It is unfair to blame either for the bits that are still stuck to me. And it is unfair to ignore their own efforts to do the same. It is a common trope that one’s parents are their biggest cheerleaders no matter what, and maybe in certain circumstances the reverse needs to be true as well. The hairy legs are hard to get over but I think I should put my bets on New Mom this year, even if at times the she seems eerily familiar.
* In quantum field theory, ghost fields or Fadeev-Popov ghosts are fields with no physical interpretation introduced into the path integral formulation of gauge quantum field theories in order to ensure its internal consistency. A field theory refers to a formulation of the physics of a system where all objects are extended in the sense of being defined everywhere in space – like the electromagnetic field that is probably all around you (recall that light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum) – as opposed to particles or other localized, finitely sized, bodies that can be reduced to point-like behavior. A gauge degree of freedom in such a theory is in a sense a redundancy due to a symmetry. As a somewhat crude analogy imagine a perfectly uniform (it looks the same no matter how you rotate it i.e. it has a rotation symmetry of sorts) sphere; if someone describes to you in detail what one side of the sphere looks like then you know what all of the other sides look like as well. If someone were then to describe to you more than one side, some of that information would be redundant. A gauge theory contains such redundant information and that redundant information cannot affect physical outcomes predicted by the theory. The introduction of ‘ghost fields’ guarantees this within the mathematical formalism – they are meaningful in the sense of keeping the theory internally consistent and producing credible predictions but in themselves they are unphysical.
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ABOUT THIS BREAK
LEARNING: It is one of the universal truths about graduate school that anyone who takes their research home for the holidays is inevitably doomed to fail when it comes to actually working on it. I am not much of an exception and have not managed to squeeze in more than a few nights of reading into the past few weeks but one of my papers did get published while I was in New York and on the morning of my birthday I got very close to submitting another. Starting off a birthday celebration with a video call to my advisor after staying up late to put finishing touches on a manuscript wasn’t exactly the plan, but hopefully it is a good omen for all the science I will try to do before the next one. As for my reading list, I let my self at least somewhat spiral into reading about rotating superfluids in neutron stars and quantum vortices, in the hope that at least one of my projects in the spring will touch on either (or maybe even both). In addition to new projects, I also recently found out that I will be presenting some of my work at a conference in Los Angeles in March which definitely makes the upcoming spring semester look that much better.
WATCHING: As during any break, my boyfriend and I soaked up a fair amount of TV in the past few weeks including re-watching FX’s Legion, spending some late night time with Netflix’s documentary hybrid Wormwood, being pleasantly surprised with I, Tonya and getting really caught in the many twists and turns of Fortitude. (And inevitably letting our eyes drift over way too many episodes of Law and Order, which is somehow always magically playing on at least one channel whenever I visit New York, but shows that glorify ethically dubious police procedures might be too much to tackle in a single paragraph.)
I’ve written about how much I liked Legion before and I was happy that it held up on a second viewing. Not watching it in a grading frenzy definitely made me appreciate the zany, groovy, trippy, faux-60s aesthetics even more but also allowed me to see that the storyline is somewhat thin at times, especially when it comes to trying to give supporting characters their own, often clumsy, five minutes under the spotlight. We spent some time discussing whether the show can stay interesting and avoid the trappings of a typical Marvel show in its next season and I really hope that it can. Maybe being a network television effort will continue to be a good stop on its way to become yet another gloomy Netflix take on pre-existing comic book IP. (But also please let’s have a better treatment of Syd and Kerry)
I have mixed feelings about Wormwood. Despite my initial doubts, the half-dramatized-half-documentary format, mixed with television footage from the era being discussed, works really well and Errol Morris’ direction makes the show rather pleasing visually. I would watch this show again just for the scenes where an old-timey TV set resting against old-timey wallpaper is playing old news. My main complaint when it comes to the content – the suspicious death of a CIA affiliated scientists who had been dosed with LSD prior to seemingly committing suicide and his son, Eric, undertaking a lifelong crusade to find out the truth about it – is that it takes very long for Morris to turn the camera towards the narrator and examine him as a part of the story instead of letting him set the tone. I do not doubt that there is a real conspiracy hiding behind this story and that there is much that is true regarding Eric’s telling of the events and his conjectures. At the same time, a man who has seemingly given up an interesting and successful career, distanced himself from people and focused on a single piece of a story the government is likely not willing to ever fully tell is not only not the most trustworthy guide through that same story but also just a very interesting subject in himself. I wish Wormwood hadn’t taken that so matter-of-fact-ly. (But if you don’t know about the CIA and LSD definitely do give this a shot.)
We watched I, Tonya somewhat randomly (my boyfriend’s mother got a screener copy due to her past acting credentials), as some sort of a cobbled family movie night (me, my mom, my boyfriend and his parents) and I had only a vague idea of what it might be about when it started playing. However, after the first few shots of Allison Janney (almost unrecognizable), Margot Robbie (excelling as the protagonist) and Sebastian Stan (definitely unrecognizable) I was mostly sold and the movie ended up being one of the better ones I had seen recently. It is a serious take on a ridiculous story but also a presentation of a serious story that plays up the ridiculousness. It was as funny as it was insightful and at times poignant. Though it did dwell on the somewhat cliché ‘media just needs someone to build up, then tear down’ notion of stardom, its jabs at gender and class commentary were rather successful. It is a very well done movie that was more than just stylistically strong and more than just a well annotated story. Ice-skating is so very much not my jam, but I’d definitely recommend it.
It is hard to figure out where exactly to start with Fortitude: it’s a show about a strange place but also a murder mystery show, a show about being an outsider, a show about the occult, a show about fear, a show about lonely violence, a show about ecological disasters and a show about psychotic polar bears. Every time I thought I knew where this show was going it threw me for a loop and turned my expectation of a well executed yet seen story in a cool new setting upside down. I still have one more episode to go but from the resolution that’s been hinted at, I think I will continue to be a pretty big fan of this show.
READING: If I wanted to set explicit goals for 2018, one of them would definitely be to read more. This is a goal I quietly say to myself at the beginning of every year and then quickly descend into ‘too busy’ and end up averaging very few books a year and even fewer pieces of fiction. This year I think I have already beat my fiction average by finishing Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the first book in his Southern Reach trilogy, over the course of a few recent train rides. I honestly can’t remember the last time I had finished a series of connected fiction books so the prospect of ‘getting hooked’ seemed pretty exciting (and the series was recommended on Stuff to Blow Your Mind which is one of my favorite podcasts) and I don’t think I have been too disappointed yet. This book, chronicling the exploration of a mysterious Area X quarantined and controlled by an even more mysterious, possibly menacing, government agency through first person narration of a nameless biologist sent there as a part of an expedition, is not perfect but it is definitely trying to do something appealingly different. The plot moves deliberately slowly and the exposition is detailed and meticulous. The narration is clearly meant to read as scientific and science is invoked often. The ecological implications are subtle but not lost and the bits of psychology strewn about the story work better than I had anticipated. There is also a nice dose of cosmic horror and something like a more psychedelic take on Lovecraft’s elder gods.
At the same time, the ending feels rushed and while I did not expect to be handed answers to most of the mysteries the biologist encounters, I did feel like the writer was like a friend who had this great idea and an ambitious way to set it up and then ran out of steam because writing is not like bouncing ideas over drinks after hours. The story needed just a little more meat towards the end and fattening it up with pretty reductive and un-innovative details about the biologists personal life did not work for me as much as the rest of the book did. The portrayal of the biologist, a female scientists, as a someone detached and only interested, to the point of harmful obsession, with her work, also struck me as grating and unnecessary at times but that might be just a matter of personal sensitivity. I ordered the second book regardless, there are many elements in this book that I am by default weak for and I am genuinely curious to see what writing more than one book about exploring Area X as set up in Annihilation might look like.