Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge by Ursula K LeGuin
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be your mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
So this time I came back to that place… some sort of reservoir hidden between two mountains along which two parallel highways run, with occasional little roads going from one side to the other. In this case one of them had even some kind of village or bigger place where we could stay and play some board game, that it, until the rain became too much.
Of course, I couldn’t say whether I was actually there in a different dream or just "in the dream I had been there before." I do remember a similar highway, but much bigger and complex, from (possibly) another dream a long time ago…
Again, I was in High School in the US. Somehow I managed to go back, but it looked more like the University in Bielefeld… And then there was the public showers in the park :-?
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
– Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826)
3rd president of the US
Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)
So it seems that several variable names were changed on the script and the templates weren’t aware of it… oh well, it’s solved :)
So, after a year or so after forgetting about this blog I found out that one of the last nanoblogger updates broke the templates and now the sidebar is empty and lonely… I’d fix it, but I’m hoping to switch to another engine soon… :-)
The train arrived at Bielefeld Hbf., this was my first time in five years, since I had never been back since my Erasmus came to an end.
I was happy and excited to see the Uni, which in this version of Bielefeld was near the train station—an arrangement vagely familiar, perhaps from another dream about Bielefeld. I came in and met some of the people I had been with during that year. We were talking and things would be happening around us. I asked about people, they told me about people…
And then I woke up, and the dream with its vivid colors waned leaving just reality—and I felt very sad at first that I was in Madrid and not in Bielefeld, wishing I had never left…
As I write this the dream is fading away as every dream does as soon as I come back to awakeness. I’m not sad or mad that I’m not in Bielefeld, but the truth is, I haven’t been there since the Erasmus came to an end…
I’ve been doing a Ph. D. in particle physics for the last four years or so, having about two crisis a year in which I was considering, to various degrees of seriousness, whether to find a real job in the IT business (sometimes including relocating to Berlin). About a year ago I decided that the most reasonable option was to postpone the decision a bit and focus on finishing my thesis, but the question remained: would I be more satisfied in general doing computer oriented stuff or in the academia? After all, the part of my research that I usually enjoy the most is coding, but again, the prospect of a rigid schedule and a bureocratic environment scares me to death.
So a few months ago I set up a plan that would allow me to pursue my Ph. D. to end while at the same time exploring the computer side (hopefully) enough to make a decision by the time it should be taken: I would apply for admission to the Master’s Degree program in Computer Science at the UCM, and take a few courses at the same time that I write my thesis. By the end of my contract (April 2009) I would be able to decide whether to jump to a post-doc in physics or to finish studying CS. The financial side of the second option would be taken care of by the interest-free loans the Spanish Government offers for these MD studies.
And then two weeks ago I found out about the (remote) posibility of a one year position available in Paris, which would probably begin right after my contract ends and would allow me to defend my thesis a bit later. Now, if I, as planned, begin the CS studies this year, I might have some trouble even finishing properly the very few courses I would enroll in this year. On the other hand, it would mean another year of guaranteed income. But it would also mean having to put off the “Computer Question” for another year.
Now, stepping out of the academia sounds like a quite permanent step, but lately I’ve been wondering whether to take a deep breath and jump into the void, or whether to stick to more solid–but maybe not so exciting–ground. There are many things I’d enjoy doing for a science career, but right now I’d be stuck to pretty much what I’m doing right now for a while, which doesn’t thrill me that much anymore. But again, there are no guarantees that it will be better on the other side.
There will be answers, eventually…
Well, I don’t feel like explaining the meaning of each thing… I’ll do it later ;-)
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys*
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World*
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye*
Catch-22
[A Clockwork Orange]
Cloud Atlas
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum*
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
[The Iliad]
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
The Inferno* (I find it annoying that this is considered a book by itself, the whole Comedy should be listed instead)
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi: a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere*
[1984]
Northanger Abbey
[The Odyssey]
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King
One Hundred Years of Solitude (I tried three times, could never make it past the first 90 or so pages…)
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver*
Reading Lolita in Tehran
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five*
The Sound and the Fury
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
[The Three Musketeers]
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth