Journal of a Sabbatical

October 19, 2000

deeply strange

Today's Reading: Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm

My mind has gone strange. Deeply strange. It's not just that I tried to stick a CD in the floppy drive or find myself mystified at the use of forks. It's not even that I have a Jonathan Richman song repeating in my head endlessly. Actually, I've had Roadrunner going through my head since somewhere on the road from Lhasa to Qinghai. I put it down to homesickness at the time. Now I've got New England on endless repeat too. "I've already been to Paris and I've been to Rome..."

It's too much cognitive dissonance. That's all. If you're standing there looking at the blue sky and enough people tell you it's green brain circuits start misfiring. So like at lunch today La Madre asked me if I'd seen the Chinese commit any human rights violations. Like what? Nobody is gonna arrest and execute somebody without a trial in front of a bunch of tourists. I'll have a large order of culture shock to go with my cognitive dissonance please.

And to add to the strangeness of my brain, either the Mac or the Mavica has gone mental too. Several of the floppies with China and Tibet pictures on 'em are partially unreadable. The Mac claims MVC-xxxxxx.JPG could not be found, and yet the camera plays all the files back perfectly. I tried copying one of the offending files onto another diskette using the camera's copy feature. It copied fine and looked fine in the camera. I stuck it in the floppy drive and tried to open it in Photoshop and suddenly there was the Mac bomb icon with some incomprehensible error message! I didn't try any more of the files after I restarted the Mac. Either the Mavica's floppy drive is out of alignment or the Mac's is. Grrr. I'll bet it's the Mavica and I'll have to send it off somewhere for months to have it rebuilt or something, which would leave me camera-less because the rebuilt unlucky Pentax got stolen enroute to China. Grrr.

Oh, the photo for today is a photo of a photo, which I took with Zsolt's CoolPix 990 in the herbarium. It's the famous photo of the Metasequoia glyptostroboides type tree in Modaoqi, the living fossil documented by Hu and Cheng. I was photographing the specimens in the type collection and felt an electric tingling go down my spine when I realized what I was holding. What a thrill it must have been for Hu, Cheng, and Chaney to realize the tree they'd only known as a fossil was alive! After I got over the thrill of seeing and handling the actual specimen, I thought to make a copy of the photos (of the specimen and the photo) for myself as a memento of my work in the herbarium. So this afternoon I spent some time cropping and enhancing the contrast in Photoshop to make kind of an arty version of a not very good but oh so historic picture. I like the result. I might print it out at 8x10 and hang it on the wall.