Phase I: Upper Egypt

My itinerary required two entries into the country within ten days of each other and I didn’t account for the multi entry visa, which needed to be obtained beforehand. And as luck would have it, the website crashed. The embassy didn’t pick up my calls, didn’t respond to emails and when they eventually did, they didn’t answer the question I was asking. So there was a reasonable chance that I could be turned away the second time for not having the right visa. But with just four days till my travels started, I decided that I would just go and sort it out.

When you begin the initial descent into Egypt by plane, you can see that most of the country is entirely deserted and sand-colored, and then there’s an almost straight line of stark contrast where the green crops grow against the plateaus near the Nile. If you can’t watch this through a plane window, the second-best option is to look at it on Google Maps. It makes sense on paper given the mineral rich soil on the river banks, but it was genuinely cool to see in person. The Nile is peculiar because it flows from the elevated south to the lowered north, and because of that, Lower Egypt is actually the region around Cairo while Upper Egypt is, counter-intuitively, the south of Egypt.

I entered the country through Luxor. I was greeted by a bunch of people wearing suits asking if I would like my visa fast-tracked. Many countries have some version of this through Global Entry or similar, but I’ve never seen a direct cash-for-speed visa situation. This helped skip all the lines, definitely evoking some groans and thrown hands from local Egyptians, but the visa process dropped from about an hour to ten minutes.

The airport is also where I learned that you tip everybody in Egypt, locally referred to as baksheesh. You don’t tip a lot because the USD-to-Egyptian-pound conversion is very much on the side of the American dollar. But this still meant tipping everybody. And when I say everybody, I mean everybody. You’d go to the bathroom and there would be someone taking tissues out of the dispenser and handing them to you, and they would expectedly and a bit sadly look up to you for a tip. The upside is that everyone is extremely helpful, at a cost in gratitude of perhaps a dollar. The downside is that this got annoying quickly. Which is also a good place to point out that having cash in the Egyptian Pounds was important.

At this point I also noticed that men here wore three-piece suits for jobs that really do not require them. This happened a lot not just within the airport but also outside where the parking ticketing person, standing in the extreme heat, was also wearing a three-piece suit, in 40°C (104°F).

There is basically one street of main hotels in Luxor with no hostels. I think I counted perhaps six in total. So if you’re staying in Luxor, you’re likely staying in one of them. The city seemed very under-hoteled, making for a great business idea if you’re particularly looking to start a hotel somewhere. I showed up in the summer, so for the cost of extremely hot weather and some unasked-for tans, I got upgraded to a nicer suite, and the hotel price was cut in half. The heat, for what it’s worth, was not too bad — maybe 40°C, give or take, mostly give. But it was dry heat, and as long as you cover your skin it’s very, very manageable, as opposed to the discomfort caused by humidity.

Sometimes you have to drive out to a site to see the tombs and the Valley of the Kings and the temples, but there’s also a good amount of dilapidated ancient structures just in the city and some of it is still functional. At Luxor Temple, the still-active Mosque of Abu el-Haggag sits about 9 m up in the Ramesses II court, built on the ruins of a 6th-century church that was itself built inside the pharaonic temple. Its door hangs high above the floor because the temple was excavated out from under it. This is much different from the two extremes I usually see -- the Chinese approach of demolishing old temples to build skyscrapers vs day-one preservation as seen in Greece.

Though I will say, in general it felt a bit exploitative to shill out such well kept history into a mass photoshoot with Dune-esque outfits for Chinese instagram. It did not feel right that you could touch all the hieroglyph walls and the tour guides would write on the walls with stone to teach everyone to read characters. A friend explains this as feeling like he was visiting a Disneyland reconstruction of Egyptian ruins instead of the ruins themself.

These scenes were from the Karnak Temple aka the biggest ancient temple complex in the world, built over roughly 2,000 years by around 30 rulers of the Middle and New Kingdom.

Small digression but here is a little primer on the timeline of Egypt’s kingdoms:

• 4,700 years ago - Old Kingdom - Pyramids were built

• 4,100 years ago - Middle Kingdom - Still some pyramids but mostly declining

• 3,600 years ago - New Kingdom - Rock cut hidden tombs like in the Valley of the Kings. This Kingdom declined as the Persians took over. Alex the Great then arrives and the Egyptians were happy to just be done with the Persian rule and happily switch over to the Greeks.

• 2,350 years ago - Ptolemies - Ptolemy was Alex’s friend and general who ascended the throne as Pharoah. The reign ended with Cleopatra VII.

• 2,050 years ago - Cleopatra dies. Rome takes over.

It was at the same temple that I learnt that you can write hieroglyphics from left to right, right to left, top down, and still have a system to read it based on what side the hieroglyphics are facing. For example, if there was a symbol of a duck, if the duck faced right, you would read from right to left, and vice versa for the other side. I don’t know any other language that has this quirk.

Were there different ‘handwritings’ in hieroglyphics that we don’t understand yet? What if somebody made a mistake? Could you erase a mistake made when carving on a wall? Would you plaster over it and start again? Stone was a lot cheaper, but you can’t exactly replace a wall if you botch it. Would someone proofread your work? Are there ways to make grammatical errors that mean something entirely different? I suspect there are. A lot of hieroglyphs look reasonably similar to each other, so you could plausibly make a mistake and have it go unnoticed forever.

Which raises a question. All of the intricate handwork needed systems where a lot of people had to cooperate. How were people trained? How did they manage to produce output that required high levels of coordination? The pyramids are the obvious example, but as are extremely detailed sarcophagi with hand-cut pieces pasted on one at a time. You obviously needed multiple people working on the same object, and the same goes for hieroglyphics. Slavery is not the answer here because there is proof that people who built the pyramids were paid for their labour in rations of bread, beer, grain and meat, and were housed, fed and given medical care on site.

A lot of the original colors still persist in the tomb and temple paintings. And there are so so so many hieroglyphs on the walls that it really makes me think of the Egyptians as the original long-termists. They cared about the record of their civilization persisting for millennia ahead of them, in a way that I don’t think modern society has really placed much emphasis on.1

Seeing a mummy for the first time drove this delta home even more. It really fucked with my sense of time, because you’re looking at a physical human who existed 3,000-4,000 years ago and had an entire life, and their toenails are literally intact. You can just viscerally feel that they used to exist. Your brain auto-corrects and assumes this person didn’t die that long ago, and then you do the math and realize how many lifetimes before yours this person existed, and it’s entirely surreal. A little creepy, but more surreal than creepy. This mummy was older than Cleopatra, who is older than Jesus! I also have no clue what physical remains of our society will still exist 3,500 years from now by default. Maybe a lot more garbage than we’d like. Maybe we get good at incineration. Or maybe we won’t be on Earth at all (Mars, etc).

King Tut’s tomb sits amongst 65 tombs in the Valley of Kings, which is a complex of underground tombs that you can actually go into. King Tut’s mummy was preserved within a coffin, which itself, like a Russian doll, was inside a second coffin, inside a third coffin, inside a stone sarcophagus, inside four shrines made of gold.

Like the Karnak temple, the VoK was also built during the New Kingdom. The architectural philosophy that went into it was intentionally very different. The Pyramids were a hotspot for tomb raiders, and were already a historic site by the time we got to the New Kingdom. The whole point of preserving the bodies of the dead in complex tombs was so they could continue their afterlives undisturbed. How stupid is it to build a giant beacon that says “dig here for treasure”. To counter this, VoK were the exact opposite of high and mighty pyramids and it worked. Their walls have hieroglyphics still intact with color, because the whole area stayed hidden.

This leg of the trip also led me to the Luxor museum where I got to meet this fun statue on Amenhotep IV. He seems like he could be in a frat and work in NYC finance if he wanted to. All his statues are significantly different from the standard aesthetic and it looks like he was mewing in all of them. And this is how we can conclude that the GigaChad aesthetic is not a Gen Z phenomenon at all. In fact, it is 3300 years old.

Food

There are usually two menus at restaurants: the English tourist menu and the Arabic menu. If you don’t read Arabic, you’re getting the English menu with marked-up prices. In dollar terms this again didn’t really mean much, so I was comfortable paying extra despite knowing I was getting mildly scammed. Luxor was particularly not great for food if you’re even a little bit specific, which I was. My doctor warned me not to eat fresh fruit or vegetables because I’d barely taken the typhoid vaccine before the trip.

The most memorable Egyptian dishes I tried were:

Koshary. This dish is hard to classify. It is best explained as a popular carb fest street food made of pasta, chickpeas, lentils, rice, fried onions and three different sauces made of vinegar, tomato and chilli. The pasta is an Italian addition, from the large Italian community centred in Alexandria.

Alexandrian foul. A slow-cooked liquid meal made of fava beans very similar to the Telugu Ambali. Just like ambali, it was served with coriander, chopped onion, and falafel made of fava beans that tasted like masala vada.

On the note of my ice cream hobby, I of course had to spend some time finding peculiar flavors. Cairo delivered Lotus, Hibiscus, Mastic, and Cassata.

I will say, for a country so close to the Middle East and historically central to a lot of trade, I thought the food would be more flavorful and spicy. Cairo had an appreciable amount of Indian food, which I was not expecting but then, neither was I expecting to see a Hindu-temple-style building in the middle of the city, built by a Belgian industrialist.

The best cuisine in Luxor was, however, Chinese.

China in Egypt

I saw more Chinese tourists than any other demographic, to the point where some local markets had more Chinese tourists than Egyptians. When asked around, I found that the Chinese tourist volume is so high that the Chinese food is great, the tour guides speak Chinese, and a lot of hotel staff were actively interested in learning Mandarin. So I suppose if you want to learn the language, you could always attend a Chinese immersion school in Egypt. The only school I saw in my days in Luxor was, in fact, a Mandarin immersion school.

Turns out this was a lot deeper than tourism, through infrastructure and much more interestingly, Chinese lingerie. Sometimes these items are made from PET water bottle recycled material collected by local scavengers who are paid by weight of plastic collected. In Asyut, a Chinese couple who sold lingerie imported a bottle washing line from Jiangsu and opened Upper Egypt’s first recycling plant. The collected plastic bottles are then spun into polyester thread, which is sold to garment makers, some of whom are also Chinese. So a plastic bottle in Asyut can come back into town as lingerie.

There is a version of this in Cairo too. In a neighborhood called Garbage City, the zabbaleen hand sort the city’s waste and recycle over 80% of what they collect, against Germany’s 66%.

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Phase II: Lower Egypt

From Luxor I flew to Cairo. The pictures don’t really show this, but the pyramids are a lot closer to civilization than I was led to believe. You can see the pyramids on your regular highway drive.

The overall highway aesthetic is similar to something from the early 2010s, which turns out to be roughly accurate because by most estimates two thirds of Egypt’s passenger cars are over ten years old. A lot of the cars seemed very dilapidated. Much more than in any other developing country I’ve been to. Seems like it’s just hard to get affordable cars in Egypt. For new cars you have to pay a high customs duty, development fee and VAT. And Egypt does not let you import a used car. Countries like Kenya and Pakistan that also have worse import deals for new cars (50-75% on duties against 30%) are just able to buy used ones, up to 8 and 3 years, respectively. So you end up with old cars with many many repairs and any new car on the streets is a mark of wealth.

Which also meant that it’s very unreasonable to expect seatbelts unless you pay a premium for a car that has them. This didn’t really come as a surprise to me, but it’s something to keep in mind if your travel experiences are limited to the Western world.

Getting a taxi was an experience by itself. I am used to haggling in India, but this truly felt like the pro max version of avoiding eye contact and trying so hard to not say “no thank you” because every time that was taken as an invite to haggle more. I am bad at haggling down, much to my mom and grandma’s disappointment. This sometimes involved someone following you from the exit of a temple till you get to your car, often reducing the amount of items they sold by 10x.

Once a hotel driver drove me to his uncle’s stone shop. Unasked for and borderline sus as fuck because once you’re far enough away from the city, there’s no way to get anywhere without a car because it’s very very sunny with no shade and you will dehydrate like the kid in the three body problem before getting far. Anyways, he asks me to just check out the place and in hindsight I should’ve said no but I don’t think annoying a driver in a place I didn’t know was a good idea. I caved and checked out the outlet which included a very elaborate demonstration of how their sculptures were made of stone but others shops use plastic. There was a confusing but hilarious singing of happy birthday as they lit a ‘stone’ carving made of plastic and it burned like a candle. I now realise how deranged this sounds. But I made the second mistake of laughing because it was so absurd. Thereby bound by more indulgence, I was obligated to buy something.

Besides the haggling, people were incredibly hospitable and were just very happy to chat. Too hospitable at times. A taxi driver parked the car on a highway, with the ignition on and all, fully ran across incoming traffic risking his life just to get me water (I already had my own…). This lad also kindly put me on some Egyptian rave music which I quite enjoyed and listened to on repeat for most of the trip until a local friend pointed out that on a scale of Drake to Kendrick, the musician I was listening to was…Andrew Tate.

I stayed on the Giza Plateau close to the pyramids, which I did not realise were white and made of limestone that was later stripped down to rebuild parts of the city. You can also go inside them. The interiors are a lot smaller than I expected. The passages are extremely steep, extremely hot, and require some crawling, and there’s not much to see, really. But the fact that you can do this at all is still pretty remarkable. I thought it was interesting that this counts as safe, given there are no exits and no way of getting out if something did happen.

The Nile was a lot narrower than I expected. This tracks with a theory that the Nile used to be a lot wider, which meant it ran a lot closer to the Giza plateau than it does today. Then most of the stone used to build the pyramids could have been floated up. We even have the logbook, the diary of Merer, which records a crew ferrying limestone to Giza by river during Khufu’s reign. The bulk of the pyramid was still local, quarried a few hundred meters away. Which makes the pyramids less mysterious than they usually are made out to be. What’s still actually open is the narrower ramp geometry of how all the stone was moved vertically

A lot of educated Egyptologists seem to become tour guides as their primary career, and a lot of them spoke five or six languages. Russian, English, Chinese, Arabic, and maybe a couple more. I initially assumed getting a tour guide was just another way to get scammed, but it proved very, very useful, especially for noticing particular sculptures and inscriptions that would otherwise have meant nothing to me. That said, there were places where it was just very helpful to have Claude say things. It was good enough to tell me where a particular inscription was within a complex — specific enough to say “go to the south wall of the XY Temple, on the external-facing side” to find the exact thing I was looking for.

Naturally I went to the Grand Egyptian Museum, arguably one of the best museum collections in the world with a 5398-piece Tutankhamun collection shown together for the first time. It was most surprising to me that gold was also everywhere. On tombs, on sarcophagi, used to make boxes, chairs, and chariots. The actual ‘gold’ of the jewelry economy was silver. You can see an example of that where a jewelry box was built out of gold, but the jewelry itself was made of silver.

Besides the nine main pyramids in Giza, there are more personality-filled ones in Saqqara and Dahshur. They house the red pyramid, black pyramid, step pyramid and bent pyramid, all pretty much explained by their names.

Instead of driving to these sites like a normal person, I decided that I wanted to ride a horse there instead. There were just two problems with this plan. I do not know how to ride horses. And I didn’t know how to get to Saqqara through the Sahara desert. Fable 5 promptly found me at an equestrian center close to the sites that did joyrides. They even sent a car to pick me up from my hotel and needless to say there were no seatbelts. There is a full side story here that involved me getting locked in the balcony of my hotel without my phone with 10 minutes to spare before the driver was supposed to pick me up. But I will spare you the details. Eventually the beat up car (arguably the most beat up car in the entire trip) took me down a highway bypass lane that looked very sus, and the only solace I had was that there were many many kids playing on the streets so it had to be safe right?

I have barely walked a horse on my own before so it was wild how quickly you’re allowed to gallop a horse in Egypt. I have never worked my abs and knees (?) and random leg muscles I didn’t even know I had, as much as I did being on a horse galloping. Many cramps later I got to see Saqqara on horseback. It was worth all the fear of falling off.

Followed by this new found joy of animal back travel, I also tried some casual camel galloping. Camels are fucking huge. I don’t think people talk about this enough, or maybe I’m just not in the rooms where camel height is discussed in particular detail, but they’re huge. And for some reason they were also running. This is what I imagine riding a monster truck would feel like. Minus seatbelts of course.

The last leg of the trip was Alexandria, and I had the cool experience of reading Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff as the trip unfolded. The book followed the same route I did. It opens with a bit of introduction to older Egypt, then moves to Cleopatra meeting Caesar roughly during my time in Cairo and follows their relationship until he dies. Her next relationship with Mark Antony then takes her to Athens which I happened to listen to while I was actually there. And I arrived in Alexandria just as Cleopatra and Mark Antony were spending the last days of their lives after being cornered by Octavian. The day I arrived in Alexandria, they both died in the book and are said to have been buried there too.

Some things from the book that were new to me: Cleopatra had children with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and it was her daughter, Cleopatra Selene, who went on to outlive her sons. It would have been an incredibly different timeline had her son with Caesar survived, he was descended from the Greeks, the Romans, and the Egyptians. There’s also an urban legend that the C-section was named after Cleopatra’s son with Caesar, Caesarion, but that’s not true.

View on Women

There didn’t seem to be a standard Egyptian look or beauty standard. Maybe this goes back to how Egypt was, in a way, probably the America of its time. A lot of immigration, a lot of emigration, a lot of trade, and therefore a big mix of what people looked like. To the point where people assumed I was Egyptian.

The city was both a lot more and a lot less conservative than I expected. Wearing headscarves was very common among women, but others were wearing tight, mermaid-fitting clothes, something I do not see publicly even in India. I was encouraged to carry a headscarf throughout the trip in case I needed to enter a temple or a more local town but it also turned out to be the most practical way to keep my face from getting fried in the sun. I wonder how much of the practice just originated from the Bedouin culture of desert travelers protecting their skin, and then evolved into something more religiously required. I think it’s quite likely it started as simply the most efficient way to cover your skin during long-duration sun exposure.

A friend joined the Alexandria leg of my trip. From then on I was only referred to as Mrs. [my friend’s name] even when we repeatedly asked the hotel to not do so. Turns out “Mrs.” is a sign of respect but also may have been a religious thing because it’s illegal to be in a hotel with someone you’re not married to (for Egyptian nationals). We tried telling them that we were siblings, but it still wouldn’t stop. And for what it’s worth, this was also an American name-brand hotel which only made it more annoying.

On the very last day of the trip, we met a local and had a very…interesting conversation. He opened by asking us what we thought about feminism. Before long, it was clear that he was talking about women being educated and having the same role in society as men as the root cause for a declining fertility rate in America. He said that most women didn’t actually want to be successful and highly educated. That the “woke mind virus” was causing people to want to be ambitious instead of starting a family. And also, on how men are better drivers than women, women make less money than men, and so their time is better spent taking care of the home and raising children (!?). This person was young, educated, and was working on very interesting technology. It was quite a surprise to see someone like that believe something so extreme, so deeply.

When I visited the Library of Alexandria, there was a class of kindergarten girls and a batch of college girls having their graduation ceremony outside the building.2 It seemed like female literacy rate was reasonable, but clearly doesn’t translate to female employment.

And with that ended my trip in the country.3 On the flight from Cairo back to India, there were multiple points while boarding where I would look in every direction and see zero women. I eventually counted six women on the entire plane, including the cabin crew, me, a little girl and a few other adult women travelling with their husbands. Which left me very intrigued about what exactly is happening between Mumbai and Cairo. I guess that is a mystery for next time.

Thanks to

UNC for funding the trip and Hiya Jain, Sudharshan Sundaramahalingam and Shreyas Hariharan for reading drafts of this piece.

3

There was a lot of generative AI imagery, in government-run buildings of all places. I joke about this, but I think OpenAI has a moral obligation to make sure ChatGPT generates good images if the rest of the world is going to base some percentage of its physical graphics on the software.

I will begin by pointing out that I have no idea where this quote is from within the book. And somewhat on purpose, I refuse to look it up. It has a sort of omnipresence to it that I could be convinced of and convince others of my own interpretation of its context.

“Scholarly and uninspired,” says Eliot, in the same sentence as “possessed by the glory we behold.” Dorothea and Casaubon seem like the deer before these headlights. A new couple aged nineteen and about fifty respectively, and one of four main couples the plot revolves around. Throughout the book, we see both their stories as a mirror of their internal workings. And it’s truly quite the contrast — the inspired and passionate wedded to the ambitious and timid.

This quote brings a whole new meaning to the conclusion where Eliot makes her case for the unrecognized, quiet talent that holds up the world. If one isn’t capable of performing unhistoric but brave acts, could they truly perform historic ones?

In the prelude St. Theresa is introduced as a little girl tugging her little brother along to seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors, and that their hearts were already beating to a (national) idea. We generally see Dorothea as a Theresa, but that is because she too practices and embodies this ideal nature demanded of an epic life; whether it does or does not lead to one, that is not the point.

Casaubon is a reflection of the opposite. He hopes to directly achieve this great life without embodying any of the qualities that would truly lead him there. He never seemed to be liberated from his small hungry shivering self. An alternate plot line from the story could have been Casaubon and Dorothea taking on the hospital alongside Bulstrode and truly pushing the medical reform forward. And this never once comes across as an option to Casaubon or the reader until Dorothea suggests that in Chapter 39, and says that she has too much already and later on offers to take over Bulstrode’s role. She was truly present in her life and even though the actual role didn’t work out, like St. Theresa on the way to the Moors, she tried at every chance she could.

In the end of the book, Eliot refers to Dorothea as the river whose strength was broken by Cyrus. But the inverse is also true! A river need not arise from a single source of greatness. In fact geographically, some of the greatest rivers like the Ganga arise as multiple independent streams that care for civilizations around them, before they join to become one grand mighty river.

The mighty river and the St. Theresa born to an unepic life need not lament about their might and potential to perhaps one day reach this ideal life. They must simply be present at this great spectacle of life and embody the ardor of a passion and the energy of an action. We do not practice what we preach. And that’s fundamentally the biggest difference between a Dorothea or a Theresa, and a Casaubon.

This changes the entire narrative of the book’s ending for me. In my own life, I can see examples of my mother and grandmother and great grandmother as Theresas and Dorotheas. My great grandmother arrived in Chennai, Tamilnadu. Although this is a large city now, and still was a relatively big city when she arrived around 1956, the specific area she moved to was a lot newer and underdeveloped. And like Middlemarch it was small. Comparable to 2 or 3 generations before the town as described in the book. In 1947 India had just gotten independence from nearly 200 years of British rule. Chennai, being a major British capital, was going through a lot of political reform. Although I was never old enough to ask her about her story, I know it must have been an incredibly challenging life to move to a city as a newlywed, whose primary income came from farming with her husband, my great grandfather. But they grew the family to over 20 cousins in just my generation. So perhaps 40-50 members in total — this is easily the entirety of characters introduced in Middlemarch.

My grandmother is the oldest daughter of my great grandmother. Born in 1956 as a female child, her being allowed to attend school, even though only till middle school, was a huge change. She learned to read and write and do math. And like Dorothea, she was married at 19. She wanted to be a nurse. My grandmother partly raised me, along with my grandfather. She is one of the clearest examples of a Dorothea in my life. Though a ‘great life’ as assessed by the book never found her, she is the reason my mother, her sisters and I are who we are. She was stubborn that all her daughters would be educated to the highest possible degree, would learn English, could drive and could financially sustain themselves. In a way, I was/am considered her fourth child and these values were also instilled in me.

And my mother. She’s the oldest child of my grandmother. The first woman in my known ancestral lineage to get a school and college degree. A degree in engineering no less, and also a Master’s. She was the first person to take a plane and work abroad. She too faced a plethora of struggles simply for being born in a time and place when her St. Theresadom lacked the best outlets.

And then there’s me. My mother’s oldest daughter. I stand on their shoulders. What am I if not a river resulting from the streams of my mother and her mothers? The argument goes both ways: that beginning from my great grandmother, the river broke into smaller channels with no great name. Or the channels collect into one larger river that will hope to embody the might that Cyrus once carried, that St. Theresa found. I actually think the answer is neither, that it does not matter the ‘size’ of the channel for a river is always flowing until it is not.

We only see that Dorothea was married and had a son. That hardly constitutes a life that is incapable of bearing great might. Knowing Dorothea over 800 pages, I know her story doesn’t simply end where Middlemarch ends. After all, isn’t the book — as titled — about the provincial town’s happenings? Dorothea doesn’t live there anymore. In my version, she still achieved a status worthy of her ambition. Through herself or through the raising of her son. It is simply foolish to think of glory of the known as the glory of the self.

Casaubon could’ve been much more if he wasn’t so caught up with his idea of success had he paid attention to other things he couldn’t have done. Scholarship and ambition are wasted on those too timid and uninspired. To be a Theresa, you must practise without analyzing the throughline of your life as it happens.

And to fully possess the glory we behold, we must understand that might is truly built up from little passionate acts.

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It began when I was working through Wilson Library’s Eliot collection while close reading Middlemarch, where I discovered an excerpt from a DiPhi speech Samuel Watson Reaves wrote in 1898. He was a math student at UNC Chapel Hill, reading the same texts as I was--Middlemarch, and likely also a differential equation textbook.

Reading his speech felt less like encountering a historical artifact and more like overhearing a parallel consciousness. It made me realise that what Middlemarch offers is not just a story but a way of seeing into the minds of others. In fact, Reaves discussed a theme strikingly similar to one I wrote about before (it was about Lydgate’s introduction into the town’s happenings, I’m withholding specifics because spoilers). Two readers, separated by 127 years and sharing little beyond Middlemarch and UNC, arrived at the same insight.

After some sleuthing I found his World War I registration card. He was born in 1875 and Eliot died in 1880, making him just the second generation of readers who encountered her work.

Reaves himself had a story worthy of Eliot’s novels. He was born in South Carolina and went on to climb the ranks at UNC, the University of Chicago, the University of Oklahoma and Cornell. Just like Lydgate, a young doctor who arrives at Middlemarch wanting to change its medical institution, Reaves moved to a small town in Oklahoma and embedded himself in an institutional structure for mathematics. His research specialization is unspecified in my sources, but he clearly excelled at it as he rose from being a Professor of Mathematics to the Dean of Arts and Sciences. He married after a long courtship, unexpectedly adopted an infant son, but devastatingly lost both of them in World War II within just a week of each other. Like Eliot’s characters, Reaves lived a life shaped by forces larger than himself: war, personal loss, institutional bureaucracy and religion.

The book drew me into the perspectives of its characters, as their lives unfolded with deliberate slowness over several chapters. Within its pages, it distilled something that can hardly be described in words--the sense of growing alongside characters whose emotional lives are only created and sustained in the minds of the readers! I would describe this experience as Eliot wanting to give us a masterclass in moral attentiveness--the discipline of understanding that every life is dense with its own motives, constraints, illusions and hopes.

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Chapter 20

Eliot so skillfully reframes what it means to notice. She does this by refusing to let us settle for quick judgements. Dorothea could easily remain only an idealist, Rosamond only vain and Lydgate only proud. Eliot slows each of them down and reveals the fears, illusions and pressures beneath their outward behavior. Her insistence is that complexity is always there, whether we choose to see it or not. And she doesn’t merely describe this to us. She makes us feel it. And feel I did, as I audibly gasped and sat in silence with my heart racing, when Rosamond and Ladislaw scandalously held hands in Book Eight. 1

“We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.“ Chapter 21

The same attentiveness Eliot demands of her readers is required to understand any complex system. What Reaves and I experienced while reading Middlemarch--the gradual training of perception--extends beyond literature into the way we interpret the rest of the world. I saw this happen to me while taking a stroll in the Wikipedia page of global GDPs.

The world runs on a lot of quiet, unglamorous infrastructure that most people never think about: the security guards outside drug factories in Hyderabad, a flock of new grads designing seed coatings in Germany, the process engineer overseeing chlorine production in China, loading and unloading container ships owned by Greek families, Egyptian workers operating toll booths on the Suez Canal. Individually they are easy to dismiss, but together they hold up the systems we depend on. I can’t picture the scale of effort it takes to keep so many invisible industries running. Like Eliot’s description of human life, the complexity is overwhelming if we try to perceive it all at once. 2

Despite this, the world largely functions. It holds together. And it is because of people like our Dorothea who make this happen. How could we ever argue that her role doesn’t quietly hold up more than we are able to comprehend as readers? I think Eliot herself believes this too.

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” FINALE

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I think it would do us good to see the world this way sometimes, and to dwell in the absurdity of it all. Especially in a world this extraordinary that we still take for granted.

In his words:

And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works,

clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole

complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives

are as if they had never been.” And art exists that one may recover

the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the

stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as

they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art

is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase

the difficulty and length of perception because the process of

perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is

a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

You can read his full essay here.

This page will be an internet version of my notesapp for defamiliarizations I like.

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere.’ I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

—Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I, Lecture 3

“On a cosmic scale, wood is rarer than diamonds”

Cleopatra died in 30 BCE. By then the Great Pyramid had been standing for 2,500 years. Apollo 11 was only 2,000 years away. She lived closer in time to Neil Armstrong than to the masons who built the pyramid she would have called ancient.

Share your favorite ones!

P.S. I’m experimenting with more notes-appy posts. This also means the topics will range pretty widely. And all of them are things I find fun so I hope you do too :)

P.P.S Shklovsky is a mirror image of my friend Eghan. Might he be reborn…?

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2. art made of cooler shades is more expensive. this made sense historically because of cobalt toxicity and extensive lapis lazuli supply chains, but seems to persist in modern times where blue hue is not scarce anymore

3. money is made of cotton and is technically clothing rather than paper

4. glass is structurally a frozen liquid

5. thermal receipts don’t use ink (clearly i didn’t take thermal at face value). it’s a lot more of molecular rearrangement rather than material deposition. heat enables BPA on the receipt to donate an H+ ion protonating the leuco dye in the reciept, making it absorb visible light rather than transmitting it. if you have to touch a receipt, you should try avoiding the printed parts because that’s where BPA is most unstable + in excess. more BPA data here for the receipt-curious 1

6. sapphire and ruby are the same material. aluminum oxide with iron makes it shift blue, and chromium shifts it red. they’re really substitutional point defects in a crystal lattice

7. eink displays take time to transition frames because the microscopic janus particles in them have one dark and one light side that need time to physically (!) rotate in a viscous fluid. this is why kindle pages take so long to load. and also why they have a long battery life - energy is only used to shift the particles 2

8. the east did not mass adopt glass at the same time as the west because they used more ceramics. leading to a later adoption of magnifying glasses, microscopes, glassware and telescopes and slowing their scientific progress

9. watermarks in money are just cotton fibers packed with varying densities to produce an image

10. pennies stopped being made because they cost more to produce than they’re worth

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I used to think of modern life as expansive. More people. More cities. More distance. I’m no longer convinced that’s true.

The first time I noticed otherwise was in high school in India.

A family we’d known since I was three when we lived in Seattle, moved back to the same city as us in India. People move.

Unrelatedly, I had a best friend in middle school, out of maybe 480 people. Years later, when I moved from that middle school to a completely different senior high school, coincidentally he did too. This was in a city with hundreds of schools, far enough away that there wasn’t any obvious geographic overlap. It helped to get a referral to get into this school which turns out we got from the same person - the family from Seattle. At the time, I tried to write this off as a localized coincidence.

Yeah...no.

When I moved to America for college I figured this would stop happening. Surely it couldn’t feel like everyone knew everyone if I didn’t know anyone. And for maybe a year, it didn’t. Then it started feeling like a small internet village. I was in North Carolina, but most of my close friends lived in cities and countries I’d never even been to. This felt like an online people happenings. Algorithms. Twitter. Discords. Surely this wasn’t actually real life.

Then I moved to the Bay. This one’s almost cheating, because I now don’t see how it ever could’ve been otherwise. But even then, it felt absurd. Everything and everyone was connected. To the point where I made it a personal goal to meet one truly net-new person: someone who didn’t know anyone I knew, and vice versa.

One summer during a shenanigan of semi-squatting at Stanford, I joined their Latin dance club. This is the kind of social dancing that involves changing partners every song. I really liked the club so I went every week. And found that I danced well with this one specific lead. So I told him that we should be ‘official’ dance partners and he said okay. That was probably the second or third full sentence we had spoken so needless to say I thought I achieved my goal. He was also a grad student at Stanford so what are the odds of knowing someone random who was probably not even close to my age. Later we decided to hangout because we’d become dance friends at this point but barely knew each other beyond that. This is at least a month in and in the first ten minutes of the conversation I learn that

1. he was in fact around my age

2. he knew someone I knew from my twitter high school social life

3. his girlfriend was friends with one of my friends and also friends with another friend’s roommate’s girlfriend.

At the time, I only knew three people at Stanford total.

In the Bay I did eventually make two genuinely net-new friends but only through intention, not chance. Tim, who works for the city of SF in urban planning, whom I met at BJJ. And Michael, who threw a Fourth of July party at the exact same place and time as one I was throwing. I was ready to fight. He suggested we merge instead. The result was a strange but wonderful mix of tech people, fratty Stanford grad students, and a lot of very good food, vibes, and stories.

Then there’s Switzerland. When I met S there, it really felt like we had no one in common. We were born in different countries, raised in different countries, went to school in different countries, and are of different ages. Clean slate. Or so I thought

His co-founder from London knew someone from my volunteering organization from high school in India. S now lives in America with someone whose lease I almost took over after meeting on Twitter. But I didn’t, because I ended up living at Stanford instead. That roommate also knows my close friend from India (not even the same city as me), who also knows the boyfriend of a girl who is friends with this close friend’s girlfriend.

At some point you stop trying to diagram it

I don’t know what this means exactly. I just know that no matter where I go, the world keeps feeling smaller than I expect it to be and that always blows my mind.

You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

But how could you ever be, when everyone knows everyone.

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Taste is one of the few things where the body reveals its opinions before the mind has time to. A good Banganapalle mango, a perfectly seasoned dip, an Oishii pack of strawberries: these things simply happen to you. So it’s strange when a taste moves from pleasure to disgust.

Chocolate did that to me. Or I did it to chocolate. It’s hard to say which.

I used to like chocolate and suddenly when I was seven, I didn’t anymore. This response has stayed true across brands, contexts, and types of chocolate, including ones where cocoa is only a minor component.

Now this would be unremarkable if chocolate was just another food. But chocolate is a globally engineered pleasure technology optimized for multisensory satisfaction (all buzzwords intended). Billions of dollars of industrial R&D exist to ensure chocolate tastes good. To dislike chocolate is to reject one of the most successful sensory inventions humans have ever produced.

An important thing about taste is that it pretends to be personal but much of it is outsourced to a bunch of other systems. Culture is one of them, chemistry is another, followed by biology, memory, industrial processing and geographical temperature variations. A lot of what we call taste is simply an amalgamation of these.

How much of taste is really shaped beyond individual preference?

The idea that eating is more than simply a way to sustain ourselves is not something we hear about every day, or even think about. But it’s central to how we decide what’s socially and culturally acceptable to eat, what we choose to eat, and why we eat certain things at all.

A crude example: imagine you’ve just eaten the most tender, well-cooked, great-tasting meat of your life. You ask the host what it was, and they say golden retriever. You would probably throw up on the spot or feel an intense gag reflex, entirely because of the idea of what that meat was. The host might even be lying. Maybe it was just well-cooked impossible meat. Without any way to confirm the truth, your disgust would still be visceral, and you probably wouldn’t be able to eat meat normally for a while. Your perception of that tasting experience changes completely based on an idea given to you, even if it may not be true and you have no way to prove or disprove it immediately. So you really could say that we taste with our brains not just our mouth. And that it’s an experience in a way socially constructed and not just independently tasted. Maybe I have a conceptual disgust unrelated to the sensory properties of chocolate because growing up my mom told me that chocolates had 8 cockroach legs in them. This is statistically true, and accounted for in FDA regulations. But it doesn’t explain physical disgust for over a decade.

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Parallely, what if you were introduced to a food by being told that it was going to taste terrible. Extremely bitter. Horrid to consume, maybe even something that would make you vomit? Dr. Briggs from UNC’s Anthropology Department, who specializes in food, conducted a case study in her class where she did exactly this. She would describe a drink as completely awful, very bitter, and likely to make students gag. Then she would invite the class to taste a brewed tea she made and ask how many wanted to try it. Only half the class would raise their hands; the other half refused. So if your first experience with a food is framed as bitter or bad, how much does that influence your taste?

Another example is the placebo effect with wine: when the same wine is labeled differently. One as ‘expensive’ placebo, one as cheap. People will consistently report ‘expensive’ wine tastes better.

Language shapes taste too. The nose and the brain work together to interpret flavors but without language, can you interpret them in the same way? If your language only has one word for sweetness, do you perceive sweetness as a single, undifferentiated category? Contrast that with languages that have multiple words for subtle textures. Tamil, for example, has karakarappu (கரகரப்பு, crispy with a sound), urundu (உருண்டு, round, dense chewiness), menmenappu (மென்மெனப்பு, cloudy delicate), ippu (இப்பு, mildly saline), and kasappu (கசப்பு, medicinal bitterness rather than regular bitterness). If language doesn’t name a texture or taste in detail, do you perceive it less vividly?

Global taste variance that followed the mass production of chocolate

Once upon a time, chocolate used to be known as a very, very different thing from what it is today. Throughout the Mayan and Aztec civilizations, cacao beans were used to brew a frothy, bitter beverage sometimes with spices like chili and maize rather than the sweet, sugary bars that we know today. Chocolate houses started in London around the 1650s functioning as early third spaces very similar to cafés as we have today, but never took off since they were more of a prestige signal than an enjoyable drink.

If you directly tasted a cacao bean from the pod, it would taste extremely bitter and absolutely nothing like chocolate that we know today. The flavor is engineered through a flow of reactions.

To understand the history of chocolate, we need to understand how it is created from a cacao pod.

Heaps and heaps of cacao are collected and fermented in a very specific way. Fermentation destabilizes the bean. Cell walls and vacuoles are broken down, which activates endogenous enzymes (like polyphenol oxidase) and generates esters such as ethyl acetate and isoamyl acetate that contribute fruity notes. Through this controlled microbial heap, chocolate gets broken down from complex molecules into simpler ones that can bind with other chemicals and eventually form the flavor compounds.

After the raw cacao beans are fermented, they are roasted, activating the Maillard reaction, where reducing sugars react with amino acids at high heat at ~120-150°C. This is the same chemistry that makes bread crust taste like bread crust, and coffee taste like coffee. Roasting is where chocolate actually appears.

Essentially chocolate was pretty disgusting for our modern taste buds for most of its history. It was only in the 1800s that it became closer to what we know today.

In 1828, a Dutch chemist named Coenraad Johannes van Houten invented the hydraulic screw press. This device separated cocoa butter from cocoa solids and marked the rebirth of chocolate. It’s nicely written about here if you’re interested in reading more. By pressing roasted cacao mass at high pressure he could remove most of the fat content and it became easier to dissolve in water or milk. And combined with sugar and cocoa solids it became milk chocolate. Without this Dutch machine, chocolate would’ve stayed a bitter frothy drink forevaa.

And the fun only now begins.

With this newfound machine chocolate became more of a global wonder instead of a localized one. It meant that different countries could use cacao powder since the powder itself could be exported cheaper than exporting cacao pods in specific conditions and post-processing them. Different countries started formulating their own chocolates in different ways.

In America, butyric acid created from fermented milk is used in chocolate and it gets a rangy flavor profile. Butyric acid is also a compound found in vomit, which earned Hershey’s chocolate the nickname of vomit chocolate.

In Europe, chocolate has a lot more cocoa-content regulations for chocolate to legally be called…well, chocolate. Their way of processing milk is very cream- and dairy-heavy, and that gives a darker flavor profile and lower acidity. In the UK, the milk is generally powdered, which gives a higher caramelized, sweet dairy flavor.

In equatorial countries, because of the higher temperature, cocoa butter is replaced with vegetable fats to create heat-stable formulations. And because chocolate is heated, refrigerated, and melted so often, there is a loss of volatiles and aromatic compounds, which mutes or tends to mute the flavor in more temperate conditions.

And an interesting fact is that Europeans consume more chocolate than Americans. America is not even in the top 16 of the 20 countries that consume chocolate, because Americans prefer chocolate-flavored things rather than chocolate itself. And in colder European climates, chocolate stores and tastes better, reinforcing its role as a staple.

∴ Chocolate isn’t the same everywhere, so there’s no such thing as chocolate independent of the region, its legal definitions, climate, and dairy technology.

My personal perception of taste - an investigation

Case introduction

The earliest memories I have of eating chocolate was when I was three: eating them in strollers, falling prey to the grocery store child-sized checkout shelves, and absolutely loving halloween. My next memory of chocolate was when I was five and only ate Ferrero Rochers and ₹10 Dairy Milks. I had also just moved back to India with my family at this point,

And then I was seven. I magically did not like chocolates anymore. Not the way I didn’t like vegetables. But in a way that would induce an intense taste of disgust in my mouth.​​

I kept testing myself just to be sure. Each attempt ended the same: one nibble, a flinch, water, and the rest in the bin. Even now I can detect chocolate in the faintest hints in buttercream, milkshakes, foods that ‘shouldn’t’ even taste like it. Somehow I always catch it.

An important question here is: was I biased? I don’t think so. The reaction remains the same regardless of what it is that I’m eating, whether it’s labeled or not, if it contains chocolate in any capacity whatsoever, regardless of what situation I’m in. I used to tolerate white chocolate a bit more, but still would never choose to eat it. I just don’t like it. ( I test this again in the conclusion in three different continents ;)

If I have no memory of what caused such a drastic change, what happened between loving and hating it?

I’ve been told another story by my mom. I was four, it was Halloween and I got a huge haul of candies, maybe three or four hundred pieces. I proceeded to do the only normal thing possible a child destined for STEM might do: sort all the chocolates in neat piles by type and then ate them in batches of ~forty. I was almost three-fourths of the way in when I decided to give up and not eat the rest of the chocolate anymore. After some attempted intervention, my mom decided it was fine. I had milk teeth, and they’d fall out anyway, so what was the harm? (pro parent move right there)

Now, I don’t remember this. So it brought up the question, is a memory of disgust stored in the brain even if we can’t recall it consciously? How can your perception of a certain sense completely change even though you don’t remember anything particular that led to that?

And if I could ‘acquire’ hate, does that mean I could acquire the taste back?

Relevant facts:

Hypotheses:

1. Genetic

If chocolate is engineered to appeal to senses and they don’t to mine, then my guess is that some part of the tasting chocolate pathway isn’t working for me.

The roasted, nutty, cocoa-like notes we associate with chocolate come from pyrazines and other Maillard reaction volatiles. They’re detected by olfactory receptors and humans have ~400 of them that are all highly variable (for reference dogs can have ~800-1000 OR genes which is why they can smell a lot better than us). If my OR’s are more sensitive to these compounds, then they might register for me as chemically wrong. This explains my consistent dislike for browned, caramelized, roasted chemical pathways like coffee, caramel, jaggery, and most sweets on top of the general chocolate dislike.

Genes like TAS2R38 influence how strongly people detect bitter compounds like theobromine are in chocolate. Like most genes, you inherit one copy of this gene from each parent and they can be either low or high sensitivity. Let’s assume: H = high-sensitivity allele; h = low-sensitivity allele. Then the combinations are:

1. hh: Two low-sensitivity copies = meh

2. Hh: One high + one low = hmm, bitter

   1. Mom: likely Hh

      1. Doesn’t like chocolate but not nearly as strongly as me, she’d still eat it if given. Loves coffee. Eats bitter gourd

   2. Dad: likely Hh

      1. Doesn’t like milk or white chocolate at all. Or coffee. But loves dark chocolate and bitter gourd.

3. HH: Two high-sensitivity copies = WHY IS THIS POISON

   1. Likely me

This theory also fits neatly into a Punnett Square

It’s also possible that these sensitivities didn’t happen earlier because certain receptors need to mature or be exposed to enough of the compound first. This might explain why my aversion took seven years to be expressed.

2. Geographic

Because chocolate is so specifically engineered to express a particular flavour, it won’t feel the same when it doesn’t hit multiple sensory systems at the same time (texture, aroma, fat melt curve, sweetness). You can notice this when your bar blooms, melts weirdly, tastes flat, snaps instead of melts, or melts instead of snaps.

Cocoa butter is also polymorphic and can solidify into six different crystal structures. Only Form V tastes ‘right’. The snap you hear when chocolate breaks is a fracture in this crystal. Legend says that the airpods case snap is inspired by this /s. At not ideal temperature or even using a formulation not designed for that particular region, it wil recrystallize into the wrong polymorph. To account for this, formulations around the world have some differences, further changing its flavor profiles.

Although I think this hypothesis is very likely to have played a role in my dislike for chocolate there is too much variance to conclude anything with certainty.

3. Sheer overload from Halloween event

Conditioned Taste Aversion (CTA) is the term used for physically bad experiences affecting your perception of the flavor. Eg, you get food poisoning and don’t like the food that led to it for a while. This is a way the brain tries to prevent you from consuming things that may be harmful to you. This can happen after a single exposure and last for a long time.

Con of this theory is that CTA is usually very specific and doesn’t explain why I dislike many kinds of chocolates, not just the types I had that Halloween. For eg, I am very sure I didn’t have Dairy Milks or white chocolate then.

Case conclusion

Genetically I may just be wired with more sensitive olfactory and bitter receptors. Geographically the chocolates I grew up with may never have matched what my senses were built to enjoy. And the Halloween binge adds a textbook moment for conditioned taste aversion, even if I don’t remember it now. So the simplest conclusion is that all three interacted.

So can I actually reacquire the taste

The miracle berry (Synsepalum dulcificum) temporarily converts sour to sweet by binding to the sweet taste receptor (T1R2/T1R3) and conditionally activates it under acidic conditions, rerouting sour inputs into perceived sweetness. There is no known compound that cleanly inverts bitterness in the same way. But inventing one would seem promising.

Another strategy: Bitter perception can be masked by sodium ions (tested in next section) or other antagonists that interfere with TAS2R signaling. A more speculative approach would be a bitter-modifying molecule that blocks high-affinity TAS2R receptors, similar to miraculin but acting as an antagonist rather than a conditional agonist.

Hypothesis tested in three different continents

Experimental log:

Observations and Experimental Conclusion:

This turned out to be much more interesting than I expected! When I salted my tongue first I could tolerate chocolate; without it I couldn’t. Salt suppresses bitter taste receptors.

I didn’t test Lindt or Hershey’s with salt yet. Until then, consider this a working conclusion.

Acknowledgements

Cheers to Halloween 2009, Jim O’Shaughnessy and Jose Sabau for convincing me that they would enjoy this piece if nobody else did, Rabbitholeathon for facilitating this rabbit hole, to Dr.Briggs at UNC, Shan and Rob for reading drafts and to me for not liking chocolate!

1. Unlimited resources are overrated. Truly novel things rarely need an abundance of money. Breakthroughs can’t be bought. Instead, passion, persistence, belief, and ingenuity are required to invent new things, qualities the less funded and young often have in abundance.

2. Assume no one knows what they’re doing and gauge everything yourself. Because this is true for more than you think.

3. Send more thank you letters/personalized gifts. Little things go a long way.

4. Physically, we know what muscle soreness (growing pains) feels like, but there’s also its emotional and mental counterparts — where in life are you experiencing growing pains, and have you mistaken them for other negative emotions?

5. “Don’t feel qualified? Nobody does. You can only be qualified to do that which you have already accomplished or trained for. Anything new is accomplished by unqualified people”

6. Picking your 1-5-10 mile radius neighborhood is more important than picking your city. Reddit is a great place to find secret spots. Followed by aimless exploring.

7. “Cosmically speaking, wood is rarer than diamonds.”

8. Learn something you can perform at a talent show.

9. Feel in your body more. Fight, dance, rec sports, rollercoasters. It’s hard to dwell in the past or worry about the future mid-chokehold on the mats or when you’re underwater and need to keep up rhythmic breathing. Can substitue meditation

10. While trying to befriend strangers — pretend they’re an old friend (internally) and slightly overshare.

11. Shortcut to making friends who fully align with you requires unapologetic authenticity to the point where you’re likely getting an odd look or two every now and then. 100% worth it.

12. Hot pot and matcha are my best culinary discoveries of 2024.

13. Listen to party music while brushing teeth both times.

14. I wonder what my future husband is doing right now. It’s crazy to me that they’re a real person with a life, and they’re not going to just exist from the moment I meet them, lol.

15. Call home more often. Put it on the calendar.

16. Be a closer.

17. Make a lot of mistakes. Just don’t make the same ones.

18. Life gets so much more interesting and entertaining when you stop wearing airpods all the time. When are you using music to escape your thoughts/as a pointless filler?

19. Not knowing isn’t an obstacle; it is the way.

*if in quotes, the saying is borrowed

Art is transformative. It brings meaning to life, turning a $7 blank canvas from Walmart or the back of a discarded receipt into a vessel for meaning and emotion. Its only limit is what you can imagine (just like life).

The freedom and lack of restriction is exhilarating and liberating at first. You can use watercolors, pencils, pastels, and charcoal to paint walls, the street, and clothes. But as you stand before this blank white expanse, paralysis often sets in. With infinite possibilities, where do you begin? 

What if, paradoxically, the solution to this paralysis stems from infinite possibilities lie in the opposite direction of embracing constraints?

My best work in art has always resulted from constraints: either a competition that set rules for what kind of thematic art they accept, a lack of actual art supplies, resorting to mixing makeup to create my own colors, or setting my boundary lines based on what I want to create intentionally as a gift for someone else.

First you understand the rules. And then you break them. 

Having more resources didn’t create electricity or invent the wheel. Language wasn’t created with the help of dictionaries. The ‘smartest’ people in history didn’t know everything about everything. But what they did know, they knew well. They ruminated on the little information they had, running through their neural pathways over and over again until the road broke off into a hidden trail. 

In today’s world, we’re much more likely to be victims of abundance, not scarcity. Too much choice, too many options, too much information. 

Constraint and scarcity force you to act better with what you do have.

When you dont have much handed to you, anything you seek automatically results from you wanting it bad enough, making it harder to do the wrong thing because it isn’t easy to. 

Unlimited resources are overrated. Truly novel things rarely need an abundance of money. If that were so, billionaires would have a monopoly on inventing new things, and they don’t. Breakthroughs can’t be bought. Instead, passion, persistence, belief, and ingenuity are required to invent new things, qualities the less funded and young often have in abundance. 

What you regard as a disadvantage might just be your biggest strength. Having less is good. An example is art, but this applies to life, too. Restrict yourself on money, time, material things. This way, you remove the bullshit and get shit done. And often, the shit done is better than what wouldve been done with more. 

Abundance flows from within you into the rest of the world.

what if you were told you had a secret superpower, something you’re better than everyone else at? the only catch being you wouldn’t be told in advance what the secret power is and need to find yourself. you could either be the curer of cancer, the best tightrope walker, or the best jazz x pop fusion artist; there’s something in you, but you dont know what it is yet. how would you find it?

sculptors have often seen the art carving not as creating something out of stone but as removing stone from what already is. 

you will complete your mission in life when you figure out what your life’s mission is. your purpose is to discover your purpose. this is not a paradox. this is the way.