unseen_phosphorus_dance epitome of incomprehensibility Saturday March 1 was another Nuit Blanche, the event I described last year after I_got_a_dadaist_haircut. My red blather calendar completes its first orbit around the sun. On another note, I might have a crush on someone I just met. I'm not sure yet. Superficially, he reminds me of the Austrian philosopher: talks a lot, speaks three languages, was born in another country, etc. Some sort of attraction that's categorical, besides the physical undercurrent, draws me in, tells me that if he doesn't like me that way (and why should he like me in any way? in person I'm not distinctive, neither pretty nor ugly) he'd still be a good friend. My unromantic mind tells me to be careful, creates categories of its own, compares him to the X. X-philosopher; now this one, in the sciences field. Well then. Branching out a little. We were in a group, the French_English conversation group, as in La_Fontaine_Park, and we two got separated from the rest. It was at least Romantic. We were in the building with the Lipstick Forest, that stretch of pink indoor trunk-like pillars along one side, looking at a temporary art exhibit, a field of speakers on low poles broadcasting quiet cricket chirps. He wondered aloud why Spanish speakers seemed to have an easier time with French than did English speakers, and I moved my hands and forearms to indicate branches: Spanish and French come from Latin, and English comes from the Germanic branch, though French and English are also grafted together a little. Three languages. Tri-Scientist, I'll call him. When I looked up the group was no longer there. We wandered back and forth a little, then decided to keep up by going northwest, as I'd half-heard the leader say he was heading towards McGill metro via the underground pathways. From 8:30 to 10:30 we stuck together, abandoning the pretense of finding other people and taking the time to look at art exhibits. Not in order: -Moving figures projected against torn-paper on a hall's wall. I marveled that I could still recognize shapes, such as a man talking on a cell phone, on such a textured surface. I made some comment about this being interestingly fourth-wallish, the screen's presence usually smooth and minimized. The person there, not the artist but an attendant of about eighteen or nineteen, said it was meant to look like a cave, because the artwork took the theme of Plato's allegory of the cave. She pronounced it a-LEG-ory. I said I'd read Plato's AL-agory in high school but I didn't really remember it. My indirect conditioning didn't work, she still said a-LEG-ory (this coming from an e_o_i who used to pronounce ignorance ig-NOR-ints), but she told the story excellently and pointed out shapes in the artwork I hadn't noticed before. -A group of women standing or sitting on another building's carpet, all in flowing, if eccentric, white dresses. They were not only models, but parts of the exhibit, ready to act and talk. The artist was among them, but it was someone else who explained that all these dresses were wedding dresses modified to represent what the wearer thought about marriage. The youngest, a teenage girl, was doodling over hers in lipstick. The oldest (I think) was cutting out petal-shaped pieces from the skirt and dropping them into a jar, a jar of memories, she said. Another wrapped in her clear plastic train "like a cocoon. A change, a transformation in life, whether positive or negative" (I paraphrase). The most interesting one, to me, had coloured streamers trailing from behind her dress and a headpiece with a small netted globe like a birdcage. As I got closer, I saw that these globes were also attached to the back of her dress, via a belt of some sort, and the streamers were attached to those. She invited me to write down things I thought about marriage in general and women's roles in it on a fabric streamer. The Try-Scientist stood back politely and nodded at me to go ahead. I wrote "togetherness" with a thin, maybe green or blue marker - it didn't show up well, then "conflict" in shiny silver, and "friendship" in black. I said that I'd both positive and negative ideas about marriage with its mixed traditions (being unconsciously influenced by cocoon woman, the physical pull of her beauty and seriousness, but only able e_o_i-ishly to talk vaguely) and she said that's okay, go and tie the streamer to one of the nets, and I did. -A hallway with French and English statements in bubbles on the walls. Facts and misconceptions about visual artists... On average make only $10,000 a year here? That's what a bubble said; also, don't tell artists to get a "real" job or say you'd like their painting, but a little smaller. (I'm on board with them that the first statement's bullshit, but can't the second be excusable sometimes? Some artists are quite glad of commissions and/or personalizing things, if the request isn't unreasonable.) It was the Scientist who stopped and wanted to look, encouraging me to do the same. We read, occasionally laughed, about these together. I admitted I knew very little about visual art. I also admitted I was trying to write a novel, and it was hard. And the phosphorus dance. We didn't see the phosphorus dance. We went the table, next to which there was a poster about the phosphorus cycle. We both took a free sample of applesauce - it was delicious, I didn't know applesauce could be delicious, but maybe I was just hungry - and the woman at the desk explained that the phosphorus cycle wasn't quite like the carbon cycle. If I understood her right, the issue isn't phosphorus getting into the atmosphere and causing global warming, like carbon does, but being leached from the soil. And also maybe causing global warming. Like with carbon emissions, it helps to eat local (the applesauce was made from local apples). There was a chart about levels of phosphorus needed to produce things; potatoes were at the top. I'd rather give up meat altogether than give up potatoes, but beef was annoyingly low on this list. (Definitely more carbon, methane, etc., produced by livestock raising. Oh, why did I start eating meat again? I don't even need it, and I eat too much food in general. But that's not the point.) The dance that would be happening in twenty minutes, she said, would bring visibility to the unseen phosphorus cycle. We didn't see the dance because we didn't want to wait for it. We looked for other things, but couldn't find much else. I went around in circles trying and failing to find the way to McGill from Bonaventure via the underground ways, so we went on in blowing wind and snow, until I saw an entrance to Place Ville-Marie. The mall was open but eerily quiet; no art exhibits, and the stores themselves were closed. We talked in the metro, he got off a stop before I did, and on the way back I couldn't concentrate on the book I was reading, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. This is a dangerous symptom of crushiness, not being able to read; it'd happened the night after meeting X Philosopher too. Perhaps I was actually on the brink of being seduced by visual art over writing. The vixen paintbrush flaunting her flowing hair, luring me away from the phallic pen. Queer E: is this a silly metaphor? Quite so, says Straight Dope. Queer E for the Straight Dope, that's write. The company doing the phosphorus dance is called the Sensorium. They dance about science, I think nutrition in particular. 140303 ... e_o_i He emailed me after a year, I called him, and we're meeting for lunch tomorrow. Do I get nervous? Do I like him? I'm not good at knowing how I feel. 150424 ... e_o_i (He was in central Africa doing fieldwork/research for his PhD project in many of the in-between months. It's not like there's no Internet there, of course, but he didn't know me that well, and there were other things to do.) 150424 ... e_o_i He disappeared last summer. I had hinted things wouldn't work out because we didn't have enough in common. He didn't think that mattered at first, but something must have happened because he stopped talking to me all of a sudden, and I didn't want to chase after him. I wouldn't want him to chase after me. But I sigh and get nostalgic, and then slightly bitter: Was it the time when I admitted I was bad at deadlines? Was that a factor? I told him about hitting S. at a bar, and he excused that easily enough, but disorganization in a love interest is apparently insupportable (French: eh(n)-soo-por-TA-bluh). 160517 what's it to you? who go blather from