Higo Blog

My eyes are irritated and itch, and feel much like they do when I spend a little too much time in a swimming pool or water park, but I came out relatively unscathed. Armed with aerosolized chlorine, I quickly and methodically went about the cleansing. Perhaps there are survivors amidst the destruction in the kill zone, but they will likely die as the basic solution that surrounds them permeates their defenses and renders them extinct from the island that they had colonized.

I wish I could show you the pictures that I took with Kohei at Santa Marguerita Lake. It was a beautiful lake, like something out of a Disney film about life in the mountains.

It's the same old struggle, a single iteration among countless similar reiterations.The battle of organization vs. the second law of thermodynamics is waged in my brain every day. Thoughts scatter like frightened birds, then draw closely together as they flutter from neuron to neuron.

I have so many things that I'm interested in doing, studying, and experiencing, that if I allow my mind to wander, it can cause a state not unlike paralysis.

Where does the word "paralysis" come from? What are the root words? Which meaning of "para" (beside, near, past, beyond or contrary) would you combine with "lysis" (to separate)? Ah, it would have been useful to have studies Greek and Latin...

I come up with so many ideas, and only a few will get a chance to mature and produce offspring. You might say that it resembles the reproductive strategy of a broadcast spawner. I produce many young ideas, most of which succumb to predation and the harsh conditions of their environment.

It's fun bouncing around ideas with others, especially those who have good follow through. Ideally, I can come up with some ideas with someone else, they can develop it, and then I can find ways to innovate on them, and so on. It's nice to find someone or a team that complements the way I think.

Make no mistake, I have the ability to focus and to follow through. This is how I work. I try and maintain a focus, set deadlines, establish incremental steps until I finish something, and relentlessly plug away until I get a job done efficiently, and to a level of quality that I find acceptable.

But on my own time, or with my creative projects, I tend to enjoy the ability to move in any direction, in a seemingly-erratic path. Usually, these paths converge, almost impossibly sync together and connect in ways I would never predict. Many times, they end in ways obvious after the fact, but once in a while with surprising results.

I've always found questions like "where do you want to be, in your career path, in 5 years" ridiculous. Too much can change too quickly, and tying myself down to a commitment for that time frame is something that I don't care to do. Not to say that I can't come up with an answer, it's just that even if I mean it, I will be a different person with different experiences, a different set of lenses out of which I view the world.

Ah, I'm glad it's the weekend. Weekends are ADD friendly. I'll see discipline and focus again in a few days, but I'll let them take a little break. OK, time to go I see something shiny!

I just got back from a weekend of freediving in Fort Bragg. Though the sun refused to emerge from the clouds, the conditions were pretty nice. We found a ton of abalone on the rocks by going into places where the entry into the water is not as easy to find (by scaling cliffs).

The water didn't seem to be especially cold, and it was pretty clear in some areas (up to 10 feet!).

The abalone were so plentiful, it wasn't a question of "is it legal", but rather, "which one is bigger". Not being a skilled skin diver, I didn't have the luxury of rejecting too many, but instead, set about the task of finding ones with the best looking shells.

I found one that looked rounder, rather than a narrow ellipse, and set about prying the ab bar under it's foot. Unfortunately, it was lodged between two rocks. I set the bar, but was unable to pry the snail off.

I dove on that abalone a few more times, and caught something out of the corner of my eye in the swirling, cloudy water, saturated with tiny bubbles from the pounding surf. In my efforts to remove the abalone from the rock, I had wounded it, and its whitish blood seeped from the wounds.

I dove down once more,and was startled to see that the red blur was a sizable rock crab, going after my abalone! The nerve! I brushed him aside, and popped the abalone off. The crab made an advance towards the abalone, but it didn't have a chance. I was off to the surface to put my catch in the bag, and it was left tasting the faint traces of abalone blood.

I have to give it to the crab, it certainly had some large gonads trying to vie with a human hundreds of times its own size. It's just lucky that this human does not have a particular taste for red rock crab...

I haven't written much about what I'm doing this summer, but I plan on posting about it in a few weeks. I will post some pictures to set the scene. This is where I work, Monterey Bay Aquarium's Great Tidepool:

I remember wanting to do this ever since I was a little kid...