simplicity.

i've been itching with thoughts recently.. all random, as always. there's no common theme to whatever i usually think, just blabberings that somehow make sense to me.

i was sitting in the park today, chowing down on lunch, enjoying the strong breeze and ever-lovely sunshine, reading the latest patagonia catalog. (yes, patagonia catalogs are awesome). the summer/surf 2006 issue has stories, like it often does, about conservation and oceans and water and environment... but the introductory story, this time, resonated quite a bit. it was a quick hello about the founders (i think) of patagonia, a climber and a surfer. the last sentence of the story --

when asked separately about their quests to push the experience to new levels, they both gave the exact same response: "i'm after the cleanest line on the steepest part of the face."

the cleanest line on the steepest part of the face. it's just so amazingly appropriate :)

and it's so wonderfully simple, so wonderfully true. but but but.. is it really that simple?

see, i love nature. that much should be pretty obvious. but i like cities too -- filled with tall skyscrapers and hot dog carts, metallic beams, large-pane windows, honks, stupid tourists, flashy billboards, rattling subway lines, dust, grime, and potholes. really. i really do love cities... there's some sort of unexplainable simplicity to them too. after all, no one purposely makes things complicated, do they? nooo.. the last scraps of naiviete in me say "no steph, no one would create complication." the buildings are built to serve their function (uh oh, i'm getting thoughts of the fountainhead now), aren't they?

okay, but if cities aren't perfectly simple, neither is nature. so there. how am i allowed to love both nature and urbanity simultaneously? i think i'm destined to a life of paradox and indecision.

pardon me, i'm totally jabbering stream-of-consciousness.

i had this professor in college -- one of very few professors whom i ever found interesting outside of class, and ironically, he had nothing to do with biology... hmm.. -- who has a website/blog devoted to "simplicity." well, i think his work revolves around the idea of simplicity as well. he's the uber-cool type of guy who busts out code in a moment's notice and creates some beautiful graphic with deep meaning but still takes the time to smell the roses and notice the artistic pattern in italian salad dressing. i'm not kidding.

the first day of class, as the 10-12 of us sat around a rectangular table in the media lab staring uncertainly at each other, the professor told us a story. (i like stories). it was about his beginnings, as a young boy in japan whose parents owned and operated a small tofu-making business at home. apparently, tofu undergoes a rather complicated process of mashing, grinding, heating, cooling, cutting, etc before it gets packaged into convenient little cubes for our culinary enjoyment. his dad would wake up each morning and work amidst the vats 'o soybean, day in and day out, to make this family-sustaining tofu. i guess the kiddos helped out too. later on, as the years progressed, dear professor made it to university and abroad and ended up at mit's media lab, given resources and funding necessary to do exploratory research on computation and media and arts and a combination of those three elements and more. how cool.

so really, besides it being a good story about his life, what was the point? in some ways, even though he's still pretty young, his life has kinda come full circle. the media lab is a large white building, composed of small white squares with a few lines of windows in between, rather cube-like in shape. my professor went from white cube to white cube.

simple, huh? it makes me wonder.