On Thermodynamics January 14, 2009

When I studied physics in university, I HATED thermodynamics.  There was something about it that I just didn’t get.  Today, it finally all made sense to me.  In a eureka moment this afternoon, it finally occurred to me that I am the poster child for Thermodynamics.

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.  It can only change forms.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the Entropy of an isolated system always increases with time.  Entropy is the measure of disorder or randomness of energy and matter in a system.  As an example, because of the second law of Thermodynamics, the energy and matter in the Universe are becoming less useful as time goes on.  Perfect order occurred right after the Bing Bang when energy and matter and all the forces of the Universe were unified.

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that if all thermal motion of molecules could be removed, a state of absolute zero (equal to -273 .15 C) would occur.  Basically, the Universe will attain absolute zero when all energy and matter is randomly distributed across space (i.e. when total entropy has been reached).

Now, if we apply these Laws to my life, it will quickly become apparent that I will be awarded the next Nobel Prize in Physics for being  the human embodiment of Thermodynamics.

As soon as I was conceived, the Big Bang of my life, if you will, I was the perfect little zygote.  It was at that moment that I was as ordered as I would ever be.  After delivery, disorder started to set in.  Through childhood and as a teenager I always felt like something wasn’t quite right.  In my “isolated system” of hot-blooded teenager all my hot molecules were located in my heart.  It was in those days that I was able to feel real passion without belabouring the consequences, since all the cold molecules were in my head. Very orderly, just as thermodynamics would explain.

In those days, I felt emotion like it was a concrete slate being cracked over my head or a soft blanket being wrapped around my shivering body.  Whether good or bad, the heat in my heart allowed me to feel love so profoundly, to find endless joy in the mating of snails and to throw myself head first into everything because I was only preoccupied with living in the moment without needing to consider the consequences.  Those few years in which I had a hot heart were the best in my life.

As time went on, I started to feel the symptoms of entropy.  The hot molecules were becoming more and more disordered as they moved to areas of low heat concentration.  The problem is that they didn’t heat any other parts of my body sufficiently to do any good.  As this process occurred, my life began to become more random, more disorderly.  I randomly jumped from one degree program to another, not knowing what field of study to pursue (this is probably why I never understood thermodynamics).  At different (and sometimes the same) moments all in my 20s I seriously wanted to be a neurosurgeon, a sex therapist, an astronaut, doctor, a lawyer, a rock climber and a kickboxer.  How random is that?  And yet, I actually thought one of those things would materialize.  Disorder became more apparent.

The age at which I should have been getting married or at least considering relationships, saw me starting to travel the world, getting lost in jungles, escaping kidnappers, surviving tropical diseases, and just generally succumbing to unbridled Entropy.  Where other people in my cohort are making plans for the future, following some kind of ordered path through life, I become less and less certain about what the heck to do with myself.

As all my heat molecules decrease in concentration from my heart, the potential energy that used to be manifested in love and passion has now been transformed (as per the First Law) into cynicism and judgement toward the world.  To muster that pre-entropy love energy is like trying to extract dissolved salt from water…impossible.  And when I think I’ve found it again, a shiver sets in to remind me, as per the Third Law, that the temperature of my heart is approaching absolute 0, as is, incidentally, the temperature of my ovaries…

Bookends January 9, 2009

When I was a kid and my parents would talk about stuff that happened “decades” ago, I used to think they were ancient and that I’d never get to that point of referring to time in decade intervals… Boy was I wrong.

I’m not sure when so much time passed, but it did. And today, as I sat hiding in my sunny 15th-floor office with the door closed, writing this neverending proposal, thinking I was so safe from the world, two things happened that discombobulated my world by making me acutely aware of the two bookends of my adulthood and of the numerous and irreconcilable tomes in between. Damn you, Communication Technology! Leave me be!

It was early in the morning. I’d barely been at work for a half hour when I hear the coarse voice of the office secretary crackling on the PA system: “Tirunesh call reception”. What’s going on, I think? I’m just in my office just doing my stuff.

I ring my very excitable Egyptian secretary who says to me frantically, “there is an Italian man with a deep voice who has called four times and he can’t get through to your extension. He sounds desperate to talk to you.” So I ask her to put him through to my phone directly the next time he calls. It’s uncommon that Italian people call me. Sure I’m often reached by Africans of all sorts, but, despite my Italian origins, I have no business in my motherland.

The phone rings a few minutes later.

“Tirunesh?”

“Si?” I reply.

I recognized the voice immediately. How could I not? Every girl remembers the voice (and, incidentally, everything else) about her first love. That one man who, for better or worse, swept her off her feet for the first time in her young life and made her live a love so impassioned, so romantic and so ideal. That one man who perhaps marked her more deeply than any other.

My first romance happened, of course, during a summer spent in my small mountain village in rural Italy. I was 17, idealistic and hopelessly romantic. I was full of life and ideas and boundless energy. I was beginning to understand myself as a sexual being and I was sure that I would take on the world very soon. With one more year of high school left, I was aiming for nothing short of our 2000 solar galaxies. Would I be an astronaut? Would I cure cancer? Would I be a Broadway star? Everything was possible, and I mean EVERYTHING WAS POSSIBLE. I didn’t live in hypothetics. I really believed in my ability to achieve anything. I really believed that I, alone, had the power to change the world. What did I want do change? Who knows? Substance didn’t really matter during that time. Everything was potential energy. All I had to do was harness it and turn it into whatever I wanted. That was the beauty of that age, of that innocence, of that ignorance, of that endless belief in the goodness of humanity and in the power of love.

With all this ammunition in my back pocket, I left my Canada at the end of grade 12 and went to my family’s Italian mountain village for the month of August, not knowing that I would live the most intense and most powerful love of my life.

I had known Sax when I was a young girl. His family who was from Napoli had a summer home in my mountain village and so I’d met him on several occasions. But he was an older boy, and even though I may have thought he was cute when I was 11 and he was 16, I was in no position to understand what to do with that “potential energy” at the time.

Now that i was 17 and ready to explode into womanhood, I needed very little coaxing when this gorgeous 22-year old science student, musician, poet and passionate Napoletano brought me to a vast country field one Italian summer afternoon and kissed me as we contemplated the images that jumped out of the fluffy white clouds.

We proceeded to live out an indescribable romance, a love that, to this day, I can’t make any sense of because I truly believe that it was unique and unreproducible. That story informed everything I was for almost a decade and everything I became.

I became invincible that summer. After years of feeling a little out of place among my peers at school, I found a partner in crime and love, who was equally idealistic, far more irreverent and who unleashed in me that delicious insanity and appetite for extremes that make me the indestructible, spontaneous, insatiable, somewhat iconoclastic, and overly-passionate woman I am today. He imparted his social conscience upon me, which fueled my first trip to the developing world the following year. He made me feel all sorts of wondrous sensations that are very possibly moral crimes in some parts of the world for one so young.

Thirteen years later, he stumbles upon my name and picture online in his work-related research. So he calls me up and we end up reminiscing about that magical time in our lives in which we were all that mattered, in which we lived something so powerful that it would remain within us forever. We had no idea at the time.

Suspended in this bitter-sweet emulsion while at work, I receive another call. A friend from Africa. A man with whom I had a difficult interaction during my last mission. He, a man very engaged in social justice, democratization, human rights, confessed to me when I was last in Africa, that he and his wife had “circumcised” their first-born daughter. I put that term in quotes because it is far worse than the male practice by the same name. It is what we call female genital mutilation and it happens far too readily in the developing world, especially in Muslim countries.

I was so appalled that all my diplomacy flew out the window and I totally let this guy have it. I was shocked! This is a man whom I’ve known for years and who is a leader in so many social justice movements. He is actually part of an anti FGM network! I basically yelled at him, saying that if he, as an educated, liberal man couldn’t break free from his society’s traditions in support of gender rights (not to mention to protect his own daughter), then his society will never change, will never improve. Then I dropped the subject cause I could tell that I probably stepped way over that line of cultural sensitivity.

He called me today to tell me that he had approached his wife to convince her not to subject their second baby girl to the same practice.

Bookends.

Chasing divinity May 15, 2008

It’s way past my bedtime but I cannot even consider sleeping. I foolishly had a fully caffeinated cappuccino at about 10 pm and now am wide awake listening to Billy Joel. Do you know that I confuse Billy Joel, Billy Idol and David Bowie… What is wrong with me, seriously? These three couldn’t be more different. It’s like mistaking Elmo, Oscar the Grouch and Grover. I can’t keep musicians straight in my head.

Anyway, I was drinking this cappuccino mostly as a chaser to two tasty glasses of wine at my new favourite place in town. Last week, my friends opened the only Enoteca in Ottawa, Divino Wine Studio. It has become my Cheers…you know, where everybody knows your name. I think that back in the 80s when I used to watch Cheers on TV and I listened to that infamous theme song, I never really got it. I never really understood the importance of having a place like that, not to mention that as a young impressionable girl preoccupied with disgustingly good behaviour, I thought it was so bizarre that people should spend their every night in an underground bar, drowning their sorrows and discussing banalities. I thought it was kind of pathetic actually. Well, little did I know that one day I would long for a place just like that. Little did I know that I would so desire the endless comfort of having one place in my town where I could walk in, know the whole cast of interesting characters and know that they will unfailingly be there to welcome me and share the mundane occurrences in their lives.

Well, I’ve got that place now and suddenly I know why folks long for places where people know that our troubles are all the same. Somewhere between university and 30, I became this paradoxical traveling recluse packing in trouble after trouble, worry after worry, forgetting that I am not the the first or last or only spiritual vagabond carrying far too much weight for her stature. Somehow, my Cheers puts things into perspective for me. Somehow, the predictability and the casualness of this place are grounding reminders of my humanity and that not every moment has to be dedicated to the search of some great meaning or to the discovery of some innovative theoretical framework explaining the blips and outliers on my life’s graph.

Some moments can and must be dedicated to tasting the differences between a Bolgheri Rosso and a Tommasi Amarone. Some moments must be spent letting people offer you a drink while they explain how to break open a 40 KG wheel of parmiggiano correctly. Some moments must be spent scrubbing a dirty grill. None of these is a waste of time. None of these will lead to enlightenment. None of these can be neglected.

“Divino” is an Italian play on words. It means both “of wine” and “divine”. I am reminded of Alexander Pope: “To err is human but to forgive is divine”. In some strange meandering way, Divino has reminded me that personal joy is about striking a balance between pursuing one’s dreams and forgiving oneself for not achieving them all immediately.

I will leave you with the prosaic lyrics to the Cheers Theme song from the special 200th episode–sobering words for the highfalutin spirit in us all.

The Cheers Theme

Complete Lyrics

Transcribed from the 200th Anniversary Show episode

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Making your way in the world today
Takes everything you’ve got;
Taking a break from all your worries
Sure would help a lot.
Wouldn’t you like to get away?

All those night when you’ve got no lights,
The check is in the mail;
And your little angel
Hung the cat up by it’s tail;
And your third fiance didn’t show;

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
And they’re always glad you came;
You want to be where you can see,
Our troubles are all the same;
You want to be where everybody knows your name.

Roll out of bed, Mr. Coffee’s dead;
The morning’s looking bright;
And your shrink ran off to Europe,
And didn’t even write;
And your husband wants to be a girl;

Be glad there’s one place in the world
Where everybody knows your name,
And they’re always glad you came;
You want to go where people know,
People are all the same;
You want to go where everybody knows your name.

Where everybody knows your name,
And they’re always glad you came;
Where everybody knows your name,
And they’re always glad you came;