the cup of my desire to write has not been filling up. yesterday, two old men told me that some of my work would not count toward the tenure decision without bothering to specify the line that separated what counted from what did not and without assigning weights to individual items. i succeeded at not expressing my anger and frustration at them but of course broke down after. it took me more than half a day and a night's sleep to wake up with the realization that my reaction was very like that of the apes who express anger at not being treated fairly, about who I was telling my students just a couple days ago in reference to explaining 'fairness' both substantive (outcomes) and procedural (rules). at least i can still laugh, ex post, at my anger. we were watching the portuguese movie 'The metamorphosis of birds' on Netflix the other day which had poetic narration and a strange experiential theatre-like presence. somewhere in it i heard that before we started to understand that birds migrated, people had believed that they had seasonal metamorphosis such that birds seen in one season were believed to have changed into those seen in another season. thus the title of the movie. today we were sitting on our terrace eating lunch when something about the birds around made me mention that aloud again - how cute and interesting it felt/sounded/must-have-been. K didn't quite get it and kept saying that if people saw birds fly in one direction in one season and fly back in the opposite direction in another season, how could they have understood it to be anything other than migration. i tried to explain that birds don't systematically just fly locally in one direction in a season; they usually hang around making travel stops wherein they fly and eat around for days etc such that people wouldn't have necessarily seen them fly only in one direction. and that it seemed very plausible that if people saw one type of bird in one season, then given their ignorance regarding their migration, they might have interpreted the sightings as arising from the metamorphosis of the same birds such that they took on different forms in different seasons. it was hard as sometimes it is hard to explain ideas to someone, esp him. i gave him an example to illustrate the limited knowledge that comes from local observation/information-collection: how early humans (before the ability to fly; sorry, before math proved otherwise) believed the earth was flat cos from our perspective we could only see as far as our horizon of vision which revealed nothing of the spherical nature of the planet. he still looked half convinced. and then the perfect example came to my mind, bringing the idea closer to home, to the birds. the male sunbird changes color only in mating season, and because we see male sunbirds as green the rest of the year and shiny purple in mating season we understand that it undergoes seasonal metamorphosis. similarly if we had never followed birds' long distance flights and our only information was local from place to place, then if blackbirds were seen in spring and some green ones in fall, we might have simply thought that the blackbirds turned green in fall, or vice versa. i really dig ideas, logic, thought, epistemology, ... and i still very much like the person i have grown to become.