#022 - knowing (2009)
hello and welcome to my weblog. this afternoon i watched knowing (2009).
in the next couple of months, my ambition is to buy a little house. ideally something old that needs a little work and that has room for a big vegetable garden. i could stand to eat more vegetables. ideally it wouldn’t be too far from my current house because my current neighborhood is cute and walkable, which are things that cannot be said for most of my city. i’ve entertained the idea of buying a house for almost a decade now but i have finally become serious about it.
i have a loan officer and a back-up loan officer at a different bank just in case. my primary loan officer assures me that he can saddle me with an unconscionable amount of home-debt; i almost asked him “isn’t this what caused the great recession?” but i caught myself at the last moment. i am finally at the point where the amount of loan that i can stomach is enough to buy the kinds of houses i would like to buy in the parts of town that i would like to live in. this weekend i discovered mortgage “discount points”, which are a way of securing a lower interest rate by paying the lender for “points” on the front end, and i spent a wild saturday night building spreadsheets to look at how much money buying points on the front end would save over the lifespan of the loan. it turns out that no matter how many points i buy, the payback period is between five and six years. so as long as i reasonably expect to live in the house for six years, it seems to make sense to me to try and buy as many points as i can afford.
we’re about two weeks out from our last probable frost date, which is the date after which we’re unlikely to have a frost and which is usually considered a safe time to transplant plants like tomatoes that you’ve started indoors. i have three large seed trays full of starts for tomatoes, peppers, basil, and lavender. there isn’t any consensus on when the last probable frost date is because everyone has different definitions of both what temperature constitutes “frost” and what probability we’re concerned with - is there only a 10% chance of frost after this date? 5% chance of frost? we’ve had frost after the last probable frost date 2 of the last 3 years, so maybe the historic weather data that the last probable frost date is based on has been rendered obsolete anyways.
all i can think about is starting a garden. there is a part of me that wants to buy a house, any house, right this second so i can go plop a raised bed out front and get my tomatoes going. i have to fight this impulse because houses are actually very expensive and many of them have been very poorly “flipped” recently with discount luxury vinyl tile hiding any number of structural deficiencies that the flipper found it more expedient to ignore. i am also resisting the urge to restart my container garden at the house that i am currently renting because i am in the process of reseeding the lawn where my container garden used to be; i would like the grass to grow back by the time i move out so that i can get my security deposit back because my security deposit can buy far more tomatoes from the farmers’ market than i could ever hope to grow myself this year.
every single place that i have rented since 2009, with the exception of an apartment in grad school, i have planted rosemary in the ground and left it behind. some of them you can still see on google streetview. i like the idea of leaving something living behind, something sticky and fragrant and innocuous at first but later ferocious, capable of growing to be almost as large as a car. you can mark my way through the world by scrubby little rosemary plants in the yards of southern rental homes. this past winter, over christmas, we got a freeze so deep and so long that it killed all of the rosemary in town. this morning i took out the loppers and cut down the dead rosemary i planted at the house i am currently renting. i am fighting the romantic notion to plant another rosemary in the yard before i move out.
in this movie, nicholas cage is a professor of astronomy at m.i.t. who, in an opening scene, asks a classroom full of undergrads whether the universe is inherently deterministic or are events the result of random chemical reactions. maybe i am too dumb to understand the distinctions at play here but it seems like the deterministic vs. stochastic schools of thought are just two different ways of thinking about the fact that everything is a series of chemical reactions too vast and complicated for us to be able to figure out the outcome to ahead of time. is randomness just a construct to help us describe the outcome of things that have more moving parts than we can ever hope to keep track of? i caught myself googling these questions during the movie and ended up at the website “quora”, home of some of the most self-involved and least rigorous intellectualism on the internet, and i decided that i don’t actually care; i realized that it is sunny and warm outside and i am beautiful and young so i paused the movie and went for a run through the neighborhood.
for the sake of this movie, it turns out that the universe is in fact extremely deterministic, to the point where a young girl in 1959 is able to foresee every major disaster for the next fifty years, which she writes down on a piece of paper as a long stream of numbers and sticks in a time capsule to be opened fifty years later. nic cage’s character ends up with this string of numbers and starts to understand its significance when he realizes the child predicted, but apparently didn’t try to stop, 9/11. later it turns out that all of it was actually just angels. or maybe aliens? maybe there’s not a meaningful distinction; maybe aliens and angels are just two different frameworks to explain how children know about 9/11 decades before it happens.
thank you for reading. have a good week.