The last entry in the journal I lost was a graph. I normally keep the contents of my personal journal personal, but since it's no longer on my person, it somehow seems appropriate to share something from it. So I had drawn this graph. In case you were wondering, it wasn't the first graph I'd drawn in a journal (that's also sharing something). In this graph, the x-axis was the number of months since our arrival in Argentina and the y-axis was unlabeled. It looked like this:
What data does this represent? I wanted it to capture that first high of when we arrived in Buenos Aires and thought, oh my god, we actually did this. And that even higher high a couple weeks later when we signed the lease to our apartment and realized, oh my god, we're actually doing this. After that, a period of settling down and getting used to our surroundings, brought back up by our first trips around the country. (It's fitting that several of our peaks coincide with being in the Andes.) After each trip, like any vacation, there was a regression to the mean. Similarly, when we had visitors, they brought it up when they came and down when they left. Finding challenging work, including learning a language, had the same effect. Overall, I think the graph does a decent job of showing the difference between visiting a place (pre-month 5) and living in it (post-month 5).
I don't have an exact definition for this class of data. After drawing it, I labeled the curve K, for kinetic energy, because it seemed related to motion. I still think that's appropriate, but it should also include the dimensions of novelty, excitement, stimulation, and other properties I haven't thought of. If, for simplicity, we work only in units of energy, we can take advantage of the law that energy is conserved. In a closed system1, if I know kinetic energy, I also know potential energy. So I drew that too, if nothing else but for symmetry:
The potential energy curve has some nice aesthetic qualities. It trends up. So while kinetic energy here conveys negativity by trending down, potential energy does the exact opposite. It's nice to feel like you're at the cusp of something—like things are about to start rolling.
Things did roll, but not how I expected. Remember, I drew this graph in the journal I lost, one day before I lost it along with the rest of our possessions. It turned out I hadn't reached the kinetic energy trough just yet. Now that I've created it in digital form, it's easy to update the graph to include the last month:
That looks bad, but keep in mind it's on an arbitrary scale, and I'm still not sure what exactly I'm showing. It's probably the most qualitative graph I've ever made with numbers. But, as you've no doubt figured out by now, I kind of like making graphs. So to round it out, here is the corresponding potential energy curve for the full ten months:
That looks better! And I think I'm actually getting somewhere now. In this analogy, I have a much clearer idea of what potential energy represents. It's all the energy that gets stored when you're not moving. It's what builds up when you're not traveling to a new place, not changing your environment, not experiencing something you haven't experienced before. It is the need for motion; the appetite for change.
That appetite swells and shrinks. It's fickle, and it doesn't always lead to change. But I think there is a certain level above which change becomes necessary and inevitable. I'm going to call that level the activation energy. (At this point, you're probably shaking your head at me for taking this analogy too far, unless you're a physicist, in which case you're probably shaking your head at me for bringing chemistry into it.) I plotted activation energy in the graph above, but only as illustration, because that line is bound to change, too. The point is, above a certain level of appetite, things need to start moving.
It's going to happen soon. While I can't predict the shape of the curve, I know what's coming up. Our lease ends in early September and we don't plan to renew (though we don't plan to go home right away, either; details to follow). Before that, we have one big region of Argentina we have yet to explore, the north. That leaves us with only a few more weeks of being in the city of Buenos Aires. The countdown has started and we have a BA bucket list (it's mostly edible). We're already feeling nostalgic for it. Change is coming soon, but we're still here, and we're hungry.
1 "Closed system" is used in the classical mechanics sense, also known as an isolated system in thermodynamics. Now you know!
What data does this represent? I wanted it to capture that first high of when we arrived in Buenos Aires and thought, oh my god, we actually did this. And that even higher high a couple weeks later when we signed the lease to our apartment and realized, oh my god, we're actually doing this. After that, a period of settling down and getting used to our surroundings, brought back up by our first trips around the country. (It's fitting that several of our peaks coincide with being in the Andes.) After each trip, like any vacation, there was a regression to the mean. Similarly, when we had visitors, they brought it up when they came and down when they left. Finding challenging work, including learning a language, had the same effect. Overall, I think the graph does a decent job of showing the difference between visiting a place (pre-month 5) and living in it (post-month 5).
I don't have an exact definition for this class of data. After drawing it, I labeled the curve K, for kinetic energy, because it seemed related to motion. I still think that's appropriate, but it should also include the dimensions of novelty, excitement, stimulation, and other properties I haven't thought of. If, for simplicity, we work only in units of energy, we can take advantage of the law that energy is conserved. In a closed system1, if I know kinetic energy, I also know potential energy. So I drew that too, if nothing else but for symmetry:
The potential energy curve has some nice aesthetic qualities. It trends up. So while kinetic energy here conveys negativity by trending down, potential energy does the exact opposite. It's nice to feel like you're at the cusp of something—like things are about to start rolling.
Things did roll, but not how I expected. Remember, I drew this graph in the journal I lost, one day before I lost it along with the rest of our possessions. It turned out I hadn't reached the kinetic energy trough just yet. Now that I've created it in digital form, it's easy to update the graph to include the last month:
That looks bad, but keep in mind it's on an arbitrary scale, and I'm still not sure what exactly I'm showing. It's probably the most qualitative graph I've ever made with numbers. But, as you've no doubt figured out by now, I kind of like making graphs. So to round it out, here is the corresponding potential energy curve for the full ten months:
That looks better! And I think I'm actually getting somewhere now. In this analogy, I have a much clearer idea of what potential energy represents. It's all the energy that gets stored when you're not moving. It's what builds up when you're not traveling to a new place, not changing your environment, not experiencing something you haven't experienced before. It is the need for motion; the appetite for change.
That appetite swells and shrinks. It's fickle, and it doesn't always lead to change. But I think there is a certain level above which change becomes necessary and inevitable. I'm going to call that level the activation energy. (At this point, you're probably shaking your head at me for taking this analogy too far, unless you're a physicist, in which case you're probably shaking your head at me for bringing chemistry into it.) I plotted activation energy in the graph above, but only as illustration, because that line is bound to change, too. The point is, above a certain level of appetite, things need to start moving.
It's going to happen soon. While I can't predict the shape of the curve, I know what's coming up. Our lease ends in early September and we don't plan to renew (though we don't plan to go home right away, either; details to follow). Before that, we have one big region of Argentina we have yet to explore, the north. That leaves us with only a few more weeks of being in the city of Buenos Aires. The countdown has started and we have a BA bucket list (it's mostly edible). We're already feeling nostalgic for it. Change is coming soon, but we're still here, and we're hungry.
1 "Closed system" is used in the classical mechanics sense, also known as an isolated system in thermodynamics. Now you know!
