#eurydike's

As if her death wasn't entirely preventable.

With the season finale having been release on 30th of June, it is now possible to binge Silo on AppleTV+. If you enjoy themes of mystery, (found) family, post-apocalyptic society this show is up your alley. With a diverse cast of all ages and ethnicities, Silo is about an underground community, living in what they call the Silo, who cannot leave lest they wish to die of the poison air outside. Our protagonist is the Sheriff, both of them.

The story first detours through the eyes of Sheriff Holston Becker who has an ideal life: a good career, a smart wife whom he loves dearly, and permission to have a child. Our first episode concludes with our first sheriff in a very different place. What I will share is that their legal structure is laid out in something called the Pact. There is one law above all others that is always upheld: If someone asks to go outside, they must go outside.

Our second Sheriff, Juliette Nichols, replaces Holston soon into the season. She is intense, hard-headed and intelligent. Her curiosity becomes a driving factor for the rest of the season, setting her on a path to learn more about their underground home and possibly the world beyond it as well. She is surrounded by themes of family, courage to the point of recklessness and social class. The Silo they live in is 144 floors, and the Upper, Mids and Down Deep have some tension despite each providing crucial skills and products.

During my time as a bachelor student in Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Utrecht in the Netherlands, I was largely exposed to concepts I understood but had no names for. Growing up on a post-colonial island in a British educational institute, we were often fed the phrase "you were part of an empire" rather than the correct phrasing "you were colonized". This perspective shift was an important one that introduced me to the value of restructuring language to better represent reality. It introduced me to one of my major interests, editing language to ensure the intention runs through from the writer to the audience well and accurately. My investment in human rights issues grew from simply there to something I understood.

Also during this time, I took an elective introducing geology and environmental science, which shook me to the core. I fell in love with the textbook, the way it read and how the information that seemed so dull – rocks and tectonics and groundwater – proved to be so entertaining and exciting. The earth below me came alive and so followed my interest. I finished my degree with courses in Earth & environment, literature and global health. My bachelor thesis was an attempt to communicate the interdisciplinary truth of Aruba's gold mine industry, to maybe better introduce the non-geologist to how even the rocks below them were used by the colonial presences to control and alter the people and the land.

Every concern is interdisciplinary, every existence is intersectional, and to simplify it to its parts, belittles the truth of the whole. We must work together from multiple angles if we wish to repair, restructure, regenerate for a more optimistic future.

This academic experience was precious, albeit complicated. An interdisciplinary degree greatly prepared me for life but less so for qualifying in strictly STEM master's, as such I am returning to a bachelor setting, now in the US, to deepen my scientific background so that I may proceed down the path I have discovered is right for me. I will be a science communicator. In some ways, you may think of this as curating content to a standard that may be consumed by a greater range of people. Science belongs to us all, so to all it must be shared with. My aim is to establish myself as a communicator, as a vessel to carry meaning and to play my role in society.

He's an octopus called Pickles and will have been released back to Neah Bay in Washington by the time I return to the Seattle Aquarium.

At the Seattle Aquarium, they have an octopus on display for a few months, captured from nature and nurtured until they mature. Maturation is marked by increased activity, an indicator that the octopus is ready to reproduce and is looking for a mate. When they reach this active stage, they are released back to where they were captured where they may live out their natural life.

Pickles is a male Great Pacific Octopus, the largest species of octopus. They live three to five years but in that time can grow to be over ninety or even a hundred pounds. Pickles is guessed to be about sixty to sixty-five in these photos. Sexing an octopus is surprisingly simple, a male octopus will not have suckers on the tip of his third arm, whist a female octopus will.

Having matched with this person on a dating app and agreed to go on a date with him, I decided to seize the opportunity to learn how to use my local public transport. Having recently moved due to not being able to find housing in the city I had priorly lived in, I've had to reset many aspects of my life. Reorienting myself into the new context has its advantages, such as exploring new opportunities. One such opportunity was learning how to move around my new city. In some ways, it was fun, exploring new places, in others, it was exhausting, like walking for forty minutes because I hadn't figured out the bus system yet.

So a month into living somewhere new, I decided to repair that and figured it out. I found which app I could download and which line to board. I took the bus back from my date. It was peaceful, a few riders looking tired, possibly off from work. The lights were low, the bus clean, and the bustle of the city calmed with the arrival of evening. The bus driver was pleasant, a gracious welcome and goodbye. It felt like a moment of community, participation in something greater, oxygen traveling on a blood cell through a body. Individually, I have no value, but as a collective to the bigger picture, I can.

It's the season of graduation, students are flocking to stages and streets in caps and gowns to photograph this momentous occasion in life. It is not often that we get to mark something as complete in such a definitive sense, so congratulations on all the graduates and their journeys ahead.

During this time, my own graduation and degree returns to me anew. I graduated high school in 2018 and university in 2022. Here I am in 2023, having to have left my master's due to lack of housing and thus moving to another continent, feeling an array of emotions. Maybe aspects of my heavy heart is driven by sadness that I am past what are often quoted as the best years of your life, or maybe I am feeling purposeless without having an academy to call home. Potentially what weighs heavy is the loneliness of no longer being the shortest walk from my friends' front doors.

I am fond of many of my experiences, opportunities and of course friends, but I can't help but wish I could do it again, do it better. The pandemic meant I had to think on my feet and readjust my path every few months. Courses were canceled, labs shut down, emails were sent with wishes for health. I was incredibly lucky that even in hindsight, my journey was an impressive one. Between interning at the United Nations in New York City in the latter half of 2020 and volunteering for every lab opportunity upon my return to the Netherlands to complete my bachelor, my CV not only had no gaps, it was star-studded.

However, that CV was not enough to push me to the top of the application lists for (science) communication and literature opportunities. It leaves me asking myself, what could I have done better? What more could I have added to my roster to call attention to myself in the application process? There are few correct answers here, after all, these processes are fluid and seldom follow a predictable structure. In many ways, luck is our greatest ally and worst foe.

It is a somber feeling to look back on my "greatest years" and only count my credits as regrets. I don't want to do that, although it is a difficult habit to break. So rather than break, I replace, with my future intentions. With this blog I work towards improving my writing, my online presence, my network. It is also my promise to work towards tomorrow so that when I look back, it will be in fondness rather than concern. I wish for my nostalgia to be kind and loving, not bitter as it often is now.

I never really did, I still write, but what I mean is that I no longer think I will be an author. I will not write a book of some two hundred pages that will be described as "a page-turner" and "a novelty". Today when I write, it is because I don't know myself anymore.

Maybe the correct question then is: When did I stop being so assured in myself? Was I such a bold child that I never stopped to question if my ideas were any good? I remember writing a short story one day after primary school. We had been read a story about how cats used to love water, but then one day, a thirsty cat took a drink from a volcano, or some such absurd exaggeration, as so cats came to fear water.

My story was much smarter in my opinion, although equally incorrect and absurd. I had written about some zoo animals, zebras and lions and giraffes, I mean it was almost as if I had manifested the Madagascar animated film before I'd ever heard of it. My story was about how all these animals had free-flowing tails like horses, but as they were rowdy, the zoo keepers would brush and wrap them everyday and leave only the tuft at the end loose to keep their tails tangle-free. The excitable animals escaped one day and without the zoo keepers to take care of their tails, the hair in the wrapping became heavily matted and so these animals never had free-flowing tails again, just a little tuft at the end.

I wonder what made 6-year-old me so creative but also so bold as to confidently ask to have my story presented to the class instead of our normal published children's books. What I do remember was the teachers being less than pleased with my creation, and fairly underwhelmed at my request to share. Maybe the answer as to why I don't think about being an author is that I didn't feel optimistic about my skillset, and I might've thought, well if I'm not willing to do it poorly, maybe I don't like it enough to do it at all.

Over time I intend to comment plenty more in much more detail on feminism, but for now, let me lightly address this book based on the podcast's summary and quotes. A book like this can be very damaging if someone is already in a vulnerable position. To be told that you are simply asking for help from your partner in the wrong way as a justification for why your partner is willfully ignorant and uses weaponized incompetence can be harmful. You are in essence asking for someone, namely married women in the context of the book, to remain in positions of subservience and potentially domestic abuse. By implying that marriage is a hierarchy rather than a partnership, the author asks that the misogynistic and controlling roots of marriage be upheld.

We live in an era where we are beginning to more widely accept the unpaid labor women participate in. A husband is not helping out his wife by looking after their children, he is being a responsible parent. Not every act in the home from a husband must be a show of love, some acts are chores that must be done one way or another and they should be shared, such as emptying the dishwasher or changing the baby's diaper. This book asks for women to place further pressure on themselves to make the life of their husbands easier, never once questioning whether these men may need a lifestyle change instead. To ask women to remain in relationships, to carve themselves out to fit into the mold of these relationships, is harmful.

To return to point two, I am glad I hadn't read this when I was younger and more impressionable. I am glad that I hadn't read this book at a time that may have lead me down a path of belittlement and subservience. We are not half-people meant to complete each other, but entire beings who should be willing to complement each other.