Tala Schlossberg - Keeping up with the Kermodes
Current Location: Portland, Oregon/NYC
Entering Year: 2015
What was your Question? How can we better communicate Science?
What does a day-in-the-life look like for you?
I actually made a video about this (here)! I am an artist full time so my days go to making projects. A lot of time is actually spent walking around with my notebook and thinking. I feel extraordinarily lucky in the day-in-the-life department currently. Every day, I try to practice writing, drawing, music, and sharing my work. I try not to put too much pressure on my output. I find that if I take care of my body well and stay with my practice, things continue to work out nicely. I love to collaborate with people – my days recently have been filled with a lot of play dates it feels like. Sitting on the floor singing into microphones and running around with video cameras. I can’t help myself but stay up really late on my laptop every night. I like to go out in nature during the day and then in the evenings I like to get super cozy and just absolutely hyper focus into digital space. That’s what I’m doing right now, but I’m starting to get really tired.
If you were to pick three things to devote most of your mental energy to, what would these three things be?
Inventing time travel, making awesome videos, hanging out with my friends.
What was the most enriching conversation you had recently? Who was it with and what was it about?
I recently had a very interesting conversation with a new friend about the idea of a circumstance. What is in a circumstance? What is outside of a circumstance? What must change within or around a circumstance for the circumstance itself to change? A circumstance, it seems, is an incredibly fluid container. And, a circumstance is inherently bound by time. Therefore, to change a circumstance, one must change the bounds of a circumstance or the contents within a circumstance, meaning either zoom or out of time OR change some immediate environmental factor. A circumstance is a relationship between the moment and its container. How do circumstances interact? Do they overlap or push against each other? This is what I’m interested in right now.
What is the most surprising element of your life and what is something that your life features that you could have predicted as a kid?
The truth is I am having a very hard time thinking about any element of my life that is surprising and that may be because every part of my life right now is entirely surprising but also in a very big way, completely logical to the life that I’ve always wanted for myself. I’ve always been creative and experimental and therefore I have always operated my life like a kind of creative experiment. So naturally the big version of the thing is filled with identical fractions. I’ve been living in New York City for the past 6ish years – I suppose that is a surprise, or more specifically how much I grew to love New York. I got a job working for The New York Times right out of Quest so I graduated and started working next to Times Square 2 weeks later. That was like a terrifying movie. That was a very surprising turn of events. But going to Quest was also somewhat of a surprising turn of events. I think the truth is every day I’m still totally shocked by the strangeness of my reality. And also – of course!
Any ongoing projects/activities that uplift your soul? Or what seems to uplift your soul these days?
Creating things is always what makes me feel the best. I love taking photos and videos and taking time to observe the world. Listening makes me feel really good. I’ve been teaching animation courses and that has been very uplifting. Laying in the sunshine. Creating with my hands. Also I’ve been really enjoying typing lately. You press little buttons to make words. How fun is that!
In your life, who is the happiest person you know and what do you pick up on most in this person (that suggests they are happy)?
My sister seems happy to me in the sense that she is doing well. She always makes friends easily and seems to have no trouble at all navigating tensions of body and mind. I suppose it is a sense of ease that I am interpreting as happiness. I associate easiness with lightness and when I am happy I feel very very light. The happiest people I know are the ones who move with ease.
Pick three words to describe your Quest experience.
Miss, it, everyday
When you gather with friends, what is your most favorite thing to do, as of late? With this question, feel free to share the quirky specifics, if these quirky specifics happen to exist.
I really like to talk about ideas. I’m thinking about ideas all the time, so when I have friends who want to think about my ideas with me, I find that we can go much deeper into certain channels of inquiry. I also like making music with my friends. I also like playing games and putting on weird plays of sorts. Generally, I really really like to laugh. I enjoy pretty much any situation that is conducive to deep laughter. Like when we get to stop talking about ideas and just roll around on the floor.
How do you decide what to eat for dinner or take for lunch? Walk us through your process.
Eating dinner or lunch first requires me to realize that I am hungry. The truth is I usually eat one meal sort of in between lunch and dinner when it gets to the point where I can no longer concentrate on the thing I am meant to be focusing on. It’s a phase I thought I might grow out of but now I’m not particularly concerned with that because whatever I’m doing is keeping me alive just fine. I don’t really like using the stove. The thing is, everything I do I manage to do in the messiest way possible. I’ve never particularly taken to cooking, likely because I’ve never really taken to cleaning. The other truth of the matter is that I actually don’t mind. I am seriously totally fine eating cold soup and toast at 4pm. I actually really look forward to it and enjoy the way it tastes. That being said, I am forever indebted to my friends who cook for me. Thank you for reminding me of the wonderful pleasures of the world.
In your opinion, what is the food/meal with the greatest texture? Please explain your choice.
Beans probably have the greatest texture. I mean come on. They are like smooth and dense and starchy but sort of creamy also? Beans are like if bread and a nut had a cousin. I am not sure what’s going on with beans but they are wonderful.
