What is Water

What happens when there is an excess of water? Mold, open wounds festering, rotting food (bedrotting), unpleasant smells, ironically dryness (licking one's lips leads to even dryer lips). Sogginess, mud, in extreme cases, storms, and hurricanes, indigestion, bloating, wrinkled fingers. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), excessive dampness （湿） could cause inflammation, heaviness, sluggish digestion, and excessive mucus production. I got that list from ChatGPT. And what is water? Water is a liquid, something adheres to the shape of the container. That is what a liquid is. Different from a gas, which bounces around fills a container, and a solid, which does neither. But more than that, there are different types of water--ocean water, lake water, river water, water in different forms--coffee, tea, sparkling water, soda. I think that's why we have the slang "tea" in our day and age--it is because we are aware that everything is water, and maybe a slightly tasty water, namely tea. 

I think we are living in the age of water. This is what I want to talk about in this blogpost. I think we are living in the age of water, and there is maybe an excess of water, currently. If we go by astrological elements, earth, water, fire, and air, and we think of these things as happening in cycles, maybe--and I'm not an astrologist by any means--we are currently living in the cycle of water, and maybe even water excess. Phones are water. Social media is a vast bottomless ocean. Information flows like water, from high to low. And the movies are about water. 

I think we were previously living in a time of fire. When I was a teenager in the early 2010's, California was in a drought--and it still very well may be--but I don't remember there being too many fires. It was only recently that there were more wildfires, at least in my memory and impressions. But even if we are currently experiencing more fire, I think we are currently in an age of water, and I think we were previously in an age of earth and fire. Things were more concrete and passionate, more tangible and real. I think another internet slang that is telling is the use of the word "real" for everything--"you're so real", "this is so real". I think this 反而 is a comment on the unreality, the liquid surreality of the times we live in. Though we were living in fire before, eventually the heat got too hot in the kitchen, and we managed to quench the fire of the earth, but then the quenching water flooded, and the water got dirty, and it led to a sort of sewer. 

But what makes something fire, and what makes something water, anyway? Fire is when heat encounters something dry on the earth, and combusts with oxygen to produce a flame. Water occurs when a hydrogen atom bonds with an oxygen molecule to form a liquid mass known as water. Fire burns, and liquid conforms. Water puts out fire, but it can also be boiled by it. Liquid conforms to any space that it is in; that is the nature of liquid. Is peanut butter a liquid? I wondered to myself in high school. A quick google AI-assisted search now shows that peanut butter is a liquid, though it is a "non-Newtonian" liquid, because force has to be applied to it in order for it to flow.  

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I think the recent wildfires in Southern California were a manifestation or a sign of water, if we are thinking astrologically. Even though it seems like fire should be pretty obviously a "sign of fire" or a manifestation of it, I think it was actually one of water. I will delineate what I mean. For instance, I think the Palisades fires in particular were a sign of water, because of the fires' close proximity to the ocean. Malibu completely burned down, and the Palisades themselves, if I am interpreting the Wikipedia page's images correctly, were also a Western LA community that was pretty close to the ocean. And the "hurricane-force" winds that were reported were, as they said, like a hurricane, which is something I associate with water, though there were technically no rains accompanying the winds. Essentially the fires were a hurricane without water, a hurricane of wind and fire. 

Now you might argue that the fires should be a sign of air and fire, if we are talking about astrological elements like that. And I would partially agree with you. In a way, the winds and fire were a sign or manifestation that the other elements were feeling an imbalance, the imbalance being an excess of water. I believe the four elements in astrology (again--air, fire, earth, and water) are there because they represent a cycle of causation and effect/affect within and throughout each other that must remain in a delicate balance, lest they cause natural disasters, personal tragedies, financial problems, or societal problems. 

If the current times we live in is water, then the 2010's were fire. I think the initial invention of the internet was more an extension of the hardware of the computer, and in that sense, the early internet was concrete, like the earth. But with the creation of YouTube and Facebook in the 2000's, and then Instagram and Twitter slightly later, everyone had a platform and a way to share their own thoughts. In a way, the early social media, Internet 2.0, was like fire, a fire sign, because we were blazing a path for future generations to come. Everything felt so new, and the new ability to communicate, to share, to commiserate, to make fun was like a fire, blazing in the darkness of the internet. Like a fire, the early social media age felt like the start of something new, a new opportunity, something warm, something light.

But now, the social media, instead of fire, feels like water, a vast, bottomless depth. Scrolling on one's phone feels akin to taking a deep dive in the ocean. And the way everyone's lives are connected through Instagram stories, a simple tap into the ether away, feels very liquid. The very hierarchy and inner workings of social structures and social media in that sense feels very liquid, in that it is constantly changing, and ever mutable. If social media is water, then we are drowning in it. 

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In traditional Chinese medicine, there is a concept known as zhuo, 浊, which means turbidity, or the impurity of liquids in the body. I remembered this concept because I read this Chinese medicine book when I was a linguistics undergrad at UCLA. The first month I was there, I found this book, called "How to Read Chinese", and I carried this book with me everywhere. It was this blue hardcover book between the size of a novel and the size of a textbook, and it was around 300-400 pages. It was putatively a book on how to read Chinese, given the fact that each article was followed by a vocabulary list, replete with pinyin and definitions, and the title of the book was "How to Read Chinese", but it was actually a book on traditional Chinese medicine. Each article in the book was on a topic on traditional Chinese medicine, and the vocabulary lists following the articles were terms in traditional Chinese medicine. One such term was 浊, which refers to the liquids in the body being too heavy, dirty, or stagnant. 

Something or a body can become zhuo, 浊, if there is too much liquid in the body, liquid that is stuck in the body, or liquid that is stagnant in the body. I think an example of this is the blood being clogged due to an excess of cholesterol, and the body feeling bogged down or stuck as a result. I think another example of the liquids being too impure in the body could be the consumption of impure substances, like drugs, cigarettes, or maybe even things like coffee or tea.

I think if social media is like one vast ocean, or like a river, then one has to be conscientious of what they pour into it. If one were to think of the social internet in this way, then one would not want to make the water impure, so to speak. One would naturally want to avoid 浊, to avoid creating a dirty water, a stuck water, a stagnant water. One would not want to pour anything too solid down the drain, lest one clogs the drain, if one were going on with this metaphor. 

Recently two movies that I saw that had vast bodies of water in them were Nezha 2 and Moana 2. Both sequels, both animated. The first being a Chinese animated movie about a demonic spirit who goes to heaven to complete some tasks to protect his homeland. I fell asleep during the second half of the movie because of anxiety, but the parts that I saw featured the deep ocean, where the dragons resided. Moana 2, is as you know, about Moana, an islander girl who goes on an adventure in the ocean, for similar reasons--to protect her clan. It, of course, featured the ocean almost as a character in the movie. Both movies came out within about the last month and a half. 

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One of the things I learned in high school physics is that electricity acts kind of like water, in that it also has a current, and the electricity flows from one point to another much like water. It also has pressure like water. Electricity is basically like water, except instead of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, it's moving electrons. I didn't learn much in high school physics, because most of it went over my head. But if electricity is like a liquid, then it makes sense that the smartphones we all have could make it feel a bit like we're drowning. 

In high school, I was obsessed with the author David Foster Wallace. One of his most famous, viral moments was his commencement speech "This is Water". In the opening line, he tells a joke. Two fish are swimming along, and an old fish swims by and asks, "How's the water, boys?" And one fish turns to the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" This joke is meant to show how we become unaware of the things that are all around us, all the time. Just like the fish in the story, we are so entrenched in water that we don't even realize it when we see it. Water is colorless, odorless, pretty much unnoticeable unless in a large mass or in a container like a cup or Tupperware. Water can be all around us, and we wouldn't notice it. Social media and our smartphones are so prevalent that we hardly know what they are anymore. "What the hell is social media?"

I feel like when I was in high school, I was always yearning and striving for one thing, love. At least in the first three years, that's what I wanted. I wanted to love, even more than I wanted to be loved. I was addicted to love. I was addicted to the feeling of love. And for that reason, I felt like maybe I was able to experience love more frequently, more fully, more deeply. Now, I'm a little bit afraid of love, of the way it's burnt my edges. 

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Something else that I think is a liquid is dreams. I think dreams are liquid because you are sinking into the lake of your subconscious, and the images in your mind are like liquid being reflected off of. 

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Something else that I've been noticing more recently is that I sometimes, when I'm talking to someone else, or when I myself am talking, notice that the words that come out are not what I would expect them to be. Almost as if the speaker changed their mind mid-sentence, and the word choice is a portmanteau of two different thoughts. Liquid.