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ELIZABETH STREB: I'm Elizabeth Streb and this is what's trending in my world.
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I worry—I still worry—that a rat will come into my loft and I've lived with rats
for so many years or when I run into a rat on the street, I freak out, so it hasn't happened
in quite a long time but I—that would signify something that would freak me out that I would
deeply dislike.
Or a snake I supposed.
Rats are worse.
Right now, I'm reading The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky and I purchased it in London
and it's hard to quantify.
It's in chapters and one of the chapters is this gentleman talking about going to meet
with Bill Gates and trying to put his finger on what is really the epiphany Bill Gates
had right around the time he was believing—this is a while ago—that the Internet was gonna
be the superhighway.
In the book, he wrote about that.
And the notion that all of these things that happen kind of in the world that are preemptory
but at the time you hear about them—like when you heard about the world wide web—I
remember thinking, what the heck is that?
And so he has one story after another about these magical things that happen in the world
and the complexity and the magic and I think he's tellin' stories.
I read more than one book at a time and I'm also reading Richard Feinman, The Character
of Physical Law.
I'm constantly struggling with that.
It was the issue of time and the more—not the present tense, but the past and the future
and I'm obsess with listening to his description of time and I've been trying to get a physicist
like Brain Green or Lisa Randel to define time.
And in fact some people will say that it doesn't exist and I want to know—Richard Feinman
would say, well you know you drop a cup of coffee and it smashes onto the ground and
then there's no way you can reverse that and bring it up and continue to drink it.
And I want to know if time exists and what the heck is it, from the point of view of
a practitioner.
So I have so many books on time.
I saw Leave the Lights On by Ira Sachs.
And it was great.
It was a beautiful movie, but my favorite movie is Runaway Train, which the screenplay
came from Kiwasowa many years ago.
Amelia Earhart because she had the guts even though I don't think she was ever fully alone,
to sit in a cold dark airplane and go all the way across the Atlantic.
And I love the mystery that they don't know where she went.
She probably went backwards in time and is now young as can be somewhere in a beautiful
island.
And I think the other one would be Mohammed Ali because of his bravery, his unbelievable
skill at boxing, which I think is physically harder than what Streb does and I wouldn't
say that about anything else and that he was the heavyweight champion of the world and
he wouldn't go to war.
I mean, right in the midst of his fame.
He refused to go to war.
To the Vietnam War.
I have one more favorite character that is nonfiction, from a long time ago maybe 1901.
Her name is Annie Etzin Taylor and she was the first human who got in a barrel and went
over Niagra.
I'm gonna say she was around 63.
A year older than myself.
Maybe she was the first person who lived and went over Niagra in a barrel, maybe she was
the first woman.
Who cares.
She got in a barrel and went over Niagra and she lived and I just think I would love to
have that ride.
I would love to do that ride.
That's a real move.
What I do that I love the most is to draw.
Especially for the last two years, I've been drawing circles.
I'm not drawing right now because I've finished major projects, but to sit in my drawing book
and imagine action in two dimensional space and ask questions on the side—it doesn't
get better than that.
I just think drawing is believing.
I'm Elizabeth Streb and you're watching me on Epiphany.
And you will have an Epiphany.