Archive for July, 2008
This is super-backlogged - from about 8 months ago when I was in the Philippines.
There’s no common word in Chinese for “I will .” To say something like “Tomorrow I will go to the church,” you literally say “Tomorrow I want to go to the church.” It’s assumed that you’d better well want to go to the church because… well, you’re going, and vice versa.
if you want to go but can’t, you have to explicitly say “Tomorrow I want to go to the church, but I have a meeting,” or something like that. If you don’t want to go but you’re going anyway, you say “Tomorrow I don’t want to go to the church, but I am required to go to the church,” which has the inference that you’d better well go to church anyway because… well, you’re supposed to. It’s an awkward sentence construction for my used-to-thinking-in-English brain.
Tomorrow I don’t want to go to the church, but I am required to go to the church. The majority of my grumbling on this matter can be traced to the latest Mass tomorrow being at 7am, meaning my wake-up call is 5 (and that I have to get up earlier than that to have any hope of getting work done).
It’s All Saints Day, though. So we’re making the trip out to visit the round of dead folks (mostly my Angkong, my paternal grandfather), burning incense in the Buddhist tradition, receiving the Eucharist in the Catholic one. The sermons at our church - predominantly Chinese - are all halo-halo (mix-mix) with English and Wikibooks: Tagalog and Mandarin and Hokkien, sometimes in the same sentence. I’ve learned enough of the four languages now to be able to tell which one the priest is speaking at any given time, but I still have no clue what he’s saying.
Not that I usually do. When I’m visiting my parents in Chicago and go to church with them, the distance to the pulpit (no lipreading without binoculars) and the echoes from the sound system render sermons in English incomprehensible as well. At least last week I was able to get the vague idea that GOD WILL ANSWER OUR PRAYERS! because the priest had the congregation do this call-response thing.
Priest: When
,
Congregation: GOD WILL ANSWER OUR PRAYERS!
(Repeat 10x.)
Oh. The Philippines is incredibly Catholic. I think it was 85% at last count - much higher around the Manila area (there’s also a decent count of Muslims, but they mostly live in the south). Once when I was walking through the shopping mall, I heard muzak being piped through the overhead speakers… but also a man’s voice saying “…mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen hail Mary full of grace the Lord is…” I ran to my aunt. “Rosary! Praying on speakers! In mall!” I whispered to her in disbelief. “Oh yes,” she said. “They always do that here during the lunch break. The owner is very pious.”
I’ve since gotten used to seeing banners advertising Mass in the shopping malls. Mass is actually held in the shopping malls - they clear a corridor or a sitting area, the priest comes, everything. And then you’re in a convenient retail location afterwards, so it’s good for both your soul and their revenue stream. I’ve also gotten used to seeing huge, multi-story billboards advertising religious retreats - bigger than some of the billboards that advertise drag queens and pop stars and provocative pants (sometimes right next to the religious retreat signs).
Random street corners are crammed with grottos of the Virgin Mary; pictures of saints crowd the walls (sometimes next to a little altar with porcelain statues of Chinese gods - hedge your bets, I guess). Angels and the bleeding hearts of Mary and Jesus gush airbrushed blood on the sides of public transport. Even in the slums, you’ll see little tables outside topped with the remnants of umbrellas that have seen better days, the words TENDER JUICY HOT DOG! or RC COLA MASARAP NAMAN DI BA? (RC Cola is delicious really isn’t it?) shielding the rosaries, garlands of flowers, and statues of beatifically smiling people in long robes. It’s even a swear. Sort of. “Jesmaryosep!” (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph - and I definitely spelled that wrong) isn’t really an expletive, but an exclamation of surprised incredulity Filipinos say where Americans might yell “Holy shit!”
Strangely enough, I’ve found that my views of how active my personal Catholicism-o-meter is are often in direct proportion to the inverse of the surrounding Catholicness of my environment. If I’m surrounded by uberpious Roman Catholics urging me to participate in church, I’ll go through the motions but get overwhelmed and flighty with all the perceived pressure and not really want to be there. If I’m surrounded by very low-key Catholics or people of other faiths, I’m more liable (and able) to think about it on my own time, get curious, read things, eventually sometimes even get myself to a service.
I just know that my parents will read this and my father will (again) suggest that I become a missionary nun.
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
The 3-hour battery of tests they ran me through at the communications clinic was fascinating, and yup - I’ve got a mild-to-moderate speech impediment characterized by various kinds of nasal resonance (I rely on bone condunction to hear parts of my own speech, so I project my voice towards my nose instead of out through my mouth). It’s typical of people with hearing impairments. Also, I randomly drop syllables at the end of words, don’t articulate consonants, and have a blasted hard time with the R and L sounds (as in, I can’t say them, really).
This is all pretty old-hat to anyone who’s ever heard me talk. Starting in 10 days, I’ll be fixing it. Let’s see how fast I can learn to control something I can’t sense… it took maybe a week of daily practice with a teacher to click into being able to pronounce consonants in Chinese I could not differentiate between, so I have confidence I’ll be able to do it even faster in my native language.
Also hard (but something I thought I’d gotten used to): playing music I can’t hear. I made an awful mess of the trio when Tank and Nikki and I tried it out for the first time yesterday. I’ve been accustomed to playing an invisible right hand for a long time, but when other instruments came in around the same frequencies as the right-hand parts I could hear, suddenly my right hand disappeared.
And then my hand was playing notes that I couldn’t hear but all these other notes around the same range (but sounding suspiciously like a cello and a clarinet) were coming in where I could hear with straining - it’s like moving your fingers trying to play “Jingle Bells” but having “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” come out very softly and at a different tempo instead. Cause-and-effect breaks down. I flounder.
It got a little better when I switched from the piano to the crummy electric keyboard because then I could see the other folks playing rather than having faint disembodied voices coming from behind.
This is going to take some getting used to.
Saturday, July 5th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I think my brain is a little better now. Thank you, Andrew, sheet lightning, fresh mozzarella cheese, and French bread, and jazz piano.
I’d like to read this paper on free universities, but don’t know how/where I can get access to it. Time to email libraries…
The history and philosophy of the free university, defined as an organization that offers noncredit classes to the general public in which “anyone can teach and anyone can learn,” is explored. Offered is practical advice for starting a free university center or exchange and ensuring its success.
It talks about several free universities like the ones in Baltimore and Colorado. To that I’d add things like Arbitrary Hour and the employee-run open tutorial sessions at places like Google (according to Greg), TOPP (huzzah for dwins and topp-talks!), OLPC (or so I’ve heard, though they started after we left for Chicago), and - well, wait… why doesn’t every company do this?
What does a good documentation portal look like? (Yes, I’m thinking of OLPC and TOPP as I look through these). Here’s the Creative Commons Documentation page. What things should be emulated, what discarded?
Tomorrow I am planning on teaching myself how to BBQ by way of providing food for the family and friends. I have not done this before. Hamburgers (real ones, not preformed patties - and with cheese folded into a pocket in the middle), hot dogs, red peppers, shrimp, zucchini, asparagus, and anything else that looks like its tastiness will be improved by FIRE. Marshmallow toasting as well. Berry smoothies.
Oh. Speaking of family and friends, the house is quite full. Nikki and I are in my room, my cousins Melanie and Mia are staying with Melanie’s mom and sister Audrey in my brother Jason’s room; Jason himself is on the floor of the office-loft, and two of his friends are in the music room on the sofa. My grandmother is in the guest room. Chris and Andrew were in the basement, but Chris is out this weekend so it’s just Andrew down there now. And of course my parents, who are used to having their house turned into a hostel by now.
I like living in a full house (or at least a temporarily full house - I need space sometimes as well). Last night I ended up in a chokehold on the kitchen floor scrabbling to take a stuffed dog away from a 4-year-old. (Tormenting each other! It’s such a fun bonding experience!)
We have too many ripe bananas at the office. I will remedy this shortly.
Downside: With people in the music room, I can’t play even my dinky electric keyboard with headphones, because the keys make a clicky-clack noise. And I’m not called the master of keyboard thunder for nothing.
My brain isn’t all the way back together - lack of cohesion in my writing is good evidence of such - but at least I feel like a Mel again, and that’s pretty darn good.
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
This post isn’t particularly useful, and people who have Things To Do (as in, “if you don’t want to waste your time”) can skip it.
Sometimes my mind fibrillates. This has roughly the same effect on my thought processes as ventricular fibrillation does on your circulatory system, except with less intensity and without the “sudden death within minutes” bit. It’s more like a temporary inability to do anything useful because the mind flits between too many things at once and can’t stop (but at the same time is conscious of and frustrated by this flailing. Alas, they do not sell brain-AEDs.
This one was very mild, but it bubbled close enough to the surface that I figured a venting might not be bad. I went wandering and blasted my ears out walking by a concert in the park nearby, turned cartwheels and rolls in the field until my arms got tired and started collapsing underneath me, and lay back in the grass and blew away the bugs that tried to land on my face. Did some other stuff too. And I went for a “cussing run,” which is where I race along saying all the stupid self-doubting insults rummaging around in my head to get them out of my system*. Only this time I was out of shape so it was more “run, curse, gasp, walk. Run, curse, gasp, walk. Curse walking. Curse while walking. Repeat.”
*for a while.
Managed to get that wordless fibrillation under control enough to walk into the house fairly normal two hours later and attack some potato salad, then sort of languidly poke at the piano (though not with any sense of seriousness or musicality), read some math and electronics books and IEEE transactions on education papers, then yammer a lot in writing (case in point: this). Really, I’m just waiting for everyone else in the house to go to sleep so I can seep out a little. Just have to do it before my mom leaves for eucharistic adoration in the wee hours of the morning so I don’t catch an earful.
I’m always fascinated at how I can write about things here that I have a hard time talking to people about face to face. Having a mediating artifact buffer gives me the ability to be more honest and forthright and raw because I can vent* without feeling overly guilty about taking up someone else’s time (since you can all just skip this post and come back when there’s more usefulness in the feed.) See? Blathering uselessly here means I don’t have to do it as much in real life.
*inasmuch as this is venting. It’s still very controlled. Higher intensities involve the inability to cease locomotion. I have been lucky enough to have a series of roommates who are deep sleepers, because I thrash when I’m restless. Sometimes, if I’m really restless, I completely rearrange my room… which only works if I have a single. (EricVW, circa 3am: “Wait… wasn’t your bed on that… other… wall? And lofted?” Me: “Yeah, I couldn’t sleep and I had a screwdriver.”)
I’m also grinning because I know that there’s a good chance that at least one or two people reading this post will be sitting across a table from me as they read it, and I’m amused at the differences between the Mel they’re reading from now and the one runnng around (hopefully doing Useful Things) several feet away. (Hi.) I much prefer the other, occasionally-competent, far-less-venty Mel other people sometimes see me as, but Venty Ranty Ineffective Mel sometimes needs to run around as a counterpoint. Part of why I love being up in the middle of the night is that the night is my time, but I’m not missing anything.
I’m tired, but not exhausted enough to sleep. I’d hoped running around for two hours would drain enough energy out of me to knock me out, but that’s not the case. I’ll try that anyway. Thrash around for a while. Pass out. Hopefully wake up and do Productive Things. Stuff.
Or maybe I’ll read more Horowitz and Hill. Or another article from the journal in front of me. Or find Greg’s letter in the swamp that the table has turned into. Feh. Will post this. Then turn off computer. Then decide. Eventually sleep.
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
My brain’s turned off and I can’t write about or create things that don’t yet exist, so this will be an attempt to break out of that by writing about things that have already happened. It’s also a thank-you for all the recommendations on piano music. (It’s also a great exhibition of how I postpone the start of actual content by putting meta-content and disclaimers before it.)
The first piece I’m working on was From The Interwebs (thanks, public domain!) and it’s the Rachmaninoff op. 3 no. 2 (prelude in C-sharp minor) because… I was downloading pdfs of music and started playing this one (my laptop was balanced on top of the horizontally-flattened music stand). It sounded good. I started memorizing it. At that point, I figured I might as well go for it.
After a while (memorizing the first 7 bars), I noticed my hands had started to hurt in that lovely “I’ve been typing too long” way. Rachmaninoff had big hands, and his stretches of broad chords rooting deep into the keys are one of the things I adore about playing his pieces - but I do not have big hands, and splaying them out to grasp the notes becomes a strain after a while. (Side note: one of the nice things over the last week has been going through the sonatas I played as a kid and playing them without the modifications I’d had to make when my tinier-then fingers couldn’t reach octaves and stretch out to arpeggios. I’m playing them very lazily and badly, but the fact that I can play them lazily now is pretty nifty.)
Back to the “Rachmaninoff had big hands” deal: fortunately, one of my usual practice modalities is in the “ooo-shiny” vein - that is, I alternate between playing a few phrases on the piano and working on whatever I’m in the middle of (code, reading a book, math, whatever), switching back and forth the instant my attention wanes. One of my dorm room arrangements had my piano directly behind my desk, so I’d swivel my chair back and forth between my computer and piano keyboards - I liked that arrangement and would love to do it again once I have an apartment and a keyboard. Anyhow, this keeps my fingers from being hyperextended for too long, and it’s how I’m going to have to learn the prelude if I want to have things that (1) sound good and (2) don’t hurt.
After a trip to the music store, I also have Debussy’s Arabesque #1 (thanks, Katie!) Tank’s mom had this on the piano when we visited her house, I played through it and made a terrible mess. The nice thing about Debussy is that his music just floats clear of sounding incoherent, and that’s what gives it such a dream-like quality… and makes it difficult for me to sightread. At some point I’ll actually study it rather than sightreading it badly each time I play, but I think I’ll work the Rachmaninoff through first.
Nikki also found some clarinet pieces with piano accompaniments, but the piano bits are fairly easy, so that shouldn’t be too bad. Then we found some clarinet-cello-piano trios and settled on a Ferdinand Ries trio in B flat major (Op. 28) for the three of us to play (Tank on cello, Nikki on clarinet, myself on piano). It’s not bad either - the challenge is that half the notes Nikki (and my right hand, for that matter) are playing are outside my hearing range. Also that I have to go through and do fingerings for the streams of rapid arpeggios running through the 40 pages (…yay) because my hands have forgotten how to turn around each other.
Also coming down the line:
Bach-Busoni Chaconne in D minor, suggested by cjb. After (slowly) sightreading through about half of it this evening, I am slightly skeptical that the piece is actually physically possible for a human being with two 10-fingered hands to play (It is, apparently - I just need to figure out how). It requires your hands to rapidly switch between odd intersections with each other, and then do crossovers three octaves over, and then switch back up and down and up and… at one point the music splits into three staffs because the range of frequencies being played simultaneously is just ridiculous. It’s going to be brutally difficult and take a long time. It is going to be very, very pretty.
At some point I’d love to be able to take on Rhapsody in Blue. And do jazz improvisation with a trio (or more)… and play swing piano. In my inanely wild dreams, I will also someday play bass (string and electric) and percussion (for jazz/swing music, and/or perhaps back to taiko drumming again). And, y’know, if a Madrigals troupe needs an alto recorder player, I might hop back into that for a spell. This starts getting into Ridiculously Overambitious Territory, though, and if I can play the prelude in C# minor and stumble my way through the Ries trio by the time we hit Boston again in August I’ll be a pretty durn happy camper. I do, however, resolve not to pick up an oboe again. That was a bad idea back in 5th grade. Me + reeds = unhappy reeds.
Someday I’ll be able to afford piano lessons again. I’d like to take them then. I wonder how good I’d be if I hadn’t stopped playing 8 years ago. Ah well. I’ve got a lifetime to get back into it again. And someday I’ll buy electronic instruments and headphones so I don’t eternally bother my housemates and neighbors with the cacophony of practice, and so when I play on real instruments it’ll sound good.
Brain-cobwebs are a little clearer, but not gone yet. I’ll keep writing.
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »