Archive for April, 2009
While I can still type for a few minutes…
Other things that have happened lately: Kelliott’s suite (/home) introduced me to the wonder that is the 5 Guys burger; Ritter and I have yet another new project and continue to bounce lifehacks off each other. Andy P came over last night, and we managed to sleep before 4am (which is an accomplishment, because the two of us can talk for hours despite being exhausted). Andy is kicking my ass to get a company together, refusing to hire me for his before I chase my own dreams down. It’s good to have friends like that.
I have been adrift for a while – enjoying the feeling, learning how to relax and not have my life sucked up by ONE GIGANTIC CAUSE (work – including work through my studies). I’m articulating myself (to myself, first) as an individual working for something bigger than myself rather than solely a tiny part of larger groups and movements, which is… very strange. I still feel mute without the ability to publish very much due to the RSI of suckage, but this is starting to change (both the RSI and the feeling mute).
It’s forcing me to learn how to give myself feedback, to learn how to trust my own thoughts and opinions, and to not be dependent on what other people say (while still being responsive to it). This, combined with the greater somatic/kinesthetic awareness I’ve been working on for a few weeks (ramping up in intensity – I am planning to spend a few hours a day on it over the next 2 weeks, and have been doing so already, unplanned) combine to make it… it’s odd. I can almost physically feel myself becoming a person, stretching slowly – it feels like being a young tree, growing, sap pushing out through branches, furling out new leaves with green and tender veins.
I’ll be at Henry’s tonight; here are the things I need to do.
- Before I leave for his place, I need to set aside some ethnography books for Chris to take over for Leslie’s SCOPE team to borrow, stuff my sleeping bag into my backpack, and make sure I’ve got Henry’s books so I can return them to him.
- Return Andy’s laptop.
- Print and mail my MA taxes (the only ones I couldn’t e-file). That gets that out of the way.
- (possibly tomorrow:) book plane tickets, workshop, and start looking for a financial advisor to consult in Chicago at the start of next month.
- More exercise and music (ear training today, since I’m not going to be around a piano). Last night I walked through Harvard square calling out and visualizing (visually and auditorily) chord transitions for a song I’m trying to memorize – “Emaj6! F9! Bb7, Fmin7, Bb7!”* Damn. Music is much more than playing the right notes at the right time; that really is just the beginning. Damn. (Yeah, you’re probably getting tired of me exclaiming about this all the time, but this has been a huge revelation to me. I’m actually learning how to hear.)
*bonus points for anyone who can guess which song this is – I think I’ve provided enough information.
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
For the past 5 years, I’ve been trying to file my taxes. My parents usually throw mine and my brother’s in with their pile to send to their accountant. This year, stubbornness prevailed, and I got to file my own taxes for 2008. This turned out to be one of those idiotic ideas that became a hard-won education, because in 2008 I…
- lived in Illinois (and had investments)
- moved to Massachusetts
- was employed as an intern (paid as a contractor) in Massachusetts (while a nonresident)
- …and employed as an employee by the same company in Massachusetts at a later date
- …and had an internship in New York
- …and didn’t have formal employment for more than half the year
- …and had jury duty
- and WHEEEEEEE
I have learned to file taxes. Boy, have I.
I’m now much more motivated to keep good financial records, and have a better idea what that term means. I also have mixed feelings on my parents handling a substantial portion of my finances (this year I finally opened up a savings account that was solely in my name; all my other accounts are joint with them). On the one hand, I certainly appreciate their foresight and care in all this – it’s nice to have an IRA, and I do like that (thanks to them) I already had one by the time I asked (as a teenager, when I found out that IRAs existed).
On the other hand, I still feel more powerless than I’d like to handle my own finances, even if I’ve been supporting myself for a number of years now. And I feel like that by not having to do it myself from the beginning, I missed out on a lot of learning opportunities that would have done me good to have experienced earlier. Doing my own taxes this year helped a lot. But still… it just doesn’t feel right to be 22 and not know what accounts your parents may have opened for you.
This is a dependence I’ve been growing increasingly uncomfortable with, and I’ve talked about it with my mom and dad since I was 17 (at least – possibly earlier; I know I’ve had this conversation with them every year starting when I entered college, if not before). They always say they’ll take care of it. Which I do appreciate. They want to take care of me. And I want to take care of myself. And I think they don’t trust me to do it properly, or worry that it’s too much trouble (because I’m always busy, etc) and worry that I have no money (which I don’t) and am unlikely to settle into the normal steady way of generating income (which is true). I’ve gotten a lot of “when you settle down in one place and have a steady long-term job,” which… honestly, I don’t know if or when this is going to happen.
But dammit, my finances are my responsibility, and I know they’ll be complicated and probably annoyingly burdensome, but I should be taking care of them and if that’s what I have to do then I’m willing to put up with it. And if this makes my dad angry, then… it does. (I could probably have handled that conversation better, though. At the time, it was the most polite refusal of help I could muster. And we were both tired and grouchy.) I’m not very financially sophisticated, but I’d like to be, and I can only do that if I feel like I’ve got complete control over and responsibility for my own money. It’s a long process. My parents and I are working it out. They’re doing the best they know how, too.
For my 23rd birthday, I’m asking for time with a financial counselor (preferably in the Chicago/Glenview area, so my parents can come for at least one session). I don’t know how to find a good one, how to prepare (and what questions to ask) so I can make the best of use of my time and theirs, how much this costs, or how long / how many sessions I’ll have to schedule with one. I’m looking for a one-time “here’s what you should set up,” since I think my finances should be simple enough to not need a constant advisor, though I’d like to have a checkup visit every year depending on how helpful it turns out to be.
Whoa, that was more than enough typing for the day. Off to give Andy back his laptop, then to Henry’s…
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Nagle and I have been geeking out about somatic awareness, posture, physiology, and pain (neck/back pain for him, hands/wrists/arms for me) lately. I overdid it Friday, which is why I’ve been off computers for a while – but since I can only really type one thing this evening, here’s what I’ve been discovering.
- Driving also makes my hands unhappy (discovered while in Chicago last week). Nikki says that’s because my shoulders are also extended forward when I drive.
- Rolling my shoulders back also hurts in the tender “I don’t think there’s supposed to be a knot under my collarbones on either side” sort of way. Attempting to stretch. Over the past two weeks I have discovered that my right shoulder is often close to frozen, that my elbows are double-jointed*, and that hip flexibility is eerily great in one direction (I can butterfly with no pain or stretch feeling whatsoever) but doesn’t otherwise exist. Yea, verily, I am messed up. Fixing!
- Pain seems to manifest first in the pinky, then the ring finger of my right hand, followed by the back of the web of my left thumb radiating out into the base of my thumb. Then my hands begin to mirror each other, then my forearms start getting sore and there’s a sharp pain in the inside of my left wrist, followed by a sharper (but later) one in the right. If I’m hyperfocusing and carry on too long (this only happened once) my pinky and ring fingers begin curling under in self-preservation as the muscles there get stiff and involuntarily contract-o-riffic, and I’m wincing as I poke at the keyboard with my index and middle fingers and an occasional thumb. This would be why I haven’t posted for a bit.
- I am ridiculously not aware of where my muscles and bones are. I borrowed Nagle’s Feldenkrais book and it is kicking my ass. I think I spent about a half-hour last night trying to figure out where my lower back muscles were and how to relax them while sitting on a chair. I can’t stand up from a chair without slamming my feet into the floor, either. Apparently my default method of moving is “begin acceleration! stop when you crash into something!” which is really interesting. Also, cantilevering neck forward == ow, but how else do I read? When I balance my head nicely on my spine, it’s like my muscles are trying to pull it back out to where they’re used to being.
- The muscles around my eyes and the base of my jaw are perpetually tense. Walking without my glasses on and periodically rubbing them (around my eyes/jaw, not my glasses) seems to help.
- Piano-playing does not cause pain, even when pursued for extended (3+ hours) periods. I wonder why. This may change if I decide to pick up the Rachmaninoff piece again (playing his stuff seriously hyperextends my fingers, and I can only practice it in 10-30 minute spurts).
*I was reading Spang’s book on RSI and saw a “doublejointedness may cause problems” paragraph along with a picture of a normally extended elbow. “That’s odd,” I thought. “My elbow goes way farther.” I walked to the dining room and asked the nearest few people there to extend their elbows, which they did. I blinked. “That’s it? Um… guys, does this look weird to you?” I asked, and threw mine out. In unison, the table shouted “Holy shit!”
I took that as a yes.
Sunday, April 5th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
On a more somber note, my smallest* cousin was hospitalized yesterday. It looks okay – definitely not as bad as mine was, and I don’t think there’s any doubt he’ll pull through, but my family is having panic flashbacks because he’s 2.5 and has pneumonia. When that happened to me at exactly the same age, I almost died and ended up becoming Not Hear Good Girl instead. (This is the time the generation above me still speaks of as “when you got sick” and doesn’t go into details on. Everyone older than me remembers this time. A lot.)
Weird to be looking at it from this side of things. I feel kind of strange because the first thought I had when I heard was “well, if the same thing happens, at least he’ll have someone to ask about it.” Which I’m pretty sure is what you aren’t supposed to think when your little cousin is in the hospital. But there it is.
I hope I don’t have to talk with him about hearing aids before he goes to kindergarten, though. Another normal “congratulations, you’re going to school now!” celebration in a few years would be nice.
*tied for smallest with his twin, technically. Actually, he’s a tiny bit older, so second-smallest is most accurate.
Friday, April 3rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Woodie’s talk* at the Engineer of the Future 2.0 conference plus the (proposed) Learning Opportunities With Creation of Open Source Textbooks (LOW COST) Act of 2009 equals…
…man, what a great time to not know yet what I’m doing next! The possibilities are endless, and more and more open up every day. Now to chase them down and make them real.**
*I’m trying to get his slides.
**And to do taxes. Wheeeeeeeeeeee.
Friday, April 3rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
From an email to Elsa, two days after the “whoa, the word sonata actually means specific things?” moment.
Aha! I think I have a way to explain why I was confused on Wednesday. See Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.
Excerpt from Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, emphasis mine.
Consider the expert chef, for instance. Awash in a haze of flour, spices, and a growing pile of soiled pans left for an apprentice to clean, the expert chef may have trouble articulating just how this dish is made… many of their responses are so well practiced that they become preconscious actions… which makes it hard for us to observe and hard for them to articulate.
A novice cook, on the other hand, coming home after a long day at the office is probably not even interested in the subtle nuances of humidity and parsnips… The novice wants to know exactly how long to set the timer on the oven given the weight of the meat, and so on. It’s not that the novice is being pedantic or stupid; it’s just that novices need clear, context-free rules by which they can operate, just as the expert would be rendered ineffective if he were constrained to operate under those same rules.
In terms of music (theory and listening for phrases and emotion and things that aren’t “did the right note get hit at the right time”, and practicing, in particular), I’m a 1, maybe a 2. You’re way, way beyond that.
That’s why I tried to describe what you were showing me about harmonic progressions in terms of finite state machines. I was looking for a recipe.
Friday, April 3rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
My brother Jason has been bitten by the design bug. After a series of happy adventures in project-based classes, he’s decided to declare as an architectural design major at Stanford. I am telling him that training himself in statics and thermo and the usual basic standbys of a MechE degree is also a useful thing to do, though (mechE being the other degree he was considering). He’s trying to get to Boston this summer to do some design/engineering work; I hope he makes it so we can get a place together (possibly at pika).
Cool moment: when he described to me on the phone what he wanted to do and I said “actually, there’s a name for that… people make their living as experience designers,” and there was silence on the other end and then a breathless “really??!!??” Boy, do I know how that kind of moment feels…
Also: a list of hacker spaces, courtesy of Chris. IMSA is going to start a bunch. I’m looking forward to that.
By the way: limited computer use does, in fact, hurt less. Sweet. Also, homemade blueberry hand pies are awesome (and by extension, Lissa rocks completely, once again).
Friday, April 3rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Yesterday:
- CFS 6th graders got their XOs, and I saw kids using Sugar on their laptops in classrooms for the first time since I started volunteering at OLPC over 2 years ago. It was great to finally be there.
- Engineer 2.0 conference @ Olin. Ended up in a long discussion with Woodie Flowers on training materials and open-source learning practices. Need help explaining to him why OSS is awesome – he was surprised I liked it, I was surprised he didn’t, need to figure out where that perspective comes from. (I think we’ve seen different aspects of OSS.)
- Elsa taught me about sonata form by dissecting the Waldstein (as I asked many stupid questions, as usual) and holy cow people write books analyzing music I did not know this before. LIBRARY. TOMORROW. How could I ever have thought I’d learned all I was going to intellectually learn about music when I was 14? (Sure, I could practice more and play different pieces on the piano, but I knew how to sightread and play notes together fast at the approximate right volume. What more was there to it?*)
*SO MUCH MORE. It’s great – like living on a little island and then sailing off and bumping into a continent… and then having people tell you there were other continents out there too. Music! World! Expanding! Exponentially! AHAHAHAHA!
Despite this, I totally failboated at piano lessons today (when you can barely make a bass line cling to the chord progressions of songs you know, you’re really out of it), and Kevin was a real champ and cheered me up. MUST PRACTICE SO MUCH THIS WEEK ZOMG. And then Lissa bailed me out and kicked ass at cooking dinner tonight and we made a gluten-free, citrus-free, vegan meal with things nobody in the house disliked. Total win. It’s great to have teachers and friends who simultaneously help you up and kick your ass out of self-pity when you’re wallowing in suckitude. I want to be able to do that better.
My laptop is going to be at pika for a week. Yes, I’m behind on email again. This is teaching me a remarkable amount about efficient/effective communication and not being phone phobic, though. Ironically, I broke my phone charger today, so that’s item #1 on the agenda tomorrow morning (in sequence: yoga, library, get charger, get mini fakebook, do taxes, go for sanda training, and eat & play piano to fill the remainder of tomorrow’s noncomputer time).
Anyway, here is the autoresponse.
Hiya. I’m trying an experiment to fend off the RSI that seems to be impending – I’m leaving my laptop with some friends (not at my apartment) for a week so as to prevent me from using it incessantly while I’m learning to rewire my posture.
As such, I’ll be checking email once a day (after dinner) from 4/3 – 4/10 (both Fridays). So if you really need to reach me right this moment, send a text message to +1.847.970.8484. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for understanding.
–Mel (and Mel’s hands)
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
