Archive for October, 2009
Shit happens sometimes. It’s a risk we take, one we can mitigate but ultimately not avoid. And when a community comes together and collectively creates a safe environment that turns a small crappy experience into a reaffirming message of support and solitude and participation in active countermeasures, then that’s the kind of world you want to live in.
I’m tired right now (landed back in DC a few hours ago and it’s now 4am) but hope to be less cryptic about this later, but suffice it to say that the folks at geekfeminism.org have been – and are – a real inspiration. A special thanks to Skud and Mackenzie for writing what they did.
Ok. Submitting a talk proposal, checking a package, going to bed; the rest of my to-do list can wait until tomorrow.
Friday, October 9th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Warren reports this Tui Na place in Waltham is a good, deep, painful, but extremely beneficial process to go through. I’m going to need to jackhammer out impending RSI doom shortly – I feel the very, very early warning twinges creeping up and am now being super-careful. Today’s lunch break will be a long and painful (but in that “it hurts because it’s good for you” way) Rolfing session in Evanston, thanks to Donald graciously agreeing to fit a nomadic hacker in at the last minute.
If (when?) my current keyboard gives up the ghost, I’m going to spring for a Microsoft bluetooth mobile keyboard 6000; it’s the only split-angled portable wireless keyboard I can find. I gotta say, of all the ergonomic keyboards that I’ve tried, the MS Natural 6000 still remains my favorite for the simple reasons that it (1) fits in my backpack and (2) does not cause me severe pain when I get into my “let me hyperfocus and become oblivious to the passage of time through several meals now” modes. It is expensive, though, which is why I am glad I will probably not need to get it for a while; my 6000 appears to be holding up just fine. Saves time on a buying decision when the time comes, though. Perhaps I plan things too far in advance.
(Huh, my thinking is scattered today, and I’m writing with a swagger; must lie down and think that out for a while tonight before I go to sleep.)
My bass is still not here. Sadness! I’m hoping to bring it to Raleigh so I can keep playing music in the evenings; I’ve been humming and memorizing bass lines all week. Dear travel 5-string fretless, where are you?
I ate dinner (eggplant parmesan) on a swingset, having stopped off at a nearby park to finish off my leftovers from last night. It was a giant swingset, too; I haven’t swung that high in… oh, maybe a year. And the swing was high enough off the ground that I didn’t need to awkwardly contort my legs at every down-swoop. Then I drove to the Indiana Dunes, which were on the way back home, clambered up the largest dune I could find, and watched the sun set behind Chicago from the other side of Lake Michigan.
Perhaps my mom is right about my old shoes; they do have holes in them, and when you climb a sand dune with shoes with holes, you end up with miniature sandboxes on your feet. Maybe I should either sew them up or chuck them and swap to an older pair of sneakers sans holes (I wear one pair of shoes at a time until they fall apart). Maybe I should… acknowledge that my spending habits can change now, and get another pair of shoes. We’ll see how much time I have tomorrow, and how I feel about it when I wake up. There is still sand in my shoes. It’s wet sand, so it won’t all come out right now. But the dunes were more than worth it. (If you are the faintest bit interested in photography/art-in-general and up in northern Indiana, GO SEE THE DUNES AT SUNSET. I’ve also been told they’re eerily beautiful in the dead of winter.)
Yep, definitely brainscattered. Well… a space heater should fix that soon – I know from large amounts of data starting in high school that my ability to regulate my body temperature goes down when I get tired, and warming myself up seems to have a “even if tired, can haz ease brain down into a gentler landing” effect (not as well corroborated as the “when tired, gets cold” thing, though).
Ah. The room is warm. Lovely. It’s time for bed.
Thursday, October 8th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 3 Comments »
I’m using this happy-fun-meta-play-time as a reward for myself for getting certain clusters of FI and FUDCon tasks done, so every time you see a post on this, it means I’ve been at least a little bit productive. ;-) This is from last night.
Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I read things. Like over 5 years of Fedora Marketing mailing list archives. I’ve been meaning to get a grounding in the history of Fedora Marketing for a while, and this seemed like one good way to do it (I read all the old meeting logs this summer when I first subbed in for Jack). The first pass took me about 3 hours, but at least 10 solid minutes (if not more) of that was taken up by “laughing so hard I can’t see the screen” time.
It was fascinating to watch people weave in and out of the list, see old conversations reappear, and notice what didn’t get written about on the list – things casually referenced in conversation that probably made perfect sense to everyone in context at the time, but which lead modern-day sociologists on hunts through the internet to find out What Everybody Else Was Talking About Back Then. Good times!
And yes, I said “first pass.” This was the roughest kind of qualitative analysis possible, basically done to get an overview (for myself) of what happened and pull out shiny bits I want to look at more a little later. Next up will be looking at those shiny bits in more detail and seeing if I want to do any further qualitative analysis (probably not; there’s plenty of actionable stuff in even this far-less-than-rigorously-done first pass, and I don’t think I’ll actually get more Marketing-fu from going through a more formal coding process) and then dumping the gzip files into Thunderbird 3, as the new beta 4 has lovely search/sort/stats capabilities I think I may be able to tinker with in EKG-esque style to get some quantitative stats.
So there will undoubtedly be much more detail later as I walk through the “look, selected links I found to be intriguing!” parade. However, the biggest lesson that this traipse through the archives has flash-baked into my mind is this:
Fedora Marketing is about strategy.
My notion of what “strategy” means is still forming; Greg explained it to me in terms of chess, Karsten in terms of battle, neither of which I have any practical experience with (except for playground skirmishes in my much younger years, which don’t exactly count). But from what I’ve gathered, strategy is long-term thinking, a plan of action rather than individual action items, the choice of a way to reach a specific goal. That having been said, we’ve got a ton of practical action items to hack through right now – feature profiles, FI deployment, and the list goes on. That having been said, all those action items move forward things that give us that bigger-picture “where are various things aimed?” view – maybe we’re more like scouts; what’s happening? Where are the pieces moving? How do we give people the information and the tools they need so they can aim at the targets that’ll get them where they want to go? Random musings from late at night; not very fully-formed yet.
One of the tough things about impending crunch times is that the tendency (for me, at least) is to put your head down and do work! and think “I am too busy to take time to explain to people in an understandable coherent manner what is going on,” which makes it next to impossible for people to jump in and help you when you most need it. I’m going to try an experiment and swing over to the other end of the spectrum from now ’till Beta in ~2 weeks; data will cross the marketing mailing list at high speed, and it will be as coherent as possible while still getting everything out in a notification and getting everything done, in that order. I know that we have to get things done, so I figure that if I try to holler before we do something, we’ll get both the hollering and the doing, whereas if we just jump straight to the “do,” things happen, but not with any semblance of transparency. Tomorrow, when I’m properly conscious, I’ll be simultaneously cranking through and more crisply articulating the to-do items on our list, so that it’s easier for other people to jump in, pick up a task, and help.
</thinking out loud>
Thursday, October 8th, 2009 | fedora | 2 Comments »
It’s nice to actually be able to concretely articulate some tradeoffs for at least one side of this decision-weighing – nomadhood, that is. I’ve yet to feel what it’s like to settle down – actually, I haven’t gone a year without moving since I turned 14.
Benefits of nomad-hood
- See the world. It’s hard to express the magnitude of this bullet point, but imagine me standing up and waving my arms around in giant circles here; one of my childhood dreams was (and still is) to travel, because I’m curious and read about things and just want to see them.
- I keep on hankering for new input, more input, just more – and being thrown into new places, new situations, new people is one of very, very few things I’ve found that fill me up in that way. I’ve heard other people describe travel as “draining” and “exhausting” – and it is – and I love that; it’s so rare for my capacity for energy output to be tapped in any sort of substantial way. Probably why I have benefit #1 up.
- Different perspectives. It’s made me a better person to see how people can react to things so many different ways, how different groups of people have shaped their environments and themselves.
- Food.
- Because the world is big and wide and beautiful.
Benefits of settling down
- A garden. I am not sure whether plants will ever survive being under my care (no luck so far), but if my thumb ever turns less non-green, I’d love to be pulling monster zucchini from the backyard
- Pets. I’ve wanted a dog since I was a little kid, but as the years go by I’ve begun to conclude that, while my own personality may be doglike (one common phrase friends use to describe me is “like a happy puppy”), a cat and I would probably make better companions (first interaction with purring cat, Thanksgiving 2008: “It’s vibrating!”), what with me being spasmodically hyperactive and not able to lavish large amounts of consistent daily attention on anything. If I could live with a dog, that might work; we could ramble enthusiastically around town together when I’m home, but the dog would be not-my-dog, and instead belong to a housemate or someone who could actually take care of it properly.
- The ability to totally trick out my living space and play with things like this (made by an Olin classmate). I have been planning X10 for my house since high school.
- Piano! I’ll consider myself “settled down” when I have a piano of my very own. A real one – a baby grand, if I can pull it off space-wise (it’s not like I’ll have that much other furniture). As much as I adore my keyboard, there’s something particularly satisfying about an honest-to-god piano.
- It’s just easier in some ways, y’know? You can buy furniture without thinking about what it’ll be like to box it up again; you can paint walls and know you don’t have to paint them back 9 months from now. You get to fix stuff, which is actually something I miss. You don’t have to fill out change-of-address forms. People know where to find you. You can put down roots.
Not ready for the settlin’-down yet, and probably won’t be for a long time. But it’s nice to know a little bit more clearly what I’d gain and what I’d trade in if I choose that way at some point.
This post brought to you by the “overthinking future decisions” dept. (On the flip side, running simulations like this (1) keeps me from getting bored, and (2) means I can make decisions way quicker when the actual time comes; sometimes my impulsiveness is less impulsiveness and more “I figured this out many years ago.”)
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 5 Comments »
- GMAT scores came in. I wonder how my cousins feel about theirs, ’cause theirs are the important ones; they’re actually applying for their MBAs, I took the test for fun and comradeship, and now owe Mark $250 – that was expensive fun, but worth it if they go to grad school in something they love.
- And so did my other smartglove (combo wristbrace/wristrest; wonderful for laptop use)
- My bass guitar did not (must call the shop tomorrow)
- Made Thursday appointment for what promises to be a painful-yet-very-good-for-me working-out of some of my knotted muscles; RSI is something that I’m just going to have to manage for the rest of my life, since I show no signs of slowing down my keyboard use anytime soon. Trying to stretch and rub them out before Thursday lunchtime to help that process along somewhat. It’s nice to be able to monitor your RSI and know what each stage of signals means, so that you don’t go beyond the very beginnings EVER AGAIN SO HELP ME GOD.
- Tried something called a Scottish Egg. Hardboiled egg, wrapped in sausage, breaded, deep-fried, and served with ranch dressing. With a menu description like that, I couldn’t not get it. It was pretty good – but one has to wonder about the thought process that led someone to come up with that dish in the first place.
- pulled midnight shift again; still not done with everything on my to-do list; need improved prioritization skills. (No worries about burning out; I’m doing this because I need to do stuff! and did not feel like resting yet.)
I could keep going, but I’ve finally reached the point where I do feel like resting now, and therefore have some chance of sleeping, so let’s try that for a couple hours.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Spent yesterday at Notre Dame with Pascal Calarco, whom most of you will know as The Force Of Awesomeosity Behind Fedora Weekly News. And also Jesus. TOUCHDOWN JESUS.
(This is the best montage I could get of the three of us, composed of two photos taken with the time-honored “hold camera in outstretched hand” self-portrait method and shoved together in The GIMP so all three heads are at least somewhat visible – thanks to Pascal for the original pic sources!)
Pascal’s department:
- is contagiously enthusiastic about open source; I wish I could have filmed these guys talking about the science of debugging, the way philosophy trains your critical thinking skills, and more generally about the joy – and the art – of contributing to the open source world. On their wishlist: teaching open source in classrooms. We’ll be working on that.
- loves social justice and saving the world (though I believe this is a Notre Dame thing – the school places great importance on values and service, and that is a common refrain I heard and saw throughout the trip)
- has a dining hall that looks like Hogwarts. Seriously.
Notre Dame also has two new departments that are pretty sweet. One is Academic Technologies, run by a fellow named Paul Turner. It’s Notre Dame’s physical equivalent of Fedora Infra’s publictest machines; profs, students, etc. can come in, try out technologies, and go “ooo shiny.” Paul’s lab will fix/customize/tweak/test things with them; the toys that work get deployed out into mainstream campus work (classes, research, and otherwise). The most amazing thing to me was such a sandbox with the capacity to Get Cool Toys exists and wasn’t full to overflowing yet; we passed around the idea of doing an unconference to change that by building awareness and more self-initiated play-with-shiny-things momentum.
Another good point Paul brought up was tangibility, which is important for immediately attracting people to technologies when they’re passing by and don’t have time/interest set aside already. He pointed out a multitouch system by Microsoft sitting in the room (it is indeed extremely fun to play with), and a GigaPan, as examples of good-for-eyecatching tangible things. What are the comparable demos for Fedora?
The second department was Engineering and Science Computing, run by Ed Bensman. They maintain everything from desktops to benchtops to… basically, if scientists and engineers at Notre Dame use it, and it’s computer-related, that’s Ed’s team. (With the exception of giant supercomputer stuff, which they coach users through, but don’t maintain.) They would love to be able to start exploring new possibilities in terms of software services to offer, but as they’re just starting up, it sounds like finding the bandwidth to do that is difficult (they already have a huge job). I suggested learning from Fedora Infrastructure and considering the option of having interested Notre Dame students wrangle VMS for publictest-like scratch workspaces (and yep, the logical follow-up to “here are interested students” would be pointing them here). So we’ll see how this works out.
Ed also introduced me to LabMan, which was my first glimpse at a network of university technology admins (and a happy one). I wonder how we can Applaud And Support Great Awesome here – or how we are already doing it. Ed pointed out that, as measured by presentation topics at LabMan, the people there already love and use open source, and we should look and see how we can tap that and encourage it; I know some folks in the Fedora community *coughinode0cough* are rockin’ this world, and I’m pretty sure there are many more there whom I haven’t met yet… must learn more about this overlap! (Ideas on how to do so welcome.)
Many thanks to Pascal for making all this magic happen! What started out as a “hey, I’ll be in Michigan City, and would love to swing by and buy you a drink” turned into “WHEE! AGENDA WHEREIN WE MEET LOTS OF AWESOME PEOPLE!” in something like 48 hours due to his total ninjahood. It’ll be his first FUDCon this December, so make sure you get to say hello if you’ll be coming to Toronto.
After dinner with Pascal & Family, I hit the road to K12 Open Minds, which will get notes posted here as well once the conference finishes up tomorrow.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 | fedora | No Comments »
Because when impossible perfectionism strikes, the way to get back to being productive is to do something – anything – that gets momentum going, then rechannel it.
The road was empty tonight as I drove through the suburbs of Michigan City towards dinner. The street was lined with houses, then with a park on one side and an industrial complex on the other, and then the trees suddenly gave way to a lake, wide and shining with ships, with a sunset way out on one end, pierced by a lighthouse held to the pier by a spindly little walkway.
My jaw dropped. I stopped the car (remember, empty road) and pulled the windows down; a mighty gale came ripping through it. So I stashed the car in the empty Coast Guard parking lot nearby and ran for 15 minutes up and down along the dock, leaping puddles and skidding to a stop with a sharp intake of breath every time I passed a Large Object and got to see even more of the sky. Abandoned fishing lines flapped their sinkers against empty flagpoles; the wind whipped through and sent giant cumulus clouds drawn in soft pastel off at a good clip over my head.
I pulled off my jacket and sprinted until I started to reach the point of not being able to breathe, then walked back towards the car, gasping for oxygen, clutching a huge stitch in my side, and happy. Happy! It doesn’t take that much to make me happy; a sunset and boats and a strong wind and the impulsive chance to run myself out of breath. (Speaking of which, I really need to sprint more; I really shouldn’t run out of breath so fast.)
Seriously, I’m just really happy these days. I need to keep my head and not get cocky about it, and make sure that I pull back and rechannel towards the stuff I should be focused on – I need to use this feeling of abundance well, because it is a gift I’ve been given for I-don’t-know-how-long, and it’s my responsibility to be a good steward of that (and I’m not always). And someday I may not want to be the person-equivalent of an exclamation point surrounded by a lot of asterisks and underscores (I mean, I can’t imagine why, but it’s a possibility; I hear sometimes this happens when you Get Older). But boy, it sure feels good now. And I’m going to run with that.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Blogging from K12 Open Minds! Sitting in a local elementary school in Michigan City, IN, back in a row of tiny classroom chairs for the first time in years. It’s a small gathering with many friendly people, and I’m liveblogging everything I can.
Randy Orwin’s presentation: Open Source? What is this thing and why would I want to use it?
Randy is presenting remotely via Elluminate, as he got back from Australia last night. He started with the definition of open source, drawing on two sources; the OSI’s definition and the FSF’s definition. (Yep, he’s using “open source” to refer to both. I have no objections, but I can think of a few friends who’d probably spring to their feet right now and clarify the difference, and it makes me grin.)
As Randy talks about the FSF’s four freedoms (running the program, studying it, redistributing it, and releasing improvements back to the community), I’m reminded of Ian Bicking’s recent post and the story of how he was captivated by the philosophy of Free Software as a teenager. I wonder what balance different K12 teachers have between the philosophical and the pragmatic, and how they’ve struck that in regards to technology in general and open source in specific – and how much they get to think about such things at all. After all, talking about freedom is great, but if your 4th grade class is struggling to read, there’s not much time to think about, say, the implications of distributing your patches back upstream, let alone be aware that such a thing exists.
He pulls up the the OSI definition, which is is far more extensive and includes antidiscrimination causes – and I think, for the first time, about how they’d appear to a classroom teacher – the school my aunt teaches at is a Quaker one, and if you take out the references to technology and software, the OSI definition sounds strikingly familiar to the brochures that the Friends School hands out.
I wonder who the other attendees in this room are? My guess is that most, if not all, of them are teachers; that seems to be the case for most of the attendees here today, according to the “who’s here?” roster. I wonder what their experience with open source is. Are they new to the idea? Are they, like me, curious how Randy will frame it for K12 education?
Randy presents 4 main “selling points” when pitching open source to the audience.
- Free (value added)
- Edit the source code
- Equity for all students
- 21st century philosophy
In speaking about #3, equity for all students, Randy talks about how now you can send programs home with students, how that barrier is now a nonissue – I think that’s the thing; it’s not that these barriers are insurmountable… one can find donors to fund licenses, one can work around a limited number of software seats… it’s that a lot of tiny little walls to climb accumulate to make you utterly exhausted. Wipe them all out, and you’ve got clear running. (I note that this point assumes that hardware availability is not an issue, that we can take the having of computers in a sheltered, power-available environment for granted, and the issue now is what they are and what software we can get to run on them and how to get them connectivity. In some places that’s true; in some places it’s not.)
Randy’s list of characteristics of 21st century learners that open source fosters: I wonder where this list is from.
- Inquiry
- Collaboration
- Community
- Project based
Now he is talking about ways you can contribute to open source communties (I use the word “communities,” he’s using the singular “community,” probably in order to simplify things a bit, though the many overlapping groups of people within open source are hardly monolithic). Randy lists four ways teachers and students can get involved.
- User
- Beta tester
- Documentation creator
- Code contributor
I love how he explains that students can get involved as well – sometimes to a greater degree than teachers, and often independent of them. Sometimes, kids will rocket off on their own, and go far deeper into something than their teacher can follow, and that’s okay. Not only okay, but fantastic and encouraged. He also emphasizes that all these roles make valuable contributions, but I still feel (in the ordering of roles in that list, in the minds of people for whom the “source” in open source predominates) like there is an unspoken hierarchy. (Question independent of this presentation: should there be? Is code king? As an engineer, my reflex reaction is to shout “of course!” – but then I think about how quickly and without thought that response comes up, and want to spend more time unpacking it and seeing why that is, and if I actually believe that.)
Randy moves on to talk about how one school (in Bainbridge, Washington) implemented open source. They started with touting the value add, the cost savings – selling by pragmatists, to pragmatists. They targeted early adopters and found a creative first use of open source technology to start, which in this case was streaming the US presidential inauguration via VLC.
He’s talking about bumps in the road now; most of them are not technological bumps, but mental ones. The changing of attitudes and mindsets is the hard part – tech staff, teachers, students, and parents alike. He’s talking through how you might coach someone through thinking about the software; how do you walk somebody with a question through, how do you mediate between technologies and people? It’s a challenging sort of interface to be; I think about how many people are, skill-wise, able to bridge the gap – they have the knowledge of technology, or the deep rooting in a classroom, or both – they have the skills to bridge the gap, but don’t. Because the opportunity cost is too high. It takes too much patience, too much time, for far too little payoff; this kind of mediation is exhausting, and volunteer devs and classroom teachers are already overworked. How do we lower that cost?
There seems to be a common theme in Randy’s notes about the gap between where we are and where we want to be, whether he’s talking about specific technology implementation cases in a specific school or the far broader notion of public perception. I’m searching for a term to describe it. He brought up the challenges of getting last-mile connectivity… is that the term I’m looking for? They’re tiny, tiny blocker bugs. I think the feeling is “so close and yet so far.”
I think this may be the effect of having two worlds trying to meet. Each has their own problem solving strategies; each builds the bridge out as far as they can from their own island – to run with the “bridge” analogy, each side has their own tools and techniques, with one side building a suspension steel bridge and the other raising an elegant wooden arch – but the strategies we use will only span out from one side so far, so we reach the center and realize that our current methods won’t close the few remaining feet, and now… we need to find a different way to reach across.
Some brave souls have begun to fling themselves across the gap, and some people have laid planks or tightropes down, and others have gingerly inched across them, but we’ve yet to find a way to make these bridges consistently complete, with arches that nobody has to think about walking across, bridges that don’t make people take deep breaths before they start out. (On the other hand, maybe we want that; maybe it means that those who cross have thought about the crossing, long and hard. I don’t necessarily subscribe to this point of view – as with a lot of things, I think my balance point is somewhere in the middle – but it’s another notion to consider.)
Randy’s list of support models is so fantastic that I’m just going to reproduce it here without further comment, other than that I’ve seen ‘em all, and there are tradeoffs galore, but beyond my ability to discuss in this post and still keep up with Randy’s talk.
- Guru with time to spare
- No guru, but someone with the nose of a bloodhound and time to spare
- Guru/bloodhound with no time to spare
- Full meal deal
The top instructional titles on Randy’s list are Moodle, Audacity, OpenOffice, The GIMP, and Freemind. The top server side titles are Linux, Apache, MYSQL, Drupal, PHPESP, and PHPList. When he posts these lists, the Elluminate chat bursts into activity, with people mentioning the software that they use, saying thank you for new leads… it makes me look forward to the 75-software-programs-in-75-minutes session later on – that’s probably going to be absolutely crazy energetic!
And now it’s time for questions.
Q: Would you recommend using Linux servers, or Windows/Samba?
A: It depends on what your staff is comfortable with.
Q: What would you recommend as a transition time to allow for this kind of switch to open source?
A: (I missed the exact length of time stated.) It depends on the type of switch; are you adding optional tools they can choose to use, presenting alternatives that they can choose to use… or completely replacing what it is they know? The latter is the hardest and the longest time is needed for it.
Q: What can’t be replaced with open source right now?
A: The only thing missing that teachers really need is on the video side. We don’t have video editing, etc. programs that are both open source and at a point where they are usable by classroom teachers yet.
Q: Do you consider Google Docs to be free?
A: I use Google Docs. It’s important to note that it’s free as in no cost, but it isn’t open source.
Q (this one was mine): How can projects present better interfaces to schools?
A: Get schools into the community to make those interfaces themselves. Get students involved. (Note to self: I should talk with Randy more about this – it’s an area that fascinates me greatly, and this is a chicken-and-egg problem that I haven’t found a good way to contribute to the cracking-of.)
End of talk notes. I may have misheard/misinterpreted/just-plain-missed things – if someone reading this spots something, please let me know so I can add/correct it, or point me to somewhere if there’s a better place to post these sorts of notes (I’d rather them be on a central K12 Open Minds wiki than on my blog, and so on).
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
12:00am: The thought crosses my mind that I should probably go to bed.
12:30am: Yeah, I really ought to.
1:00am: At some point.
1:30am: Bed.
3:30am: Alarm! Mutter something; ignore.
3:45am: Snooze button.
3:50am: Snooze button.
3:55am: Snooze button.
4:01am: Rocket out of bed; arrive at computer several minutes later, hunt for…
4:47am: …people! Yay, Harish!
5:22am: Emails, emails, emails, shove clothing into backpack, kiss sleeping parents goodbye, fly out the door, and…
5:55am: …hit the road, deliriously happy to be heading towards more edumacation things! and blasting one of my mom’s CDs from the radio as pink threads begin to peek through the pitch black. You’re gonna hear electric music / solid walls of sou-owwnd
Flash forward: 10:20am; having crossed back over into EST, I’m driving through South Bend to meet Pascal Calarco in person for the first time, thumb pinning a bluetooth headset to my head; it seems like that particular experiment didn’t pan out, as the point of trying a bluetooth headset was to see if I could jam my phone’s audio source into my ear canal enough that I could understand speech without mashing the earpiece (or, if it’s noisy, speakerphone) against my skull with one hand. Resolve to try another pair; also decide that at some point I actually need to measure the frequency profiles of various types of background noise to mathematically corroborate why certain environments are particularly crap for hearing; car-rumblings obscure the only frequencies of speech that I can hear. It’s why I scrunch into strange postures in the backseat of cars so I can lipread people in the front through side and rear view mirrors, and why I suddenly grow quiet in motor vehicles when it is dark.
Sometime around 11am: TOUCHDOWN JESUS!
Shortly thereafter: Hi, Pascal!
A wonderful day follows wherein The Mel completely preaches to the choir on open source stuff, and gets a much better gauge on how TOS might come into Notre Dame; my fingers are crossed for a POSSE here if follow-up goes well. It is topped off by dinner with the Calarco family, where I compare favorite PBS shows (a side effect of living with a kindergartener) with Pascal’s kids. Arthur and Wordgirl are popular, though they like Dora the Explorer way more than I do.
Driving to Michigan City with a giant moon hanging in my rearview mirror and the sky flapping in the wind, dripping Kool-aid into the trees so that they redden for the fall. Trying to transcribe in my mind the piano for the piece “She’s Got A Way” by Billy Joel, playing it over and over to hear the thin points where his voice breaks free from its wistful restraint, and how the keyboard comes up to wrap around the rawness. I think I have it now; I wish I wasn’t so shy about singing so that I could record myself playing, or that I could play cello properly and have its voice stand in for mine. It’s hard for me to even listen to myself speak (let alone sing) sometimes; I keep imagining the nasal deaf accent that I can’t hear pervading it, invisible to me but grating to everybody else. Dumb flight of fancy; I should corroborate something before I actually avoid it. But I still flinch and cringe in front of cameras and microphones, regardless. Something I’m training myself out of, like similar reactions to physical contact. Hard. At least I have a lot of energy to spend on it, and people to help push me now (which is still new and wonderful, the notion of somebody catching me before I do).
Music helps; reading helps. Walking down the mental track of someone else who’s not perpetually straining at the leash helps me strain less on mine. Writing helps; I can lay out my own mental tracks to follow back into a settling-down. Long journeys help, although I can’t tell if I’m running-to or running-from (and in the absence of indications towards either, choose to believe I’m simply running).
Tonight I play travel agent for FUDCon, then travel agent for myself, then sleep a couple hours ’till the morning hits.
Monday, October 5th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 3 Comments »
Heh. Here I’ve been having one of my moments of struggle between talking, doing, and talking-as-one-of-many-ways-of-doing, and then I read the missal during Mass today (although my own relationship with religion is… still interesting, when I’m home, I go with my parents to the Catholic parish I grew up in) and James 2:14-18 comes up and whacks me across the face.
What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.
Okay, okay, I get the point.
While my mind was on such things, I also looked up the name I chose when I was confirmed, back in 8th grade. It’s one that bothered my father to no end; why not pick something nice and feminine, like Mary (always safe) or Elizabeth, even Teresa? Bernadette? I’d read all the saint stories; I’d read pretty much everything in the tiny one-room church library, in fact. And sure, these women were interesting. But their stories didn’t speak to me.
I had been thinking of what I would choose for months, as Confirmation class wound along in our basement (my dad was teaching) and I deliberated different saints, different biographies, different… surely there was something more conventionally appropriate, some girl’s name that I wouldn’t have to fight my parents on. But as a thirteen-year-old who would lie awake in bed each night with the world swarming inside her brain, sneaking into the bathroom at 3 AM to pore hungrily through math textbooks, wiping a peekhole through a foggy window into the same backyard lit by the same suburban light pollution and wondering what was out there and when she’d ever get to go, I thought about a question I’d never really been asked. What shall I give you?
There are so many things that I could ask. And I had slowly picked out what I wanted. Not knowledge; I could read that stuff in books, and dry facts would only get me so far. But to comprehend the facts – to go beyond comprehension, and beyond facts, and towards something more important, something I couldn’t clearly articulate, but wanted to understand – ah, that was it, or at least as close as I was going to get in English. Understanding. And not in my head; my brain was a rushing wild morass of thought at times, too cold and rational at others; a powerful engine, but immature and without guidance. Where would that guidance come to, where would it be felt from? Not from my head, for sure. Not from my head, but from my heart.
And somehow, thousands of years ago, a teenage king had stared into the lonely night in Gibeon and answered the same. Give Your servant an understanding heart.
“…but I am but a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in. And Your servant is in the midst of Your people whom you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to be numbered or counted. Therefore give to Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people, that I may discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of Yours?” –Kings 3:9
Even now, nearly a decade after I’ve walked away from church, reading that passage makes me ache the same way it did when I was thirteen. So when I turned fourteen, and was confirmed, and the Bishop came by and asked my name, I told him Solomon. And so that name was sealed with oil on my forehead and a gentle slap. And I was officially an adult in the eyes of my faith, despite my earlier protests that I was not yet ready. It’s a long story, but in effect, my first act as a Catholic adult was to declare myself a child and drop into non-practising status to search for what it was I actually believed. (Still working on that, not as actively as I should, really.)
The name reminds me of what I hoped it would remind me of, and the reminder deepens as I grow. It is a counterbalance to my geekiness, my tendencies to seek these bits of shiny information to squirrel away inside my brain, a very possessive and cerebral thing to do. It is an image that I never want to lose; a restless child, late at night, bewildered (even terrified) at the thundering strength of the seeking I continuously felt (and still feel), pouring through me. And the rest of Solomon’s life is a reminder to me that one can start out young and hungry for an understanding of the truth, yet aim so passionately for the understanding that, in the end, they miss the truth. The comprehension ought to serve the doing and the being, not the other way around. And I would be wise to remember that, especially if wisdom is what I would ask for.
Ugh; I’m writing in an overly poetic torrent tonight; that’s how the words are coming out; I’m not editing them. Aah. That means my brain is caught up too much in itself; I’m just luxuriating in the meta of my thought processes. (At least I’m getting better at recognizing this faster, though.) Mm. Kicking self out to just go do and be for a while. It is a sputtering process.
Sunday, October 4th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »