In an attempt to keep this blog-boat from sinking, I'm posting.
I've been a good little consumer this Black Friday weekend. A monitor, a pair of headphones, and LittleBigPlanet—take that, recession! Ha!
In other news, I've tried Red Bull for the first time, and it doesn't keep me from sleeping in class. It's shocking just how tired I am these days on six hours of sleep. How was I ever awake in high school? In retrospect, I was probably only half awake most of the time. I remember a day, either junior or senior year, after I'd gone to bed at midnight and slept six (six!) hours—I was bouncy and euphoric all day and commented to several people about how much better everything is after a lot of sleep.
Sleep! Which I am currently forgoing to bail out this broken bleeding blog-boat. My priorities are kind of messed up! Good night.
Faith Restored
We are soon to witness what the future holds—let the healing begin.
~ ~ ~
Watching McCain's graceful concession speech—as the crowd booed his calls for unity and his mentions of Obama—really drove home the tragedy in McCain's presidential bid. Here was a man of true honor and decency, reduced to a shell by a party that has learned to thrive on ignorance and hate.
I was struck by the lack of even a modicum of respect from that audience. As one MeFi commenter put it:
McCain's actually coming over pretty well. Better than his idiot crowd. God he must hate them.
Ahoy
I'm in all the right places, yet somehow lost in life.
I've had a perpetual sense of impending doom, lately. Something just feels slightly off. I've come to a point where the criticality of the questions I face increases exponentially by the day, but I'm hardly better prepared to answer them than I was before.
If anything, the choices now are harder than they used to be—there are more options, and more considerations. Practically all my life I've been dutifully navigating the course charted by others, and though the waters were rough at times, I always knew where I was headed.
But the map ends here. I need to make my own way.
Here I am, sailing blindly into the night, hoping that when the sun rises I'll find myself in a world where I belong.
I've had a perpetual sense of impending doom, lately. Something just feels slightly off. I've come to a point where the criticality of the questions I face increases exponentially by the day, but I'm hardly better prepared to answer them than I was before.
If anything, the choices now are harder than they used to be—there are more options, and more considerations. Practically all my life I've been dutifully navigating the course charted by others, and though the waters were rough at times, I always knew where I was headed.
But the map ends here. I need to make my own way.
Here I am, sailing blindly into the night, hoping that when the sun rises I'll find myself in a world where I belong.
JAM
I dropped my guitar yesterday.
Basically, it went something like this:I walked into the room holding the guitar and patch cable, and the strap (from my old guitar) slipped off the tail and it smacked the ground pretty hard. The three people in the room (including me) yelled for a moment before going on with the
It all started when I was late for a huge stadium gig 5 miles away. The problem was, the streets were empty and public transit was shut down because everyone was already at the gig. So I ran there, carrying the guitar on my back. When I finally stepped on stage (15 minutes later) the stadium exploded into applause.
Suddenly ninjas dropped from the sky, emerged from the crowd and circled me like a swarm of rats, brandishing swords and nunchaku and pointy stars and handguns and other menacing weapons. Everyone gasped. Somebody fainted. I saw murder in their eyes; I had no choice but to wield the guitar like the axe it was.
As they rushed me, I swung the guitar wildly, snapping bones, splitting skulls, lunging and dodging and spinning in a frenzied cacophony of musical justice. One by one they fell—until the last ninja, in a burst of rage, launched into the air, sword held high, and swung it down in a desperate arc—with all my might I hurled my guitar at the sword, and as steel met wood, the axe hit a single thunderous power chord, so righteous that his sword shattered into a million pieces and he instantly died.
Everyone started to cheer, but then the guitar crashed to the floor, exploded, burst into flames with a roaring fireball reminiscent of the sun, and everyone screamed.
~ ~ ~
In other news, does anyone have wood sealer/superglue/clear nail polish I could use to cover up theoretical exposed wood on a theoretical chipped guitar?
Basically, it went something like this:
It all started when I was late for a huge stadium gig 5 miles away. The problem was, the streets were empty and public transit was shut down because everyone was already at the gig. So I ran there, carrying the guitar on my back. When I finally stepped on stage (15 minutes later) the stadium exploded into applause.
Suddenly ninjas dropped from the sky, emerged from the crowd and circled me like a swarm of rats, brandishing swords and nunchaku and pointy stars and handguns and other menacing weapons. Everyone gasped. Somebody fainted. I saw murder in their eyes; I had no choice but to wield the guitar like the axe it was.
As they rushed me, I swung the guitar wildly, snapping bones, splitting skulls, lunging and dodging and spinning in a frenzied cacophony of musical justice. One by one they fell—until the last ninja, in a burst of rage, launched into the air, sword held high, and swung it down in a desperate arc—with all my might I hurled my guitar at the sword, and as steel met wood, the axe hit a single thunderous power chord, so righteous that his sword shattered into a million pieces and he instantly died.
Everyone started to cheer, but then the guitar crashed to the floor, exploded, burst into flames with a roaring fireball reminiscent of the sun, and everyone screamed.
~ ~ ~
In other news, does anyone have wood sealer/superglue/clear nail polish I could use to cover up theoretical exposed wood on a theoretical chipped guitar?
Stream of Consciousness, I swear
So I haven't posted in my blog in quite a while; over at my tumblr blog (tumblog), I blamed this on a lack of time. However, reputable sources have since irrefutably demonstrated to me that
Let this be the dawning of a new golden age of me blogging. While we have witnessed many false starts in the past two years, this one is TOTALLY FOR REAL.
Seriously.
99% of time [sic], when people say that they don't have time to do something: what they really mean is that they're unwilling to reallocate their youtube/tv/sleeping/drugs/gorging/shopping/digg/video games time towards doing something.As such, I have decided to reallocate some of my gorging and drugs time to write this post. The type of posting that I'd referenced initially in that tumblr comment was true, structured, long-form writing, written slowly with at least a modicum of care. What I'm doing here, which may in fact be ultimately more rewarding, is writing more or less just what comes to my mind as I type. Quantity over quality! [Edit: Perhaps (hopefully) more accurately, quantity before quality.]
Let this be the dawning of a new golden age of me blogging. While we have witnessed many false starts in the past two years, this one is TOTALLY FOR REAL.
Seriously.
Last seen on a Facebook wall
I am single handedly democratizing China. Not really, just kidding. I don't know what kind of notions you have about China, but Beijing is alright. The first thing that got to me was the sky--even on a sunny day, it's not deep blue, but kind of a pale blue. We did get to see a real deep blue sky last Saturday, but that was the only time so far. A lot of the time it's been raining, which apparently is created by the government as a way to battle air pollution. [Edit: During my 8-week stay, I saw what I consider to be a true blue sky a total of three times, including the last day I was there--the news media made a huge deal of the first blue day of the Olympics.]
Food is cheap. I can get too much to eat for about US$1.50. I can get a pretty fancy meal for $5. Bottled drinks are generally around 50¢. I've actually gotten used to it now, so any meal over 10元 (~$1.50) is more than I want to spend.
I hadn't found any real internet restrictions until yesterday. What happened at times was that while surfing the 'net my connection to certain websites would suddenly be reset (even if I had just been on that site) but it would always come back shortly. Yesterday I found out that Chinese Wikipedia is completely blocked. I just get a "connection was reset" error if I try. English Wikipedia, however, is completely fine, and I can read all about historical Chinese oppression with no obstacles. [Edit: As the Olympics approached, Chinese Wikipedia was unblocked, perhaps a result of international journalistic pressure. Wordpress and Livejournal, however, were blocked during my entire stay. Blogger, curiously, was not; I get the feeling they struck some sort of deal with the Chinese government--the navbar was automatically Chinese when I looked at Blogspot pages (like this one).]
The whole city is a huge construction site. There is a mind boggling amount of construction going on, everywhere. Things get done FAST here; work goes on 24 hours a day, and I watched a whole strip of road get rebuilt in like 2 days, the kind of thing that takes like a month in the US. The workers here have pretty sad stories; they're migrant workers with homes in the countryside, who take on work in substandard conditions as it pays better than farming. I've seen their living quarters, temporary little shacks or tents adjacent to the construction sites.
At the same time there is a middle class in Beijing that appears to be trying pretty hard to mimic American excess. I've been to a few bars/clubs with people I've met; they're packed with strobe lights and flashing lasers and ridiculous thundering sound systems and drinks and fog machines and visualizations on the walls and bouncing floors and scores of young people and some creepy older people all coming together to form a cacophonous mass of excess.
Actually that's only truly applicable for the last place I went to. It was ridiculous.
Food is cheap. I can get too much to eat for about US$1.50. I can get a pretty fancy meal for $5. Bottled drinks are generally around 50¢. I've actually gotten used to it now, so any meal over 10元 (~$1.50) is more than I want to spend.
I hadn't found any real internet restrictions until yesterday. What happened at times was that while surfing the 'net my connection to certain websites would suddenly be reset (even if I had just been on that site) but it would always come back shortly. Yesterday I found out that Chinese Wikipedia is completely blocked. I just get a "connection was reset" error if I try. English Wikipedia, however, is completely fine, and I can read all about historical Chinese oppression with no obstacles. [Edit: As the Olympics approached, Chinese Wikipedia was unblocked, perhaps a result of international journalistic pressure. Wordpress and Livejournal, however, were blocked during my entire stay. Blogger, curiously, was not; I get the feeling they struck some sort of deal with the Chinese government--the navbar was automatically Chinese when I looked at Blogspot pages (like this one).]
The whole city is a huge construction site. There is a mind boggling amount of construction going on, everywhere. Things get done FAST here; work goes on 24 hours a day, and I watched a whole strip of road get rebuilt in like 2 days, the kind of thing that takes like a month in the US. The workers here have pretty sad stories; they're migrant workers with homes in the countryside, who take on work in substandard conditions as it pays better than farming. I've seen their living quarters, temporary little shacks or tents adjacent to the construction sites.
At the same time there is a middle class in Beijing that appears to be trying pretty hard to mimic American excess. I've been to a few bars/clubs with people I've met; they're packed with strobe lights and flashing lasers and ridiculous thundering sound systems and drinks and fog machines and visualizations on the walls and bouncing floors and scores of young people and some creepy older people all coming together to form a cacophonous mass of excess.
Actually that's only truly applicable for the last place I went to. It was ridiculous.
I find linguistics fascinating now, but I'm sure if I studied it I would hate it. This post has nothing to do with linguistics.
So I just read an article (中国今后的文字问题 The Problem of Present-Day China's Writing System) written in 1918 by a Chinese intellectual (钱玄同 Qian Xuantong), where he promotes the wholesale and complete replacement of the Chinese language with Esperanto.
It's hard to understand today the extent of Chinese self-loathing at the beginning of the 20th century. The author explains how "99.9%" of historical Chinese literature is composed of "confusing, dreamy" nonsense (that incorrigibly messes up children for their entire lives), and in order for China to progress and modernize as a nation it is absolutely imperative for China to abandon both its language, spoken and written, and its culture, namely Confucianist ideals of loyalty and piety which push a morality of "slavery". Similarly, prominent contemporary writer Lu Xun (鲁迅) claimed “If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die.” (漢字不滅，中國必亡。)
For Qian Xuantong, complete romanization of the Chinese language was not enough. He died in 1939, ten years before the Communist takeover of China, and this article, written some 38 years prior to the official introduction of Simplified Characters, reveals that the simplification policy was pretty moderate on the spectrum of Chinese linguistic reform.
It's hard to understand today the extent of Chinese self-loathing at the beginning of the 20th century. The author explains how "99.9%" of historical Chinese literature is composed of "confusing, dreamy" nonsense (that incorrigibly messes up children for their entire lives), and in order for China to progress and modernize as a nation it is absolutely imperative for China to abandon both its language, spoken and written, and its culture, namely Confucianist ideals of loyalty and piety which push a morality of "slavery". Similarly, prominent contemporary writer Lu Xun (鲁迅) claimed “If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die.” (漢字不滅，中國必亡。)
For Qian Xuantong, complete romanization of the Chinese language was not enough. He died in 1939, ten years before the Communist takeover of China, and this article, written some 38 years prior to the official introduction of Simplified Characters, reveals that the simplification policy was pretty moderate on the spectrum of Chinese linguistic reform.
Introspectacle
I've been trying to come up with new names for the blog, and on a bus the other day I thought up the name "Introspectacle", which I found appropriate, in a "tearing out your innards for the world to see" fashion (not literally—ick). Of course, I first had to run a search to see if my new word was actually new, and indeed I discovered "introspectacle" was not unsullied as I had hoped. The first result on Google is a blog written by an overtly Christian fellow.
There is a reason that I often say, "it's probably already been done"; it probably already has. Maybe I'm overanalyzing this, but as students who have grown up in the United States we have been exposed broadly to the same kind of education and culture. We share similar creative processes with other people. That is not to say that we are all the same, but rather that our minds often fit into categories (which paradoxically is encouraged by the same American culture that praises individualism--think about how engineers, art students, scientists etc are expected to think, or just look at politics).
A pessimist might draw the conclusion then that anything we do is already done by someone else, and shockingly we're not as special as they told us in elementary school. Especially considering a standardized and increasingly regimented education and entertainment that can be traced back to but a few sources, it is easy to assume that each person will fit neatly into a pocket of established culture, a classification, a stereotype--ultimately, it's all been done before.
That standpoint, however, neglects a crucial fact--the same fact that drives the evolution of species--that from the combination of old ingredients we can indeed create something new. It is our specific mixture of experiences and talents that define who we are as individuals; it is that which drives change and innovation in all fields.
Regardless, it is still generally discernible, given a set of circumstances, what constitutes an obvious result and what is truly creative.
There is a reason that I often say, "it's probably already been done"; it probably already has. Maybe I'm overanalyzing this, but as students who have grown up in the United States we have been exposed broadly to the same kind of education and culture. We share similar creative processes with other people. That is not to say that we are all the same, but rather that our minds often fit into categories (which paradoxically is encouraged by the same American culture that praises individualism--think about how engineers, art students, scientists etc are expected to think, or just look at politics).
A pessimist might draw the conclusion then that anything we do is already done by someone else, and shockingly we're not as special as they told us in elementary school. Especially considering a standardized and increasingly regimented education and entertainment that can be traced back to but a few sources, it is easy to assume that each person will fit neatly into a pocket of established culture, a classification, a stereotype--ultimately, it's all been done before.
That standpoint, however, neglects a crucial fact--the same fact that drives the evolution of species--that from the combination of old ingredients we can indeed create something new. It is our specific mixture of experiences and talents that define who we are as individuals; it is that which drives change and innovation in all fields.
Regardless, it is still generally discernible, given a set of circumstances, what constitutes an obvious result and what is truly creative.
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