slow learner

There's an episode of the Simpsons where Lisa places an electrified donut someplace in the house and tracks how long it takes Homerto learn not to touch the donut. "mmmmm donut.... ouch!" "mmmmm donut... ouch!" "mmmmmm donut .... ouch!" of course, the joke is that he never learns.

So it is with me and recreational alchohol consumption this year. Note to self: stop after second beer. too skinny for third beer. third beer will make me act stoopid.

fun filled friday

So I went to buy tickets to see Aaron play percussion in a dance recital, but it was sold out. Alas. But when I talked to Aaron, he told me he could get me in as his roadie. So I sat and chatted with him and Charlie and Angela before they went on. Topic: Belle and Sebastian. Are they excusable? Are they good makeout music? What is good makeout music? I mostly spectated as I really have no clue about Belle and Sebastian. I'm not sure about good makeout music, but it might be an interesting summer project. (ummm.. to produce some, I mean.... although further research is requied) Do Gen Y types really make out to Marvin Gaye?

The trio was really excellent. I'd never heard Angela play clarinet before. She has a beautiful tone. The piece was lovely. Charlie composed it. His pieces that I've heard all have a nice thoughtfulness and an asthetic sensibility that's just right, not heavy handed at all. He allows beauty to emerge.

Since I just watched the one piece, we got out of the recital pretty early and Angela and I decided to go to a dance called the Girl Twirl (I kid you not) at the harbor park. It's a women's dance party.

Consequences of high self-esteem: I really like dancing and I don't need to be drunk to do it. Of course, drinking is fun! So we danced for quite a while. I requested Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-lot, one of the finest pop songs from the 90's. This time, I didn't talk to strangers, but that's ok.

Fortunately, it was completely warm out and we were able to walk to and from Girl Twirling, which was good cuz I went ahead and drank beer number 3. I'm lucky I didn't fall off the ladder to my bunk bed when I got home.

The beautiful bleakness and desolation of grad school is such that people expect you to occassionally drink to excess. So much the more so if you have recently experienced woes in love, which is so dern common it should be in those "so you want to go to grad school books."

So You Want to Go to Grad School?

You have a surplus or life savings, or you think you can survive on the piteously meager stipend, or the economy is bad and your parents are generous and the economic sacrfices seem reasonable, or heck, an improvement over your current statis. Well, say goodbye to your girlfriend, becuase even if the stays with you (give it less than 50% odds), you're not going to have a lot of time for her. And say goodbye to all those hours of sleep you're used to. Say goodbye to your pre-existing social life. You'll have time for that on breaks, if you can afford to get home. Used to living in a clean house? Forget it. It's not compatible with your current situation, unless you pay too much for campus housing and then they'll send somebody around periodically to make an attempt at cleaning your kitchen, in which, by the way, very few green things will reside... assuming by "green things" we mean things that started out as green. Look in that fridge. What do you see? spots of mold. beer. good, maybe it's time to go to the store. after class. and rehersal. and doing some reading for tommorrow. don't worry, you'll have time to clean at the end of the semester when you're also trying to pack to leave. You do have time, however, for intense personal crisises, inner turmoil and angst. Make sure to pick a school which offeres mental health services included with tuition. you'll need it.

why would you want to do this? Do you love your subject? Really love your subject? Do you want to dedicate years of your life to living in semi-monastic cloistered conditions just to focus on your subject? (this isn't like your undergrad.) Are you willing to endure mortification fo the flesh and the spirit in the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom? turn to page 2 for preparing for the GREs.

I love grad school. No really. What should I work on first? Should I read Foucault? Should I read the Boulez-Cage correspondences? Should I write a second movement for my symphony? Should I finish my song in progress? Should I record some analog noise? Should I write lyrics for my "Urban Hipster" song? Should I start my string quartet? Should I work on an installation for the May symposium? In what lovely way should I consume myslef? I mean, as soon as this hangover wears off.

Resume Draft

Celeste Hutchins
(860) 301-2508
celesteh@casaninja.com
www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh

Objective:

Summer internship doing audio programming, sound engineering or sound design

Education:

Mills College B.A. May 1998
Majors: Computer Science and Electronic Music
Wesleyan University MA in Music Composition anticipated May 2005

Skills:

Languages: Java, C/C++, SuperCollider, MAX/MSP, Perl, CGI scripting, HTML
Operating Systems: OSX, Linux, Solaris, MacOS, IRIX
Programs: Pro Tools, Digital Performer

Experience:

Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
TA August 2003 - Present

• Teach workshops in using Digital Performer and sound recording

Java Just Intonation Calculator http://jjicalc.sourceforge.net/
Lead Programmer Spring 2002 - Present

• Took over the abandoned open source Just Intonation Calculator
• Added support for multiple file formats

Other Minds, San Francisco, CA
Volunteer Sound Engineer 2002-2003

• Edited sounds for the web

AOL/Netscape, Mountain View, CA
AOL Online Music
Product Manager October 2000 - February 2001

• Product design
• Wrote PRDs
• Researched webcast technology

Open Directory Project
Software Engineer February 1999 - October 2000

• Wrote web-based tools for editors in perl
• Apache Server configuration
• Processed and pushed RDF and search data to http://search.netscape.com

Isadra Inc., Palo Alto, CA
Software Engineer August 1998 - February 1999

• Java Servlet programming for JavaWebServer
• Finding and fixing software bugs
• Set up intranet

Whole Bean Software, Oakland, CA
Founder December 1996 - October 1997

• Attempted to start a software company to produce a real time java chat application for the web.

Multimedia Resources Inc., Portland, OR
Intern May - August 1996

• Wrote Java applets
• Wrote CGI Scripts in Perl / server parsed HTML

Tetherless Access Limited, Sunnyvale, CA
Intern May - August 1995

• Tested / fixed software for wireless routers
• Implemented new features for the wireless router software
• Documented router software and networking

Mills College Information Technical Services, Oakland, CA
Student Worker August 1994 - November 1996

• Maintained subnets of NeXT machines and Macintoshes
• System administration including user support
• HTML Authoring and user documentation

Informal Experience:

• Electronic musician with a home recording studio
• Belong to a co-location coop, where members share root responsibilities and keep the server up
• Run and program for a MOO (similar to a MUD but object oriented)

---

Does anyone care about my internships in 1995 anymore or should i cut those? any feedback?

still more faq

see questions 1 - 2 and 3 - 8

9. How was your break?
   Cathartic.
10. Is that good?
    yes.
11. How's school? How do you like Wesleyan?
    School is cool.
    Teachers are great. classes are useful. i'm writing a lot of music.
12. what are you going to do after you graduate?
    Um... I dunno. I might do the german exachange program. I think I will. After that, I dunno. Look for a teaching job? Get a PhD? Go back to work for the computer industry?
13. What Cds did you order?
    Movement By: Gossip
    Geogaddi By: Boards of Canada
    Fever To Tell By: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
    Amnesiac By: Radiohead
    Hail To The Thief By: Radiohead
    Draft 7.30 By: Autechre
    Additional records will have to wait until I get to Amoeba where I can buy them used for cheeper.
14. What times can I call you?
    10 am to midnight eastern standard time. If you know i'm awake after midnight, cuz i'm responding to email or something, you can call me later.

What would happen if you burned inscence inside a refrigerator?

maybe i should get a navel piercing to gaze at

ok, first note that i caved in to peer pressure: http://celesteh.blogspot.com/2004_03_14_celesteh_archive.html#107972820218639842

and now i'm going to talk about emotions. i feel like i tore myself down and built myself back up again. and maybe it's too early to say much about that, cuz i've felt like i've had my feet under me for all of a week now. sometimes i feel aftershocks, but not so often. and maybe i'm just in a good mood because it's warm and sunny and if it got cold and dark i'd be sad again, but i dunno, i feel changed. i've been looking in the mirror the last few days and thinking "i'm cute." Which is not something I ever remember thinking before. maybe when i was a child in gradeschool or something. and, well, it's weird. i feel very weird... will it last? i hope so, but you know, it's nice right now.

I started drinking coffee again and that is fantastic. If I have a latte, I am the smartest person on earth! I had some tea before giving my Freud presentation in class today and I felt like doing laps around the classroom. Presentation went well, I think. People were taking notes on what I said. These kids are able to understand Foucault, and that's incredible, but I've read a lot more than them, so if I can find something familiar, I can make a connection that they might not. Oh, this case study of a male hysteric sounds like something I read in Faludi's Stiffed, so maybe I can use what she said to talk about what Freud said. and also, i'm the smartest person on earth! well, only metaphorically

And last night, I was out on a supercollider field trip (geek run) to get pizza in New Haven and I was talking too much, without the benefit of coffee . . .. Many CA folks know me as a really talkative person, but I just haven't been for a while. So...who knows... maybe CT people will have to get used to me talking a lot ... Or maybe I'll stay quiet. It's just weird.

And you guys all asked for navel gazing, so if I seem arrogant or something, well, you asked for it.

I have a bunch of old noise music on the web at http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh, from my analog phase. The last real analog thing I wrote was about death, but it's not on the web. My grandma died not that long before my mom did. My poor dad lost his mother and wife less than a year apart. And all the drama played itself out in minature with my grandma. All the dynamics around my mom's death were there. All of them. Asshole medical health people. Angry me. Christi angrily explaining that she was attached to my grandma too . . ..

I realized at the funeral, that I didn't know what kind of music my grandma liked. I didn't know her favorite singers or her favorite hymns and I asked my dad and he didn't know either. Something incredibly important that I would never know. So I was upset for several months (and mad at my mom because she was acting so weird. oy vey) and finally understood that my grandma was hella old and tired of being alive and had a pretty good life that had to end sometime. so i wrote a piece of music and it turned out to be about that. it sounds like death. less than a week after i finished it, my mom had brain surgery. it's the best piece of music that i ever wrote and so prescient, it scares me. I had been exploring an asthetic of openness and "air" in analog electronics and I lost it at that point. I've been forced to switch to supercollider, which is nice and portable, but kind of bloodless.

Listening to: Laurie Anderson's song "Oh Superman." fxcking fantastic

So you like navel-gazing, eh?

I think I had some lint in there, but then I took a shower....

Talked to my shrink today. "And then this happened and then this happened and this happened...." She nodded and said "wow" a lot. I like her because she does a great empathetic expression. I told her this a while ago and she assured me it was sincere, but I actually don't care if it is or not. Anyway, she said I should feel proud of myself for all the progress I made. So I'm getting an A in mental health. woo! (this is a metaphorical A...)

I'm trying to write some happy music. This started out as a bid to impress CT chicks with mullets, but I think that might be a lost cause. I see them as Thomas Kinkade fans and they see me as the Unibomber. No TV. Doesn't like driving. Makes weird Noise Music. Eats weird things like avacadoes... Yeah, I'm an alien. But at least I don't have a mullet.

People who like my music are mostly geek boys or other composers and other mullet-less types. So I've decided I'd most like to have geek girl fans, insofar as I might have groupies . . . as if . . .. But I'm not writing for their benefit. I'm writing to impress my teachers. No, just kidding. I still want to write some avant-happy music, cuz I'm running out of angst to tap in to. I don't have any real problems right now. I could get angsty about the white stuff settling out of my fridge onto my (tightly sealed) food containers, but I think that will go away shortly... I hope.

I was listening to RadioHead Kid A to get some ideas, because I love their synthpop and it might be cool to write some laptop music and then sing along! but maybe they're not really all that happy? Is my baseline for happiness skewed, or is this just an asthetic issue? Hrm. Been smiling a lot, so that must count for something.

anyway, Kid A is my most recent pop album. Aside from getting all RadioHead since that album, what CDs should I buy? I have some Amazon.com gift certificates. I like indie rock. I like punk rock. I like noise. I like what Sonic Youth has been up to for the last few years. I just got a CD of Laurie Anderson playing live in NYC Townhall Spetember 19th 2001 and I'm not so into it. Not edgy enough, at least in disk 1. I'm not familiar with her work at all, which is why I got the CD. Reccomend me some music so I can buy it based soley on your suggestion!

Today in class, Alvin was talking about a concert that Ellen gave her a few years ago and said it was the best concert that he ever saw. Pretty cool. And I got CVS set up across my home network, so my laoptop will be in synch with my desktop, which will be helpful. yay.

more faq

3. Did you do any homework during break?
   ummmm. no. well, a little.
4. Are you screwed?
   No. My goal for break was to get very ahead of stuff. Now I'm behind, but not very. I still have time to spend some weekends in NYC, which I must do or it will have been very silly for me to come out to the East Coast.
5. Can I come visit you?
   Sure. Gimme some advance notice. My weekends go from noon thursday till sunday night. (woo!) I can meet up with folks especially in NYC, but also in Boston and I can provide lodging at my abode, which lies in between those two fine cities. I might be able to find you a place to stay in NYC. I managed it for Tiffany. Flying JetBlue from Oakland to JFK airport is cheeeep and it is a direct flight. Flying to Hartford is also cheep, if you book in advance or fly red eye. There are no direct flights from Oakland to Hartford, alas. Do not change planes in Dallas, it's way the heck out of the way. Both of those fine airports offer car rental. There is a very useful train out of JFK. I can come get you at Hartford. I can come get you at JFK on a weekend, or at the train station in New Haven.
6. Are you really going to send all of your CDs to Christi?
   No. I'm trying to split them up evenly. It will actually be nice to have fewer CDs, so I can actually listen to the ones I have left and then I have an excuse to get new ones. all of my pop music is about 5 years old.
7. What is Friendster?
   http://www.friendster.com/info/moreinfo.jsp
8. How much time do you have left at Wesleyan?
   My semester ends the first week of May, which is looming alarmingly nearby. I have two semesters left after that, so I ought to graduate in May 2005.

Freud Report

Hysteria and my mystics class

Symptoms of hysteria include "anorexia, carried to the pitch of rejection of all nourishment, various forms of disturbance of vision, constantly recurrent visual hallucinations, etc." (p 4) These are remarkably similar to some of the signs of holiness in mystics. Saint Claire (?) starved herself to death. Hildegard of Bingen had a constant disturbance of vision and frequent visions, which some might term hallucinations. Breuer and Freud were not unfamiliar with these similarities. They claim that hysteria results from repressed reaction to trauma, and hence is common in "saints and nuns" (p 11) as well as others taught to repress their feelings. Thus this paper seeks not only to define hysteria and explain its cause, but also to explain why "saints and nuns" are so often effected. It is not approaching mysticism neutrally, but with the idea of explaining the phenomenon as illness. The writers go so far in making this connection, that they refer to a certain set of symptoms as a "hysterical stigmata." (p 15)

However, the hidden symptoms they attribute to hysteria do fit extremely well in finding a non-mystical explanation for mystics. They claim that dissociative states, otherwise known as "splitting of consciousness" or multiple personalities, are "present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria . . .." (p 12) Thus, hysterics have two voices. One is their own voice, and one is the voice of the "hypnoid states" that hysterics enter into during hysterical attacks. "The ideas which emerge [during hysterical attacks or hypnosis] are very intense but are cut off from associative communication with the rest of the content of consciousness." (p 12) Therefore, the ideas do not exist in an accessible form during the hysterics normal, waking self. They are ideas from an internal other.

Breuer and Freud assert that hysterics enter into hypnoid states for a few reasons. One is excessive daydreaming, "to which needlework and similar occupations render women especially prone." (p 13) Thus they continue to define hysteria as female. The case studies where they find the root causes of hysteria include examples of men and women. In all cases though, the victims endured some trauma and were powerless to stop it. The hysterical man was physically attacked by his boss. (p 14) He was thus feminized and made subordinate through physical force. His attacks also stemmed from having been unable to win a case against his boss in court. The hysterical man was thus denied access to power through normal channels. He was thus feminized and responded to that in an affective, feminine manner. This is similar to the condition of female religious who can never rise in power through the church, due to their gender. They also had an affective hysterical response, which at the time allowed some of them to gain power. This powerlessness shows up again when the writers describe the typical hysteric, "They include girls who get out of bed at night so as secretly to carry on some study that their parents have forbidden from fear of their overworking." (p 240) Girls who are barred from gaining power, in this case knowledge, through normal channels. As the lives of our mystics are not well known, it's hard to know how much they fall into these patterns. It's easy, though, to imagine Joan of Arc, the self-proclaimed best spinner in all of Domremy, working and day dreaming about leading soldiers to battle.

The mystic who most closely matches hysteria as defined by Breuer and Freud, is Kempe. Her woes started during a time of trauma surrounding childbirth and lead her to experience hallucinations of demons and other hysterical symptoms for months. Even when that ceased, she continued to have hysterical symptoms, similar to those described by Breuer: "Every pain, however, caused, reaches maximum intensity, every ailment is 'fearful' and 'unbearable'. . . . We find nervous palpitation of the heart, a tendency to fainting, proneness to excessive blushing and turning pale, and so on." (p 241) It fits perfectly with a Freudian hypothesis that her traumatic event was sexual and her visions and her issues surrounding her husband were of a sexual nature. Breuer goes on to say that auto-hypnosis, such as Kempe's visions, "develops from reveries that are charged with affect." (p 248) For example, Kempe's in depth day dreams about the passion of Christ or of serving the Blessed Virgin while she was pregnant may qualify. Kempe reports crying constantly during these meditations. Perhaps her praying for visions was a form of auto-hypnosis which triggered her hysterical states. Perhaps all successful prayers for visions are auto-hypnosis.

faq

1. Is it ok that I'm reading your blog?
   If I didn't want folks to read it, I wouldn't be posting it where they could see it. (yes)
2. What's going on with you and Christi?
   Neither of us wants to reconcile. I am buying her out of the house. I'll sue for divorce (thus jumping into the gay marriage legal fray) in May when I'm in CA and I have time.

woof

I just got xena back from her dog sitter. she stayed with a music dept secretary for about 2 - 2.5 weeks. I picked her up this afternoon. she was moderately happy to see me, but also bored in the way she is these days. *yawn*. Deb, the sitter, though, was nearly overwrought. She told Xena a bunch of times that she loved her. Told me to bring Xena back for a visit. Told me how great Xena is. Clearly did not wish to be parted from my dog.

which brings me to the problem of this summer. My current plan is to disappear from CT as soon as possible, prolly the first week of May, and head back to CA. There, I'll hopefully have an internship doing audio programming (in C, C++, Java, Supercollider, MAX/MSP), sound engineering (protools/digital performer), or sound design. (Resume coming very soon. hire me.) And then head back some time in august, possibly heading to the Michigan womyn's Music Festival and maybe on to the Deep Listening Resteat and then finally to NYC, where I'll be crashing with Jess. So big questions surround poor little Xena.

If I have an internship, I'm going to need to find a daily afternoon dog walker. And then, what to do with her during august. Even if I skip music festivals, I'm still going to need a place for her while I'm in NY. So I've got at least two options of where to put her for the summer. One is to send her where she went for winter break and one to send her to spring break lodging and in both cases, I'd give slightly less than 50% odds that I'd get her back. I barely got her back from winter break. She's very happy when she goes to see these people. They have space for her to run and other dogs and one has kids and the other has a farm. she's prolly a lot happier there than she is lurking in my house with no dog contact and insufficient exercise. But she makes me really happy.

I wouldn't adopt a dog right now. Heck, I wouldn't adopt a cat right now. when I got her, I had a stable job, I was married, I owned my house. even then she didn't get walked enough all the time. It'll be harder to fit her into my swinging urban hipster lifestyle when I come back. My current thought is "I'll find a way." and drive her back to CA and then drop her off maybe with her spring break sitter when I get back to the east coast. But maybe I shouldn't have a dog at all....

Back in CT

Got up at an ungodly early hour to get my 6:00 AM plane, which was, for some reason, routed through Dallas. I think I may go with the second cheapest tickets next time. Mitch says that the Dallas routing was because I flew American. "If you flew American to hell, you'd go through Dallas." Or would that be the final destination?

Continuing my trend of having angry people sitting next to me on planes, I was roused from my nap by an angry, loud yelling argument. And the person who was yellling... was the stewardess. Apparently a 95 year old non-english-speaking diabled woman had failed to comply with an instruction to get out of the isle (go figure) and this stewardess had done something to the woman and then was yelling at her extremely upset son who thought that elderly, disabled people deserved a bit of consideration. They went back and forth a loooong time. I didn't see the incident. I don't know who was right. I do know that the stewardess finally "won" the argument by claiming the guy was calling her stupid and insulting her. The guy was not. She had very very poor conflict resolution skills. And I think it's possible that most people have terrible conflict resolution skills. My Middletown housemate, Aaron, teaches kids some of these school in public schools, but his techniquies are "think of the color blue" and don't hit the other kid. I think teaching kids age-appropriate conflict resolution throughout their schooling would be really good for society as a whole. Anyway, there are right ways to win arguments and wrong ways and sometimes winning isn't a good goal. That's my thought.

I got home to my humble abode and noticed a slightly weird smell and decided it was cuz the garbage hadn't been emptied and so I was ignoring it, trying to figure out what was up with two of the power outlets in the living room. Stereo and modem were both dead. Alas. Then my hosuemate suddenly appeared and I was talking to him about stuff and Jess showed up. Aaron popped open the fridge to look for some beers and made a loud exclaimation.

Not only did both of us fail to clean out tupperware, throw out soy milk or do any preperation for being gone two weeks, the mini-power outage also included the fridge. And it had been off for a while. Green fuzz coated the entire inside. when he opened the door, a haze of mold spores filled the kitchen. ack ack ack.

Aaron is currently bleaching the inside of the fridge. I will mop afterwards. We found the tripped breaker and restored it. But what made it trip? Was it just something random, or is our house in danger of burning to the ground? I'm glad I installed smoke detectors.

oy. well, the fridge needed cleaning anyway.

Aim

I am now on AIM in addition to yahoo instant messenger. contact me directly for screen names.