Origins of weird ideas

Self-esteem

When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my class had to sing that song that starts "I believe the children are our future" as part of some school production. I still know almost all the words to that song and will sing it to you if provoked. My mom, a devout Catholic who was somehwat uncomfortable with Vatican II, was also somewhat uncomfortable with that song. I was at a Catholic school. My mom thought we should not be singing that song, which has a line near the end, "learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all." What sort of stuff were they teaching us? God's love is the greatest love of all, she told me.

Some years later, I had gotten a free glossy magazine, prolly at gay pride, which had a page that said in large, colorful block letters, "love your body." Being a teenager who pasted all sorts of stuff to the walls of my room, I cut that out and stuck it in the next available space. My mom scowled at it. Self-love was definitely suspect. Any corporal self-love was doubly suspect. It was always worse to be egotistical than to have low self-esteem. And really, my mom's self-esteem was not high. She was terrified of going to hell her entire life. this is a cultural thing for Irish Catholics and maybe most catholics in the US. It's how they're taught to behave. And it's incompatible with high self-esteem and it's how I was raised.

I am not blaming my mom for my own low self-esteem. I'm grown up now. I can fix this. I just wanted to know where it came from.

Anger versus Hurt and Not Asking for Help

I told my parents that I thought I was queer when I was 14 years old. This was in 1990. They were the first people that I told. I wasn't even totally sure at the time. this was a huge mistake. 1990 was before Ellen, it was before gay-straight alliances. Most adults weren't even out then, at work or to their families. I mean, in big cities, yeah, but in the south bay, no. People thought that they didn't know any gay people then. so much has changed in the last 14 years, it's incredible.

But there I was, 14, a freshman at a catholic high school with no gay friends, role models or anything except for some books like One Teenage in Ten that I found in the Cupertino library. I was profoundly alone and confused and my parents said they would help me with whatever my problems were and they would understand and so I told them and it blew up.

My mom would call my friends parents and they would swap their litanies of complaints about their children. "Paul isn't doing well in math." "Sandy got detention for chewing gum in class." "Celeste thinks she's a lesbian." My mom never told me what other parents said about their kids, because it wasn't my buisiness. However, some other parents did not subscribe to the same philosophy. It got around my freshman class in high school four seperate times that I was queer. Kinds in my PE class were screaming at me in the locker room. they would sneak up behind me and hit the top of my head and then dissolve into a giggling group. This was not good. finally, I beat up one of them and that stopped, but the rest didn't. there was nobody to complain to. My religion teacher told us that god blew up Soddom and Gommorah to get the fairies. I was really into the Catholic thing at the time. I played trumpet in mass every week. I thought that God hated me. I knew my peers hated me. And meanwhile, my mom had started a reform program to discourage me from being gay by giving me a hard time about it. she and my brother would sit around making homophobic comments whenever I was there. My brother was delighted. I had always done better in school than him and had been the "good" kid. finally, it was his turn to be the favored child.

I know now that my brother just wanted approval from mom and was finally getting it. And I know mom really loved me and thought that being queer would be a disaster for me and was tryign to stop it any way she could. But at the time, I felt outcast by peers, by religion and by my family. I contemplated suicide, as did most gay kids at that time. About a third of them would actually try. Chapters of PFLAG were starting to be formed to address this problem, but my folks didn't want to join.

It was really really important to me that nobody could know they were hurting me. I didn't want my parents or mean kids to know they were getting to me. I eventualy started reading Hothead Paisan:homicidal Lesbian Terrorist comics. The motto: "it's better to be homicidal than sucidal." I cultivated anger to protect myself. If I could just get really mad, I could do something. And I did. I was the first out person at my highschool. I actively came out, it wasn't just rumors. I took my girlfriend to senior prom, after more than year of clashing with the administration in an argument that started a few months before junior prom. I think queer kids that went to that hischool after me had an easier time because of the battles I fought, mostly alone (although I had great band friends who kept talking to me despite major social stigma. They weren't necessarily supportive, but they were there and that was a lot. and some were accepting). Four years or so after I graduated, a stranger approached me at dyke march and explained that she had been a freshman at that school while I was a senior.

And my mom finally came to terms with me being queer and really loved Christi. So it all worked out in the end. I had a much easier time than a lot of other queer kids. I never got gay bahsed. I had friends. A few people yelled "dyke" at me, but I ignored tham and they stopped and prolly feared detention anyway. African American kids had a much harder time at that school than I did. I found a strategy for dealing with stress that was the best I could do under the circumstances. And it was getting angry instead of sad. Hiding my feelings. And not asking for help.

I should have jettisonned this long before now, but really, my life wasn't very stressful for the next several years. This strategy wasn't working as well as other strategies would have, but it wasn't really ever tested. Until my mom died. and now I'm getting rid of it.

For Marek

Bush Radio - uses the weekly Bush radio address from right before the State of the Union, which is when this was written. Due to peaking or something random, the recorded version of this sounds almost nothing like the "real" live version. There's a lot more data-bendy static, basically, I think digital peaking, which you don't hear when this is played live, but has screwed up the recording quite a bit. Although, I kind of like it this way.

Untitled thingee. Sounds like the real-life version. Written January 28th

taking an assesment of what's important

I have a sound file of dubya speech where he says, twice, "in fact what the terrorists have done is caused us to take an assesment of what's important." I'm taking an assesment too.

I think I must have thought that the slogan "think gloaball, act locally" had an extra clause of "and indoctorinate your friends and family." I tend to get involved in cult-y movements to improve the world, like veganism or Esperanto. things that would work if a critical mass of people started doing it. So I'd try to convinve other people around me of what a good idea it was, to help reach this critical mass.

Christi makes the most awesome Quiches and Dutch Baby pancakes. We used to have a dutch baby every weekend. She would get up and start making one. I would slice strawberries and roast coffee. Often our neighbors came over and shared with us. But I read Fast Food Nation and became more militant about my diet and quit eating eggs and milk. I was making a sacrifice for the good of the planet. But I was also sacrificing Christi's amazing cooking skills. Does that really help the planet, or does that just alienate loved ones? How is the world in any shape a better place because I haven't had one of christi's great dutch babies in years?

I was getting more and more inflexible and more militant. Christi likes/d to make cookies. Her favorite cookie recipie calls for brown sugar. Brown sugar is the most processed food on earth. Some processes use animal products. I told her that she had to use the raw sugar stuff I was buying from the hippie grocery store. We had poor boundaries. We didn't know how to talk things through. We argued. I won. How fucking important could brown sugar possibly be? Why on earth would I argue with her abut her great cookies? What was I thinking??

Then my mom got sick and died and I wanted to compartmentalize that. I would go see her five or six days a week and when I wasn't seeing her, I was going to live a normal life. I was going to put the pain behind me and carry on. I was going to supress all negativity and look at other things and I was not going to ask for help or talk to anybody about it. this combination is somehwat explosive. All this stuff about moral purity in consumption seemed really important. but what good is moral purity if it chases off people you love?

In short, I've recently been shaken to the core. All the stuff that I thought mattered didn't. All my "radical" ideas are for naught. They're stupid. I bought brown sugar the other day to make cookies for Christi.

I know that Christi doesn't want me back. The last few years have been hard. I might hurt her again. And maybe she thinks if she took me back, she's have to throw away her brown sugar. but I think having boundaries means that (as long as it's not hurting me), she can do whatever she wants.

We were poorly individuated. We got together when we were 18. We had virtually no boundaries. We grew together like two trees that have been planted too close. this is not healthy for the trees. It wasn't healthy for us.

I look at these ideas that I had and wonder how I could have been so stupid. I know that I need to learn from them and go on. and part of learning from them means forgiving myself. why did i do it? youth. foolishness. a misguided desire to avoid pain. because i didn't like myself. according to feeling good, dichotomous thinking (aka: binary oppositions) is a thought pattern that depressed people fall into. i wanted all-or-nothing moral purity because i was somewhat depressed and because i was mourning in a destructive way. and this is why i need to forgive myself, so i can like myself and stop acting like an angry, bitter, untreated depressed person.

So I'm telling myself that I like myself. I'm smart and funny and creative and cute and kind of charming. I've made terrible mistakes, but so have most people at some time in their lives. I'm doing my best.

My dad came over yesterday and i spent several hours crying on his shoulder. for some reason, it's easier to cry with somebody else there than it is by myself. splitting with christi is the hardest thing that's ever happened

Two weeks ago

I woke up to a grimly pleasant morning and got up thinking that despite major turmoil, I was still on an even keel, and thus was now, finally an adult. My shrink disabused me of this notion. I thought that to be grown up meant to supress despair and to never ask for help. I also thought that criticism was an acceptable part of normal discourse. Not to be overly dichotomously binary about things, but these ideas were wrong wrong wrong.

And the two weeks since have been a lot like being caught up in a tornado and getting wacked repeatedly with flying debris. Not a happy event at all, but an opportunity for growth, as my shrink might say. I'm going to be a happier, more stable person at the end of this, but getting there really sucks. I would really like just to drop down in Oz right now.

not standing alone

I wrote something a few days ago about standing alone against pain. what complete bullshit. nobody can do that. that's why people have friends and shrinks and religion. i am not standing alone, thank god. i tried that once. it was a disaster. i don't see the need to repeat that experience. stading alone is sort of masculinist. supporting communities is a "feminine" ideal. there's a reason that women live longer than men.
if i can't undo the past, at least i can learn from it.

working out angst via supercollider

Anger

I just got email from my (soon to be ex)mother-in-law about anger, saying I had every right to be furious about things in my life and I need to find a way to deal with it. Ok, yeah, so I'm angry. I'm angry that my mom died. I'm angry about all the shit that happened then with the insurance company and the doctors and my family. I'm angry that the anti-seizure medication they gave her was an appetite supressant when she was eating three bites of food per day and I called the doctors and they told me to give her ice cream "there's a lot of good calories in ice cream." and i'm angry at the indignity of it all, that they didn't see her as a person and that all the doctors were on vacation when we needed to be meeting with them and rather than find people to fill in for them, they just made us wait even though the treatment couldn't wait. And I'm angry that I was only 26 when she died and that I didn't really know her and she had just barely begun to accept me and I had barely begun to accept her. And I'm angry that she didn't accept me for so long and tried so hard to change me by being mean to me about being queer. And I'm angry at her for getting sick and I'm angry at myself and everyone around her for not noticing until it was too late and I'm angry that she died. And I'm angry that I couldn't solve these problems. I couldn't make things go right with my mom or with Christi.

And my anger changes absolutely nothing. My mom is still dead. Doctors are still assholes. All the stuff we never said to each other will always be unsaid. Christi is still gone. And all of this anger is just a protective shell over a whole lot of hurt. Life isn't fair and people I love leave me.

One website says it's very important that we express our anger and adress the cause of it, but do so with I statements. I can picture myself calling up my mom's now-defunct insurance company (they went bankrupt while she was in hospice care) and saying, "I felt very unhappy when you refused to cover the costs of speech therapy for my mom, so she never recovered any of her speech even during the brief time that it seemed like she was improving. And I'm extremely upset that we had to threaten to sue you before you would cover raditaion therapy because I felt like you didn't care about my mom."

another website says not to express it, but to find the root emotion under the anger and deal with that instead, because anger is always the second emotion. Really, I just felt very frightened that she was dying, so I just need to go learn how to deal with fear and go launch into another web search.

another website says to look out for getting easily frustrated and angry in traffic or at plane delays and other bits of impatience that are signs of unresolved anger. But that stupid shit is so trivial. who cares that your plane is a few hours late when everyone who cares about you will eventually die or leave, thus stranding you entirely alone to face your own mortality? yeah, i spent six hours trying not to cry in the dallas airport. and in a hundred years, i'll be dead. so why be mad? i wasn't crying because my plane was late. i didn't even fucking care until i tried to find food in the airport.

Anger seems more proactive than other negative emotions. If you put it into a binary opposition with another emotion, like sad, anger would be the more masculine one. By our patriarchial standards (which I unfortunately subscribe to), anger would win. so what? so what do i do? do i try to talk it out by explaining to my friends and posting in my blog that i'm angry? is my anger just sublimated sadness? should i take time to let myself feel anger? do i turn it in another direction by writing a loud orchestra movement with a lot of trumpet blares and tritones and minor seconds? do i try to distract myself and put it behind me?

the only thing I think I know is that I should speak and act in a loving manner to people I love. I should keep love in mind. Because one day everyone I love will leave me whether on purpose or not and they need to know in their hearts and their minds that I love them.

goddamn it

And then there were none

Christi has moved out. the walls are basically bare. she left one of her grandmother's paintings, perhaps by accident. she also took the imac, which is hers, but i can't see what use she might have for it, not that it matters, as it does belong to her. she left behind a little terra cotta horse that her grandmother gave her, a replica of the ones in those imperial tombs. her grandmother was one of the first american tourists allowed into china.

She said she left some stuff behind. It was too much for just one day and just one pickup truck load and just one broken heart. as hard as this is for me, it must be much harder for her. She's doing the best she can and so am I.

There is nothing I can say that I haven't said. There is nothing I can do that I haven't done. I need to be quiet and give her space, which is perhaps the hardest possible thing.

I don't want to find a new relationship, just a series of meaningless flings. I'm out of meaning to share. New love seems too hard right now. I want to simultaneously forget and remember. I want to forgive my tresspasses as I forgive those who tresspass against me. I thought a few months ago that I could get away from my problems by moving far away, but my problems were wiley and followed me. I cannot avoid the crushing pain of existance, I can just find ways to ameliorate it, to face it head on and survive, to know that I am stronger than pain and that I can stand alone and prosper and then stand with friends and be truly blessed. I have wonderful friends.

Still accepting applications

While applications are being received and processed, to date, no single candidate has been chosen and there is still time for you (yes, you) to apply. Preference will be given to applicants that actually live in California or are at least within hundreds of miles from here. All applications will be kept stricly confidential and the final candidate must agree to a non-disclosure agreement. (I know it's hard not to kiss and tell, but such is life.)

In the beginning

I remember when I first fell in love with Christi. We were both 18 years old and freshwomen at Mills College. She was studying music and I was studying computer science. We lived down the hall from each other in Mary Morse, the freshwoman dorm. I was dating an art major who had a nice room at the very end of the hallway. In the evenings, she liked to brew a huge cup of coffee and hold court. People would come sit around her room and we would pass the big cup of coffee around. I remember the excited way that Christi would exclaim "coffee" and how she would smile and her eyes would sparkle as the cup got passed to her. She was so funny and so enchanting. I remember telling my girlfriend one night that I hoped that Christi would come over. She said, "I don't. She drinks all the coffee!" Who could begrudge a cup of coffee to somebody's who brown eyes percolated so happily?

Christi was facinated with sound. She would walk around tapping on things, looking for new sounds for percussion. She would tap everything, lightpoles, street signs, pieces of junk. I was facinated and I started tapping thigns too. She changed the way I looked at sound. I list John Cage as one of my major influences, but really, it was John Cage through Christi. All sorts of sounds could be beautiful and could go into music. Christi so brilliant. I was convinced that she was going to be the greatest composer who ever lived (actually, I still think this). I was following her around and telling her that I would write her biography when she was famous. I remember one time, we were in one of the three places that Mills used to dump junk and she picked up some glass object and smashed it. She was looking for glass things to break. She had been a tiny bit distracted as she was combing through the junk yard, but the glass smash focussed her attention. She said, "oh! that made a nice sound! I wonder what it was?" That was the moment I fell completely in love with her.

We weren't dating (I thought christi was straight) but were spending all of our time together. A receptionist in the dorm told us we were like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb and Christi and I got into a very chivalrous argument about who was whom, each insisting that the other was definitely not Tweedle Dumb.

I had already declared to Christi that I was going to live with her after school. she was so beautiful. so smart. so talented. She had such a beuatiful smile. She was always smiling. she was the closest friend I had ever made. I was wondering at how strongly attached I felt to her and how it was odd that it was completely platonic.

One night, after several months of this, Christi told me she had a huge crush on me. So we started dating. she wasn't out, so she didn't want me to tell anyone right away, but everyone who saw my huge smile just immediately knew.

Clearly a lot has happened and changed in the nine years since then, but Christi is still the smart, enchanting, beautiful, talented person that she was then.

Reaching me

Send email to the wesleyan addr4ess or call my cell @ 860-301-2508. Please specify if you are contacting me about the tumultuous affair (women only need apply).

adventures

Christi is having a lot of exciting adventures right now and I'm happy for her. I think she thinks that being with me would mean having to give them up. And it might mean a bit of compromise on some things, but on the whole . . . we live on seperate continents. even if we were together, i couldn't control what she did when i wasnt around. I wouldn't want to.

So I went to have breakfast with Christi this morning. Spent the whole time trying to convince her that it would be a good idea to try to work it out. I'd been telling people that even when I did stupid things, it always seemed to me at the time to be reasonable. Well, as I sat in the restaurant, untouched food cold in front of me, manically explaining how things could be really great because we'd both learned so much, I was ...um... kind of aware that i was not being reasonable or even rational. This didn't exactly put christi at ease, or convince her. I'd think "I have to stop. maybe if i just say it a different way!"

Yeah, so she's kind of extremely mad at me. We tried talking about my mom being sick a little bit. She said she was hurt. I didn't come back with "my mom died!" which was my previous responce. I said that I was sorry I had been so angry, etc. She explained that, no, she was hurt because my mom had died, as in, it was really hard for her.

I blinked a bit. It surprised me to hear her say it. But I don't know if it was a wow-she-was-upset-about-that-too kind of surprise or a that's-really-not-what-i-expected-her-to-say kind of surprise. I mean, I got kind of caught up in my own devastating loss of my mom and wasn't really foccussing on how it was affecting other people. On the one hand. On the other hand, of course it's obvious that it would have upset Christi. She knew my mom for 7 years and they loved each other. I don't think I would have failed to notice that, but I dunno. I feel very confused right now. And my memory from times of stress is all jumbled and unclear. This morning is jumbled. A year ago is more jumbled.

Christi really does not want to work it out and I need to accept that. Just because I think we could and should is not going to change her mind, no matter how I say it or how many times. Harping on it for over an hour is just going to make her not want to talk to me at all.

I wonder if I'll ever see her again.

I need very much to have a tumultuous, reboundy-type affair. Now accepting applications. I'm in California till the 22nd. Why not have some short-term drama?

Lately, I've been very "now, now, now." It's because the future scares me.

Christi is gone

She's gone to La and Ellen is using my room for other guests, so by the time I get back here, everything that Christi decides is hers (things get blurry when they're acquired together and i don't care about stuff so much anyway, just symbols) will be gone.

I'm still breathing

Other minds festival

is this weekend. christi and I are both planning to go. It'll be the first time I see her since breaking up with her. I feel anxious about this. but I beleive it will be ok. i really want it to be ok. i'm really glad that i'll get to see her.

After many plane delays, gate changes and a cancelled flight, I am now, finally, in Berkeley.

I don't understand why people get angry and yell at gate agents about these things. there were weather problems. being angry won't change anything and yelling at a person won't cause a plane to appear. given all the indignities of life, late planes seem so small a thing.

Sometime in the last year or so, I quit being angry. I was an angry youth. It didn't serve me well (see yesterday's long post). I'm glad for this change.

I put Christi throught so so much and she still loved me. and i threw it all away. while this is incredibly painful, i still feel happy to know i was loved so much.

what does it mean that it took me breaking up with her to realize this?

Looking Backwards

The best case scenario, for a couple in a time of crisis, is that they will support each other. One will be able to turn to the other for love and reassurance. In the worst case, they will make each other miserable and end up making the crisis worse. When my mom died, Christi and I fell into the latter group.

Until this week, I blamed Christi for this. "She wasn't there for me." I broke up with her because I thought if I had another major crisis, like my brother, my dad or myself getting cancer, that she "wouldn't be there for me again." I thought she was unable. Trying to talk through it would bring up incredibly painful memories and at the end would fail, so why put ourselves through that?

My strategy for dealing with stress from the time of my mom's death and the aftermath, was not to think about it. I didn't think about it. I didn't talk about. I started thinking about it for the first time over winter break. christi and I couldn't even talk about the period and still can't without arguing. It breaks down into "my mom died!" "i felt very hurt!" "I felt hurt too!"

After a couple of weeks of being broken up with Christi, it occurred to me that she was very very present for her brother. He had a nervous breakdown, which is worse than what I experienced (at least more personally debilitating . . . ) and she was there for him the whole way. Maybe is she was there for him, she would be there for me. I called her up and asked her if she wanted to work it out. I told her that I had some demands, but that I couldn't ask them except with a shrink as a referee, because each of us is carrying an incredibly loaded stack of hurt and an attempt to discuss this without help would explode.

When my mom first was sick, I was sad, I was scared and I was angry. I wanted Christi to be there right next to me the whole time. And she was. She took time off work and sat with me and my mom in the hospital. She brought me sushi every night. She did everything she could for me. She knew my mom for about 7 years then, so she was directly feeling sad, stressed, etc too. My support network was primarily Christi, but was also some south bay friends, including Tammy & Vince, Mitch and the Kazes. Those guys were way cool. Christi relied upon them and her brother, who was living with them at the time.

The situation with my mom got worse, she was angry at me and I was supposed to be caring for her and she wouldn't let me. Then her insurance company was declining treating her. And it was completely terrifying that my mother, the woman who raised me, was trying to run away from the house in her pajamas. I kept a list in my head of all the terrible things that might happen (she might fall, she might take all her pills at once, she might run away, etc) and how to prevent them and fixated on it. I also became increasingly angry.

I was angry at my dad for not implementing my list and for being afraid and for not realizing sooner what was going on. I was mad at my brother for running away. I was furiously completely angry at the insurance company. Christi and our friends began strongly encouraging me to get therapy. I remember trying to figure out how to work the therapists door system and becoming completely, totally furious and wanting to smash it. Then I spent an hour in therapy, stressing about my mom's treatment plan and the insurance company, in a bitter rage and so so so much pain and the shrink kept saying, "it sounds like you have a lot to think about." I went in wanting to figure out what to do about this problems. The shrink didn't give me a plan of action. She didn't make me feel better. It was clearly a waste of my time and I felt angry about it and angry that people made me go see her. Clearly my problems were all rooted in the physical fact of my mom being sick and that's not something that you can talk your way into fixing.

I don't remember my overall mood at the time, except upset, but it seems to me now that if I was that angry at a shrink and her door, I must have been angry at many many things. I wanted Christi to be right next to me as a crutch, but also as a human security blanket. I wanted affection from her when I needed it, but I probably also did what kids do to their security blankets and bit her when I was angry, which was probably most of the time.

Christi was leaning more and more on her brother, who was very kind to her and more and more hostile to me. I wanted him to move out because of his hostility. Christi saw that as me removing her primary source of support. He stayed and she leaned on him until he completely fell apart. He went to the hospital and then he went to Portland. Christi went with him. She didn't want to come back. I insisted that she should. She had to be there for me! So she did.

We couldn't be in the same room without fighting. We couldn't work out the problem with so much stress still pouring in. My mom was still getting worse all the time. we told a shrink our tale of woe in factual terms. My mom had cancer. The insurance company hadn't wanted to treat it. The surgeon messed up the referrals. We couldn't start treatment until it was too late. And then Christi's brother had become very ill and was living with us. The shrink was horrified at the awfulness of it, but said she could see how much christi and i loved each other. She gave us the temporary advice not to talk about it, so that we could at least co-habitate.

My memory is that Christi didn't like that shrink and wanted to find a new one, even thought I liked her. Christi's memory is that I didn't like the shrink and she did. In either case, we went to find a different shrink. We would start telling our tale of woe, and it seemed to me that Christi would rattle off a litany of my misdeeds. I felt attacked. I nixed all the shrinks. I walked out of one of them. So we never talked about what happened with her brother and my mom at that time. We still haven't.

I don't remember feeling rage at this point. I remember having a panic attack and Christi taking me to the emergency room and me sobbing in the ER, but I don't know when that happened. My memory is all jumbled. but I feel "comfortable" being angry. It's an emotion that doesn't scare me and than I can settle into when things are negative. I'm sure I was still angry. (actually, as i re-edit this, I remember being angry then....) I would have pointed this anger out in all directions. As the person closest to me, Christi would have gotten a whole lot of it.

Christi wanted space from me. She didn't want to be my security blanket anymore. Her own source of support was gone. She was increasingly distant. Her brother blamed me for his problems. She agreed with him and was angry at me.

after my mom died, I was a mess. I didn't get out of bed until christi came home from work. My conversational skills were shot. And I quit talking to my south bay support network or really anyone but Christi and Tiffany. Christi had to deal with me alone. I wanted to go on a trip to LA to visit my cousin. Christi did not want to go with me. she said she couldn't get off work. I started arguing with her constantly about her work schedules and whether she could get time off (my mom was a major donor to the organization she worked for, it seemed to me that she could get time off . . .. ). I thought that she just didn't want to travel with me. She might have foreseen a long road trip, trapped in a small car with the world's angriest woman. It only occurs to me now that using work as an excuse might have been an attempt to spare my feelings. Or maybe I wouldn't accept "I don't want to" as a reply.

My rage must have gradually subsided. when I'm grumpy, tho, I can be snippy, so I must have been snippy for a long time. I think that the last summer went relatively well, but it must have been a relief to Christi, when I moved out, that she could be sure of no snippiness. then I came to visit her in Paris and was stressed with school and was kind of snippy . . .. Now things are as they are now.

When my mom was dying, I needed to find a better way to deal with things than being angry. even after she was dead and I was calming down, I didn't want to see a shrink and I refused to discuss it. Christi was using increasingly forceful ways to communicate with me, probably out of necessity. We were angry at each other. It was a bad time. And I looked back on it a little bit and remembered feeling alone and Christi being angry with me and decided that she "wasn't there for me." I was bad, but I hurt and she should have cut me slack, I thought. But how much anger should a person have to absorb before they've cut enough slack? I pushed her too hard.

Trying to work it out based on "you weren't there for me" would have failed. so I was right. Lucky me.

More navel gazing

I tend to see the world as a series of binary oppositions. I just read an article about this for my english class by Hélène Cixous (a french feminist) called "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks / Ways Out / Forrays." In this article, she documents the essentially masculinist (phalocentric) nature of binary oppositions. She makes a claim that inherent in these oppositions are value judgements. Things binarily opposed are not equal. One is better than the other. Moreover, it is how some chooose to define themselves, but labelling on thing as "me" and another thing as "not me", opposing them, and then comparing them to rate how we are doing in relation to everything else.

I do this and it has not served me well. For starters, it means that there is always a hierarchy and thus I can never equally relate to anyone or anything I put myself in binary opposition to. Furthermore, it creates false dichotomies. There are a lot of grey areas in life. Real life is not "do X or be a loser." this has been harming my worldview and my relationships.

I think it might relate to my trying to supress mourning and not feel sad, something that has also not served me well. I wanted to bravely soldier on and put the past behind me and not look back. It's like I formed my self image from outdated ideals of maleness and manhood. How did I get such a masculinist viewpoint? It's bizarre. Reading my blogposts from last winter is bizarre. I know I must have been in turmoil, but I barely acknowledged it.

So I'm confused about how I have formed my concept of self, but, while I cannot change the past, I can effect the future. I'm not going to say "these things must go now (or i'll be a loser)," since this would just put me in another binary opposition, but I can look at how I am reacting to things as I react to them and see if I am falling into a pattern that might not serve me well. I will feminize myself. But don't expect skirts or lipstick. I have boundaries.

Emotional history

Highschool - sad before coming out. after coming out, don't remember

College - till senior year - don't remember. I think I was a rilly happy freshwoman. Sophmore year, christi got sick, which was deeply alarming. Junior year, don't remember.

senior year of college (97-98) - stressed to the point of trying st john's wort, which i thought made me manic. I sad, "I thought i was depressed, but it was all in my head." stress cause: thesis

right after college - unhappy and directionless after finishing major goals in life.

first jobs - depressed due to crappy hours and no music in life. mostly felt sad while stoned, but made major changes as a result.

netscape - very happy at first. better pay. better hours. bought music gear. made a lot of tape music.

christi goes to work at nolo - my netscape commute starts to suck. sili valley culture is very irritating. job is less interesting. want to quit, but am persuaded to stay, meanwhile, economy going south. becoming more and more unhappy

got laid off by netscape (2001) - feel very directionless. alternate between feeling relieved and like a loser. trying to convince christi to take a long leave and go to europe. she doesn't want to. no idea what to do with life. i think i must have been unhappy.

trip to europe 2001 - christi got laid off by nolo, so europe trip happened. felt somewhat stressed at the time, but great experience. overall - happy

back to grind - fall/winter 2001 - 2002 - still not sure what to do with self. start focussing more and more on music, which makes me happier and happier. driver for om festival in 2002 perhaps happiest time in my life. then going to confrences, writing stuff, had an ensemble going, checking out grad programs. happy. on the way to visit a music thing in seattle when ...

spring 2002 - mom gets cancer. miserable. sad. stressed. not much clear memory from this time. dark dark days.

fall 2002 - mom dies - days get darker yet. quit getting out of bed. barely able to function. don't rember the winter, but know i was sad. blog posts indicate that i was working on grad school apps. trying not feel sad by supressing emotions (i think). probably acting weird.

spring 2003 - got accepted into wesleyan. neighbor said it was the first time she'd seen me smile in months. played a gig at jack straw. still sad, but trying not to. felt sense of direction.

summer 2003 - playing a lot of music. working on many projects. happier than i'd been in a long time. i think i was pretty happy and becoming happier the whole time

fall 2003 - not knowing anyone at school caused stress, so i was unhappy and lonely at first and returned to heavy mourning. created stress for myself by taking too many classes + doing too much work on assignments. got happier and happier until winter break, but possibly supressing feelings?

winter break - deeply stressed. feelings supressed as much as possible. broke up with christi.

the present - unsupressing emotions. feel mostly very sad. regret winter descision.

conclusion

tracking trends, I've been unhappy the last 6 - 7 years way more often than happy. however, 1. happiness comes in moments, usually, which might defy trends (is this true for everyone?) and 2. when i'm sad, i have an easier time remembering sadness and when i'm happy, i can only remeber that, which skews any data.

things that make me happy include having goals, having direction, new projects, and having music. things that make me unhappy is the abscence of any of those "having" things, a screwed up social life, death, divorce

please comment

The last key ingredient to a relationship

both people have to want to be in it. without that, you're pretty much fxcked.

Differences between Need and Want

You could wake up one morning and realize that you're not dependant on the loved one who is been irritating you. And depending on what your life has looked like before that point, you could yell, "I don't need you!" and chase that person out of your life.

But that descision could lead to regret if you realize that you really want (but don't need) that person in your life. You could make yourself miserable. Be forewarned.

Germany Pros and Cons

Ok, I want to do study abroad thing. It was a motivator in applying to Wesleyan. I have visited the institution at which it was held (Read what I said about it at the time). It's an awesome thing. And I was planning to apply after I graduate.

Taking a year off to do it is a different thing tho. I had sort of pictured the year as a possible springboard to Europe, which it would not be if I had to come back to Wesleyan afterwards. I wouldn't graduate until 2006 at the age of 30. Aaron says he would take over my lease. Since it would only be a year, I guess I'd find temporary shelter for Xena. But I would come back and have virtually no friends, since almost everyone I know would have graduated. Any contacts I made in the EU would have to be put on hold for a year so I could come back and take classes and do my thesis.

It would, on the other hand, put me a lot closer to Christi, which is enough to motivate me to do it next year, if she wants me to. Application deadline could be pushed back to the end of spring break.

Thee things needed in a realtionship

1. Love
   This is the most important thing to make a serious relationship work. But the Beatles weren't right, it's not all you need. But I think with love and determination, you can get to the other two.
2. Communication
   You can love somebody to death, but if you aren't getting that across, well, that's a huge problem. You need to be able to communicate both what you need from the other person and to be able to understand what they need from you. I think communication fails more often than love.
3. Boundaries
   Limits to what you can demand. Limits to what can be demanded of you. Limits to how far you'll push, how much you want to know and what you're willing to do. The clearer you are on these (and the clearer you communicate them), the happier you will be. Incompatible boundaries are a huge potential problem, but hopefully love will enable compromise. And if not, well, boundaries can break relationships. But they can also make them work much much better. I'm told this and I beleive it.

Germany?

I have an opportunity, potentially, to spend next year in Germany, doing the program that I thought I might do after I graduate. Apparently, none of the second years want to do it, meaning that I could apply for next year or apply for the year after. Karlsruhe is the warmest part of Germany and is about a day's walk through the Black Forest to France.

I need to think fast. applications are due next week.

Today

The concert went alright. More people showed up than I expected. Composers were not publically acknowledged, so I felt kind of anonymous afterwards. I like my piece because it's just intonted and the just reverberation is very nice.

It occurs to me, on the subject of depression, that I have a really good reason to feel sad right now. And I have a shrink. And I should feel sad. and that's ok.

Concert Today

5:00 in the Wesleyan Chapel. Deborah Justice will be premering a work by me, "Tangled Hammers"

2 things

1. The weather was very very lovely today. Sunny, breezy, pleasant.
2. It's possible that I've been depressed for a looong time. I want to know what people who have known me for 3+ years think.

*pained noise here*

After Christi didn't show up, I sent her some email asking her about rescheduling, etc. I thought that she didn't write back, but I just found her reply hiding amidst supercollider mailing list crap

She doesn't want to work it out. not ever.

I was a fool to break up with her

maybe this would have happened anyway.

I love her. I counted her as the most important thing in my life for a third of my life.

My shrink says that I should let myself feel sad when I feel sad.

this is so so so wrong. this isn't supposed to happen. there must be some mistake somewhere. we're married. we're supposed to love each other. i was thinking all day about how much i miss her.....

alas alas alas alas woe misery

it would be very bad to call her right now and i'm not going to do it. very bad. very very bad.

Website review

Everybody I hang out with is currently out of town, so I'm going to a review a website on my blog. Orkut.com is Google's forray into the world of Friendster-like communities. These are community-type websites that rely on personal connections. You sign up and then get your friends to sign up and they get their friends to sign up, and it creates networks of these friendship associations. You can use these association to search for people who, for example, like Ayn Rand. You get a list of people and can see how they are connected to you. You are friends with Joe who is friends with Amanda who is friends with Julian, who likes Ayn Rand. You can then click on Julian's profile and look at her picture and find out where she lives and other info about her. For example, Julian might live in a town five miles away, list bondage as a hobby and that she is looking to date people of your gender. You could then send Julian email, ask for an introduction through the parties in between or pretend you never found this connection, depending on what you think of these things.

Orkut seems to offer all these friendster services, with a few more. For instance, orkut has "communities" of their members with similar interests. So you can find anarchists, biodeisel fanatics or whatever. Also, it goes farther in the personal ad aspect of friendster, by asking the same questions as yahoo personals. describe your sense of humor. do you live alone, have roomates or pets? etc. It lets you list a website, which is not supported by yahoo personals. and it's free.

It also will list your job skills, education, skills and resume-like things for potential headhunters. This inappropriate mixture of personal and professional is something that would only come out of silicn valley. does a headhunter really need to be able to find out on the same website that I know java and that I think body piercing is sexy? boundaries! networking for jobs and networking for dates are different animals! engineers should not be allowed to design these services because of their tendency to not have lives outside of work.

Also, what website do i list? my blog? my personal site? my professional site? i'm confused about the mission that i'm supposed to be trying to accomplish. also, it asks for a lot of information for a personal ad. More than I would normally post. But You can set levels of privacy for information and of course, it relies on these friendship networks, so theoretically, the people seeing it are somewhat trusted. Unless people cheat the system. In my friendster network, I've found Yale (who knew?), a few college radio stations, a Chinese restaurant, and the other day, Screetch from Saved by the Bell popped up. Who knew I was so few degrees of seperation from fictional celebrities?

Some nice things about the Orkut service is that you can tell it your many email addresses, so if people invite you to be their friend at any one of your ten email addresses you've used over the last few years, it will find you. And when I signed up, it remembered invitations that I must have received months ago and ignored, so I had connections waiting for me.

This service lists "affiliated with Google" on the bottom of every page. Will Google take over the friendship market? Is mixing networking goals innapropriate or very powerful? Is this product brilliant or too weird? I dunno. If you want to join and/or add me as a friend, just type in any email address that you normally use to reach me.

I am influenced by kraftwerk

The thing that used to need salt. I don't think it was obviously at 210 bpm before.... The code for this has changed a lot to reflect last monday's lecture. Um, and Kraftwerk has complicated drum lines and is extremely reptitive. so this now has um.. more involved drum lines and in every section, the rythms and melodies are now linked. so if you hear rhythm x in section 1, it will have melody y connected to it every time you hear it. of course, every time the program is run, the melody will be different. and the drums aren't linked to anything. and it is definitely definitely time for bed.

headlights

yeah, so the big mystery with the electrical system in my car is that i took out the highbeam bulbs instead of the low beam bulbs....

yeah....

Song structure

So I'm still working on the song that needs salt (ok, I know it's not a song unless it has words....). Aaron told me that the lastest incarnation resmebles Kraftwerk, so I popped Die Mensch-Machine into my CD player so I could try to get some inspriation on how to fix my doomed work (aside from de-glitching it....).

I'm listening to it right now, from an analysis point of view. when I listened to Kraftwerk before, as just tunes I liked, I tended to focus on their awesome sound design. This album came out in 1978 and is a fine example of analog synthesis. Their sounds are very nifty, nicely filtered and in tune. They get many nice fx from good filter usage and do a lot of unashamed analog sweeps, which are idiomatic of the instrument and aren't afraid to throw in a nice splat here or there.

Structurally, however, sound design aside, their songs are just lame pop songs with simplistic rhythms and chord progressions. Everything going on is in the sound design and the arpegiation. if you played the songs on the piano, they would just be goofy. they're not Frank Zappa, they're just a silly pop band and I never noticed till now.

Let this be a lesson to you: do not change the way you listen to music that you like.

friendster questions for Miss Manners

How formal or casual is the process of asking an aquaintance to be your friendster? If you exchange a few emails with someone in your friendster network and then meet in person is that adequate or should a more personal connection exist?

My car is fixed

I get it back tomorrow. Then i can rejoin the human race (... the daytona 500??....) and seem less flaky to the natives of CT. I hate driving, but I don't like bumming rides. But really, it took the scorn of my peers to incite me to repair.

Open Mic

I played at a trendy bobo restaurant. (bobo is a word i just learned. It means bourgeois bohemian. I like this word very much.)

Anyway, so I got on "stage" and my computer wouldn't start. So I got back off stage and it booted fine. computers like to do things like that on stages. they get stage fright. It's troubling for them to have to perform on command. So some other guy played and I got up and played three tunes. One was Dance Tune for Marek. The other two don't have names. One involves dubya. The other doesn't. All the other open mic players were guitarists/singers, except for Deborah, the host, who played dulcimer and confessed to me that she felt a bit out of genre.

I had been joking that there might be A&R people in the audience. Maybe I would be discovered and signed by Warner Brothers new experimental music label.

while I was playing my last song, some guy came curiously into the room and then made a rock-on hand signal and left. Apparently, he works at the restaurant and is a DJ at WESU radio. He came up afterwards and asked for a CD, so I sent him to my website. I'll burn him some CD tunes later. Not exactly an A&R guy, but still cool. this would be my first non-pirate radio play in the us.

A while ago, I cast the I-ching and it said there would be advantage in every movement. There are some obvious areas of my life where this is not true, but outside of those areas, it seems to be the case. Things are really going well. I'm meeting with success in a high percentage of my endeavors. sometimes, this success is different than what I envision....

Oh, and last thing, some dood at the open mic said I sounded like a band called "Silver Apples" from the late 60's. Apparently they did stuff with early analog synths that was really unlike what other people are doing at the time. Which is cool. But it also means one of two things: 1. They are this guy's only forray into experimental electronic. or else, 2. I still sound like I'm doing analog stuff, even when working on the computer, which would be unfortunate, since analog gear is better for analog sound, but at least the computer is portable and just intoned.

Cars and Marriage

Well, both my headlights are out, which means I can't drive at night. To locals of Connecticut, this is a way of explaining that I am a complete loser. Yes, a car is as vital and as necessary an accessory as it was in my high school.

So I was telling some story to Heidi (Heidi is the woman who told me I was too tall to date, so now we're buddies) that involved me getting a ride someplace, and she responded by saying she was going to come help me fix my car. Hopefully, this big 'L' will drop off my forehead...

After a lot of labor, I can now say that the bulbs are not blown and the fuse is not out and what's wrong is anybody's guess. consumer reports says something about weird electrical problems like the in the 98 bug. I'm calling the dealer tomorrow.

And, in the other news of the subject line, Dubya now supports a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Ok, so things have been pretty clear for a while now that Christi and I did not get married to live happily ever after (yeah, all this "breaking up" stuff....). we really got married in an attempt to destroy the institution of marriage. I can tell that family values are very precarious and need constant vigilance and that the opposite sex marriage of everyone in america could be destroyed, so that's why we did it. Who knew Bush would catch on? He must be smarter than he looks.

Ok, maybe I wanted to live happily ever after, but failing that, smashing the entire isntution wouldn't be so bad.

Spring Break!

I will depart Bradley Internation airport (located a mere 45 minutes form the wesleyan campus) on Thursday March 4th at 1:51 pm, which gives me time to provide my ride (whoever he or she may be) with lunch. Or, I could provide my ride with breakfast and spend some time in the airport doing reading for my Mystic Voices class.

I will arrive in Oakland, CA on Thursday March 4th at 7:42 pm. I will be amazed at the warm weather. I will immediately want either mexican food, chinese food or japanese food or good onion rings. in any case, i will be pining for the food offerings of my homeland, which I would certainly share with my ride

While in California, I will visit the beach. I will visit my family members. I will visit the Lexington Club. I will also do reading for my Mystic Voices class.

I would also like to do some gigging. I will have 20 minutes of laptop music. I can open for yer show. I can play at your house party. By the end of the break, I should have a longer set.

I will depart Oakland on sunday March 21 at 6:00 in the morning. Ugh. the tickets were about $70 cheaper. I will take a cab.

I will arrive at Bradley International airport on sunday March 21st at 5:00 pm. I will provide my ride with dinner (at a Middletown Zagat-rated restaurant!!) and a movie.

Missing something

If it were soup, I'd add salt. Can this algorythmically generated bit of music be saved? Does it need:

• George Bush?
• Explotions?
• George Bush exploding?
• Analog-ish grinding noises?
• Jessica Feldman singing on top?

all i wanna do is sleep

christi missed her flight out here and on the same day got an offer to go do field recordings in China (for which she would get a grant) and to be music director on a movie done by the same person who did Winged Migration. Her star is rising. Specifically it's rising because she's far away from me.

Upcoming shows

Tuesday February 24, sometime between 7:00 - 9:00: New laptop music at Open Mic Night at It's Only Natural restaurant.

Sunday February 29, 5:00 PM: New piece for Hammer Dulcimer performed by Deborah Justice in the Wesleyan Chapel.

Christi overslept and missed her flight. this was to be a meeting where we determined whether or nto a future together was possible.

Mostly, I feel stunned.

So I cleaned the house in anticipation of Christi's arrival tonight, which I was feeling increasingly hopeful about. but i just got a message saying that she's not coming. I don't know whether to go back to bed or to get drunk.

I love Gavin Newsom

Ok, so he has problems. But goddamn, this a momentous thing he's done. February 12th every year should be Gavin Newsom day and events ought to be held to commemorate it. He's a striahgt guy and he did this. He's a mainstream democrat straight guy.

a happy couple. I met Hyde and Dawn when I went to the Michigan Women's music festival a few years ago. That's also when they met. Dawn moved to California shortly thereafter and I would sometimes see them around. And today they got married.

This is momentous. I wish i was home.

acadmic writing

"New paradigms of the responding self, capable of exemplifying the dialogic relation that structures the meaning space deliminated by the biblical canon, spring up along this trajectory of interpretation." (Riccoeur, "The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation." In Figuring the Scared: Religion, Narration and Imagination. p 267)

The debate:

Is academic writing bullshit or horseshit?

While heretofore the traditional cry of the beleagured student, representing an esprit de corps as much as a remonstrance against obfuscated elusitivty, has been to invoke bovine post-gustatory effluent, it is encumbent upon scholars to examine the lexical baggage surrounding this phraseology and unpack possible biases. For instance, exegesis of the prefix unearths an allusivity to masculinormative beastomorphism, clearly substantiating latent gender issues in the academy, a constituent of occidental scholastic heritage. This, conforming to the mysogonist preposition that congizance is a masculine endeavor. Contrast this now to the symbolic grid envoked via refrences to enquine imagery. The social gendered meaning space deliminated the academic tradition remains undiscerned, masking a recalcitrant responce to gynoschoalistisim or evoking the semiotics of tolerance? Given the subjectivity of differentiating the two prepositions and to avoid "looking a gift horse in the mouth," the communal recitation is quasi-mandated to equimorphise. That is, academic writing is horseshit.

what about academic music?

ah yes. What about academic music? My music is heavily academically influenced. this is my second round of music school. i read acadademic books about music. i talk to professors. i create stuff that is respected in academic settings (more or less), but doesn't have much of an outside audience. Just like the essays of the guy I quote at the top of this post. Academics like him. they know the lineage of his teachers and can recognize his influences. The read him and think about him and incorporate his ideas into their own writings. just like music.

well, ok, so is my music horseshit? Some people like it (mostly academics and other composers). But some people also like academic writing (mostly academics). So horseshit is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Or, maybe pretension is always horshit?

Morton feldman just wrote things as he wanted to. He didn't have a system. He wrote notes down on paper and people played them. No manifestos. No pronouncements on "invoking temoporal space." Just notes on paper.

I think music is nifty, but it's not like finding a cure for cancer or something. It's entertainment. People ultimately listen or don't listen based on how they like the sounds, not because of over-intellectulazised program notes. music is nifty. "nifty." not "secular quasi spiritual pathos."

Learning things

Last semester, I learned to tie my shoelaces so that they don't come untied. This semester, I think I'll learn about how to do bow markings, so string players can figure out how to play notes I write. Maybe next semester, I'll learn some social skills. I need to concentrate on the usefulness of bowmarkings, or i'll never do my reading again.

For Marek

Fxcked at 110 bpm 2'04

blogosphere

http://www.blogpulse.com/ does automated trend discovery in blogs. This means if a new phrase starts popping up in people's blogs, it will note it and provide links to the indexed blogs. So if you look at yeasterday, for eaxmple, you see a lot of variations on valentines day.

What's interresting, to me, is looking at terms related to gay marriage, which have popped up recently for obvious reasons. Every blog that they found that is talking about gay marriage is on the pro side. this means that either homophobes aren't smart enough to figure out how to blog (likely, but unfortunate, since they seem to be able to manage voting machines), or that the people who care about this enough to post about it are all pro. This means, that while the country may be split on the issue, those who really care about it (at least among the digerati) are pro. If this can be extrapolated to the general public, if Bush gets behind the evil anti amdendment, no antis will care about it enough for it to make up for his previous crimes, but pros will hate him for it, if they didn't already.

It is with mixed emotions that I look at all this stuff going on. I'm still pro gay marriage, of course. I'm also pro gay divorce. If we can go to Canada an enter into the bounds of holy matrimony, then it would be nice if there was a way to get out of it too. You know, should it become necessary. bleah.

Hangover Music

Yes, I am sitting alone on a saturday night, on my computer. What's more, it's valentines day. I woke this morning with a wicked hangover, after really not having consumed that much alchohol. Or maybe it wasn't that bad, but it took me a dern long time to shake it. Deborah suggests that I didn't drink enough water.

Anyway, I woke up with the idea that if I made more accessible music, I would be more able to impress chicks. My noise music is not working for me in this regard. I know I used to have a techno-dance generator that was somehwat finished, but it was for MAX/MSP for os9. SO why not do a dance thingee in supercollider? This is why not. I'm never going to get chicks with music. In fact, I may have to lie and tell them I do something else. It might be better to pretend to be an English major or something.

I did nothing productive today

[8812 messages expunged from folder "INBOX"] 

truths

1. Ice might sounds neat when it breaks, but slipping and falling on it while drunk (or presumably, while sober too) sucks. ice sucks.
2. Everything Tom says about Connectucut and CT women is true. Tom is Connecticut.
3. Email is as at least as untrustworthy as the telephone
4. Hangovers suck

Xena is locked in India House and no human is there to let her out. I want Xena to come home.

I'm 28 years old

I left my heart in San Francisco

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/02/12/GAYMARRIAGE.TMP Lesbian couple legally wed.

when I was a youth, before I was out, I checked all the books on being a lesbian out of the Cupertino library and I know I've read a bunch of stuff that Del Martin wrote. I think. She wrote a bunch of stuff about how homosexuality should be removed from the DSM, or whatever that book is that lists all the psychiatric diseases that people can have. the first ideas that I had about what it meant to be a lesbian were from reading what she wrote.

Some of my day

Went to the best colloquium of my time at Wesleyan. Korean drummers came and performed. Some of their stuff sounded a lot like house music. It was also at club-type volume. As loud as the Polo Club, for example. Some grad students complained later about the volume and talked about hearing loss. What about people who go dancing? do tey all go deaf? I quit wearing my earplugs because i am a slave to fashion. maybe i should start again. Anyway, the drumming was awesome. it made me want to dance.

then, later, I went to India House where there was an impromptu party, celebrating the coolness of the Colloquium, I guess, and acting as a wake for Leroy (Angela's gerbil) and for Nick Hawkins' relationship with his ex, too I guess. Most of the department came.

Leroy died early this morning of respitory failure stemming from a short illness. A funeral is planned for some time tomorrow, when he will be interned in the Connecticut river.

We toasted him several times and talked about other ways to honor his remains. Tom suggest a funeral pire in the middle of the street, or , failing that, in a parking lot. Several people suggested that instead of dropping him off a bridge into the river, we should put him in a boat and set it on fire, like a Viking funeral. I wanted to have a mourning procession down the street where we carried his remains and maybe played some instruments, but Andrew insisted that we would all be arrested. (Which, really, would just be a cool thing to put in a bio or mention in an interview, since we're all planning on being famous.)

We are however, unrealted to Leroy (god rest his soul), starting a Drone Music Marching Band, which we will call the Drone Core and will have a Drone Major. I will be playing tuba. I knew there was a reason I dragged my sousaphone to CT. Of course, it's really leaky, so it's going to need a lot of gaffing tape on it before it's up to playing a drone. I'm going to drag it to the electronic music studio and start repairs very soon.

the question has always been how to get new audiences to come to concerts. we'll bring the music to them by playing in the student center at lunchtime!

feel excited about this. also have fun plans in store for my b-day. happy happy joy joy

terrorist!

Apparently, the white house only offers audio archives of radio addresses delivered in the last year. (This one is very instructive: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030208.html. what we without a shadow of adoubt know, or rather, maybe didn't know so well.) This gives me less material than I had wanted, since I was going to mine all the radio addresses since Sept 2001. I was thinking of writing to the whitehouse and asking them to send me a CD of the old addresses. I was trying to figure out how to phrase this so that they wouldn't figure out that i had artistic designs on the material or am registered Green. Also, since the web archives are all in Real format, I've been capturing them with Audio Hijack, which is time consuming and has the low quality associated with Real streams. But now I've got all the available radio addresses that mention "terrorist" or "terrorism" (but not just "terror") and it's 930 Mb of data. That's way more than a CD will hold and CDs are 74 minutes. Maybe I'll just work with what I have. ANyway, the low-fi could be nice.

not so shy

my shrink points out that people are normally shy approaching strangers and doesn't seem to think that there's anything wrong with me. I think she's going to cut me off soon. then i'll have to go back to whining to my friends.

acoustic awesomeness

but i did pay a compliment to a stranger today. I saw Mark Dresser play this evening and told him that his was the best bass playing that I'd ever heard. It was completely awesome. He's got a pickup behind the neck, fingerboard sort of part of the bass, you know that thingee that people press the strings against to play notes... (go music shcool terminology!) So it pickups both the note he's playing and the anti-note of the string left over. and he was doing this super cool finger buzz thing, where he intentionally didn't press the string hard enough and it made this great buzzing sound. His string tunings were toally wild. He started writing the piece by coming up with the tunings. Then he wrote themes in those tunings. then he played the score by improvising on those themes. I'm not sure whether he just ordered them in real time or played variations on them. When I grow up, I wanna play standup bass. this very morning, when Alvin's composition seminar was waffling about what ensemble we'll write for, Alvin threatened us, saying he would make us all write for solo bass. I think I'd be fine with that. If we get a string quartet,, I think I'll write a bass feature.

bass = good

and speaking of Alvin's class, we had a pianist come in to talk about John Cage's Music of Changes and play it. He played the third and the fourth books. Alas, his name is escaping me, but he is an excellent pianist. and I was thinking, as I was listening to it, about what made the piece what it was. Every moment in it is beautiful. It's a lovely piece filled with lovely and discreete (meaning totally seperated) events, which somehow blends togther into monotony. (i'm going to be burned at the stake like Joan of Arc by the music department. It's bad enough that I like Phillip Glass' new stuff.)

I read this book once about cartoon theory, which I can't remeber the name of or the writer, but it's pretty influential so far as comic books about the theory of comics go. and in it, they talk about using a lot of colors. Usisng a lot of red, for example, makes a bold statement. Or a lot of blue. Or a lot of yellow. or green. or whatever. But if you start using all of the bright colors, it starts to blend together somehow into grey. Or if you play too many frequencies at the same time, instead of getting the groovy complexness, it sounds like white noise. so what I think happens with Music of Changes is that you have to stay very much right in the present to enjoy it, because it is what it is while it's going on. Every moment is pointalistic and lovely. and i think if i try to perceive it in any way but on a moment-by-moment or event-by-event way, it's too complicated rfor my little brain and gets white-noisy.

However, the moments in it are so darn wonderful. I thinking of writing a program to generate some brass stuff based on the approximate algorythm that Cage used. But I think his timings are very virtuosically complex and are perhaps overburdening the player, so I want to combine the results with a performance algorthm invented by the total complexity guy. He wrote some pieces in the 60's that players could play at the same time, but not togther, so as to create complex textures but still be fun to play. Music of Changes is an amalgamation of 8 parts, with incredibly complicatred timing. In fact, the timing is integral to the structure of the piece. My poorly conceived knock-off would have N parts, but be much freer on the timing. because it would be neat to have something with so many beautious moments that doesn't take months to learn. and I want to write a brass ensemble piece, possibly as the second movement to my symphonic thingee

Just had a personal-ad-related email exchange where somebody said i'm too tall for her to date. what's up with that? should i tell her that i slouch? I guess there's something to be said for knowing what you want.

the plan

I'm going to capture all of the bush radio addresses since september 11th and get samples from them of him saying "terrorist." I want to get all of his public pronouncements of "terrorist." since he's so rarely unscripted, it may actually be possible to download all his public pronouncements, since he usually just gives speeches and the white house (probably) archives those. I'm going to be listening to a lot of bush. And then trying to assemble all of the audio. I bet you're glad you're not my housemate (unless you're Aaron, in which case you are my housemate).

class today

I co-lead a TA session on recording stuff in the electronic music studios and the recording studio. actually, it was 9:00 am, so i let Jascha do as much of the talking as possible. I've been told the way to cure my shyness in approaching strangers is to pay a compliment to a stranger every day. this makes me not want to leave my house, so I think I'll start by saying "hi," to strangers. but I won't take candy from them.

My visionaries class will be discussing Joan of Arc on wednesday. Some of the reading makes claims disputed by Regine Pernoud, former head of the Joan of Arc Centre in Orleans. I wish they offered a seminar just on Joan. That would be awesome. We've been reading all these visionaries and they're just odd. there's a whole lot of god talk, obviously. Some folks find Margery Kempe to be annoying because she's extremely repetitive. She's extremely trashy too. I don't find the repetitiveness annoying. Is it because I'm a musician and music thrives on repitition? I don't find the repititiveness annoying.

Wrote some stuff for my SuperCollider tutorial, which will hopefully constitute enough work to cover the two weeks that Ron was gone. If I may be so arrogant, I could put together the whole class project by myself in an afternoon (ok, a weekend), but I'm not sure how much flexibility is required or how much work I should do.

and then

I went to retrieve Xena from India House, but ended up staying for the evening and having my first encounter with what Connecticut terms "Chinese Food." Oh dear, no no no no. The India House denizens were mocking me for my snobbishness in refusing to try local chinese food. I should not allow myself to be swayed so easily.

I'm starting to like the ice that's everywhere. Yeah, it's slippery, but it looks kind of cool and makes very nice cracking sounds when you step on it. Also, if it's very cold out and you kick an ice formation, it makes a very satisfying shattering sound. Like breaking glass but lighter. And nobody cares if you break ice and it won't cut anyone, but if you kick something too thick, it may hurt your foot. Last semester, an undergrad, Dan St. Clair, did a cool installation with sheets of ice shattering and I thought it was impressed, but only now do I get it. I've been trying to think of sonic things to do with ice, but Dan's project covered everything that I can think of so far. He's kind of brilliant.

Lynn Breedlove is trans? Man, all the cool chicks are now cool boys.

and also

my personal website is out of date. it's kind of embarrassing. Maybe it was hip in 1999, or whenever third generation web design was the hot new thing (indeed the layout is influenced by a very influential book about such design), but the content is um . . . kind of lame and third generation layout was never so cool as it was hyped to be.

I don't have time to redeisgn my website. should i just take it down?

Proposed strip-down

Update

Of course I have time to alter my website. It's a bit more interesting than my homework. besides, aren't we supossed to rest on the 7th day?

ok then

how does one overcome shyness? Are there exercises that one can do? If I approach three strangers a day and say hello, will it make me more able to approach a clique of hot dykes? Should I just drink more?

It is not enough to go to queer bars. i must also actually talk to people. this shyness thing is not working for me. i think i must be feeling what hets experienced at junior high dances.

wanted:

field recording of a group recitation of the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed, such as is done in the catholic mass. You'd think that with google, I could find such a recording, but I'm having no luck.

So I was looking for some text by Emma Goldman on the connection between power and violence (power is violence, I think) and then I was getting back to my reading of medieval visionaries and i realized that god is all-powerful, which means he's all-violent. Which is why he's running around casting people into hell left and right. I'm sure that if I'd grown up in a fire and brimstone religion instead of namby-pamby catholics, the 'god = violence' thing would seem so suddenly interesting. Or maybe it's the gallon of earl gray tea i drank this afternoon. So I'm thinking of mixing a short text about "power is violence. absolute power is absolute violence" with a group recitation of "all powerful and everliving god" with dubya talking about "war on terror" and the taliban and (mystic) Julian of Norwich's thoughts on sin (everything god made is good, so sin must serve god somehow) and maybe some gunshot noises.

this is for open mic night at the local hippie cafe. who wouldn't want to ponder power, violence and religion while eating cajun tempeh sandwiches?

yanni

So I met somebody the other day who said she liked Yanni, and I realized that I'd never actually heard anything by him, despite his being a staple of pledge-drive season public television in the bay area. I asked Tom and he said, "Yanni's great! I actually really like him." But tom used these same words of praise on Britney Spears, so I thought I should investigate this for myself.

The offical Yanni website only offers 33 and 36 second previews of his work, so I can only talk about his introductions, of which I just downloaded a few. And listened to them while Xena stared at me with a confused and disapproving expression, the dog version of "wtf?" It sounds like an instrumental version of Celine Dion, but performed on Casio Tones.

Don't get me wrong. I love Casio tones. And I don't know what year's music I was listening to. Perhaps it was recorded in the heyday of Casio tones. anyway, someplace, I have one, I think. I'm fond of it. It's a midi controller and the accordian sound is really nifty when passed through an overdriven low pass filter. Actually, it's Christi's casio tone, so perhaps I will never see it again, since i'm not sure where it has gotten itself off to.

I feel like there may be a strong asthetic connection between Yanni, Thomas Kinkade and Chicken Soup for the Soul. It feels like it is strongly rooted in the middle class, perhaps distinctly American (except that Yanni is Greek and Celine Dion is Canadian). It's something born in the last decade? Perhaps earlier? The middle class is the backbone of our society. the silent majority who tromps off to work every day, pays taxes (most taxes? the rich aren't paying anymore) and sees little benefit except in public education. Without the middle class, the US would decend into chaos and open class warfare, or at least chaos, since open class warfare is already being waged in many places. The middle class, locked into debt, is locked into non-radicalism. they have the most to lose and the most fear of losing it. the cultural values that they embrace define us a society, as they are consumers, so the rich pander to them while ignoring the poor.

Therefore, the middle class asthetic is safe. the middle class is up to it's eyeballs in student debt, credit card debt and morgage debt, they can't afford to rock the boat. the asthetic is comforting. while existing a few paychecks or one serious illness away from bankruptcy, the need for comfort is strong. And it allows them dreams of togtherness, unity and a social safety net. While isolated in the suburbs, with no real community around them, who wouldn't desire to look at pictures of cohesive village social structures?

Or maybe I'm readin too much into this

I have a CD with an interview with a Dadaist on it and he's talking about how the thing to do seemed to be to attack the bourgeois, as apparently they were unaware that it had been done to death. then they did some investigation and found out that they were all bourgeois.

"Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . . " (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/tzara.html)

I want to write a manifesto for an art movement. analyzing capitalist systems and Yanni is optional

googling myself

randomness. It's too bad about mp3.com.

Maybe I should add myself to wikipedia

More

and this!. Ok, it bothers me that nobody told me that they were putting things i wrote in a book, but goddamn, i'm now a published feminist writer. a totally, uncontacted, unreimbursed published feminist writer. wow.

Google Bombing

EllenFullman.com (which resolves to deepmedia.org/ellenfullman) is now the number three search result for Long String Instrument on Google. Let's push her up to number one! Add a link from your blog or website.

There will be advantage in every movement

So yesterday, I went on a date

It was my first date since becoming single and, indeed, my first date since I was 18 years old. The last date I went on was with a 17 year old French horn player who was still in highschool. (Christi and I didn't date until after we were a couple, so it doesn't count.) Actually, the horn player may have been the only girl I ever went out on dates with. I had a girlfriend before that, but I didn't go out with her so much as . . . well, nevermind.

I have a memory of feeling awkward and thinking that dating girls was, suprisingly, as awkward as dating boys. I actually dated quite a number of boys when I was 15 and 16. It was awkward and stupid and confusing, because sometimes I would like them, but I never liked them.

Anyway, I went out to a coffee shop in town yesterday and met a woman from a personal ad. She's a Middletown resident, which means she can tell me things like where to get my car fixed and where folks hang out, which is very handy. I'm horribly shy with new people. I hardly spoke, I think. She told many stories. She's a security gaurd and wants to be a cop and is some sort of volunteer with the Middletown PD, where she actually wears a full uniform (minus the pistol) and responds to certain types of calls. (I am a nice girl and didn't ask about handcuffs.)

She's also an aspiring poet and sent me a poem she wrote last November which she is very proud of. It won some sort of contest at poetry.com, through which she can get a publishng deal of some kind (that sounds a bit scammy). I think she outght to hold out for Chicken Soup for the Soul. Her poem is better than some of Tiffany's mom's poetry and as I recall, Tiffany's mom was published in Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul.

I gave her the url for my music, but haven't heard anything back about it yet.

I didn't feel any sort of spark. I'm not sure we share an asthetic or a worldview, but she seems fun. I talked very little and was uncertain what to say. I said virtually nothing of my background. when I pulled out my post-it pad to write down my phone number, the top post-it had a phone number and said "divorce lawyer" in large letters. she must think I'm escaping from a het marriage.

The real situation is much too complicated. I want to work it out with Christi, but when she said "maybe later," the possible time she indicated was after my graduation. I told Angela last semester that it was foolish to pretend that I had any say whatsoever over my fate. I dunno what to do with myself over the next year and half, or indeed, any time after that either. I'm just putting one foot in front of the other and waiting to see what life gives me.

I've been making movements, with the idea that there will be some advantage in all of them, despite my lack of a plan or even a completely clear goal state. Then I looked again. The future state has advantage in every movement. And Change is slowly occuring. Right now, movements might bring disadvantage, for all I know. Or maybe it's just important to keep busy. Or maybe the only direction to go is up.

Telephones

Right now, we live in a very visual culture. People make biological explinations for this, which I'm not prepared to discuss, but it's important ot note that Western Culture was not always visual. During the Medieval period, most information was translated verbally. Thus listening was more important than seeing. Even literate people were trained to read aloud, rather than silently, so in literacy there was still a sence of an auditory component through which information was relayed.

Many factors in our modern culture have changed that. Television. Movies. Widespread silent literacy. Visual images have become the dominant communication medium. Sight is now culturally more important than listening.

Thus, when you sit in a room and talk with someone, you are doing so in a visually-dominated milleu. You look at them, looking for information cues, such as facial expression, twitching, body language, etc. This makes up at least half of the communication. You also detect other stimuli, which we are less aware of, such as pheremones. The voice alone is telling less than half the story.

This means, that under ideal circumstances of perfect audio reproduction, let's say 24 bit audio at 96 k sampling, with a perfect condenser microphone, you're getting less than half of the cues, especially the emotional cues. And most voice reproduction is not so ideal. Take, for example, the telephone. Under a perfectly clear connection, the sample rate is not so high, the bit rate is lower and many high and low frequencies have been filtered out so as to require less bandwidth. Most phones have very cheap dynamic mics and equally poor speakers. Subtleties are lost. Voice inflections, rich in emotional content, are compressed away, filtered out, not reproducable by the speakers and not picked up by the mic in the first place. This is under ideal circumstances, making a phone call to somebody down the street on a perfectly clear line. What percentage of content is actually getting through?

Now, think of a very long distance line. If you're calling Europe, for example, your signal is bouncing off a satalite or going through a very long trans-atlantic cable. Your phone is probably analog, with heavy filtering of highs and lows. The signal gets converted to digital part way through by the phone company, using A to D converters that are probably less than perfect, probably passing again through a filter to clear out analog line noise (and taking some of your signal with it), then it gets sent across the atlantic, then is re-converted to analog, again with not a studio-quality D to A converter, or recompressed and sent out to your cell phone, which does it's own D ot A conversion using whatever circuts are included in the thing. your voice has been routed a long way, filtered, compressed, converted A to D to A and maybe to D and A another time again, and otherwise mangled. Some of your packets were probably lost. You're lucky if there's not static or echo or both.

On the one hand, it's entirely astoundingly miraculous that you can be standing in Connecticut and hear the apartment noises of dinner being cooked in an apartment in France, while it's actually happening. On the other hand, how much data is really getting through? It's something like a cruel joke, in that it implies that communication is possible, but then drops so many pieces of it, making communication extremely difficult.

Having phone conversations with strangers works well because there's often very little emotional content. Having phone conversation with someone you see frequently can also work well. We are creatures of habit. You are used to reading their cues, because you spend time around them and have the full picture of their cues fresh in your mind. But that gets lost if it's not practiced. The cues that you can read over the phone, because you read them all the time in person, get less clear over times of seperation. Thus the phone, once a handy way of saying you'd be a few minutes late to dinner, subtly turns against you as the distance and time seperating you grows.

The parable of the frog not jumping out of a slowly heating pot and getting cooked, alas, is not based in fact. Nevertheless, it can take time to realize that the phone is not helping things. The seeming miraculousness of it disguises it's evil intent. It's like the devil appearing to the unsuspecting and performing false signs and miracles to lead would-be visionaries into heresy.

It is barely possible to have an emotional conversation in a long distance phone call. It is impossible to conduct a relationship over the phone. What is the answer to this dilemna?

Ok, so there must be both sincerity and an appearance of dignity. sincerity, obviously, must be felt in the heart. But the dignity is something in between. To put on dignity entirely for show, would lack sincerity. However, the feeling of dignity in the heart is not specifically called for. What is called for is merely the appearance, but mixed with sincerity.

There is also immaturity, "the looking of a lad." Perhaps maturity would mean dignity felt in the heart. Perhaps for the immature, it is enough to work sincerely to appear dignified, which is to try to be dignified, but fake it when you have to. In any case, it's a call to grow up and to approach things maturely. Hildegard of Bingen (who I'm studying in Medieval Visionaries class) had a vision of seven vices and seven virtues. One of the vices had the appearance of a dog and said that it would run dog-like towards everyone and be playful and happy forever. The virtue responded by condemning the vice's immaturity. Running dog-like towards people both lacks maturity and dignity.

Therefore, the solutions called for are sincere, restrained and mature. Romantic comedy-type actions are therefore not called for. The failed actions of the past are similarly not called for. They don't work. And they're not mature: they are patterns formed in youth that have not been modified. They are regrettable in grown-ups.

The situation will be slow to change, but will end well. Taking action is advised. Even drastic action (presumably as long as it is sincere and mature and appears diginified) will lead to good things. However, it's presumable that the slow change along with the necessity of dignity means that any drastic action must be thoughtful. Large actions must be weighed carefully, as impetuousness is immature, even if it is sincere.

I explained this to my shrink and she asked if the appearance of dignity was a large concern of mine. I said I wanted to do the right thing. Of course, there are many right things rather than a single correct course of action. Indeed, there may be advantage in every movement undertaken, although there may be varying degrees of advantage and different kinds of advantage in different life arenas. My shrink points out that crises can lead to a lot of growth, for example.

I'm using this as a platform from which to try to maintain my mood of cautious optomism. It looks more dignified than despair.

Grasping at straws

Christi's blog says "not now." Which means "maybe later." Right?

I was reading about John Cage's use of the I Ching. As soon as he could, he used a computer program. So I found one on the web. At least it's using the right algorythm, whereas I was not, since you have to toss a coin 18 times, not just six.

The present is embodied in Hexagram 20 - Kuan (Contemplation): He should be like the worshipper who has washed his hands, but not yet presented his offerings. There must be sincerity and an appearance of dignity, commanding reverent regard.

The first (bottommost) line, divided, shows the looking of a lad - not blamable in men of inferior rank, but matter for regret in superior men.

The situation is evolving slowly, and Yang (the active masculine force) is gaining ground.

The future is embodied in Hexagram 42 - I (Increase): There will be advantage in every movement which shall be undertaken, and it will even be advantageous to cross the great stream.

Appearance of dignity, well, um, moving right along . . . "slow evolution" and "great advantage" are sounding good. Polly told me that Jupiter is in retrograde for the next three months or so, which makes starting new projects difficult. I'm mixing astrology and the I Ching . . . because I am a hippy new ager with an appearance of dignity.

Anthony Braxton came over today and left his laptop behind for me to install stuff on. He's in the supercollider tutorial and it met at my house today because Ron, the teacher, is off in China.

Misery. woe. despair

I got up this morning. I co-lead a workshop on digital performer for two hours. i went to class and participated in a possibly intelligent manner although i had not done the reading. (apparently the paper due next week is about the class discussion i skipped last wednesday). i turned in my add/drop form. I purchased food. I opened all the bills and wrote checks for them and called on two of them to check the balences. and signed all the checks andput them in envelopes with stamps and return adresses. I found my missing sweater. I found a flyer i promised to post. i want a fucking medal. i'm not kidding.

will i flunk out of school?

doom. pain. weeping.

I told myself that if i paid the bills, i could take a nap. and the heat won't get turned off. i'm napping.

Alas, I am filled with woe and at a loss as to what to do with myself. Why did I break up with christi if I didn't want to breakup with Christi? after she told me not to come to paris, my feelings got hurt with a high percentage of the phone conversations we had. then she announced she was showing up suddenly. i wanted space from all of it. i wanted it to stop. i didn't know what to do. i was worried about things that we hadn't dealt with from the past. i needed time to think. i told her we were breaking up and then didn't speak to her for three weeks. and thought about it. and thought about what i wanted from a relationship. and realized that christi and pretty much wanted the same things and that i love her and she sent email saying she loved me.

but, of course, love conquers nothing.

I was picking up cues. i thought she'd want to work it out. who wouldn't want a low stress, low-drama relationship with me, where reliability was stressed and there were good boundaries and space and stuff?

of course, getting there would be a bit of work. it seemed possible. we had similar goals in mind. after thinking for three weeks, i understood more of what was going on. i felt guilt. i had told christi i would always be there for her and she was in distress, which i had caused, and i wasn't there for her. i always wanted to be more of an ameloriating factor, rather than a stressing factor. I thought about family. family is very important to me. i felt like a member of her family. she was accepted as a member of mine. a couple weeks before she died, my grandma told christi that she thought of her as granddaughter. how could I just walk away from that? what about responsibilities? what about marriage vows? what about nine years together? what about love?

not that it matters anymore, but i think it might have been better to tell her that i was distressed by our phone onversations rather than not speaking to her for three weeks. hindsight. alas alac woe

although i didn't act it, i did have a lot invested in this. my heart for example.

there's so much i wish i could take back or that i'd done differently. all is for naught. the past can't be changed. the future can't be fixed. if you make bad decisions, you have to live with them forever. it's very cold here. there's piles of snow on the ground. it can be below freezing and snowy for ten days in a row and then four degrees above freezing for one day and then ten degrees below freezing for the next month, but in that one warm day, all the snow disappears. what happens afterwards doesn't change the damage that's already been done.

everything is essentially hopeless

Verdicts

Christi called today to say that she doesn't want to work it out.

Not what I expected.