Binary Oppositions

Celeste Hutchins
Mystic Voices
Cixous, Sorties

Cixous starts with binary oppositions, such as "Sun/Moon" to "Father/Mother." She makes the point that binary oppositions are heirarchical and patriarchial. One side of an opposition is always ranked better than the other and that side is identified as male. The most tangible duality that humans see everyday is male/female, but for some this is not a binary opposition. Transgendered people may switch sides or may reject the idea of an opposition altogether. Their actions are met with hostility and sometimes violence. Transgendered people now are more likely to be victims of a hate crime than any other group.

When Joan of Arc was young, she started to have visions, which told her to dress as a man and take up arms. Freud wrote that, "One may observe that it is just those girls who in the years before puberty showed a boyish character and inclinations who tend to become hysterical at puberty." In class, Professor Zieman remarked that at puberty, Joan of Arc became a boy. In this reading, Joan crossed sides of the binary opposition from female to male, and from weakness to strength.

I would like to argue that she did not cross the opposition, but rather straddled it. While she did start to dress as a man and take on a male role, she made no effort to hide her identity as a woman. She did not change her name. In fact, she chose a title for herself that was explictly female and feminine. "Pucelle" is a word like "maiden." Furthermore, during her trial, she bragged that she excelled at all the womanly arts. One of the charges brought against her had to do with her telling a comrade that she would have three sons, one of whom would go on to become Pope. She did not transition fully to male, but held on to, and was proud of, her female-gendered activities and traits.

Just downloaded GIMP

Can't decide whether or not I like it. And, for the benefit of wesleyan students and Amy, who ended up with a copy of Digital Performer by accident: A DP Tutorial. All images manipulated with GIMP.

East coast style, west coast girl

Look at this picture of a puddle. what do you notice? Nasty cigarette butts. Good start. Lots and lots of folks smoke here. what else? It's frozen! That's ice on top of it! I took this picture on my way home right now to illustrate that it's still damn cold here. And the wind is blowing like crazy. brrrrr. this post is image heavy for the benefit of any left coast folks who wonder what my world looks like.

So Ron (see photo) noticed that I haven't done any TA work since the start of the semester. This is because he didn't tell me to do anything and I didn't think to ask for a long time cuz I was distracted and then when I did think to ask, I was scared of what might happen. I must now photo document the procedures for using the electronic music studio (see photo) and how to use Digital Performer and write a suite of small SuperCollider applications useful for testing the setup. And I need to be able to explain to the class the algorythms for my tuning pieces with handouts on thursday. A bit of work. At least, on my pre-existing to-do list, I called the tax guy and arranged to file for an extension.

this next picture is the CFA = the Center for Fine Arts, where I spend all my time. this view is from the south and is most of the music buildings. The whole thing is in this cement block style architecture. some folks love it. some folks hate it. I kind of think it's nifty, but the insides of classroom are a little weird, especially acoustics wise.

Lastly, here we have Charlie and Angela. Charlie is a composition MA and a mighty fine viola player. Angela is an ethnomusicologist MA and a mighty fine clarinet player. They're good folks.

7 concerts in 6 days

was my week last week. tonight, there's traditional Irish music, but i'm going to skip, since it's not really my thing and while I saw a lot of great music, I got little work done. Yesterday, from whence the picture comes, was Anne Wellmer's going away concert. She goes back to Europe today. It was 44 minutes of music, starting at 4:00 on 04/04/04. Lots of fourishness. Nice concert. I showed up late, so I don't know why the fava beans are on the piano, but I did see some of them get blown off with a battery fan.

I don't really have anything to say, I just wanted to document the kind of abuse that the piano in the student center is forced to endure. Last Tuesday, it had an encounter with wasabi peas instead of fava beans. And blocks stacked in it.

There was a little party after the concert to say goodbye to Anne W. and to wish Anne Rhodes a happy birthday. The concert goers were made up of the usual suspects. some of the people that come to every concert are not in the music department. We get undergrads from all disciplies and some science grad students. As things were winding down, some of these folks sat at the piano and in the style of Rythm and Blues, started a group piano piece. But these are fans of experimental music, so they were playing something 12 tone. Someone remarked, "I can't tell if that's a real piece or not."

To do

• Call tax guy
• Clean floors beofre seder tommorrow
• Two one page papers
• Do reading for class. all of it. really.
• arg, everything that was on the todo list before is still on it!
• having a great time, wish you were here!

My Fabulous weekend

Ok, so around 11:00 Friday, Jess and I hitched a ride to New Haven and took the train into New York. We got off in Harlem and rode the bus to the Coloumbia University area, where Jess' friend Yvette lives in student housing. She gave me lodging. We dropped our bags there and then all went for lunch. J & Y decided it would be faster to get a cab and would cost the same as the subway. Jess hailed a cab by standing in front of it as the light changed from red to green. One thing I thought I learned in Europe was to never step in front of a taxi, but she told me how to tell if the taxis have people in them. If the number is not lit up, then it's full (and if you love life, don't step in front of it), otherwise, you can hold them up at will. So we hopped in the cab and the driver drove like a maniac. I remained calm. If I were in another car, though, I would fear the irratic actions of the taxis. I think they create market for themselves by scaring other people off the streets. When you're in NYC, it's not uncommon to a street full of taxis, maybe one delivery vehicle and no private cars. But why would you need a private car when the subway is so good? Anyway, we were in a taxi headed for lunch when my life did not flash before my eyes. We got out and went to pseudo Japanese fusion food. It was pretty good, but east coast food is pricey. It was next to a chain store selling popcorn. the idea of starting a popcorn chain store is so ludicrous that it makes me think of capitalism as performance art. suddenly, there was a beautiful moment amidst all the turmoil and people could buy overprices bags of popcorn.

After we had food, we went to a coffee house, named the Mozart Cafe, which was covered with Mozart kitsch and only played his stuff and was full of conservatory wanna-bes. It's odd to think an establishment could survive catering soley to dead music snobs, but there you go. I mean, KDFC (Your radio concert hall in the sf bya area) lives, but it has a wide broadcast range and this is just a cafe. We spent too long in both eating places and didn't get to the Kitchen, but the galleries are free and will have their current exhibits up until school gets out, so I can go at a later date. Jess and I went to times Square to see, or hear rather, an installation by Max Neuhaus. (I don't know if I'm spelling his name right). So we walked up towards the bright lights. It's better than Vegas, I think, although the one time I was in Vegas, I barely cruised the strip. what's nice about Times Square is that you can cruise it on foot, whereas Vegas requires a car.

However, like Vegas, times Square is owned by the Disney-idied corps of the world. Disney store. MTV store. Planet Hollywood. chain thing. Chain thing. Chain thing. I got there a few years too late to see any real debauchery. We walked around a bit looking for, or rather listening for, the installation. Jess didn't remember exactly where it was, just that it was unlabeled and under a grating by 42nd Street. We walked around and found the grating where all the tourists get their picture taken. Jess took my picture. My camera's flash is such that it causes blinking more than half the time. We were walking around that pedestrian island, bent over double, trying to hear anything that sounded installation-y coming up from the grating. Such is New York that nobody even noticed us peering intently into the grate or wondered about us in the slightest. I heard later that it's nice to go the installation in the summer, because you can lie right down on the grating and hear it. Again, presumably, with no notice from anyone. We wandered around the wrong grating for a while and then left and bought popcorn from a chain store and then came back and still coudl not hear anything, when Jess had a flash of insight and we crossed the street to the smaller pedestrian island and we stepped on to the grate and suddenly, like crossing into another world, we heard the installation. It's based on the overtones series of bells. It was put in in the 70's, so it's not digital, whatever it is. and it sounded like a bell, so it's not analog oscilators, since they would be way out of tune by now. It had a pipe-y sort of sound to it. Like white noise sent through several long pipes. The frequencies beat against each other like bells do. I could hear different beating patterns by moving around. things fell in and out of phase with each other. It was always the same and always changing. It's a wonderful thing to have there in the midst of everything of Times Square. All the people and the traffic and the Andean Flute Band were all still making noise, but a wonderful new sound was added to it and somehow didn't compete with the other sounds at all. Jess said, "Watch these other tourists. They'll walk over it and not notice." so we people-watched for a long time and nobody noticed. I wonder if I would have noticed if I hadn't known about it. I know that I've been walking along sometimes and hear a resosnance and stop to listen to things, but Times Square is so full of sounds... The installation sounds intentional to me. The tuning is too interesting to be machinery noise, but apparently, that's what people think they're hearing. after a while, we went on. We stepped off the grating and into the street and the sound that had surrounded us faded to nothing within steps.

We hopped on the subway for a bit and then walked through Alphabet City, which is a neighborhood with some amusing grafitti, towards a club called Tonic. a band calleed the Jazz Travellers was playing. It was the Village Voice pick. We bought tickets to the 10:00 show and then went in search of food. All the restaurants were prohibitevely priced bobo (recall that bobo is slang for bourgeois bohemian) or sketchy pre-gentrified restaurants which Jess reistsed and which didn't have much in the way of vegetarian fare anyway. We walked for a while, searching for food when we came upon a burrito shop offering a vegan burrito, so we went in. I noticed a tie dyed piece of fabric on the wall which had a picture of a street sign on Haight on it. Hrm. the menu said it was San Francisco Mission District-style mexican food. Be it ever so hunble, there's no place like home. I couldn't stop laughing that I went to a big city far away from home and ended up at a place imitating the big city at home. I think California oozes out of my pores. In true Mission district style, the burritos were good and cheap.

We went back to Tonic and heard the fantastic band. they played stuff that was either standards or standards-y, but then in the solo sections, they got pretty free-jazzy. the music was really good and really fun. And then, after a few songs, the band leader asked for a singer to come up from the audience. a woman pushed past me, saying "excuse me." and got up on stage. It was Debbie Harry from Blondie. she sang for the rest of the set. Yes, she's still hot. She was wearing an untecked tuxedo shirt, black thigh-length pants and leppoard-print boots. she is a fantastic singer and sung a bunch of jazz tunes with the band. The band had a xylephone player, a drummer, a standup bassist, a sax player, a trobonists and a violinist. At one point, the sax player was playing a tenor and soprano sax at the same time. He had both of them in this mouth and was playing the keys of one with one hand and the keys of the other with the other hand. And it sounded good. Good tone. Totally amazing. They played a bunch of jazz tunes and then did an encore of a Blondie tune and all marched out and then back in like they were the Archestra or something. It was awesome.

Then we went to one of NYC's two lesbian bars, the Meow Mix. It was relatively empty. I had a beer and Jess had some girly mixed drink. She was tired, so we didn't stay very long. It's a tiny tiny club, with a stage. A band was packing up to leave. I imagine it emptied when the band finished, but I don't know. We caught a cab back to Yvette's place. Tried to sleep in strange bed. Woke up very early and then had sleeping-in like disturbing dreams. Got out of bed when Jess was hitting the buzzer to get back into the building in the morning. Our plan was to have brunch and then head back to New Haven, where we could get a ride no later than 3:00. Best laid plans of mice and men.... J & Y & I walked towards the brunch place, dawdled at burnch, and walked back. New York looks very European in parts, but it is self-consciously so. We went to Coloumbia to get computer access to check train schedules. The train we needed was leaving in 15 minutes, so we took a much later train and took the bus back to Middletown. Since there was nothing to be done, we went to visit John McGuire, the Coloumbia professor who addressed Alvin's class last week. Jess knows him from her Ivy League days. He's a really cool guy. We talked in his office for a while, where he was working on Saturday and then walked to a tremedously pretentious coffee shop., where we met a real artist, whose name I don't remember. He's a woodchooper, a manly man, like Hemmingway, he explained. I went to the bathroom and people had scrawled poltically appropriate Shakespeare quotes. Jess was trying to explain how the coffee shop was emblematic of the neighborhood. I said "yeah. We've got nothing like this in Berkeley." The coffee, though, was dismally bad. the place was packed. It would never have survived in Berkeley. after more dawdling, which was delightful, despite the coffee, we walked around to a Radio Shack, where I bought a bigger memory stick for my camera and then went to the cathedral of St John the Divine, which is the largest cathedral in the Americas. It took me a while to figure out that it wasn't catholic. It was Episcopal. they're a lot like catholics, but without the desire to return to the 14th century. But no prayers to Mary. I would miss rosaries and Haily Marys if I were going to catholic-like church. The church wants to look centuries old, but it's not even finished yet. Part of it burned down a year or two ago. More attempt to self-consciously ape Europe. Catherdrals, in my opnion, should be timesless but also timely. Like the Gaudi Cathedral in Spain. It's not trying to look like it was build in 1509. Nevertheless, St. John was very nice. I love the resonances of huge cathedrals, and this had it in abundance. Also, a lovely looking pipe organ. I want to hear it played. It's huge. Pipes around the choir area but also trumpet-like pipes in the very back of the church. Pipe organs were invented by Ancient Romans, by the way. It's surprising how old some ideas are.

Jess and I then headed to Grand Central station. It's large and impressive. We got on our train to New Haven, and sat next to a nifty geek named Jen, who goes to 2600 parties in the city. I showed her supercollider stuff. I want to check out these parties. I miss being surrounded by geeks. They're my people. Jen was talking about an Electric Kool Aid Acid Test-like novel for our generation and how it might be tied to blogging. She's on to something. For long time, I've been day dreaming about writing a novel made up on instant messenger conversations. This is actually part of the reason that spies on my Moos keep logs: so I can analyze the conversation to see how to mimic them, either for AI applications or for art. Maybe we're all writing the great American work of our generation right now as a blogging work in progress.

Jess finally gave me the CD with me singing on it. It was just the "is this thing on" part of recording something else. but Jess spent all day friday singing my own songs back to me. Apparently, she's been playing it to other folks. I think this is silly.

Got back to Middletown at 8:20. Ran to tim's senior thesis concert and caught the last 20 minutes of it. Nice, droney, angsty music. angsty music touches a deep and resonant chord within me. But the fun jazz band did too, so maybe just good music touches a deep and resonant chord. Most happy music is banal and stupid, alas, so that might create an illusion of favoring angsty music. anyway, Tim's thesis touched a deep and resonan tchord within me. It was nice. Went to the after party at tim's house and drank Pabst blue ribbons. I am no longer a beer snob. Got kind of buzzed and then went to see an undergrad blues band play at a bar in town. I was surrounded by very drunk undergrads, a huge number of which were music students. fortunatately, despite drinking 2.5 beers, I sobered up enough by the time the bar closed to stay out of trouble. Undergrads: oh so cute and oh so young.

The grad stipend just got increased by 4% (woot), but music grads are paid half what science grads are. And the music stipend is below the federal poverty line. Some music students are having a lot of trouble because of this. So there has been much traffic on the grad email list about this. Talk of unionization has come up. but some math student was complaining, saying that he might get more money, but he had to lie and say he was a music student to impress women. Grad students complainign about lack of money and lack of sex. How classic is that? If you try going to a woman from connecticut and explain that you study experimental music, she goes looking for a math student. But with undergrads, he is so right. I tell undergrad chicks that I'm a music grad student and they look really impressed. they flirt with me, but then they run away. Which is good. I gave up drama for Lent. I'm thinking of giving it up forever.

I'm back.

Going to NYC

as a part of my plan to see five concerts in five days, I'm going to NYC tommorrow (whoah, actually today) and returning the next day. Two nights ago, I saw weird electronic music made with tweaked guitar pedals. Last night, I saw undergrads do a Fluxus concert. Tonight I saw a bunch of popish bands play at a club/house called Ecclectic. It was fun. I was unable to incite a mosh pit, however. Tommorrow night, something in NYC + checking out the gallery at the Kitchen and an installation in Times Square. Sunday, undergrad Tim Eastman's thesis concert. My camera finally came, so pictures will be forthcoming.

After going through all my papers and not finding my w2 form, but stumbling on several wedding cards (arrrg), I went off to do some Deep Listening meditation. It was quite nice. I felt much calmer afterwards. and Buddhist House, the location we met at, is conviently located right next to a Dunkin Donuts. I'd never been in one before. They don't actually have very many donuts. I was surprised.

Checklist

Yes, you feel gloomy today. (ok, maybe you don't but pretend you do for a minute.) It's a gloomy day. Maybe a day to go back to bed or to be grump or to cry or to yell at the dog. Let's say. But first, let's check a few things: When was the last time, dear one, that you ate anything? Have you had all the meals you should have by this time of day? Would a snack possibly be a good thing? When was the last time you ate anything with protien in it? When was the last time you ate a green vegetable? How long has it been since broccoli crossed your lips? When was the last time you injested a vitamin sort of thing of any kind? What about those omega-3s? Hrm? Been eating right?

Ok, so after a nice snack of broccoli, tofu and brown rice with hemp oil drizzled over it, still feeling blue? Well, what about sleeping? too little? too much? yo-yo-ing between too little and too much? Four hour nights followed by 12 hour nights is a bit bumpy. And what times have you been sleeping? 3:00 am - 11:00 am is eight hours, but it's kind of weird hours. and you miss the morning sunshine, provided there exists some. Daylight waking is good for you. And when I sleep in the late morning, it's not good, solid sleep. it's more like napping. or what if you're going to sleep, waking at a normal time and then turning off your alarm and sleeping until the afternoon? Oh, it's thursday. no class! i'll just nod off for a minute. oh my god, it's 2:00! Not good. Maybe schedule things in the morning?

Ok, eating right, sleeping right, still grumpy? Maybe you should leave the house! When is the last tiem you had a social encounter with another human? Invite somebody to have dinner with you (at least you know you'll be awake by then).

And when I say "you," I of course, mean "me."

I had dinner with Angela last night. She does not read my blog. I was kind of grumpy at the begining of the evening. Spent a lot of yesterday afternoon on taxes. Going through financial paperwork looking for tax stuff is stressful. And I can't find some of it! But what's the worst that could happen? I would have to file an extension. Thinking Wtwtch is very helpful. Ok, so I was still stressed and just got out of many hours of class and sleeping oddly. And I said, "I'm thinking about getting on porzac." And she said, "wait until a sunny day to make that descision." ok, so i'm obviously solar powered. But then I had tofu with mixed vegeatbles and some ice cream and felt happier, so there's something to consider there. figure out what makes me happy and do a bit of it every day.

I've been thinking about priorities lately, because my number one priority has sort of left my life, so what's important now? And I've been putting school/career first, even though that doesn't seem quite right. Shouldn't people come before career? But if that's true, what the heck am I doing in Connecticut so far away from my people? And so I think having a heirarchial list might be the wrong way to go about it. Follow my goals, but do a bit of what makes me happy every day. If it's so stupidly obvious, why did I have to go through the trouble of figuring it out? Everything is so blindingly obvious once I blog it.

I am ready for winter to be over

Yes, I am technically experiencing what New Englanders describe as "spring," but to my Bay Area self, this is winter. fall was winter and winter was winter on steroids. It is still bleak out. Yesterday, there were snow flurries as I walked to class. Today, it's rainging and cold. I guess I should feel happy that it's not freezing rain. I'm going to go back to wearing thermal underwear, since the warmth of last week was clearly a fluke.

the trees are still baren. Only the grass and the evergreens are green. Everything is brown and dead. No flowers bloom. Few birds sing. A few trees are thinking about waking up, but there are almost no visible buds. It's a replaying of the desolation of fall, but in reverse. And it's still desolate.

Let's emphasize some words: bleak, barren, desolate, cold.

And it is now quite clear that the weather and my mood are strongly linked (one is like a barometer for the other... ha ha ha). Is this like a normal thing?

To do:

• find tax paper work and mail it to tax guy. (deadline ASAP)... ack i lost my w2 form...
• modify symphony movement to fit requirements for American Composers Forum content, print it, put it in the mail. (postmark deadline tomorrow)
• write short paper about Joan of Arc, binary oppositions and the male gaze (due next wednesday).
• Write one other short paper of undecided topic (also due wednesday).
• Ask advisor for resume advice, figure out where to send resume, send it off (asap).
• do paperwork for out of department course (should have done this weeks ago)
• installation idea for first weekend of may symposium (due?)

And all I want to work on is the ultimate pop song generator.... by which i mean, it's an idea that i can't escape. i thinking baout how to do drum patters for Urban Hipster, and I end up thinking about the logics behind the creation of drum patterns and how you might be able to tell a computer to modify a pattern based on song intensity levels or to develop it's own patterns or what the rules are for drum patterns in different genres and how to represent those grammers.... i'm going to go write a giant drum object thingee while sitting on the radiator and ignoring my giant box of paperwork which contains tax stuff and my readers and umm... not the symphony deadline, cuz i already wrote the dern thing....

update

Ok, I'm not sending in the score. Why? Well, apparently I need a letter of reference and it's way too late to ask. (curses for not paying attention to this earlier) and also, it's a week long program in October of next year, not just a reading. On the one hand: awesome. On the other hand: I've already got a music program that i'll be attending on October. Anyway, the Wesleyan Orchestra will be reading it in April, so it will still get a performance. And then I can modify it based on hearing it, which will make it better if I decide to submit it to a contest later. And mostly, I'm flaky for not paying attention to the requirements until the day before it's due.... But I've sent tapes and scores and whatnot to a bunch of these contests and so far all I've gotten out of it is the joy of helping support the US Postal Service.

i've already been awake for 12 hours

I got up at 5:30 this morning (before some of you west-coasters went to sleep, i'm sure) to give David ride to the airport bright and early this morning. Met him at 6:00 AM. I am not a morning person. David is nifty, though. And I have bad airport karma. At the end of spring break Ellen woke up at 4:00 to give me a lift so I could get back to school. I think I also still have bad moving karma, although I've helped so many folks move, I may have worked it off by now. I think that and then I remember Lisa Peña standing with me at the bottom of some stairs with a refrigerator. the stairs were outdoors and kind of steep and painted cement (bright purple, in fact) and all slippery. And it was pouring rain and the gutter was jammed, so all the water from the roof, whose overhang ended exactly in the middle of of the stairs, was running down onto us and onto the fridge, and from there on to us. Think of all the water from the 6 foot wide by however many feet long section of the roof running down the fridge on to us, while we struggled to hoist a refrigerator into the lovely second-floor Casaninja 2. Ah, Casaninja 2, where we had decided to settle forever.... until midway through painting it, the landlord told us that it was for sale. Best laid plans, etc...

So I've been drinking coffee! and tea! to stay awake! I was the smartest person on earth and was going to write a bunch of proofs about the fibbonacci series (what a nutty series it is), but it's wearing off, and now I might just nap or write a paper. zzzzzzz

Saw presentation today by a composer named John McGuire. He's pretty cool. He talked about the fibonnacci series, which he used for a piece he played a tape of called A Cappella. the piece is lovely.

I've been asked about the melody for my latest musical endeavor. There exists a recording of me improvising lyrics. Jess has it. I'll post mp3 when she passes it along. *hint*

automation

I've long had an ambition to write a program that would just make music for me, so I could just press go and it would make tunes. I could teach it a few pop genres and then run it a whole bunch of times and just pick some good outputs until i had an album's worth. Better yet would be to teach it somehow to evaluate the output. Somebody (a record company or something) actually has a program that will do this. So I could just feed my tunes into the pop analyzer, pick all of them with a high enough score and have instant hits. Even better would be to incorporate a neural net sort of design into the generator, so it could learn from the appraiser and create more consistently catchy music.

Well, I now have a little program that creates avant-happy tunes [listen] (when i said "pop", Aaron encouraged me to re-evaluate the pop genre...) and it repeats rhythms, but it has a different melody everytime. And it's kind of catchy, I think.

so.... now what? it's always kind of the same song. I guess I could generalize it, so the rhythms would change with every run too. But... somehow it's not as satisfying as i thought it would be. I guess it would make good video game music, since then it would get run over and over again and the repeating non-sameness of it would be interesting.

What would I do with myself once I had written the uber-music generator and it said everything I had to say?

avant happy

My avant happy song has been improved via Ron's suggestion of adding some space and by switching my note array to LIFO queue instead of a FIFO queue. It's way more repetitive, but it makes more musical sense. Still kind of glitchy, tho. especially when i record it.

Springtime!

When people's thoughts turn to cheesy pop songs! As heard in my shower this morning:

Urban Hipster

[intro]
lemme show you a picture of the girl i like
black and white photo
she's the one on the right

Lemme tell you about the girl i like
urban hipster keeps me up at night

[verse 1]
really pretty with curly hair
she wears t shirts with funny slogans

little glasses, converse shoes
she's the coolest thing in oakland

[refrain]
she's a little bit younger and hipper than me
she gets pop culture cuz she watches tv
[repeat]

[verse 2]
Urban hipster in a miniskirt
I want to get to know her better

Urban hipster in a miniskirt
she'll steal my heart if i let her

slow learner

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

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

fun filled friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

So You Want to Go to Grad School?

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

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

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

Resume Draft

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

Objective:

Summer internship doing audio programming, sound engineering or sound design

Education:

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

Skills:

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

Experience:

Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
TA August 2003 - Present

• Teach workshops in using Digital Performer and sound recording

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

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

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

• Edited sounds for the web

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

• Product design
• Wrote PRDs
• Researched webcast technology

Open Directory Project
Software Engineer February 1999 - October 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Informal Experience:

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

---

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

still more faq

see questions 1 - 2 and 3 - 8

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

What would happen if you burned inscence inside a refrigerator?

maybe i should get a navel piercing to gaze at

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you like navel-gazing, eh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

more faq

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

Freud Report

Hysteria and my mystics class

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

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

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

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

faq

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

woof

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

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

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

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

Back in CT

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

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

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

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

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

oy. well, the fridge needed cleaning anyway.

Aim

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

Audium

Went to see the audium last night, a 35-year-old audio installation with many many speakers. It cost $12 to get in. Apparently, they've been playing the same piece of music there for the last nine years. The speakers are all 35 years old, it seems and not very sharp, but they are what they are. Despite having hundreds of speakers, they only have 4 tracks of audio. this is actually logical, as i was trying to figure out how anyone could afford hundreds of amplifiers for each speaker and hundreds of tracks of tape or whatever. but 4 tracks means 4 amps and 4 tracks of tape, which is reasonable. It's all analog, so the lack of crispness could just be from playing the same tape twice a week for nine years. the high pitched audio gradually gets rubbed off of the tape and gets stuck to the tape head. crispness is all pretty high-frequency. This hapens this way because the magnetic material on the tape has some thickness. High frequencies do not have a lot of energy to penetrate the tape, so they end up mostly on the surface. Low frequencies have much higher energy and end up at the "bottom" of the tape. this I think I recall from Maggi Payne's class in audio engineering.

Anyway, at the Audium, the same guy does this every time. I can't imagine spending nine years playing the same work twice a week. But he gets audience. There were more than 30 people there. He's working on a new piece, which will be deployed in a month or two. And there's talk of opening up the installation for other composers some time after that. But it might be a year or two. Things don't seem to move quickly at the audium.

the nine year old piece features some tape collage of recordings of birds and ocean sounds and stuff. then there are a bunch of cheesy analog synth sounds. alas, they really are cheesy. they sound like they must be much older than they apparently are. There was a cool Forbidden Planet type vibe around them, tho. (If you have not seen this movie, you must. It has an amazing soundtrack.) The room is darkened completely during the show. Pitch black. And then an intermission of 5 minutes and then pitch black again. I fell asleep during the first half. I don't think pitch black is the best way to listen to sound. I mean, you do want to concentrate with your ears more than your eyes, but I think senses highten each other more than they compete. Sitting in a dark, still room with no air circulation could tend to de-focus you, rather than steer your focus towards sounds, but I dunno. I know that if/when I go again, I'm going to be more rested. I fidgeted constantly during the second half to be wakeful, which worked, but there's still some sensory deprivation element that makes it hard for me to pay attention.

It would be cool to combine a million (ok, over a hundred) speakers with something like a planetarium, so you could do audio collage and laser light show at the same time! ok, maybe not...

other stuff

Today is the last non-travel day of my break. The navel gazing has come to an end so I can get some school work done and because it's undignified to make a spectacle of myself. No really. I have dropped down to my normal, background level of angst. I feel happy. (I just discovered halvah in the fridge that Ellen had been hiding from me, so it wouldn't all disappear. but then she decided it was safe to leave it in sight again..) I feel kind of transformed, maybe, but I'm not questioning everything anymore. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but the over-examined life is a problem too. Yeah, this means I'm going to keep doing things just cuz it's how I've always done it and it seems not to be causing a problem. Maybe it's stupid to be a vegetarian. I don't care. I've been doing it for 11 years and I'm not stopping now.

As for identity: I am my ideas, experiences and perceptions. I start at the tips of my fingers and end at the bottom of my toes. That's it. "Finding myself" was my excuse for my 25-year-old driftiness. I am hereby declaring myself found. I'm the person sitting in front of the laptop.

happy happy happy

Jesus Christ Racing Team trying to witness for Jesus Christ by racing the Christmobile.

Quick Matthew, Mark and Luke! to the Christmobile! There are money changers in the temple!

audium tonight! Be there or be someplace else!

fate

this post killed for being too navel-gazing. for pete's sake.

--Update-- this post restored by popular demand

Lately, whatever I've needed has come to me. Not what I wanted, but what I needed. People are appearing at the right times and being helpful to me or nice to me or generally improving my situation a great deal. I feel happy right now and it's because of friends (current and from the past) and some people appearing that I didn't expect. I feel loved, not just by family and friends but also, somehow, by fate or whatever that seems to be steering me in the right direction and causing things to appear at exactly the right time. I think I'm going to become a unitarian.

And so I dunno what to do with myself when the semester ends. I want to come back here, where I'm surrounded by caring and kind people and to pick up things I've started while here. But, alas, Ellen points out that I really really must do more in nyc. (She's right. It's essential for my career.) Then I've got financial entanglements, in that I'll be paying my berkeley morgage and my CT rent no matter where in the world I go off to. And so I feel pulled in multiple directions by career, connections to home and whatnot.

So I'm going to send out some resumes in all directions and then trust in fate. I'm not sure how much trust I have in descision making right now. I decide things and they turn out to not matter cuz of changing circumstance or I decide something and later decide it was a disaster. Or I try to decide things, but am ultimately powerless. I have many feelings, but I don't know how much to trust them or how much weight to give them. All sort of new experiences that most folks have at age 20, not at age 28. filled with doubt. and pulled, ultimately, by the difference between what i want and what i need. alas. how can i tell which is which?

Event!

I am going tommorrow (friday) night to see the Audium. If you would like to join me (I would very much like it if you did), the instructions on the Audium website say to arrive at 1616 Bush St., SF. by 8:00 PM. As there are supposed to be large anti-war protests in the City, it might be a good idea to ride transit in (or head over after blocking the federal building or whatever).

The Audium is something of an SF landmark. It's been there since the 1970's. And it's a room with 169 speakers where concerts are given every weekend. I haven't gone before, so it's about time. Reviews of it have been mixed, but there's a few reasons to check it out aside from its landmarkness. some people complain about the old-school 70's synthesizer sounds. (!!????) 70's synths are awesome! They're way better than digital. Anyway, I heard a rumor that it might be opened up for other composers to write stuff for the space, so I want to check it out for that reason too. and I thought it might make a nifty group outing. so come, if you can!

Not Reading Freud

I'm supposed to be readin Freud right now, but I'm not doing it. I swear I will do it . . . later. I have to give a report on Monday, so yeah, I'll do it later. Anytime now. Right after I post to my blog and eat lunch and....

And what about ameliorating the crushing pain of existence? Life is inherently tumultuous. Bad things happen. All the freaking time. But good things happen too. You've got your joy of existance and your wonder of existence and your beauty of existence. Would it make a difference if we talked about things that adulterated to joy of existence rather than talking about things that ease the crushing pain of existence? How would our worldview suddenly shift? I mean, you can't avoid pain unless there's something wrong with you. Maybe you can't avoid joy either. Maybe there's more than one state of existence. Maybe the states of existence are not in binary opposition to each other. Maybe pain is a way of teaching us things and so adds to joy. Maybe joy is a way to create contrast and so adds to pain. Are you a pessimist or an optomist? Maybe this is all so knotted up and gordian you can never untangle it. Maybe any way you look at it is simultaneously a useful tool for understanding things and a distortion. What good are words anyway? Where would be without words? What if everything is in everything else? What if all distinctions and all ontology are just tricks we use to survive and find food?

I'm going to describe my current state as ungrounded. I don't know where the gound is. I don't know which way is up. I don't know if talking about "up" has meaning except in relation to gravity. It's not a useful direction to give in a space station. My words here are bordering on cliche. Ungrounded. Sleep-deprived. Experiencing beauty and wonder.

forgiveness

My highschool religion teacher in my junior year told us that we needed to always forgive but "don't be a doormat." I had the kind of disrespect for her that only a highschool student could have. What could this possibly mean aside from being a cliche or a half-hearted forgiveness?

Sharon Olds (I think) writes a lot of poetry about her father, who was abusive. In one of her poems, she talks about thinking of her father as a young boy, before he was abused and when he was joyful and not yet broken and transformed into a monster. She thought of him then and loved him then. Because holding hate in your heart is too heavy? Because everyone, even people who hurt you, deserves love or maybe it's easier to love than to hate? I don't have answers. I only have questions.

You've done bad things. I've done bad things. Maybe you don't know why you did bad things. Maybe you've thought about it and found an explination or a reason, something so you can say that you were doing your best and forgive yourself. I shouldn't have called her an asshat, but I was really angry. I had a terrible day. My cat died that morning. Or something. I was fucked up. It was a fucked up time in my life. Or something.

Everyone has extenuating circumstances. Everyone has reasons. Everyone thought that what they were doing was the best thing to do or was under some sort of compulsion or was hurt or was damaged. You can empathize with yourself. Man, I yelled all the time when my mom was dying and that was extremely stressful for the people around me, but my mom was dying and I had no tools for dealing with it. I can empathize and forgive myself. Does this sound easy? It's not. Forgiving myself is harder than forgiving anyone else. This is how I've been doing it: Look at what I did that was wrong. Look at what I should have done different. Try to understand why I did wrong things. Empathize with myself. Try to avoid thinking errors like overgeneralization, labelling, emotional reasoning, all-or-nothingism, etc. Find places where I did things right, if I can. Keep in mind correct deeds in addition to misdeeds. Take deep breaths. Cry. Eat a lot of Halvah (or equivalent) (Ancient proverb: Halvah ameliorates the crushing pain of existence). Feel rage. Try to get rage to subside. Not a quick thing. this why I've done no homework. I tried to forgive other people. I put blame on myself for my part in causing disaster. I tried to forgive myself. Now I'm back to other people. I don't think there's a set algorythm for how to do this. I feel like to forgive other people, I need to keep love in mind. to forgive myself is the same deal, I think. "poor me. look at the mess i was in. i did my best." It sounds like ways I was trained not to think. I'm not supposed to feel sorry for myself. I'm supposed to have charecter, whatever that is. Freud says that people get hysteria because they supress emotions and reactions to things . . . and too much daydreaming.

Teaching myself new ways to think. Freud says (ok, I did some of my Freud reading afterall) that incorrect (or let's say instead "not useful") thought patterns can wear deep ruts really quickly. When you train yourself to think in a new way, you are literally forming new connections between neurons and neglecting strong, well-connected pathways. This is not an easy thing to do. It's why seeing those 3-D magic eye pictures is so difficult for the first time. You really, actually, need to rewire your brain. So I'm rewiring my brain, which is why it's not surprising that I couldn't concentrate on anything.

So what about forgiving other people? Empathy! Empathy! Empathy! What could have caused this person to behave in this way? What is good about this person? What can I love about this person? And then eat a lot of halvah. And then forgive, but don't be a doormat. Forgiving someone in your heart can be something you do entirely for your own self interest to lighten your load and to move on. Forgiving someone in your heart does not mean that your relationship with the forgiven reverts to the pre-hurt state. If I forgive myself for over-using rage as coping tool, I'm cartainly not going to do that again, if I can help it. so what about relationships with other people? Should I renew them? Change them? Break them off?

How likely is this to happen again? What steps have been taken by me or this person to prevent it? Have I removed some stressor? Has s/he learned some new coping strategy? Was this hurt in repsonce to a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal, or could something like this happen again? How can I communicate my expectations to the other person? Would it make a difference? How do I evaluate whether or not it has made a difference? Cluelessness is indistinguishable from malitiousness in certain instances, so says Dilbert. Was s/he clueless or malicious or can I tell? Can I clue this person in? How much maliciousness should I absorb before I seperate myself from this person? How much time to I allow? What do I do during this time? When do I stop trying? How do I love someone after I quit trying?

I've got none of those answers. but they seem like the right questions. Maybe the other person is asking the same questions too. what do I do if s/he gets different answers that I do? what if one of wants change and the other doesn't? What if one of us wants to break it off?

what is the nature of commitment and expectation? Does it change how much I have to try to change or renew rather than end? I think this is the definition of commitment: I will change and renew as much as I can. I will try to find compromise. I will do whatever I can within my boundaries. (my god, where do the boundaries go?) I think commitment means not giving up until you've exhuasted all your options. Of course, there are different levels of commitment. You can't make anyone else do anything. Just because an expectation seems reasonable to you, doesn't mean you won't be disappointed.

More later

Better than Halvah

My experiments with ameliorating the crushing pain of existence are resoundingly successful. i'm still hella distracted though.

But I thought I'd share a weird and complicated story with you, on the 11th anniversary of my grandma's death:

How My Grandma Died

Well, when I was a youth, I eventually became dern certain that I was a homo and I've always been terrible about keeping secrets. furthermore, shameful secrets give people power over you. People can guess or find out and threaten to tell everybody. This happened to me on multiple occasions. And "I am not!" is not a good responce to any taunt, whether someone is calling you an asshat or a dyke. So I came out at school.

I was sixteen years old and it was the end of my sophomore year, about a week before final exams, maybe less. It was definitely the very end of May or the beginning of June. My friend had given me a bunch of information about Gay Pride Month events and parades. She had gotten a photocopy from someplace. This was before the internet. It was sometimes hard to find out about things, especially subculture events. Well, I've always been one for flyer-based activism. So I printed up 50 flyers that said "June is Gay Pride Month" and listed all the parades and street faires in the Bay Area. And I started handing them out to people. This was about equivalent to printing up flyers that said "Celeste is a big dyke!" I knew this would be the case and I had decided to answer any questions that anyone asked me. The other kids weren't sure what to do about this. They'd ask me "Are you a lesbian?" and I'd say yes. And they'd look at me quizzically and say , "ok." and go back to talking to their friends.

I went to talk to the director of student activities to get permission to post the flyers around school. He was my freshman english teacher (and was arrested last year for groping a student, but anyway), he was only in his second year of teaching then. I was used to occassionally seeing him nervous, but I'd never seen him so nervous as I did then. He explained that it was unfortunate that society (and specifically the catholic church who ran the school) was not accepting of homosexuality and maybe in future years, people would be allowed to post these flyers, but not now. I thanked him for his time.

Meanwhile, astounded kids were asking me for flyers. People would come up to me and ask if I was gay just because they couldn't beleive I would say it. It would walk past a cluster of kids that were talking amongst themselves and looking at me and then one of them would come up to me and ask, just to hear me say it. I remember one afternoon, I was walking the length of the quad, rolling my tuba behind me to go home at the end of the day. It seemed like a relay race. I started out across the quad and passed a group of kids, probably practicing cheerleaders. They talked excitedly amongst themselves for a minute and then dispatched a runner to the next group of people talking along the path. they would gossip excitedly! then they would send a runner to the next group. I don't remember if it was me or the rumor that crossed the quad frist. I do remember having stressful dreams about being chased by students with pitchforks and flaming torches, ala Doctor Frankenstein.

but my timing was really perfect. Just as things were getting to a riotous pitch, final exams struck. This was a college prep school. Kids took their finals very seriously. Nobody had time to worry about me anymore. And then school was out for the summer. I didn't know what would happen to me in the fall. I remember telling a coworker at Pizza Hut that summer that I didn't know if I had any school friends. But after spending a summer digesting it, they all calmed down and more or less accepted me.

This horrified my mother. she didn't like that i was queer. she didn't like that she hadn't been able to dissuade me from being queer. and what's worse is that now everybody knew! I would tell anybody! every day was coming out day for me. she pleaded with me not to tell my grandma. My grandma had a bad heart. if she knew i was a lesbian, clearly she would have a heart attack and die. I acquiessed. It was the only time my mom was able to restrain me. She tried to build on this success. She told me that I couldn't subscribe to any gay periodicals, because my grandma used to know the Cupertino postmaster (in the 1950's) and certainly the postal carriers would gossip about delivering the Advocate and it would get back to my grandma and she would have a heart attack and die. Other farfetched connections were made. Some completely unexplained. I couldn't go on a date with a girl because my grandma would have a heart attack and die. How would she know? she just would and it would kill her. My mom told me this over and over. If I went on a date with a girl, my grandma would somehow magically find out and have a heart attack and die. I was somewhat unconvinced and completely undeterred.

Anyway, during this time, I was young and naive. I thought that people mostly discriminated against queers by accident. As in, they didn't think about anything but straight people, so they wouldn't realize that queers were being excluded. As in, privledge is blinding. People who are able-bodied often don't notice a lack of ramps for handicapped accessiblity and so can create barriers without meaning to. I used to think people only discriminated against disabled people by accident, which alas is not true. and I thought they discriminated against gay people by accident, which alas, really was not true. so when my highschool responded to slam-dancing at the Valentines dance by banning people from getting same-sex guest passes, I thought I could just explain to them about how this was disciminatory and they would fix it.

I had only gone to the homecoming dance of my freshman year and I went with a band guy, so no paperwork was required. But if you wanted to take somebody who went to a different highschool or something, a permission slip was needed, called a guest pass. At the valentines dance of my junior year, a bunch of guys got guest passes for their friends at Bellarmine, the catholic all-boys higschool down the peninsula. Boys will be boys and there were too many of them and they got rowdy. Instead of issuing a proclimation "no slam dancing," the administration decided to just make sure all the non-St Francis boys were on some sort of leash, like a female date.

My friend knew a lesbian who went to Castilleja, an all-girls highschool in Palo Alto. She gave me contact info and I called this girl up. Her name was Emma, as I recall. I made a date to meet her after school one day to get the pertinent information for the guest pass. She was a granola girl. She was cute, she was friendly, she was flirty. I was on cloud 9. I remember walking with her in Memorial Park in Cupertino, holding hands that first day. I pushed her on the swing. Parents with kids saw us, realized we were two girls together grabbed their children and left. But it just made it all the more exciting. At the end of the afternoon, I drove her home. I sat in my pickup truck, looking over at her and she kissed me! I had kissed a lot of boys by then. Maybe 10. I was looking for the right one, but all I had found was slimy toungues and bad breath. But her! It was the first time I had kissed a girl. It was astoundingly wonderful. I felt dizzy. My foot slipped off the break of my truck and it rolled several feet. I promised her that I would see her the night of the dance.

Meanwhile, the wheels of the school machinery were turning. I got a slip saying I should go to the dean's office. The assistant dean, a really butch PE teacher, told me to go to the dean. The dean told me to go to the vice principal. The vice principal told me to go the the principal. the principal wanted nothing to do with me and sent me back to the vice principal. He helpfully explained that the school had to answer to the standards of the catholic community in which it existed and could not issue me a guest pass. I met with him and argued with him several times. I was surprised. I remember my heart sinking when my English teacher, a silent ally, said, "you don't think you're going to win, do you?"

the night of the Saint Patricks Day Dance came and I had lost. The next dance was the junior prom, for which a date was pretty much required and which, it was clear, would also deny me entry. My (one and only) ex-boyfriend asked me to hang out with him, so me, him, a friend of his, and Emma were tooling around in his car. I don't remember where we went or what we did. I do remember spending quite a lot of the evening making out with Emma in the back of Brian's car. Brian was probably not amused, but I didn't notice. I didn't care. Girls! Girls are awesome! Emma was awesome! It was the best thing ever!

I came home from that night, my first date with a girl, walking about a foot off the ground, I was so happy. It was the best thing ever. All of my lingering doubts or confusions about my identity seemed to have been swept away. I felt like a new person. It was the best thing ever. the guest pass thing didn't even matter anymore.

I went inside my house and my parents were still awake, which was somewhat unsusual given the hour, but not unheard of as they were night people. But they were acting very strangely. What happened, I asked?

My grandma had a heart attack. the next wednesday, St Patricks Day, she was dead.

I never saw Emma again.

Be careful about threats you make over and over again, as you never know when they'll come true.

still philosophising endlessly, don't mind me

Today's subject is still anger. Anger provides temporary relief. Somebody hurting you? Don't get sad, get mad! If you're angry, you're energetic and you can go do something like hate them or get revenge. It's really easy to get mad. Just look only at somebody's flaws, turn off empathy and assign them the worst possible motives. The more you love somebody, the easier this is, because you've got a lot of experience with the flaws of people you love. It's rewarding and easy to turn love into hate. Everything is the other person's fault. And you can burn with a justified and bitter rage.

This, however, is akin to visitting a loan shark. Lots of funds now, lots of debt later. Hate almost always hurts the hater more than the hatee (excluding acts of violence. silent hate is more self-destructive). Hate burns a hole in you. And hate doesn't hurt the other person, usually. I mean, you can do things to hurt them, but they might fail to work and then, either way, you feel guilty or enraged or some other taxing emotion.

anger causes explosions. Get mad! Get wound up tighter than a spring! freak out at small provocations or for no reasons at all! yell at your cat! Mad! Mad! Mad! BOOM!!

Of course, maybe you do succeed in hurting the other person. then s/he gets mad too and extracts revenge in return! and then you extract revenge! and the s/he does! and then you! ohhh all this righteous rage is enough to burn down a house, or a temple . . . some people think their body is a temple. somepeople would gladly burn their bodies to the ground. Anger could be addictive, you need more and more to keep hurt at bay. And when you're wound up so tight, how do you stop?

Man, I dunno. Take a deep breath. As Jean says, if you're not breathing, you're not doing your best thinking. Then think of something good about your nemesis. Everyone has something good about them. If this person was all bad, they wouldn't have been able to attract your attention long enough to get you mad. This strategy may not work for elected officials, but it's got to work for people you love. Yeah s/he's got more flaws and misdeeds than you can shake a stick at. And her/his nose was always just a little bit pointy in an unasthetic way. And s/he did yell at you and say something maybe s/he regretted later. But abstractly, without hurt, there would be no hope. Concretely, there is something that made you love this person. And that something is still there. S/he still has a contagious laugh. there was that time s/he bought you ice cream when you were having a bad day. there's all the love you shared and that still counts for something. Breathe. find love. find a stable platform. then figure out what to do. imho.

facing facts

well, christi has gone back to Paris, and we're still seperated or broken up or whatever you call divorcing queers. thus meaning that i'm still single. thus meaning that there's still time for a very short tumultuous affair. it would be an affair on a budget, as i have not done any school work and really need to spend time on that. i'm not sure that me just being here till (very very very early) sunday morning is even long enough to qualify for a tumultuous affair. maybe just a tumlutuous couple of evenings? no committment, lots of fun.....

i am not special

many young people are angry. many are militant. this is a cliche. the world is full of angry young women in their late teens and early to mid 20's. then, in their late 20's to early 30's or so, most angry young women chill out a bit. people are like honey mead or some wines. they mellow with age. stuff happens to them. they learn to talk. they learn to have boundaries. they learn mostly by making mistakes. sometimes from a teacher-type figure or a book, but mostly through trial and error.

This stuff that's going on in my life is a story told over and over. i was young and angry. now i'm less young and less angry. i was in a relationship. now i'm not. If I wrote something dramatic, like my heart felt like shards of broken glass cutting into me with every beat, you would all know what i meant. almost everyone gets their heart broken. almost everyone outlives their parents. almost everyone has a life filled with emotional ups and downs. almost everyone my age gets shaken up and re-examines things. we all live this story over and over. we all tell this story over and over. This is what the novel Generation X is all about. It's what many many novels are about. it's a story we never get tired of because it is universal. it is what happened to all of us, over and over again, but with different details, different faces, different names. what makes my story special to me is that i'm in it. what makes it special to you is that it reminds you of your own story.

We're all in this together. We're all looking for love, feeling pain, facing challenges, changing according to somewhat predictable patterns. because we're all human. and we all hurt each other or goof up or fail to communicate or act our age. nobody in this world is perfect. what makes us human is our errors, our hurts, our foibles, our personal drama, which is really our shared experiences of life.

We can look at people around us and see that they're all highly flawed. We're all born with Original Sin, according to Catholic dogma, meaning we're all doomed to fail sometimes. this makes us human. it is a cause for making connections instead of driving folks apart. how often is it that people appear more human and more likable because they're not perfect? we all share flaws, we all feel pain, we all bleed and this teaches all of us compassion. this can teach us forgiveness. we hurt each other and otherwise fail all the time. most times, people don't do this on purpose. all of us have done it. all of us have purposefully hurt each other. all of us have accidentally hurt each other. hopefully, more often the latter.

keeping a list of misdeeds of ourselves or anyone else would be exhausting. every person you'll ever meet will have a million things wrong with them. they probably have more wrong than right. if you know them long enough, they'll hurt you more than once and long enough again, they'll hurt you on purpose. we're all fucked up people and we're all fucking up all the time. you. me. everybody.

diogenes walked around with a lantern, looking for an honest man and never found anyone. anyone now looking for someone perfect or someone that won't hurt them is going to meet a similar fate. you can search yourself with a lantern and be similarly disappointed. but perfection is not actually desirable. what would you have in common with someone who had never hurt anyone or been hurt? no shared humanity. and perfectionism is even more undesirable. holding anyone, including yourself to overly high standards is just going to lead to more hurt and more heartbreak and a terrible feeling of aloneness.

this is why we must forgive. because our shared pain is an essential part of our existence. it binds us together while it pushes us apart. forgiveness is the final glue that holds us together. she who forgives is happier. the happiest people keep trying and trying again. they see faults and flaws and mistakes in themselves and everyone around them, but they look for the good. they look for what is beautiful and lovely. they look for what flaws have taught us, like compassion, forgiveness and hope. (perfection defies hope. it is a hopeless state, since it leaves nothing to aspiration.) the happiest people know that love and growth and mistakes and hurt and forgiveness and patience and compassion and compromise are not incompatible. they are essential. they exist in all relationships. if everyone of us is wrong and everyone of us is wronged, then we all desperately need values of compassion, forgiveness and compromise.

love is too important to be perfect. it is too human to never err. love is as fucked up as the rest of the emotional lives of people. love is the most important thing in our lives. to feel love is to look for the good amidst everything else. love is hope. love is forgiveness. love is compassion. in short, love is a product of hurt and errors. love is a second chance.

Asshat

today's word is "asshat," pronounced ass-hat. this is an insult. it can be used with great satisfaction

when i was a senior in highschool, i told the vice principal that if he didn't let me take my gf to prom, that queer nation would have a sit-in in front of the school and that the front page editor of the santa cruz sentinel was anxious to cover it. I said, "and the ACLU told me I should sue you, but I don't want to do that..." in a voice that suggested that all this activism was spinning out of my control and i could end up with a lawsuit in my name against my will. suddenly, it was decided that people could take "friends" to proms instead of merely dates, the compromise I had been suggesting all along. muahahahaha. He had said earlier that some of the students would later marry their dates and since gay marriage isn't allowed.... blah blah blah and that's falling down now too. (my response: um, what if we promise not to get married at prom?)

We live in happy times and the asshats are losing.