Re:Creation

not to continue with the theme of my last post, but i’d just like to say that i took no less than five whole minutes to pick what to listen to just now. organized by artist and album, i have simply to use my optical mouse’s scroll button to view any segment of my cd collection. then, i have simply to use the left button three times to spin any desired virtual disc. these actions combined can take no more than 1.5 seconds, and yet, the decision takes five minutes. extraordinary.

maybe music has preoccupied my thoughts recently because of the shows: sigur ros last saturday at the warfield, and pedro the lion tuesday at the great american music hall. the time has certainly passed for writing an emotion-driven entry about either show, since the high can last no more than a day or two (except, perhaps, in the case of sigur ros, due to the large amount of pot being smoked at their concert). moreover, no one, i think, could profit very much by hearing whatever thoughts i have about the shows. either such a person would like the artist, or not. if not, she certainly wouldn’t care. if so, the thoughts would boil down, for her, to whether or not the show was good. the answer is, yes.

sigur ros was beautiful and haunting and tormented and insecure and fuzzily cynical and hopelessly joyful = YES it was a good show.

pedro the lion was gruff and embarrassed and hilarious and piercing and wise and never to be successfully heckled = YES it was a good show. i stand wholeheartedly behind my friend chris’ assessment of the tour (he saw the orlando show): in many ways, going to this particular pedro the lion concert was very much like sex. and because i feel like being sensational, i won’t bother adding the necessary qualifiers to give you the correct context of that statement. or, perhaps i mean it just like that.

i left two days early to come home for thanksgiving. my plane tuesday night was overbooked, and due to some quick thinking and walking i became the only volunteer off the flight. american airlines put me up in the wyndham hotel for 6 hours, put me on the first flight out wednesday morning, put me in first class, and put $300 in my pocket in the form of a voucher, all because they sold too many tickets. i love it. thanksgiving itself was great, and the first time i’ve had it in our house in orlando (even though we’ve lived here for three and a half years).

still, homework count is at 0, while movie count is at something like 5, so some things need to be ironed out in my schedule. i guess that’s why i’m staying here till thurs. of dead week.

i am tired from waking up late, from walking barefoot on the hot sandpapery roof putting up christmas lights, from a few hours of football, from a too-big dinner, from the egg nog and cookies, the glow (the crisp, DVD glow) of the movie we just watched, and from wishing i was a jedi, or at least that magic was real or that i was a hero. i think i’m going to bed. maybe tomorrow i’ll wake up and realize that a jedi’s life is not really so envious. maybe i’ll realize that if magic was real it wouldn’t be magic. maybe i’ll realize that there are all kinds of heroes and there’s nothing to stop me from being one.

virtual disc on spin: love | the juliana theory

i do believe that i am defined by my CD collection. first, there is the fact that i have a CD collection–most college students these days seem to owe their musical tastes to whatever mp3s they can get off kazaa. these people are like the mp3s themselves–tinny, with the tops and bottoms of the audio spectrum cut off. the sound is in-your-face, shallow, and lacking in life. there is the related fact that you download a song, a two-or-three-minute pick-me-up, in lieu of buying an entire album–the artist’s mind and soul for the space of months or years. offensive to me is the radio culture of ‘hits’, and the subsequent ignoring of the album in pursuit of the popular single.

second, there is the size of my collection. it is, relatively speaking, large, consisting of nearly 200 discs and corresponding artwork. a substantial size is necessary for the definition i wished to show. imagine, to the contrary, a person X with only 20 CDs. the chances that there is some person Y with the same 20 CDs is, on balance, high. much higher than the chances that there is some person Y with the same 200 CDs as me. each CD i buy is added information about myself…added specificity that becomes exponentially harder to randomly duplicate. here is an analogy: say you have a certain number of words with which you can describe yourself. if you have to describe yourself in 5 words, chances are that someone else would use those same 5 words. however, if you allow yourself the thousands of words that make an autobiography, it is inconceivable that someone else would unknowingly describe herself in exactly the same way. thus with each purchase of burned plastic i add telling lines to the sketch of myself.

lastly, and most importantly, there is the extension. “extension” is a word used very precisely in set theory to refer to all the objects in a particular set. so, the extension of the set of letters in the english language is simply a – z. likewise, the extension of the set of my CDs is defined as those specific CDs which are in the set. obviously, this is what matters most in the whole dialectic, since it is the fact that i have one CD and not another that most exactly defines who i am. as before, each new CD says something about who i am and about what my personality is. for, what is personality save the union of all our choices past and present, which influence strongly even future choices? of course, we must assume here that in buying CDs i do in reality exercise a power of choice according to a certain axiom, namely that of only buying what ones likes, or thinks one will like. immediately, however, we run into a problem: what of old and no-longer-loved CDs? i certainly have some that i would no longer proudly display as part of my collection. in this case we can simply stipulate that the person may define his collection in light of the aforementioned axiom, thus ruling out disliked CDs from the outset.

in the end, we can form the set JLCD to contain those CDs which i own and like. and, all that is required for this set to uniquely refer to me, and not anyone else, is that the extension of JLCD is unique among all sets of CDs in the world. more formally, the intersection of JLCD with any other set S of CDs cannot be such that JLCD is actually a subset thereof. if this result obtains in the world, and i believe that it does, or at least that there is an extremely high probability that it does, we are assured that i am correct in asserting that JLCD uniquely determines me.

you might think that the added claim that the previous result is sufficient for describing the totality of my person is unwarranted. unfortunately there is no way to logically demonstrate the truth of such a claim, but i’ve no fear here of stepping back from first-order logic and stating something without proof. music is my soul, and my soul is music. that is who i am, and so if anything is to be the embodiment of the sum total of me, why not the music that drives me in life? i suppose a better analogy would be that my music–the music i listen to and the music i write–draws a maze of arrows, all of which, pointing beyond nature at the forms which are actually the building blocks of my nature, trace where i come from and where i’m going.

virtual song on spin: “almost there” | pedro the lion

i was sitting in the back of the room during cru tonight, listening to the speaker and trying to eat my quizno’s sub without making too much of a mess. unfortunately my requirement of taking the tomatoes off the sloppy TBG sandwich made this nearly impossible, and my antics must have drawn attention to myself, because a minute later i was singled out and called up front and the speaker was telling me about his daughter. people were laughing, but i had no clue what was going on, because i was still scooping some gooey guacamole off my hand-out and putting it in my mouth. don’t ask my why i chose to do this in front of a large group of people. i made the appropriate grunts of approval to the speaker’s comments and focused on the guac as he had some more fun at my expense. it was great.

next thing i knew, i was asked to chant a lament: 2 samuel 1:19-27. this is where david laments for the death of jonathan and saul. i’d never chanted anything before, but i made a go at it, and all of a sudden i forgot myself, forgot when i was, and became one with the grief of god’s servant over the passing of his best friend. my emotions were also strangely flooded and charged, since i was chant-singing verses of mourning for my namesake–my self, almost. my voice died down finally and i was shaking, mostly from being nervous in front of a group, but also substantially from how cool it was to be involved with the words as they flew across barriers of time and culture. i’ve certainly never felt that engaged with a psalm before.

we ended the night singing the doxology. it’s hard to understate how meaningful that is.

i am a philosopher by trade, but i have a suspicion that the root, the backdrop, the canvas of reality does not consist in platonic forms, propositions, the cartesian product of infinite sets, or linguistic acts.

i suspect we will ultimately see that it is all poetry, thick with the living imagination of god.

random song on spin: “priests and paramedics” | pedro the lion

the leonids of last night had nothing on the veritable storm of glittering, transient, dust daggers that was last year’s show. still, i was glad to give up a few hours of sleep and drive up to skyline in order to lie on a blanket on the top of a hill, watching the periodic larger-than-normal piece-of-space-crap become transcendentally something more for the blink of an eye.

i’m sure someone, somewhere, has made an analogy between the human life and the brief glory of ultrafast burning dust, so i won’t bother. also, i’m not sure i would agree with it.

in other news, it’s been confirmed by all reliable sources that i am in fact addicted to procrastination. useless procrastination, at that: i’m growing fat in addition to lazy. well, i’d better get back to my addiction.

virtual disc on spin: greatest hits | bjork

i got frustrated with trying to put my thoughts into words here on the blog, so instead i wrote a song. listen to it here. (The word “here” in the previous sentence is a link, for those of you not prone to mouseovering)

in other news, in the past few days i’ve had special dinner, played paintball, read the first two harry potter books, watched a few movies, played guitar, and contracted frostbite. though not necessarily in that order. one of the more salient features of this list, of course, is the fact that it makes no mention of schoolwork, or, more particularly, the logic problem set which is due tomorrow and has yet to be started. thus, i am off for a long night of work and little sleep.

regards,

i hit the low point of autumn quarter 2002 friday morning. i had stayed up all the previous night (must be something about thursdays) doing a midterm for logic and reading some crap about rhetoric in the ancient near east for my greek class. i finally went to bed around 5am to catch 2 hours of sleep before getting to class at 7:30. when i woke up at 7, i despaired: the wind howled, and the rain lashed against my window in a constant thumping staccato. on any other day, i would have immediately gone back to bed, thanking god for the rain. everyone knows, of course, that you’re not expected to go to class if it’s raining. however, friday was different, since i had to give a presentation in greek. so i got myself up and psyched for the long trek to the quad — just at, or over, a mile in distance.

my little black umbrella did little to help keep off the rain, though it was very useful in trying to pick me up off the ground and turning itself inside out. anyway, i got to class on time, only to see someone taping a sign on the door: “greek class cancelled today”. needless to say, i fumed, i raged, and i almost cried. then, with a resigned and broken sigh, i clutched my soaking jacket closer around my defeated frame, letting the cold seep in. utterly in hate with circumstance, i slogged through puddle after puddle back home, where i took off my sodden shoes and water-logged socks and fell into a fitful sleep that should never have been disturbed.

thankfully, friday night more than made up for the horror of the morning. we had suites formal. the theme was “high school homecoming”, and the title for the evening was, “a night in heaven under the sea in paris under the stars”, no doubt a tribute to those geniuses of originality that were our high school student councils/governments/presidents. always early and on top of things, i asked the wonderful erin spokes if she would be my date for the event late thursday night, and she accepted! a group of about 20 friends went to p.f. chang’s for dinner, and then boarded huge charter buses full of (thankfully not too many) drunk people. we were shuttled to sinbad’s, a club in san francisco, where we danced the night away to hip-hop tunes.

there were the usual sketchy-stanford-dance-party-event antics going on, and therefore never any lack of entertaining/immoral behavior being realized merely feet from my person. still, our party survived mostly unscathed. i was exhausted when the dj shut things down at 1am, after two straight hours of being on the dance floor without a break or even a stretch. since i was still tired from thursday night (only 2 hours before ‘class’, remember, and then only another 2 before i had a meeting friday morning), i wasn’t on my best game, but no one could say that i didn’t get my groove on, what.

all i’ve done today is shoot some paintballs in lake lagunita, so it was obviously very exciting. and that brings us to now, where i write what i’m listening to and then click ‘post & publish’.

virtual disc on spin: wings to fly | plankeye

you should all be very proud of me: today i skipped class for the first time. not that that itself is worthy of praise; rather, it’s the fact that i’m in my 6th week of instruction and haven’t yet skipped. a personal best, if not a straight-out world record. of course, since i fell, i fell hard, and skipped all three of my classes in favor of sleep, which is a beautiful and blessedly delicious way to skip.

still, more important things beg telling. i’m in sort of a dilemma, you see. friday, being, technically, the day after today, is the suites formal, which i plan on attending. unfortunately, to attend said formal i need a date, preferably female, as there seems to be very little chance of ‘going stag’ and at the same time maintaining the illusion that i am in fact cool and socially normal and all the rest. normally, there would not be this mutual exclusion, but circumstances being what they are, there is. thus i have one day (less than 24hrs) to decide on a girl and ask her. i guess i should start thinking.

in other news, i want to buy a giant hookah.

i didn’t go to sleep last night. now that i think back on it, there really was absolutely no reason i needed to stay up. i pulled a meaningless all-nighter, with no work needing to be done and, accordingly, nothing to show for it.

still, there is something fascinating about the hours between 3 and 5 am. i feel like, if any time is my time, that cold and pregnant third watch is mine. maybe it’s just that, since no other soul is awake then, i feel a legitimate and unchallenged monarch of that two-hour domain. i love the tension, the restlessness, the fear that if you drop off either something horrible will happen, or something amazingly beautiful will flicker briefly into being without consulting or notifying you, and then just as quickly disappear, all while your consciousness lays chained behind closed eyelids. there is no such a crisp, cold, and clear time as the dead of night just before dawn, and whenever i am awake during it i feel as if i might accidentally start an adventure.

unfortunately, i used my free time last night searching the internet for long lost friends (from my old, more nerdily inhabited, days whiled away in the star wars cantina: an internet chat room on the wbs network), taking a shower of record length (probably close to an hour–yes, i wasted a lot of water, yes i feel suitably bad about it), and listening to the four cds i bought on impulse yesterday at an exorbitant price.

i did, of course, read a few chapters of mostly harmless, book five of the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy trilogy by douglas adams. it is a work of pure genius, as were the four novels before it. this is most clearly evidenced by the fact that his trilogy has five books in it: who else could boast of such a thing? anyway, i will very rarely laugh when i read books, even if they are freaking hilarious, and i laugh constantly when reading adams. ergo: the series is freaking hilarious times a billionfinity. ergo: read it.

it struck me just now that, not only was i foolish enough to stay awake all night for no reason, which will throw my clock off and prevent me from designing a website today by 5:15 (an externally imposed deadline, of course), i actually went to my 8am class instead of going to bed. how dumb you can you get? i mean … hey.

virtual disc on spin: ( ) | sigur ros