Thursday, June 29, 2006

Vibes

He has to go, he says. I feel that tenseness in my chest, a dull weight. If only I could breathe and get rid of it and have a happy goodnight...but I don't know how. "Sorry for babbling so much." I'm manipulative. He's supposed to say "it's okay, I love listening to you!" He doesn't. Damn him. "See you tommorrow," I say coldly, wondering why I have to get like this when he leaves. After a minute: "see ya". Twenty seconds: "love you". "love you", I type quickly back. Like an auto-reply, impersonal. "Sweet dreams", he says. Silence. What am I doing, punishing him with distant coldness for having to go to bed? What a bitch I can be.

After a minute: "hmm..." And then, "I miss you too".

In a world where so many of our interactions are masked by words and conventions, what you should and shouldn't say, what sort of social masks you're expected to maintain, what a blessing it is to have a soulmate who can see through to the actual feeling behind the tenseness and bitchiness and manipulation. As soon as he said that, the weight lifted from my chest.

Sometimes the smallest things make me feel like the luckiest person in the world.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Irony

If you're ever in the position of having to illustrate the concept of irony (of the cosmic variety) to someone, which is often a daunting task, try this: Irony is receiving the perfect attendance award at school, and not being there at the awards ceremony to get it. *giggles* Because you snuck off to Burger King with your friends...

Ahh Andrew, you are wonderful.

In other news, I'm feeling oddly moody tonight, so I'm not going to attempt to post anything coherent.

Sigh.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

For the record

Okay, today on the elliptical machine thingy at the gym, I managed (approximately) the following:

In 33 minutes, 3303 steps (or whatever they call them), and around 260 calories, with my heartrate (whenever I checked it) usually up around 170, although I tried to keep it down a bit.

This is just so I remember. Those numbers had better improve by the end of the summer!!

Animal Dreams

Last time I read this book, I cried...I remember so clearly, however many years ago, lying in my bed on my back, the weight of the hardcover book pulling my limp right hand down over the edge of the bed, a finger marking my page, and tears and soft sobs rolling out of me. I cried for several minutes. It was wonderful.

I was hoping to recapture this experience, rereading it now, but of course I didn't. I knew exactly what was coming and this time I didn't even feel a shiver or a burning tightness around my eyes. It was disappointing, but predictable.

Rereading the book was not a waste, though, far from it. Tears welled up in my eyes, enough to make me blink hard, and I felt those beautiful cold shivers, at a moment I hadn't even remembered from my first reading:

"A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.

But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know."


For some reason, it feels deeply satisfying that I cried reading this. Like I was tapping into some universal sadness of mothers. It made me feel...grown up, for lack of a better term. Maternal? (Not to rely on constructed gender roles...) In any case, it was nice.

Does it mean something that my favorite books are the ones that make me cry? Songs, movies, any sort of art, anything that makes me cry jumps to the top of the list, but it's especially true of books. My dad once said he doesn't feel like crying, for him, really correlates with sadness...of course, "sadness" is so hard to define...in this case, meaning, real pain, something unpleasant and unwanted and bad, something that makes life more oppressive rather than more beautiful. He only really cries, he said, when something is beautiful and touching in a particular way. When a book makes me cry, it's usually something sad happening in the book that does it. But feeling that sadness makes me feel deeply happy. Of course, it's safe to let it make me happy, purely happy, because it's fictional. Maybe in some way, I love crying over books because it's such a perfect way of being able to feel the power and beauty of the emotion of sadness without having anything actually sad happen in your life to complicate your appreciation of the joy the feeling brings, the way it lets you tap into something so deep and beautiful.

Another feeling I love is when I get shivers; I can never predict it, and it's magical. Shivers aren't provoked by sadness. I think I feel them when something I hear or read feels profound and important and elegant.

Then finally, there's a feeling I don't know how to describe. It's not shivers, nor the tightness around my eyes when I'm close to actually crying. But it's close to that...a slight waver of my heart and stillness in my throat, and something stinging around my eyes, with no tears and just for an instant. I have to swallow, blink, and catch my breath afterwards. I can never ever predict or classify what gives me that feeling. It's like for just an instant I've found something that's some key to life, in some way, however small, and it makes my soul jump. I remember it happened when I read, in some paper for adolescence class, a quote from a teenaged girl: "Independence means being able to depend on people." That's the only one that pops into my head. It doesn't happen often. I wish I could remember more. It is such a powerful and beautiful feeling.

I'm not sure, but I suspect the fact that I enjoy books that makes me cry betrays the fact that deep down, I'm very happy. I feel so blessed for that (and "blessed" isn't a word I often use). I hope my children can love books that make them cry.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Linear algebra nostalgia

So I was thinking about linear algebra (mainly how I've forgotten most of it!), which got me thinking about Jim, which got me searching for the list of quotes I compiled during that class, which made me feel like posting them here, since presumably the site he had them on is no longer in existance. So without further ado, some pearls of wisdom from Math 16H, Fall 2004...

You just know these n values, and now you know everything!
Who knew it was that simple?

It's good, but it's not Sundae Friday good.
Few things are.

I guess I'll call this a fact...
It's hard to tell sometimes.

There are terrifying lows and dizzying highs in linear algebra.
And people think math is so dry and boring...

The tricky part is struggling to figure out why what I say is not stupid.
The real challange of math class.

This statement is practically content-free.
"Practically", I suppose, being the operative word.

I'm gonna try to go the rest of the class without saying or writing anything that's wrong.
A noble goal.

You run into trouble here if you think too much.
Such is life.

Basically the problem is that infinity is weird.
Mathematicians like to use very defined, precise terminology.

What's similar about them is that they're similar.
Well, that explains it.

Mathematicians are handy 'cause we understand math.
It's true, what can I say?

If you get hung up on actual definitions you'll be in trouble.
Yeah man, just go with the flow...

Mathematicians don't go for that cutesy crap.
I think the people who do go for the cutesy crap in this case were physicists...silly physicists.

I don't claim to know what I'm doing.
It's good to be honest.

If you disagree with me, it's because you're stupid.
Yeah, that's how I typically feel.

The big problem is that your mom is not part of our vector space.
I don't even know what to say here...

They sound worse than they are because they've got this German name.
That'll do it.

(on complex eigenvalues)
Jim: It's child's play!
Student: Then how come they don't teach it in preschool?
Jim: It's not FUN child's play. *thinks for a moment* Actually it's kinda fun, if you're into that stuff.

Who'd want to play in the sandbox when they could be calculating complex eigenvalues?

Turns out there are a lot of real numbers.
"A lot" is a technical mathematical term, meaning a great heapin' boooonza pile.

Jim: A lot of math is seeing patterns and then guessing that they might always be true.
Student: And then you're done?
Jim: No, that's physics.

Ooooh, harsh.

Basically, you can't win, don't try.
How discouraging.

(on the fact that all symmetric matrices are orthogonally diagonalizable) Our cup runneth over!
He got very excited by orthogonal diagonalization...

If someone asks you to orthogonally diagonalize a matrix that's not symmetric, you should spit in their face.
Oh hell yeah.

And of course, my favorite:
There are lots of things that are obvious that are not true.

Ahhh...I miss that class.

Friday, June 09, 2006

A World of Wonder

Raffi is just an amazing person. He seems to have come close to perfecting this magical attitude of simultaneously taking the world and everything in it deeply seriously, and still having a lively optimism and sense of fun. I can't try to capture all the fascinating, scary, terrible, wonderful, thought-provoking ideas the people talked about at the conference I just went to, but I just want to write my favorite thought that I heard tonight, so that I remember it in the future looking back on this. When asked about whether or how to introduce troubling facts about the world to small children, one of the women on the panel said that she believes it is crucial for a small child to grow up with a deep internal feeling that the world is good. Without time to develop a connection with, a love for the world and society and life in general, how will a child grow up to have the hope and optimism and desire necessary to be an activist for real change? I thought that was amazing because I'd never thought in those terms before. But thinking about it now, I feel like that's been such an amazingly important factor in my own development. Right now, and the past several years and in the future, as I learn more and more about the scariness of the world and the terrible things that go on, shocking and demoralizing as they may be, I come at the task of confronting these things from the state of having a deep feeling that things can be good, people can be good, families can be loving, schools can be vibrant and nurturing communities, whatever I may hear about the world, I know that's not all that's possible in human life, and I have that feeling because I had such a happy and safe and nurtured childhood. And that's probably what stops me from becoming cynical and depressed, even when I feel confused or overwhelmed by how much there is wrong in the world and how little I can do to fix it. I can always come back to the feeling that if I can just be a good person and try to help the people around me be happy, that will be something important and worthwhile. Even when I feel insecure about it, at the deepest levels, I'm optimistic, idealistic even. And apparently, it was no accident: my dad told me in the car on the way back that he was amazed to hear the woman say that so firmly and clearly, because he says if he and my mom ever were to articulate a general philosophy behind how they tried to raise me and my brother in our early years, that would be it. I had never thought of it, but it's so important; if we raise a generation of people scared about the future and cynical about humanity, how will that lead to change? Sure the world is in many ways in horrible shape right now, but what we need is a generation of people with a deep faith in the ability of society and the world to be better, to be good, and enough love of the world to propel them to work hard to improve it.

Back to Raffi, I am just amazed by how his whole attitude shows such deep optimism and faith that the world can be good. Naive, idealistic, yes, but why not? If you can have idealistic goals of reforming all of society, and yet feel joy and fulfillment just from making one child smile, isn't that the ideal attitude for real reform? I just find it so inspiring. He said in so many words what my dad told me he found obvious from Raffi's music: that his basic goal is to create children's music that respects children as whole people, without being at all condescending. And he enjoys it, singing and dancing, being silly, with such an endearing child-like spirit.

And I met him! I shook his hand, and my dad told him the story of when he signed an autograph for us and a bunch of other people who'd been waiting even though he wasn't intending to sign autographs, and I told him I loved him when I was little, and he asked how old I was now, and I said twenty, and he said well then I'm a Beluga Grad. *laughs* I told him I was going to be a teacher, and he said "well there you go, you're part of the revolution!" *giggles* And he really does just have this air of respect and interest when he's talking to you, even though obviously there were many people wanting to talk to him and we couldn't have his attention for too long, but it didn't feel like talking with some big celebrity who didn't care about some random adoring fan. It was really wonderful.

Quickly, a bit about the four panelists:

*One was a woman who talked about all this ecological stuff about how many toxic chemicals there are in our food and water and all that...pretty scary. Makes me glad I at least don't eat meat, heh.

*Another was a woman whose main point was that commercialism is harmful to children and to parents' attempts to raise children the way they think is right. Coming from a household where we all sit around during shows either groaning and muting all the commercials, or actively making fun of them and picking them apart, I have an instinct to think "eh, that's overreacting, it's not such a huge influence," but of course that instinct is probably wrong, and in general I have no problem agreeing that commercialism is annoying and immoral and harmful.

*Third was the woman mentioned in the first paragraph, whose main point (and such an incredibly important one!!) is that children should play more! Creative play, running around, building in the woods, playing make-believe in any way, just exploring the world in a free and creative way, without the idea of a goal or task to be accomplished, is so important to early development, and more and more devalued in the educational system. I do have one caveat in wholeheartedly agreeing with her stance, however: I believe that adults sometimes overlook real creative, interactive, developmentally healthy uses of, say, television and computers. Now I'm not advocating that children sit in front of a screen all day. There are obvious physical health problems with that, and it's also true that chances are that if you spend all day at a TV, not all of that time is healthy, engaged, interactive TV-watching, the kind where you're actively contemplating and evaluating what you see, finding meaning in the humor, connecting with other people over the stories, et cetera. But that kind of TV watching exists! As do healthy and even wonderful and enriching uses of the computer. Yes, there are dangers, horrible dangers. There are internet predators. There are games that are mind-numbing and really don't involve much brain activity or any social interaction. But taking the stance "TV and computers are evil!" is a simplistic approach, and unrealistic, I think, at this point, if you want a child to be able to actively engage in the social world they're growing up in. Instead of targeting specifically the entities of "TV" and "computer", a more nuanced approach, I think, is to focus more actively on the child and the child's development, on helping children become intelligent critical thinkers, guiding them to be responsible, trustworthy people, and then TV and computers will be just two more things in a huge list of factors in a person's life that can be used in both healthy and unhealthy ways, and the child will be well equipped to choose the healthy ways. Now, for very young children, obviously the adults should be active in encouraging activities other than sitting and watching whatever's on TV, or shutting yourself in your room to play computer games all night alone...and I'm not denying that there are real problems caused by these media. It just seems to me, as someone who's life has been influenced and helped very much positively from both TV and computers, that these technologies are a reality and are going to be a reality in children's lives, and childhood theorists needs to develop ideas about how they can be utilized to be healthy tools in development, rather than just sticking with the mantra that kids shouldn't spend time watching TV or staring at a computer screen. Of course, no one on this panel was specifically advocating that. It's just something I always feel weary of whenever this general topic comes up. But in general, I think her point is so important: children need to play!

*Finally, the last guy was some lawyer or law professor or something, whose main thing was talking about how evil big corporations are because they're pretty much designed to not even be able to take any interests into account other than the interest of the stockholders to make money. Hence they are pathological and inherently don't have the well-being of the people as a goal and they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. Here here, I'm all for it, down with corporations! *laughs*

Okay I've babbled long enough. I met Raffi! How amazing is that? He is wonderful, he really is. I'm so glad he and all the other people at this conference are in the world. Maybe the world really can be good.

Here is Raffi's Covenant for Honoring Children:

We find these joys to be self evident:That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving "village." And to pursue a life of purpose.

We affirm our duty to nourish and nurture the young, to honour their caring ideals as the heart of being human. To recognize the early years as the foundation of life, and to cherish the contribution of young children to human evolution.

We commit ourselves to peaceful ways and vow to keep from harm or neglect these, our most vulnerable citizens. As guardians of their prosperity we honour the bountiful Earth whose diversity sustains us. Thus we pledge our love for generations to come.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Dynamics

I should be unpacking right now. Or sleeping. Or doing the exercises we were assigned. Yeah...there's lots I should be doing. *shifty eyes* Oh well. This is more entertaining and relaxing, heh. Plus it gives that satisfying feeling of procrastination.

It's interesting, everyone said that when you go to college, particularly a place full to the brim of brilliant, driven overachievers, you stop feeling smart. Now, I really hope this doesn't sound like arrogance or bragging or anything, because that's completely not how I mean it...but even after two years at college, I've never had a problem still feeling smart--well, academically smart, that is. Not that I see myself as some genius or that I hold myself above people with lower grades--I'd hate myself if I ever felt like that lol--but I've always had an internal sense that whatever classwork we're doing, I'm up to the task, that if I put my mind to it I won't fall behind or disappoint myself or other people. And I've had that feeling all my life, and it's a nice feeling. (Certainly I have inferiority complexes about other things, like how much community service/activism stuff I do (or don't do), or whether I'll be a good teacher, or whether my ideas are interesting, or whether I'm fun to be with, et cetera et cetera...but straightforward academics has always been the one thing I really don't feel that way about.) But right now, for pretty much the first time I can remember, I have this nervous fear inside me that finally I've come to a place where I just don't have it in me to do what's asked or expected. I mean, for the past two days we've been listening to lectures, and I've been able to follow and understand about 95% of what they've been saying, which is pretty good I suppose, but I've still never been in a position before where what's expected isn't for me to do math that's already been nicely worked out for me, but rather for me to innovatively create and explore new math, and figure things out without anyone who can tell me whether what I'm doing makes any sense at all, because no one knows. And I just don't know if I can do that, and I'm so scared that everyone around me will just zoom ahead of me, making all these great discoveries and progress, proving new theorems, programming computer algorithms on programs I've never even heard of, and I'll just be left behind trying to get them to explain it all to me once they figure it out. And if they explain it, sure I'll be able to understand it. But that's not the goal here. And I'm just scared that everyone has learned more math than me and knows more about computers and the REU people will be thinking at the end of the summer, "Why did we invite that Rebecca girl here? She's nice and all, but she really didn't contribute anything important to the research. Oh well."

Of course it's ironic, since I can rant for hours about how math is supposed to be an innovative and creative field, filled with opportunities for discovery and exploration, and is not just about remembering what a teacher tells you and answering test questions about it. And yet, I suppose what I've really been good at all these years is doing exactly that. I just really don't know if, when thrown into the world of real, true, innovative, creative, exporative mathematics, I'll really be that good at it after all. It's a weird feeling to suddenly have about the one thing that all my life I've never had this sort of inferiority complex with. Maybe it's a good and healthy thing. And I suppose I'll find out over the next few weeks whether my worries are justified...

On another note, the dynamics of people never fail to fascinate me. I remember feeling the same way during admitted students week and during orientation; there's some specific energy that runs through a group of people all getting to know each other at the same time. I say "energy" because I'm not really sure what to call it--this specific mindset, dynamic, way of interacting, social code, whatever it is. Of course, I'm sure it feels different for different people. There are always a lot of little jokes, banter, laughing, but it's so drastically different from the joking around of a group of close friends; the subtext is so limited, restricted to only things in the immediate environment or things in the mainstream culture...so while hanging out with a group of seven people I don't know can be quite fun, and a lot of the chatter and banter is funny and amusing, somehow it takes a certain amount of mental energy for me to stay on this elevated level above a personal context...I mean like, being in an environment where no one knows me, however much fun we're having, after a while I just can't do it anymore and I need to fall comfortably into a setting where there's a deeper context for the interactions, jokes, et cetera, where they're based on personal things, where I'm interacting within a context of who I am and not expected to be constantly defining who I am more and more with each new thing I say.

Sometimes I wonder whether it would have taken me much longer to feel comfortable around some of the people on my hall last year if Andrew hadn't gone to California for a week without telling me. Not that we wouldn't have become friends...but since during freshman orientation, I was so worried, so distraught and preoccupied, and desperate to talk to anyone who was around about it, I ended up plunging right into much more personal and important interactions than I would have otherwise. Instead of hovering for several weeks around the environment-and-common-culture-based interactions, within the first week I was explaining details of the most intense (and, let's face it, kinda sketchy-sounding...) aspects of my personal life to some people, and leaning on them for support during a time I was very worried. I really think that made a pretty huge difference, at least for how the first few weeks or months felt.

I really wish, in a way, that people were more inclined to do that--spill out everything that's truly most important to them to people they're just getting to know. Of course, I understand the impulses against doing that...but wouldn't it be kind of nice? If in the first or second conversation you had with someone, you could be talking about the most important relationships in your life, what you're most worried about, what you're most passionately interested in and why, and so on, instead of having most of the conversation consist of little anecdotes carefully chosen to be lightly amusing and easily relatable-to by the generic college student (or whatever the specific peer group is)? A part of me feels like I want to get to know these people, really know them, who they are, how they think, how they feel, what makes them cry, what do they love most, etc., but since topics like that are taboo until you're already pretty close to someone, it's hard and frustrating. But obviously, I also understand at least in part why we don't do that; there's some sort of instinct to keep all of that guarded and reserved only for the people we somehow deem most fitting and worthy of being trusted with it.

Counting people in my life, off the top of my head, I can think of at least eight people that I feel completely secure being myself around. That makes me feel like one of the luckiest people in the world. Even if I do end up sucking at math research, heh.

Time for sleep!

Friday, June 02, 2006

Memory

My personal feelings on the afterlife are summed up pretty well by John McCutcheon, in the same song I quoted earlier:

I don't look for reward ever after,
For I hold this life much too dear,
And from what I can tell, both heaven and hell
We create in abundance right here...

At the moment our lives become memory,
And all of our dreaming is done,
We shed what it is makes us different,
And we don what it is makes us one.

What is memory but time rendered timeless,
Some small proof we each live anew?
And I refuse to surrender that small part of me
That is you...


We took Patti for a walk today, for the first time in pretty much forever, and it was so lovely; I think she had a lot of fun. I really wish I knew how she felt about Polar vanishing like this...

On another note, I just lost two duels to my brother. How sad.

Okay, enough of this for now...more later if I get bored, heh. Farewell!