What A Wave Must Be

Got back from visiting Jon and Lyla at Brown the other day.  All in all, it was a good time, and I had a lot of fun.

I got in on Friday sometime around 7:30.  My flight was delayed for a while due to all the rain Phoenix was having for some reason.  We made it there quite a few hours behind schedule, which was rather annoying to me.  I picked up my bags at the carousel and then went to get a taxi to Jon’s dorm.

For the record, I hate taxis.

Jon and Lyla’s dorm is pretty nice and makes me want to live in something similar next year.  They have a five-room suite with attached bathroom and single-occupancy rooms.  The rooms are spacious and cozy.  I like the idea of living with people you know and at the same time being able to live in a single.

I quickly showed everyone Bang!, which Donna very kindly let me borrow for the weekend.  Jon and Lyla loved it right away and the rest of the suite and their other assorted friends seemed to like it too.  This could potentially mean that I wouldn’t need to get a copy of Bang! for myself as Jon expressd interest in getting one himself.  We pretty much played Bang! the whole time whenever we were playing a game, and didn’t get to playing Betrayal.  I was somewhat disappointed at that, as I brought it along for nothing, but oh well.

On Saturday Jon and Lyla showed Adam and I Brown’s taiko drums and showed us how to play their particular taiko form.  I will say that their form is quite a bit more tiring and offers much less room for improvisation compared to the form Kyodo and the general West Coast uses.  Their stance is very low, owing to the fact that their drums are positioned horizontally about a foot or so above the floor, which means that your weight has to be very well distributed and your legs need to be very strong and holding firm.  They also have a lot of sliding motions while hitting which I thought were sort of interesting, but only made the whole thing more tiring.

Overall, I think I like the West Coast style more.  It allows for more improvisation and freedom of movement, especially hand and arm movements and fancy sticking, and is less tiring as the stance is not so low and only more of a lunge forward.

Arik showed us the Brown Production Workshop’s performance spaces.  From what I gathered, PW is a student group but gets a lot of priveleges from the school.  They operate two black boxes and have pretty extensive light grids through the larger of the two.  96 dimmers and a pretty high-end ETC board, if I remember correctly.  If only Hooligan had such a good repoire with the TFT department.

On Sunday, we went into Boston to walk around and visit some of Lyla’s friends.  We took the train and then the T into Harvard Square where we met this old French couple that has apparently been friends with Lyla’s family for some time.  We had lunch with them at Au Bon Pain and then met up with one of Lyla’s high school friends who was going to Tufts.  He showed us around the Harvard Natural History Museum and then around some shops in the area.

The HNHM was alright.  I’m not really one for natural history.  I’m more of an art museum person.  Jon liked it a lot though, owing to the extensive exhibits on rocks and invertebrates.  The whole time I was trying to think of a possible situation where I could show off knowledge of linguistics in a museum setting.  I couldn’t really come up with anything beyond knowledge of foreign languages as linguistics is such a metaknowledge field.  You don’t really study anything that’s very substantial (at least the subfields that I’m interested in don’t study anything substantial) so you can’t really show any knowledge to anyone without sounding sort of lame.

“You see, these crystals are a nice green color because of the copper oxides embedded in them…”

“You see, the X-bar structure of this phrase shows the complexities of head-movement…”

Yea, I like the first one a lot more too.

I guess phonetics is as close to a physical phenomenon as linguistics gets.  But even then, when you find a museum of phonetics?  Or even an exhibit relating to phonetics?  I think this is one reason why linguists are so unreknowned.  We deserve more recognition.

One thing that I don’t like at all is when people confuse linguistics for the study of foreign languages.  Yes, to study linguistics you must study foreign languages.  But linguistics is not concerned with vocabulary or gramar of particular languages.  Linguistics is concerned with the structure of a language and the rules that allow us to communicate using language.  I guess language is something that comes so naturally to everyone that no one thinks it’s anything very complex.  Language is simple on the surface but that’s just because you know how to use it intuitively.  I guess if we could produce complex chemical reactions with as much ease as we speak, chemistry would be a lot less interesting.

After we were done at the HNHM, we went shopping around a Japanese imports store and a comics store.

The imports store was pretty cool, although it focused more on trinkets and posters than on CDs, manga, and DVDs than I would have liked.  I still found some nice stuff.  I even managed to win a free box of Pocky.  The cashier was telling us that if we could guess the name of the anime the song playing came from, he would give us a free box of Pocky.  Everyone tried, and no one managed to get any of them, mostly because they were all from older generations of anime and we were all a little too young to have actually watched them.  I however did manage to identify the Ai Yori Aoshi theme song, something I am both proud and ashamed of.  To my defense, I have never actually watched the show, and only knew the song because I had the soundtrack to the show for some reason way back in middle school.  I used to like the song a lot, but stopped listening to it after I lost most of my music when we switched computers.  Anyway, because I was the only one to get mine correct, he gave me the more expensive $2.50 box of Pocky.

It was rather good Pocky, actually one of the spin-off brands.  They called it Poare, and it was basically Pocky with filling rather than dipped.  This particular box was filled with bannana cream custard, which was actually surprisingly good.

We had dinner at this weird little “Japan mall” place.  I say “Japan mall” because the mall was pretty much exclusively Japanese stores and restaurants.  Jon, Adam, and one of Jon’s freinds named Rossie (sp?) ate at a ramen place, while Lyla and her friend Dan, who was showing us around, ate at a sushi bar.  The ramen was pretty good, if a little under-seasoned.  I’m not very discerning when it comes to ramen though, so I enjoyed it.

We rode the train back to Providence and then someone had the brilliant idea to stay up the whole night.  The reason was that they wanted to go to this diner called Louis’ which opens at 5am.  The tradition is, however, that you can only go to Louis’ if you have been awake for the whole night and morning before hand.  When 5am did roll around, we walked down to the diner and had a very early breakfast.  I had bannan pancakes, Jon had pumpkin pancakes, Adam had blueberry pancakes, Lyla had a spinach pie, Alice had eggs over easy and toast, and Rossie also had pumpkin pancakes.  The food was altogether good, though I wish I had not endeavoured to finish my entire plate as I was somewhat sick afterwards.

We took a brief excursion to the Science Library so Adam and I could print out our confirmation tickets for our flights back home and then headed back to Jon’s dorm.  We somehow came across the idea that it would be awesome fun to play mah jong so grabbed Lyla’s set and played.  After four rounds we realized we were way too tired so cleaned up and took naps instead.

That afternoon Adam and I split at taxi to get back to the airport and were soon on our flights home.

Have been putting more thought into where I want to live next year.  I really feel bad for Pat because we don’t really have any other friends that he could live with next year without being somewhat awkward.  If Adam weren’t going to Japan next year, my plan would be to room with Adam next year and let Pat and Evan room together.  I think that’d work out well enough.  However, since Adam is for all intents and purposes going to Japan, we have to consider other options.

All other options involve introducing at least one other person into the mix as three can only occupy a triple and that’s a state I have vowed to never return to.  The options are connected doubles or trying to swing into a five-person suite.  I would like to do the five-person suite as I sort of want to live in a single next year but don’t want to be entirely antisocial and isolated from the everyone else all the time.  Connected double wouldn’t be so bad, either, but I find a single more appealing.  I only wish that Terrace and Vista had more suites in them.  Summit has three suites on every floor, which is awesome, ignoring the fact that it is Summit and thus a million miles away from everything else.

The goal is to live in Terrace or Vista.  We can get suites and/or connected doubles in both.  Hopefully we can get good sign-up times so at least some of the good rooms will still be around.  I think juniors should be getting the best sign-up times as seniors aren’t guaranteed housing anymore.

Because I can’t think of another two people that I’d immdiately want to live with in a suite for next year, we’re having to get creative in order to cobble together enough people to take over one side of a suite.  I’m not really interested in living with either Rod or Brian.  Pat said he would ask his suitemates as they had expressed interest in living together next year, but I’m also not really sure if I’d be interested in living with that many freshmen.  Also, it would get awkward if I discover I don’t actually like them.

I’ve started wearing my glasses regularly again.  This was initially because I had stayed up the whole night before flying over to Brown and so didn’t want to have my contacts in and wore my glasses.  I had brought my contacts to Brown but didn’t end up actually using them as sleeping hours were somewhat erratic.  I’ve decided that I like wearing my glasses, and am considering wearing them more.  I still have this conceit that they make my face look less angular.

I’m starting to get annoyed at my Phonetics project.  It’s not really all that hard, it’s just that I don’t like doing the research for it.  I still need to get Joyce to help me find minimal pairs for the diphthongs.  I’m not sure that minimal pairs of good enough, but I think I’ll be fine.

In good Phonetics news, I got a 96.5 on the midterm and a 38 on the transcription test.  I am very pleased with myself.  I was really worried about transcription as I haven’t been doing so well on it and I suck doing it for English words.  I didn’t do so bad this time though, and was even above average.  I’m not really a phonetics person, so I’ll be glad when this class is done.

Not much else to say.  If I’ve been lax in my blogging of late it’s because my life has been relatively boring.

I’m so bad at being honest.  I’m almost sure it wouldn’t work out.  But I wish it could somehow.  Pragmatics keep my mouth shut.

Sometimes I fell like I must have at least a mild case of some sort of emotional disorder. My moods can vary so widely throughout a single day, it’s somewhat amazing to me. And I’m not talking just small dips, but ones that give my psychological landscape a quite varied topology.

I tend to feel really depressed late nights and mid-afternoons. That’s usually punctuated by more normal feelings mornings and around dinner and lunch. And I get so angry sometimes, usually just doing random everyday things like walking to the store to buy cookies, or riding the elevator. It’s times like these when I wish I knew how to play an instrument or something.

My brain often feels like it wants to do too much. That, or I’m not giving it enough to do. There are times when I’ll be sitting at my desk, entirely unable to do anything, sheerly because my brain is so adamant about wanting to do everything at once.

I have such trouble concentrating because of this. Unless what I’m doing is something that is truly, genuinely interesting to me, I won’t be able to focus on it for periods of time longer than five or ten minutes. While this has served me well as a gauge for what I find interesting and what I like, I still find it troubling. If you can’t manage to catch my attention with the first handful or half handful of sentences you say, I am very likely to not listen to anything else you say until we change the topic.

We’re not kids anymore. This is something that’s been hitting me harder and harder every day. We can’t obviate ourselves from the future any longer. Our futures are coming whether we’re ready for them or not.

Can something like love really last? How can two individuals, by the very definition of their existence distinct and separate, really ever be together? The idea is almost inconceivable and the odds boggle me. Were it not for significant outstanding evidence, I would write the whole affair off as entirely impossible.

I’ve always been so far away from my heart, so far away from emotion, that whenever I have to confront anything bearing any semblance to it, I almost completely shut down. I took comfort in matters of the mind, where facts were something to be relied upon, and where mistakes were something to learn from and didn’t make you hurt. Sometimes I forget what it is to feel.

I’ll see you again but I’m still unsure. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. I want to take a leap but I’m afraid of falling. I’m always missing chances. I hope it’s not the last time.

My life is my own yet it isn’t. I’m not the lead. I’m just a stand-in, just passing through. But we have to take control because nobody else will.

So I decided to look around at JavaScript libraries again and decided to check ExtJS out. My conclusion: it’s pretty much the most awesome thing ever. I thought Y!UI’s web controls were awesome, but Ext blows Y!UI out the water. It makes web application development mirror desktop development really well. You make panels that have containers into which you put controls. And the controls themselves are absolutely stunning to look at.

Finally finalized plans to go visit Brown. Jon managed to convince Adam to go too, so it’ll be an all-around good time.

I’ve been debating getting a PS3 seeing as Blu-ray won the format war. I could get Rock Band on it and all would be well. And then all of the modern systems would be represented in our room. Not sure if it’s really the best investment, though.

I really need to get a haircut.

I finally got around to looking more deeply into vim and emacs. I think I’ve decided that I like emacs more than vim, even though I see the productivity advantages vim has over emacs. emacs is less scary to me. I downloaded Aquamacs Emacs as the version of emacs being used on the terminal apparently can’t capture the Meta key properly.

I sort of want to start writing my book again. I’m going to try to revisit the plot again and try to think up what happens to everyone in between when they first meet and the end. That’s always the part that’s hazy for me.

I’m still debating buying a copy of Bang! I figure I should do it soon as I want to bring it to Brown to show everyone there.