things to accomplish

i am back from a mild holiday hiatus (couldn't think of anything to write) with a very short list of things that i want to accomplish before my removal from this world -- and i don't mean all the super serious goals that i already have in place (i.e. marriage, children, retirement, aforementioned removal from this world). these are not long term goals per se, merely long and arduous enterprises.

1. Learn Tai Chi -- i've already started this one (it's always good to start early) thanks to the internet. there are a few websites out there with instructions on basic warm-ups and simple forms. once i get that i will hopefully have developed better living habits and a solid foundation to build on after i retire and join the senior Tai Chi group at the local park. the ulterior motive is, naturally, to master waterbending.
2. Switch to Ubuntu -- or whatever Linux distribution suits my needs, because i know that Mac OS X will be too expensive and Vista will be too crappy. what is holding me back at the moment is my limited hard drive space (so maybe i'll get a bigger one -- Seagate for sure) and the level of nerdery required to use Linux to its full potential, nevermind the 4-5 hours i will spend tweaking the GUI, on top of the hours spent digging up the necessary codecs, drivers, applications and learning the unix codes. as my astronomy prof (a hard-nosed Linux veteran) would often say, "RTFM."
3. Play Ice Hockey -- after graduation (so soon!) i plan on gathering up the old crew (HC Mimico Supra Redux) and signing up for a casual hockey league. acquiring equipment will be a bit costly, unless i get used equipment (pre-broken-in and already full of someone else's sweat -- huzzah!). but i will be saving money with Linux! it's all coming together.
   

'tis the season

ever wonder where all those september babies come from? 

victorian prose and poetry

as i write this i am awaiting my last exam of this calendar year, for the course Victorian Prose and Poetry. i had a lot of difficulty with this course for the following reasons:

1. teaching style -- nothing against the professor, but the format in which the class was held was not particularly conducive to my learning or understanding. i should have probably done more of the readings before class, rather than now, before the exam. it was just a bad circumstance. the class was held at 3-4:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. as well all know, that is the exact hour my brain turns comatose. it was preceded by two other courses, one of which was very similar to this one on all counts except that it was held at 9 am. coupled with all my essays due in a brief period of time, i skipped this class like a little schoolgirl with a Hello Kitty lunchbox.
   
2. course type -- it was a survey course, thus requiring the reading of many, many, many examples of Victorian writing from many, many, many different Victorian writers and thinkers. fluctuating styles and copious reading per lesson is not something i am suited to. this being the second survey course of the day made it very difficult to concentrate or care.
3. topics -- many of the topics that the writers railed upon (and i do mean rail; Victorians are quite good at it) border on irrelevant in my mind. anxieties about feminism and industrialization i have already come to my own terms with. though they are interesting, it just felt like someone was arguing my own arguments back to me.
4. jealousy -- because there was a girl that i liked who was always making o- i'm kidding. some of the writers were so accomplished and learned that i could not help but feel mildly inferior.

once this class is done, i might actually just read the text (an anthology) for fun.

innocuous

once in awhile my parents will ask me a random question about a girl. i'll be washing dishes when my dad asks something like, "how old is [la-la-la]?" or "what program is [la-la-la] in?" i think they are trying to hint, in a roundabout fashion, at something.

back in high school, i wrote an essay on prearranged marriages (funny how in television/movie/book prearranged marriages, the guy is usually really keen on this and it's the bride-to-be that runs for the hills with the man she truly loves/higher paid actor) and my conclusion was along the lines of "i would be in favour of a prearranged marriage if my parents picked the person that i would have picked." how clever was i back then, eh? i referenced Apu's and Simba and Nala's prearranged marriages and i was advised to stick to the text.

it is in moments like the i'm-pretending-to-not-be-interested questions that i long to become a parent myself. not because i will have opportunity to meddle in someone's life, but because i can then exercise the art of innocuous attention. this is a character trait that i am consciously trying to develop. it is attending and loving someone without him or her really being aware of it. most children do not realize how much their parents do for them, or have done for them, until much later in life when they become parents themselves. where worldly acts of kindness happen because of the possibility of gratitude, i consider a sign of gratitude as a failure for the innocuous attender in subtlety. sure, a word of thanks is nice, but it is so much better knowing that the affected is oblivious.

i went for a walk with a girl once, just around the school, because i wanted to tell her that i liked her but was stalling to formulate thoughts. a truck was heading towards us along the lane to our right while we were on the sidewalk and i saw that we would 'intersect' right at a puddle. as casually as i could, i slipped to her other side in between her and the truck so that i absorbed the ankle-high splash. in hindsight, i probably could have just slowed down and the splash would have fallen ahead of us, but that's not quite as cool.

my parents are very good being innocuously attentive (or i am woefully dense). even though i haven't said anything about it, they seem to be pointing me in a direction that i already intend to go. i don't think they are spying on me. they just know me. of course, they could just be very good at pointing out the glaringly obvious. my mom always tells me to get a drink when i've already pulled out a cup and started pouring.

Editing Power

i made my first 'movie' yesterday. it was annoying because i don't have any movie making software, other than Windows Movie Maker. it is an adequate program, but it doesn't work on my computer. all the dynamic link libraries cannot be detected. so i had to use another computer that was not internet capable; i used my computer to download the pictures and music and usb-drove it over to the video-making one. you'll see it on sunday. it's not even a video, more of a fancy slideshow (7.8 MB).

[EDIT]
video is now uploaded (click slideshow). couldn't get it onto youtube (i only tried once), probably because it is wmv.
[/EDIT]

anyway, it got me thinking about audio/video editing and how the media can so easily twist what you say or do and spin it a certain way, all because of context and framework.

below are two movie trailers. they're not the real trailers.

Shining

i've never seen this movie, but i know the general story, courtesy of the Simpsons.

Mary Poppins

this video shows the opposite effect. i have also never seen this movie, but i know the general story, also courtesy of the Simpsons.

reading list from july to december 06

Completed Books

1. J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
2. J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
3. J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
4. Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake
5. Margaret Atwood - Wilderness Tips (Short Story Collection: 10)
   
6. Alice Munro - Dance of the Happy Shades (Short Story Collection: 15)
   
7. Alice Munro - Runaway (Short Story Collection: 8)
   
8. Timothy Findley - The Wars
9. Timothy Findley - Not Wanted on the Voyage
10. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
11. Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
12. Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island
13. Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden
14. Roald Dahl - The Witches
15. James Fenimore Cooper - The Last of the Mohicans
16. Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
17. John and Stasi Eldredge - Captivating
18. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
19. Orson Scott Card - Speaker for the Dead
    
20. Orson Scott Card - Xenocide
21. Orson Scott Card - Children of the Mind
22. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Shadow
23. Orson Scott Card - Shadow of the Hegemon
24. Orson Scott Card - Shadow Puppets
25. Orson Scott Card - Shadow of the Giant
26. Christopher Paolini - Eragon
    
27. Christopher Paolini - Eldest

Completed Short Stories

1. Edgar Allen Poe - The Raven
2. Edgar Allen Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart
3. Anton Chekhov - The Lady with the Pet Dog
4. Henry James - The Real Thing
5. Evelyn Waugh - The Man Who Liked Dickens
6. Herman Melville - Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
7. William Faulkner - Barn Burning
8. William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily
9. Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper
10. Katherine Mansfield - The Garden Party
11. Katherine Mansfield - Miss Brill
12. James Joyce - Araby
13. James Joyce - The Dead
14. Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens
15. Chinua Achebe - Dead Men's Path
16. Leslie Marmon Silko - The Man to Send the Rain Clouds
17. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
18. Rohinton Mistry - Squatter
19. Mavis Gallant - Voices Lost in Snow
20. Alice Munro - How I Met My Husband
21. Margaret Atwood - Happy Endings
22. Lori Moore - How to be Another Woman
23. Phillip K. Dick - We Can Remember it for You Wholesale 
    

Porcelain Philosophy 3: Hermaneutics

it has been quite some time since my last porcelain philosophy post. that is not to say that my cheeks have not seen their fair time of the cold seat, but rather my mind has not been philosophizing lately due to preoccupations. in any case, the quest for self-identity is still under way.

heads up: narratology in action.

i came across two very vague terms in the course of my studies: the Hermeneutics of Emanation and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. they're a mouthful, aren't they? hermeneutics, for the uninitiated, is the science of interpretation, pertaining most commonly to Scriptural study.
Hermeneutics of Emanation refers to the use of narratives as interpretation through emanation. that is to say that everything in life has meaning; any narrative that fits it does so because of its inherent meaning. life is a logical force; literature is its interpreter.
Hermeneutics of Suspicion is, as i'm sure you suspected, the opposite. life in itself is meaningless; it is just cause and effect, repeated ad infinitum. sentients (i.e. us) give order and logic to this haphazardous life by imposing a narrative upon the events: imbued meaning. life is random; literature is used to put it into an order that makes sense to us.

i started this search for my narrative prior to learning of these two schools of thought. the Christian in me leans towards Hermeneutics of Emanation. all around me i can see the cycle of Christ: birth, glory, trial, death and resurrection. i see it in the seasons, i see it in comedies and i see it everyday in the way people wake up, do their thing, go to sleep, and do it all over again. the sun will (appear to) rise and then it will (appear to) fall. this pattern is hardcoded into our being. but what have i just done? i have imposed a narrative upon what i've observed in life, like in Hermeneutics of Suspicion. and around we go.

final assignment of the year 2006

for my short story class, i was asked to re-write the story of the Three Little Pigs with a particular genre in mind. i started out wanting to write a Gothic short story where three sisters were the 'pigs' and the family butler was the 'wolf' who was in love with sister #3, hiding in the house with them from some rumoured predator (also the butler). it would have been stalkeriffically creepy, but it was too hard to write in 2 hours (because i procrastinated). so i was struck by a new idea as the Office was running through my mind: a documentary.

here it is, in all its unedited glory because i don't edit.

House Pigs: Habits and Habitations

The common house pig (sus domesticus), unlike its wild and hedonistic brethren prefer to settle in rural areas, rather than tramp around forests foraging for food. As omnivorous scavengers, their diet varies from location to location, highly dependent upon the humans that choose to feed them. Humans, a lazy but resourceful breed, follow house pigs around, waiting for them to build lodgings before co-opting them for their own purposes. House pigs are recompensed with food and mud. House pigs are incapable of making their own mud for wallowing. As they do not roam for watering holes, they rely on humans to provide the necessary water for mud. The relationship between house pig and human is considered to be symbiotic. After many years of co-habitation, house pigs and humans can become indistinguishable in feature and habit.

Juvenile house pigs embark on a journey in their fourth year to find a new home to live, building their own when one cannot be found. Building materials vary, also dependent on the materials they can forage from human refuse. The most common are made of straw and thatch, or sticks leaned against trees and rocks. They are not the most impressive of homes, no more than hovels in the ground. There have been isolated instances of houses built of sturdier materials, like the hull of an abandoned carriage or a pile of bricks. These houses can be ornate enough for humans to live in them outright. These houses also allow for the house pigs to build hearths for warming their homes in the winter.

The house of the house pig is not only meant for protection from the elements but also from the house pig’s natural predators. As large and slow-moving beasts, house pigs fall prey to any carnivore larger than 1 m in height. Crafty hunters will trick house pigs out of the safety of their homes by baiting the entrances with giblets or turnips. The most prominent house pig predator is the windy wolf (Canis lupus ventosus), a very rare breed of wolves with expanded lung capacities and the ability to exhale with gale-force winds – 8 on the Beaufort scale (63-74 km/hr), enough to cause light structural damage. Lazy pigs fall easy prey to this elusive predator. Their homes – far from sturdy – are blown away with ease by the windy wolf. Of course, Newton’s third law forces the wolf back several kilometers from the recoil of its own breath, giving the house pig time to escape if it is not grievously injured.

In 1435 there was a recorded instance of a stubborn windy wolf making siege on a house pig holed up in a brick dome. Each attempt to blow down the house sent the wolf back three kilometers, allowing the crafty house pig to forage and relieve itself at half hour intervals. Observers at the time theorized that the house pig had actually stolen a kite from the windy wolf, for they saw a red one flying from the smoke vent of the brick dome, taking advantage of another futile attempt. They noted that the wolf seemed particularly irate after that. When it finally returned from the recoil trip, it clambered up the dome and into the smoke vent. The wolf was not seen again. The house pig was arrested by environmental officials upon hearing the reports of the observers for the murder of an endangered species. He was later released and absolved when the judge ruled that the pig was provoked.

sleep is for the responsible

LifeDev has posted a link to the National Sleep Research Project on 40 amazing facts about sleep.

excerpted from said facts:

It's impossible to tell if someone is really awake without close medical supervision. People can take cat naps with their eyes open without even being aware of it.

The continuous brain recordings that led to the discovery of REM (rapid eye-movement) sleep were not done until 1953, partly because the scientists involved were concerned about wasting paper.

Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain's sleep-wake clock.

British Ministry of Defence researchers have been able to reset soldiers' body clocks so they can go without sleep for up to 36 hrs. Tiny optical fibres embedded in special spectacles project a ring of bright white light (with a spectrum identical to a sunrise) around the edge of soldiers' retinas, fooling them into thinking they have just woken up. The system was first used on US pilots during the bombing of Kosovo.

one actually confirmed a theory i had about sleepiness. i found that i acted drunk when very very tired, even though i've never been drunk, or even tasted alcohol before:

Seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%.

during a late-night poker game at winter retreat 06, i found that my inhibitions mysteriously disappeared at around 1:20 am, resulting in a) the ability to bluff opponents by shooting my mouth off; b) sitting outside for 20 minutes eating a block of ice because i got eliminated and that was the challenge.