Category Archives: Musings

Salvete

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I received an interesting email from my friend Randy today (no, not RK). He’s apparently applying to JET (Japanese Exchange and Teaching program) to teach English in rural Japan for a year, and wanted second opinions on his statement of purpose. This is a program I’ve always been intruiged by (I’d love to go to Japan for a year), so I really hope he gets the position.

Reading over his statement, it really got me thinking about what my own purpose is. It is often easy to lose track of your goals amidst the chaos and little deaths of day to day living, and sometimes you just need a swift spiritual kick to the head to get back into the swing of things.
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Head of Radios

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So, I still don’t think I’ll get to post tomorrow, but hey, I’ve got some time right now, I’ll post a second today, and balance it that way. (I could also cheat and date my post for tomorrow, but I don’t like doing that.)

I seem to be talking about music lately, and I really see no reason to stop any time soon. I’ve already at least briefly touched upon King Crimson, one of my favorite bands; what better time than now to touch upon one of my other favorite groups, Radiohead?

I’ve reached the Radiohead portion of my music collection, and am slowly progressing through it: I’m already through Amnesiac (much to my chagrin, I don’t recall listening to it… it was while I was at residency, and probably had it on in the background while talking to someone), and have just reached the end of Hail to the Thief (they are in alphabetical order by album).
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Not November

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There is this day-long limbo period between the residency and my flight home. November 1st, today, seems like a good limbo day. It is currently 58 degrees, with estimates taking us as high as 68 today, a temperature that really does not fit November. Novembers in New England are generally grey, bitterly cold affairs, with the ground sucking the heat from your every step, a blanket of insulating snow not yet on the ground.

It is hard to dislike this change, though. On this, my last day in the area for a full six months, it is beautiful, warm, and sunny, leaving a fond memory and an enticement to come back. Not that I really need that enticement: Vermont is like another, fond family member to me, neither sibling nor parent but at the same time both. While the Seattle area is treating me well, like a doting aunt, Vermont will always be Home to me. While I may live elsewhere (and I am not ready to return to Vermont to stay), there is more to a Home than where you live.
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More Music

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Residency is at a slow-point right now, while the faculty decides who is going to work with whom (results of said discussion get posted at noon). So what better time to write a blog entry?

First: Uri has managed to post every day for the past week. Go read it. Also, both Adam and Chris have posted congratulations on me hitting 100 posts. I’m definitely grateful to have readers who seem to appreciate the effort. I’m also intruiged to see what happens in the NEXT hundred posts. I still say that this site is heuristic in nature, and as such will continue to evolve in content and form. I’m already feeling the desire to write more than just what’s happening in my life, and start incorporating more diverse writing.
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100th Post!

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This is my 100th post (on this part of my site… there are another 80 images in the visual gallery and half a dozen articles in the written gallery as well). Woo! I actually feel like I’m starting to have a real quantity of content (well, I didn’t say it was thought provoking, witty, or even interesting content).

I have about 5 gigabytes of music on my laptop. 99% of it is rips of my CDs, and the other 1% is freebies downloaded off sites like MP3.com et cetera. (Take that, RIAA! Gestapo Fuckers.) It being autumn, a time I find particularly useful as a period of careful introspection and personal assessment, I’ve been going through my music collection. I’m up to “K.” K as in King Crimson, one of my all time favorite bands. My entire King Crimson collection is on my computer, which means that this particular section is going to take quite some time to complete… not that I mind, not in the least.

The listing starts with Cirkus, a delightful collection of live performances of some of their best songs. It’s broken up into new (neon heat disease) and old (fractured), and is just freakin’ cool. For those who haven’t listened to King Crimson (you poor souls), let me give you a brief summary: King Crimson started back in 1968, and released their first album, In the Court of the Crimson King in 1969. While they have certainly grown and evolved musically since then, in many ways In the Court of the Crimson King is still one of their best works. It is certainly indicative of that era of the band (they have gone through several incarnations). After releasing several more albums, and touring extensively, becoming well known as a masterful experimental group (well, well-known to musicians, anyway), they broke up. They re-formed later, in a different configuration, and continued to create excellent music that pushed boundaries as to what people were doing with music. Their style (if you could call it just one) is uniquely their own, exhibiting a diverse range of influences and originality, combined into a kind of music that by its very nature evolves every time you listen to it.
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Residency

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I’m currently listening to the official Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack, which is a delightful panoply of stylistic excellent music, music that evokes mood and mentality in a fashion that many other modern works simply and utterly fail to do. This is not a posting about music, mind you (though I could easily make it so), but I wanted to mention it as a segue that represents a certain mode of thought. “Mood music” if you will.

School residency started yesterday. I felt a strange mixture of dread and elation at coming back, feeling unprepared but at the same time eager to pick up a new study. I’ve been getting a lot of compliments and congratulatory comments on my recent marriage and move across the country (something that surprised a good deal of people, and has proven to be a conversation starter since). My hair still has highlights from when it was dyed this past July, which has been the source of most of the compliments (“wow, your hair looks great” and such). I dig the positive attention, but what really does it for me is the relative familiarity I’ve achieved with the other students, a familiarity that largely remains unchanged after not seeing or hearing from any of them for a full six months. At this point, I am an “old hand” at the residency, someone that new students can come to if they want to know how things work.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing this coming semester, which is a change: past semesters have had me coming in with a pretty firm understanding of exactly what I was going to do. This time, I come with a concept and that’s about it. I want to study mysticism, the mystical counterparts to several of the mainstream religions, with a focus on mysticism in the Baha’i Faith, since I have more of a direct interest in that one in particular (I’m a Baha’i, something that I’ve mentioned at least three times before on this site… do a search for “baha’i” to see where). Of course, there is another component to this study: I find myself feeling tapped creatively, and would like to find a way to reenergize and get motivated on really USING my creative resources again. So the other component, if it were to be summed up (and I’m going to have to for the study proposal) is studying the relation between spirtuality and creativity.

And yes, I am in fact writing this blog entry partially to help codify what I’m thinking. I went to my first exploratory meeting today, and found myself rambling a bit, so I want to cut down on that. We’ve got a large group this time (largest its been in several semesters), so the exploratory meetings are a bit more full than usual, leaving time as a bit of a precious commodity.
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Back in Vermont

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I’m back in Vermont for the first time since the beginning of August, and likely for the last time until April. It’s interesting to be back… the elation I felt as we touched down certainly reaffirms my firm belief that regardless of where I live or for how long, Vermont will always be Home.

During the days prior to leaving, I spent time with Mickey when I could (she’s been working) and for the rest of the time, I’ve been working on getting a local mirror of this site working on my computer. This took far more effort than I’d expected (or was really necessary), as I decided that it would also be an opportune time to update my versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl on my local machine. After all said and done, I reverted Apache to what it was, MySQL got downgraded from 4 to the latest version of 3, and PHP and Perl actually managed to be updated (though not without trials and tribulations)

I’ve almost got it working, I just need to figure out why my author database isn’t working on the local machine, and how exactly I can fix that. I’m sure given a few hours to root around in the MovableType forums, I’ll find a solution. Once that’s done, I’ll be ready to really start gutting the site and making the more significant changes that I want to do. Of course, my reference books (O’Reilly’s Definitive Guides to MySQL, XHTML, CSS, and PHP, plus the PHP Cookbook) are all at home, so it may have to wait until November. We’ll see. (Well, I’ll see, since all changes will be on localhost until I have it running smoothly, at which point they’ll all get migrated to the website.)

I digress. Mickey’s father showed up the day before I left, travelling the countryside on a photo safari that I’m quite envious of. We all did some wandering, and swung by the local camera store (where Mickey thinks I should work, since I seem to be so good at evangelizing various types of equipment), and in general had a good time. Finally, Mickey dropped me off at the airport for my redeye on JetBlue to Vermont.
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Things I Miss

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I miss my family and my friends. Words cannot begin to describe how much or in what way.

I miss New England Autumn, wandering through a forest aflame with oranges and reds and yellows, on crisp, clear days.

I miss going to Squam every Columbus Day Weekend to see my extended family; to laugh and share and talk and eat good food (and laugh some more).

I miss Wednesdays, getting together with family and friends to eat lots of good chinese food at Panda House.

I miss evenings in Hanover, drinking coffee, meeting random people, having a good time with friends, writing, putting the day in order in that form of meditation that only happens in Third Spaces.
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Sanity, Work, and Me.

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I did a lot of virtual running today. Money issues have been pressing over the past few days, really made manifest by the current frustrations in collecting the funds for the upcoming semester of school. There were several emails batted back and forth trying to confirm little details and to get the process under way, a process further delayed by the fact that tuition apparently went up this semester, a notice of which I have not yet received, due to the additional time it takes from mail forwarding.

Then came the calls, contacting the bursar, confirming that yes, the tuition DID in fact rise. Then getting back to the Bank to let them know that yes, it did in fact go up (they refused to do any of the running around on this, even after receiving an official bill from the school and then being confused by the information therein). I am not happy with the bank, and I’m less happy with my aunt, who acts as trustee to the account (if you’re reading this, sorry, but it’s the truth: this sort of bullshit pisses me off).

I’ve been contemplating graduate work after getting my Bachelors. Really, the thing that has been holding me back the most is that I’m not sure if I want to have to deal with fighting for every penny out of a fund explicitly created for my education. I do not feel that the intentions of my grandmother when she created the trust are being upheld. Unfortunately, I am unsure what, if anything, I can do to correct that.
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Identity

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of identity a lot lately (with my essay due in two weeks, this isn’t too surprising). I’ve noticed that I’ve been pretty strung out the past few days, frustrated by pretty much everything. (It’s been a viscious cycle: I have to psyche myself up to progress with the convention and make contacts out here… I manage to do it and finally feel comfortable and happy with the process, email in what I’ve done… after reading the responses, I’m back to being frustrated as hell.)

I’ve been spending time on IRC (I leave it open in another window while I write and occasionally glance at it to see if anything interesting is being talked about), and have found myself getting more and more pissed off by it. I’ve kept coming back to IRC intermittently ever since I originally started being online, and invariably I end up getting frustrated and leave. Looks like this will be another one of these occasions. I just can’t seem to help but get irritated when I frequent a channel for more than a week: the mishmash of young teens (and the angst and stupidity that goes with it), college-age elitists, and a thin layer of talented, intelligent, caring people that are generally silent for about 95% of their time online… it’s just frustrating.
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