(McGill's main campus, a few thousand kilometers from where I am now)
17.4.11
Talkin' bout my generation
Sometimes just for a second with no fully formed logical explanation it seems to me that we're doing just fine.
(McGill's main campus, a few thousand kilometers from where I am now)
(McGill's main campus, a few thousand kilometers from where I am now)
10.4.11
Almost paradoxical for me, but an excellent reminder
It's peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cellphones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games. It robs them of their self-identity. It's a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that's got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.
-Bob Dylan
-Bob Dylan
3.4.11
Food (and instructions) for Final Exams
Ingredients:
-One (1) package of rice noodles
-One (1) bottle of peanut sauce on sale at PA
-One (1) package of spinach
Boil rice noodles. Douse in peanut sauce. Toss with spinach to assuage feelings of guilt brought on by poor nutrition. Put in tupperware.
Think about the behaviour of the heat equation (with solutions bounded at infinity) at the outside boundary of a threedimensional spherical domain.
Despair.
Open tupperware.
Eat noodles.
Do pushups.
Feel better.
-One (1) package of rice noodles
-One (1) bottle of peanut sauce on sale at PA
-One (1) package of spinach
Boil rice noodles. Douse in peanut sauce. Toss with spinach to assuage feelings of guilt brought on by poor nutrition. Put in tupperware.
Think about the behaviour of the heat equation (with solutions bounded at infinity) at the outside boundary of a threedimensional spherical domain.
Despair.
Open tupperware.
Eat noodles.
Do pushups.
Feel better.
14.3.11
Not even to borrow, just to marvel at:
since feeling is first
e.e. cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
e.e. cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
3.3.11
A missed connection
Female, Blonde. I actually can't see you right now but I bet you're reading a book on welding, eating french toast or listening to van morrison.... I need to see you more
I found this during a brief internet trawl as a break from studying. I wouldn't mind meeting (or being) this girl...
I found this during a brief internet trawl as a break from studying. I wouldn't mind meeting (or being) this girl...
24.2.11
Songs about love and bacon and Nova Scotia
Pretty solid
Saw this man last night under a ship's mast in the biting chill of the maritime winds.
Saw this man last night under a ship's mast in the biting chill of the maritime winds.
22.2.11
I wrote this while on the phone with a girl who wasn't interesting enough to listen to.
I don't remember the poem that followed, but I remember this, and your smirk and your swagger.
18.2.11
A wind in the door
Matted hair and little boys' parkas handed down, giant climbing packs on the metro, the winds of Halifax in my eyes, train horns sounding in the distances of my mind. The sidewalk salt and balmy drizzle of Montreal feel Atlantic.
I board The Ocean tonight.
I board The Ocean tonight.
17.2.11
No glove SO MUCH LOVE
Montreal does this thing where for four months of the year your days are slush and darkness. The monotony seeps in and the state becomes immutable. You no longer mind, you adapt and deal. Winter biking, impervious to the biting cold, skiing on the mountain to remember what the world outside the window looks like, drinking mugs of spiked everything and wearing grandfather's sweaters, you let grayhaze depression say hello but fight to not quite let it settle in. You get goodnatured validation looking at all the wellheeled Tranochildren who feel the need to wear $700 polar expedition parkas and $150 galoshes in the city while your outdated kamiks and softshell hold their structural integrity but turn greyer and filthier as the season wears on. You get slippers for the math building so you never have to go outside. You think about replacing your bike chain for an entire month.
Then one day the thermometer peaks just above zero and you notice it's four pm and still not dark and for the first time in months you take off your gloves and bike barehanded, the pleasure of the contoured handlebars under your softening callouses hard to explain. So you buy sausages at the butchershop and barrel down the streets off the Main with groceries on your back and your head full of the melodies and noise of the Talking Heads, grit from the salty snowmelt in your hair and glasses and teeth, hearing the ices finally crack.
Then one day the thermometer peaks just above zero and you notice it's four pm and still not dark and for the first time in months you take off your gloves and bike barehanded, the pleasure of the contoured handlebars under your softening callouses hard to explain. So you buy sausages at the butchershop and barrel down the streets off the Main with groceries on your back and your head full of the melodies and noise of the Talking Heads, grit from the salty snowmelt in your hair and glasses and teeth, hearing the ices finally crack.
New Lovers
In a sunlit room nestled on the couch putting off tedious calculation, watching them.
The slightly sweaty softfeatured guy with the paunch and stained t-shirt making small talk with the businessdressed shorthaired professional girl, eyes in adoration. Their hands touch more than casually, voices animated, the pleasure of their interaction palpable. And I sit here with a refreshing feeling of presentness, disconnected from their world but still a part of it, and I play this song and drink fifty cent meteorological coffee, my eyes smiling of their own accord, my thoughts at rare peace of their own accord.
The slightly sweaty softfeatured guy with the paunch and stained t-shirt making small talk with the businessdressed shorthaired professional girl, eyes in adoration. Their hands touch more than casually, voices animated, the pleasure of their interaction palpable. And I sit here with a refreshing feeling of presentness, disconnected from their world but still a part of it, and I play this song and drink fifty cent meteorological coffee, my eyes smiling of their own accord, my thoughts at rare peace of their own accord.
19.12.10
The strangest sensation
I was sitting in my favourite Mile End café pretending to study for my final tomorrow (to keep up appearances), cuddling with the local cat, and listening to some musicians set up for a set. As often with foreign languages I caught mostly only the conversational fluff, the fillers that frame communication - we need to, we have to, where is, I'm glad that... A pleasant lilting melodic background until I realized something. The musicians weren't speaking the usual background Québecois French. They were speaking Spanish. Because I have a familiarity with but not a fluency in both languages, the framework seemed natural even when I couldn't perfectly understand it. My preoccupied mind just harmonized with the flow of the language, got into its rhythm, prepared to maximize understanding, without even bothering to register what it was trying to understand.
Odd.
Odd.
14.12.10
Viral
Julian Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, founded and controls Wikileaks. Assange has white hair, grew up on a place called Magnetic Island, never attended school regularly, spent ages 11 to 16 in hiding from his mother's abusive cult-member ex-boyfriend, and adopted the online moniker "Mendax" as a teen when he began hacking into servers at the Department of Defense, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other sensitive targets. He was arrested by the Australian National Police in 1991 and charged with 31 counts related to his hacking; he pleaded guilty to 24 of them and avoided jail time. Prior to founding Wikileaks, he spent time as a programmer, blogger, security consultant, and physics student at the University of Queensland. He is essentially homeless, spending the vast majority of his time couch-surfing around the U.S., Iceland, and Europe. In his OKCupid profile, he described himself circa 2006 as engaged in changing the world through "passion, inspiration, and trickery," and his CouchSurfing.com profile promises that he will regale hosts with tales of "attempted assassinations in Africa, telephone taps in Australia...election rigging, the Russian mafia...and politicians' wives." He has a 20-year-old son, Daniel Assange, in Melbourne.
-Gawker's crib notes on Julian Assange
Julian Assange sounds like the sort of badass nerd-cum-hero every pasty high school computer geek wants to be when they grow up. [Also allegedly an egomaniac and less than savoury character in some aspects, but what's to be believed?]
Apart from all that, this new role model for the nerds, despite a notsoslight immersion in it I've always been wary of the viral world (this is the point where the hypocrisy of this blag comes to the forefront, I know) as at once a watered down, pixelated substitution for the real world and the best marketing tool in human history. Information especially from the social aspect of the Internet is collected in mass quantities and used for the clever targeted sales pitches that then insidiously bombard us from all sides. It's inspiring to me, then, to see this network of nerds fighting back, using information and computer code as their weapon, telling the world things it needs to know. It seems almost too blackandwhite, good guys versus bad guys, and of course it's more complicated than that even if we like to think it's not. But lately I've seen the Internet as overwhelmingly a banal distraction/ purveyor of quick gratification/ marketing machine, so it's a nice reminder that people out there who understand this particular system far more than I ever will are using that information as power and having a very real impact.
One of my close friends had a poster on the wall of their dorm in freshman year. Soundbytes in pretty font are oft derided for being almost too easy, but this one rings true and perhaps sometimes a salve against the onslaught is not so inexcusable:
-Gawker's crib notes on Julian Assange
Julian Assange sounds like the sort of badass nerd-cum-hero every pasty high school computer geek wants to be when they grow up. [Also allegedly an egomaniac and less than savoury character in some aspects, but what's to be believed?]
Apart from all that, this new role model for the nerds, despite a notsoslight immersion in it I've always been wary of the viral world (this is the point where the hypocrisy of this blag comes to the forefront, I know) as at once a watered down, pixelated substitution for the real world and the best marketing tool in human history. Information especially from the social aspect of the Internet is collected in mass quantities and used for the clever targeted sales pitches that then insidiously bombard us from all sides. It's inspiring to me, then, to see this network of nerds fighting back, using information and computer code as their weapon, telling the world things it needs to know. It seems almost too blackandwhite, good guys versus bad guys, and of course it's more complicated than that even if we like to think it's not. But lately I've seen the Internet as overwhelmingly a banal distraction/ purveyor of quick gratification/ marketing machine, so it's a nice reminder that people out there who understand this particular system far more than I ever will are using that information as power and having a very real impact.
One of my close friends had a poster on the wall of their dorm in freshman year. Soundbytes in pretty font are oft derided for being almost too easy, but this one rings true and perhaps sometimes a salve against the onslaught is not so inexcusable:
13.12.10
Saudade
I just came from the company of friends. In the face of exams we talked at length about the concept of view opinion and even experience being intimately tied to language - how the means of expression you have at your disposal almost predetermine how anything presents itself to you. Your mind packages things simultaneously with their occurrence, as they come up rather than after the fact, subconsciously categorizing and organizing, choosing what information to take and which to ignore, where to go from here. Language is intimately linked to that process of mental sorting - you can only communicate your experience through the limitations of the language you employ. Orwell's newspeak simplistically illustrates the causality of this perfectly - control language and you control thought.
The fact that there is so much to know means I know nothing about anything, I feel. There are seminal works in every field that I don't even know I don't know - I learned who Hegel was a year ago (and haven't gotten past "philosopher" in the time since), I learned the very extreme Magic Schoolbus-style basics of how a neuron fires around that time, how a bottom bracket works is still a mystery to me. I am accepting of, and perhaps almost detrimentally comfortable in, this ignorance. Often I don't read the news.
Being through no merit of my own fully bilingual brings a more unsettling, profoundly divisive ignorance to light. I am culturally Czech and American. I can function in both systems and think in both cultures, and this brings something up - each language, with its accompanying modes of cultural expression, attains sentiments and ideas that are inaccessible to the other. That cannot be translated, that cannot be explained. Not small things, either - fundamental ways of looking at the world, keystone ideas.
These are, mind you, two modern western countries sharing many of the same mores and conventions. What then must it be like to be Mongolian? To speak Creole or Urdu or Icelandic or any of the thousands of tiny dying tribal languages that dot the globe. I am unaware not just of facts and ideas, then. There myriad entire frames of thought absolutely inaccessible to me. To borrow a phrase, entire doors of perception infinitely shut.
A lifelong fascination with this wall of perception, in a nutshell, is why I translate, or attempt to. A bit like an irate American tourist storming the Bastille with a toothpick, admittedly, but we stand only to gain.
I came home from that conversation (with two friends who between them speak English French Russian Spanish and Urdu, no big deal) to another friend's one-word facebook status - Saudade. She is part Iranian, part Portuguese. I looked up Saudade. It is again fundamental and untranslateable. I know what it means, now, I identify with the feeling it describes very strongly, but I will never know what it means. I will never be culturally Portuguese. I know this and accept it - I also, despite my (American) second grade teacher's proclamations to the contrary, will never be an astronaut - but it makes me wish, just for a second, that saudade triggered for me what it does for Maryam.
The fact that there is so much to know means I know nothing about anything, I feel. There are seminal works in every field that I don't even know I don't know - I learned who Hegel was a year ago (and haven't gotten past "philosopher" in the time since), I learned the very extreme Magic Schoolbus-style basics of how a neuron fires around that time, how a bottom bracket works is still a mystery to me. I am accepting of, and perhaps almost detrimentally comfortable in, this ignorance. Often I don't read the news.
Being through no merit of my own fully bilingual brings a more unsettling, profoundly divisive ignorance to light. I am culturally Czech and American. I can function in both systems and think in both cultures, and this brings something up - each language, with its accompanying modes of cultural expression, attains sentiments and ideas that are inaccessible to the other. That cannot be translated, that cannot be explained. Not small things, either - fundamental ways of looking at the world, keystone ideas.
These are, mind you, two modern western countries sharing many of the same mores and conventions. What then must it be like to be Mongolian? To speak Creole or Urdu or Icelandic or any of the thousands of tiny dying tribal languages that dot the globe. I am unaware not just of facts and ideas, then. There myriad entire frames of thought absolutely inaccessible to me. To borrow a phrase, entire doors of perception infinitely shut.
A lifelong fascination with this wall of perception, in a nutshell, is why I translate, or attempt to. A bit like an irate American tourist storming the Bastille with a toothpick, admittedly, but we stand only to gain.
I came home from that conversation (with two friends who between them speak English French Russian Spanish and Urdu, no big deal) to another friend's one-word facebook status - Saudade. She is part Iranian, part Portuguese. I looked up Saudade. It is again fundamental and untranslateable. I know what it means, now, I identify with the feeling it describes very strongly, but I will never know what it means. I will never be culturally Portuguese. I know this and accept it - I also, despite my (American) second grade teacher's proclamations to the contrary, will never be an astronaut - but it makes me wish, just for a second, that saudade triggered for me what it does for Maryam.
11.12.10
I'm trying to read your portrait, but I'm helpless like a rich man's child
How could I answer that question if you've got the nerve to ask me?
10.12.10
As mental doors finally clang shut and the balance between a levelheaded vision for the construction of something worthwhile and the youthful bloodrush to the head that is not yet in its dying throes (I hope, for it's a sweet siren song indeed) is sought with clarity that increases every day, I'm torn between expansion and self-control, whimsy and rigor.
Screaming "Kick out the jams!" is the antithesis of saying "Save a small part of the world through math and sense and sensibility.", and I want both.
And allthewhile avoiding being derivative is almost impossible. Perhaps that's not remotely undesirable, though.
Screaming "Kick out the jams!" is the antithesis of saying "Save a small part of the world through math and sense and sensibility.", and I want both.
And allthewhile avoiding being derivative is almost impossible. Perhaps that's not remotely undesirable, though.
8.12.10
There Are Those Who Love To Get Dirty
There are those who love to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,
And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.
There are those who do both,
they drink tea.
-Gary Snyder
Oh, Americana! One of my favourite wanderers suggests that I am doing just fine indeed. Alas my fixing has been less than my breaking of late. Blizzards aren't good for bikes, and theoretical math isn't good for getting dirty. Or fixing things.
Them's the rules, though:
1. Everything will be alright always.
2. No decaf anything ever.
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,
And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.
There are those who do both,
they drink tea.
-Gary Snyder
Oh, Americana! One of my favourite wanderers suggests that I am doing just fine indeed. Alas my fixing has been less than my breaking of late. Blizzards aren't good for bikes, and theoretical math isn't good for getting dirty. Or fixing things.
Them's the rules, though:
1. Everything will be alright always.
2. No decaf anything ever.
6.12.10
On a pair of socks
A year ago at a party I was party to an effusive hug which ended in a fall, a stocking ripped at the toe, and a badly twisted ankle. Yesterday in the library wandering around without shoes I noticed a subconscious twinge in my ankle, a ghost-sprain, as it were, the slightest feeling of unease, the smallest worry fighting to escape the back of my mind. I looked down and saw the hole in the toe of my sock.
A strange sensation to be sure, but my young malleable consciousness has learned the lesson. Today I am wearing sturdy wool socks and my feet and mind are calm and warm and dry.
A strange sensation to be sure, but my young malleable consciousness has learned the lesson. Today I am wearing sturdy wool socks and my feet and mind are calm and warm and dry.
1.10.10
Last Weekend Retrospective
When I was a young idealist
(as opposed to now
when I am old bitter and cynical)
(evidently)
Kick bag, dig, while we do it to you in your eardrums.
(as opposed to now
when I am old bitter and cynical)
(evidently)
Kick bag, dig, while we do it to you in your eardrums.
29.9.10
I'm nearly out of things to say
This blog is undergoing a planned demolition on Saturday, but today I learned to prove the following:
If you take any two numbers on the real number line - any two numbers at all - there will always be both a rational and an irrational number between them.
It's been a while since I found math beautiful.
If you take any two numbers on the real number line - any two numbers at all - there will always be both a rational and an irrational number between them.
It's been a while since I found math beautiful.
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