W.R: In which it becomes obvious that I'm a math nerd

Right now I'm spending hours at my desk studying for my last exam, which is math, because I'm partly a math major. I've liked math all my life. Like pi. And pie. We played this song in ninth grade I think, and math is on my mind:


Related: It irks me when professors use π for anything other than the concept 3.14159. Yes, it's a greek letter, but there are others. Pick xi or something, I think it feels neglected. Also using the letter t as a variable, because with my handwriting it looks like a plus sign, so you get something like ∫t2 t t ttt tt 89 d/dt. Stop that shit.

I need to get out more.

The Sun sets near Flagstaff

I remember rolling evening into night, having passed the plains of Kansas with their giant windmills imposing a sort of Don Quixotic view of a land otehrwise brown and flat. Flyover country at its finest. Low buildings and the American lonely road, route 66 indeed, down to northern Arizona. I had borrowed a book from my seatmate and read it, an uninspired drama mystery ending in extortion and love and of course an oozing blood trunk. And then there was nothing to do at all. I sat crosslegged watching the road, counting mile after mile and twentyfive minutes seemed so long a time to wait. Nothing but darkness and an illuminated shrub here and there and the endlessly repeating reflective strips on the side of the road, signalling towers on the horizon blinking red in the distance. And the bus rolled on in my impatience.

I do this for myself because I am my own fatherland, and my handkerchief is my flag.

I'm taking a break from memorizing neurotransmitters and ionic/metabolistic gates (fascinating to the many neuro/med kids in my classes, a bit distant to me) to bring you some quotes from Reinhold Messner, one of my many heroes, to remind myself that within two weeks I will be in a place that no pavement can reach. It's terrifying, and exhilarating, and stressful, and worrisome, and inviting, and I don't know what else. I guess that might describe Messner's life as well:

“Today I am amazed that my father did not forbid us to make such first ascents. At that time I had a confused picture of freedom: today the name is the only thing people know about freedom. They want to be free of laws, free of everyday cares, free of hate, free of ambition. Who knows what freedom is? No one. I often think that we mountaineers get nearest to it, this paradise on earth. Or, to put it another way: the truly free climber is one who obeys no rules. He is no high flyer, keeping up with the Joneses; no slave of others or of the summit fall line, like the directtissima men. I am sorry for them all, but especially for those who do not realize at all that rules force their way between them and the mountains.”

“I do this for myself because I am my own fatherland, and my handkerchief is my flag.”

“Over time, our only chance at safety will depend on not turning the mountains into Disneyland.”

"I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits."

"Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous."

Weekend! Retrospective

Nope, no Panic at the disco here, I was too old for them by the time they came around, thankfully. But when I was a kid, I listened on tape to the adventures of a giant talking St. Bernard dog in stopmotion. The music for it is very characteristic, but I can't find any of it, so here's a short stop-motion clip of a giant St. Bernard taking a drive - a bedtime story, actually, when I was six. You can kind of hear the tune. Man, my childhood was awesome.

Reason number 5515325 to deplore hipsters -

They don't believe in the census.

I guess that's somewhat better than not believing in dinosaurs...

Don't let that horse eat that violin, cried Chagall's mother

Whimsy with a touch of surrealism, or potentially surrealism with a touch of whimsy.
It would be wonderful to see an edition of Master and Margarita with illustrations by Chagall - I wonder if that would be possible, or if it would violate all copyright laws known to man to put two such disparate individuals' work together.
I personally think his paintings fit in rather well with the flying through the night, masked balls at Satan's place, burning manuscripts, white flowers, talking cats thing. It was actually my immediate association. My second association is one of my favourite Ferlinghetti poems. Ferlinghetti, Bulgakov, and Chagall - strange bedfellows indeed!





Don't let that horse
eat that violin
cried Chagall's mother

But he
kept right on
painting

And became famous

And kept on painting
The Horse With Violin In Mouth
And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
and rode away
waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings
attached

Weekend Retrospective: The Bus Edition

For my summer job, I plant trees. Lots of them, little ones, big ones, all over the place. We own northern Ontario, yo. (Well, actually, the Queen does.) The thing about this job is that a lot of people hate it, including a crewboss that shared my ride to the block every day. (Incidentally, my ride to work every day was a blue short bus named the Vagiant, which was written in big letters on its front roof). His supreme hatred for planting trees was kind of a spectacle and increased exponentially throughout the season.
Northern Ontario weather is famously fickle, and we were at least 100km from the nearest place anyone took readings for, so when the weather forecast was seventeen celsius and it started snowing, no one was that shocked. As we huddled into our fleeces, started bitching at least a little because that was allowed, and played mental gymnastics with our resolve, he put on this song:



The rest of this post is dedicated to the insurmountable entity that is the planting bus. Old schoolbusses with 200000 km on them, driving where the average SUV fears to tread, always there, sometimes pushed, sometimes pulled, but always there.

Trouble me tomorrow, today I have no sorrow

It's a well-known fact that I have a huge affection for various good old days Americana. I also have a huge affection for bluegrass. In honour of my friend's pretty fantastic bluegrass show last night, during which they played this song:

It's Finals Season at McGill

Subtle clues:
-I made an industrial sized quantity of chicken-pineapple-cheese-pasta and am eating it this entire week.
-All my time seems spent rewatching lectures on 1.8 speed.
-Math has abandoned the concept of numbers altogether.
-The library is full of people who aren't MathPhys, who are in there all the time anyway.
-I'm wearing my father's flannel and carrying a colourcoded binder everywhere (I mean business).
-I've relented my coffee abstinence, had a cup four hours ago and am now wired to the point where I can't focus.
-All of McGill is full of couples making out. I'm not sure if this is because of a need for an output for the sexual tension due to stress, but it's causing obstructions. Today I nearly tripped over a couple vigorously making out in the middle of the doorway of Architecture Café. As Architecture Café is a fairly frequented location, I put on my grandma voice and pointed out that "This is a hallway, guys", something I don't think I've said since middle school. Crotchety crotch crotch.

Also, on an unrelated note, I'd like to take this opportunity to critique the following composition and the paradox it poses:

This song confuses me. I can't seem to avoid it, I hear strains, usually terribly trebled due to shit speakers, all over the place, even in the middle of traffic on Sherbrooke a few days ago. It seems to try to straddle the fence between respectful love- or at least appreciation-song and YOUZSOHOTDOMENONAMESNEEDED. But that's kind of a barbed wire barrier, ya know? The first lyric I heard was "I'm trynna find the words to describe this girl widout bein disrespetful" and it kinda struck me as out of place to the point of silly and wussy and difficult to take seriously. This genre of music does not do respectful and thoughtful well - if you wanna write a misoginistic song, it had better be a good misoginistic song, and leave it at that. Try:

See? That's how you write a brilliantthoughactuallykindaoffensivebutwhateverit'sJagger song. Don't water down your misogyny!
The second confusing part of this song is that it then repeats "DAMN GURL YOU'Z A SEXY BITCH" a bunch of times, and involves the phrase "neighbourhood ho". Which totally kills the I'm not being disrespectful concept without fully embracing the unapologetic, lusty cry it's clearly meant to be. Get your act together, rap industry.

You can't have your cake and eat it too,
or,
in the experience of the eskimo who burned his watercraft for warmth off the coast of Greenland:
You can't have your kayak and heat it too.

Sorry for the awful joke.

Inspiration: Afro

I'm white. I'm actually about as white as it is possible to be, being from northern Europe. One of the sad things about being white is that I will never, ever have an afro, that majestic fullblown glory of HAIR. Sure, some of my friends may rock the jewfro, which is approaching the concept, but my own physical features consist of high eastern european cheekbones and impossibly straight hair (as seen at right) - therein lies the conundrum. A girl I see around McGill's MK has the most gorgeous afro I've ever seen, and the girls I used to go to school with sometimes had epic ones that made me jealous as I sat in first period with a bun of wet hair. (Fun fact: I attended all award assemblies my senior year of high school with wet hair, not on purpose but out of an inability to organize my hairwashing schedule). So, in celebration of something I can't have:


and this is how you coquette



Erykah Badu, enough said.


Vogue tries, and it's quite aesthetic in its own right, but...


nineteensixtyeight, dearies, not nineteenfortyeight!


Louis vuitton runway - miss sticklegs still fails to capture it for me.


my friend. He's African. From South Africa. And he has gorgeous hair which he insists on cutting/mohawking/something


portrait of my friend as a young man.

In mourning for limited hairstyling options,
Guy Fawkes

Self-discipline by way of Peche Mortel

I like challenges, to a point. I agreed to swim in the salty St. Lawrence this weekend for that reason (although I was a huge wussy about it), and my summer job is supposed to be one of the hardest in North America, although I wonder about that, since I don't think the hardest jobs in North America are done by drunk college students. But, in any case, if I am allowed a significant level of good-natured bitching, I'll do a lot of things, so this week I'm trying to eat nothing with added sugar in it, for several reasons:
-I like sugar way too much, so it'll be good to not have it for a while.
-I no longer train as hard as I used to, so it might be good to stop eating like a very un-discerning horse.
-As Calvin's dad (and my older male friends who place an almost idiotic value on being hardcore) says:


So far today, I've had an orange, some cheese and a bottle of really strong Québecois beer called Peche Mortel. Clearly, I am not doing this for health reasons. I might make this whole issuing self challenges thing a regular occurence. That could be fun. Or it could build character.

Weekend Retrospective, or, the mood I'm in

„Koločava, krajina, kterou můžete najít na mapě, ale my jsme ji hledali v lesní tmě, v plameni a kouři sobotních ohňů, kdy se člověku zachce hodit všechno za hlavu a nemyslet na to, že po neděli přijde pondělí…“



Balada pro banditu is a Czech musical about a man named Nikola Šuhaj, a thief from the Karpathian region of Ukraine around the time of the first world war. It's a story about outlaws and war and love and death and sex and sadness and the choices one makes in a land where there is not much choice, really. And it's beautiful. It was filmed in 1978 on a low budget. I remember seeing it and hearing the songs when I was about five, having no grasp at all of anything that was going on but liking it. I remember running to these songs over the Czech hills in the fog. I forget about its existence most of the time, but it must be in my subconscious, because when I got my first guitar (which I never learned to play very well but someday will, I swear), I named it Eržika.

"Is that the protest?" "No, the library's on fire."

(Overheard on campus)

Sincerely,
Guy Fawkes

Almost heaven, West Virginia

I never realized how much I would miss Shenandoah.
The beauty of Québec is stark and powerful and tinged to me at least with the vastness of pride, ouais, the poutine, the hockey, the habitants.
The beauty of Ontario is just as stark and desolate and miserable but everpresent, like cheap beer and hard hats and hardwon dirt, long lakes for naked swimming in the sunset.
The beauty of Bohemia is not as extreme, but a supreme loveliness prevails. One can feel that people have lived and loved here for millenia, without any sort of obligation to any grandeur but that what is - the ancient paths and quiet trees and odd rocks and wheat and mills and lakes.
And West Virginia, with its desolate trailers on beautiful mountaintops, raging rivers, waterfalls, old churches and old people, quiet mornings and raging rain.
Take me home, country roads?