Day # 9131, or, The Time Traveler's Dilemma

Actually, it's already Day #9132... ^_^ But day 9131 turned out to be so eventful that I had no time to post over here! Anyway, perhaps the pictures will do the talking.

Today I watched The Time Traveler's Wife with my family, and I have to say that it is an interesting movie. My favorite part of the movie was anytime anyone said the words, "Everything's going to be all right" (or "OK" or any version thereof). Normally, when someone says this to someone else who is having a tough time, there is no way the first someone could really mean it. I mean, really mean it. Sure, I can tell it to someone close I've known for a long time and whose troubles I am well aware of, and even perhaps whose troubles I've encountered in my life in the past as well. But when it comes down to it, I have zero authority to say those words, because I myself do not know how things will turn out. In the movie, though, whenever someone said those words, that someone had some authority over the statement.

Before I went into the movie, I thought the main conflict within it was going to be a series of tensions between wanting to tell the truth and wanting to reassure the other. But it didn't turn out quite that way at all. What was especially interesting was that the first time in the movie we hear the words "Everything's going to be all right" it comes from the (future) wife, the non-time-traveler. She speaks the truth, of course, because she has already met the time-traveler, but the one she met was older (and obviously wiser and doing better for himself).

One of the humanizing realizations of the movie occurs when you realize that the time-traveler is not much better off than we are--although he can see his future, he can do nothing to change it. But this also is part of the rules of the literary game, because everyone--wisely--sooner or later catches on to this fact really quickly and turn their energies towards the small things that make each other's lives more... what's the word? Livable.

The movie ends up having a different kind of tension--the characters end up in a balancing act where they try to prepare each other for the many eventualities of life. In this environment, "Everything's going to be all right" ends up being true, no matter who says it. And, paradoxically, because of this moral of consoling each other in the small things, the movie ends up teaching us that it's OK to say those words to someone who is going through a tough time, even though you have absolutely no idea how things will actually turn out--as long as you are willing to be part of the solution.

It must be nice to hear from someone who actually knows that "everything's going to be all right." Even if that someone knows he or she is lying.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Broken Social Circle, "Love Will Tear Us Apart". This is a cover of a Joy Division song that was the wedding reception formal dance in the movie. Sounds imo.

Scratchwork

The singular upheaval in the arrangement of my room has given me an opportunity to look at all those many pieces of paper I had stored away in those semi-neat folders. I'm finding that I am throwing away a good percentage of them. This is both good and bad. It's good because I need to reclaim space in my room. And it's bad because if I kept it at first and then now I'm throwing it away, that means I've already forgotten why I kept it in the first place.

But now I have an almost neverending stack of scratch paper.

If I borrowed anything from you ever, hold on; I've found it and I will return it to you as soon as I see you again.

Song in my head: Fred Astaire, "The Way You Look Tonight". I heard it when I saw Swing Time (1936). I rather enjoyed the movie, even though it was about people falling in love. That was surprising.

Status update

I guess it was wrong for me to assume that other people will remember me the way I remember them. First of all, there's more of them.

Song in my head: Keahiwai, "Where Did Our Love Go".

Why I like this song, No. 2

Today on "Why I like this song" I thought I'd write about a song that to my knowledge wasn't released as a single (and therefore probably never made it to radio anywhere). This kind of song is fascinating because most of the time record executives have a big say on what becomes a single from an album. The fact that this song was not a single meant that either the composer or the executives or both decided that it would not be fit for radio. Let's do Jason Mraz, "Beautiful Mess".

At least on Guam, the only singles I heard from We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things were an updated "I'm Yours" (which I already discussed earlier, though not on Why I like this song) and "Lucky" with Colbie Caillat. So when I heard "Beautiful Mess" I was pleasantly surprised.

Jason Mraz has a (late 90's style) rap- or hip-hop-like cadence to his written lyrics; this is characterized by the meter or rhythm of his words varying almost every line. This song is no different, demonstrating a meter that fits the words, instead of words fitting a meter:

Although you're biased, I love your advice
Your comebacks are quick and probably have to do with your insecurities
There's no shame in being crazy depending on how you take these
Words they're paraphrasing, this relationship we're staging

If you tried fitting these words in the second verse to the actual cadence he sings, it would probably look something like this:

          Al - though        you're    biased,       I  love      your   advice
          Your comebacks are quick and probably have to do with your   insecurities
There's no     shame     in  be -  ing crazy          depending on how you take these
               Words they're       paraphrasing, this relationship we're   staging

It's a proper--if highly irregular--meter, because the stresses are in the right places.

But what really makes this song for me is the first part of the chorus:

Well, it
kind of hurts when the
kind of words you write
kind of turn them-
selves into knives

He repeats the word "kind" three times as the beginning of the middle three lines, all with a stabbing quality to them, singing them in high G-sharps and an F-sharp for the last one, harmonizing with the E, G#m, and F#m in the guitar. It's like he is reacting to being stabbed repeatedly with a sharp knife slowly going into him. Whenever I hear this part of the song it makes my eyes well up, because the words, melody, and chords work together towards an effect that translates to the listener as "puti korason," Chamorro for heartache. And who said sound-pictures are dead? ^_^

The whole song itself is actually very easy to play; four-chorders out there would be delighted in its basic progression: E G#m F#m A -> B, and repeat. The "beautiful mess" chords are just "A / B /" then repeat. Incidentally, it felt as if a quarter to a third of the songs in the rest of the album used the same chord progression (albeit in different keys). The creativity is injected in how the song shapes itself around the words he wants to say.

Is it imo? Every time I hear it I become more convinced that it is. The "relationship" being staged is far from perfect, but for the speaker, the fact that he is still hurt by her verbal blades proves to him that there is still something beautiful and worth continuing:

And through
timeless words and
priceless pictures we'll
fly like birds
not of this Earth.
And
tides they turn and
hearts disfigure but
that's no concern when we're
wounded together.

Thanks for reading.

Why I like this song, No. 1

I don't know whether this is going to be a regular feature of my blog (let alone whether it will ever be repeated ^_^) but tonight after hearing the recording of Cueshe, "Back to Me", I suddenly stumbled upon the reason I liked this song. (Incidentally, I did post a comment on the video that is an outline of what I am going to say here, but I found that "the margin could not contain the proof", as it were.)

There is a certain feeling I get whenever I listen to it or play it. I cannot think of a single word to describe it, but it's somewhere between loneliness and an almost insane hopefulness and yearning.

Most of the drama between these two emotions is illustrated in the contrast between the song's lyrics and the type of music accompanying it. It begins with a four-note motif that alternates between Esus2 and E, which appears to be setting up the song to be a love song--in effect, a love that is ongoing. This creates tension with the words first sung over it:

        C#m A                 E
Sometimes I feel like I'm all alone
Wondering of what have I done wrong.
      C#m A            F#m     B
Maybe I'm just missing you all along
          F#m           B
When will you be coming home
    N.C.    E
    back to me?

(Chords are solely my interpretation.) Oh, so the love was lost. Well, this is weird, because we have already been cued in to thinking about ongoing, current love by the opening motif.

Also, the verse chords resolve to E major (as can be seen in the fragment above) but are mainly the minor chords (C#m and F#m being the main chords in this section). But when we get to the chorus, this happens:

        E        C#m            F#m   B
Can you feel me, see me falling away?
Did you hear me? I'm calling out your name.
           F#m            B
'Cause I'm barely hanging on
      F#m              B
Baby, you need to come home
    N.C.    [Intro]
    back to me.

We get an explosive E major, coupled with the almost screamed words "Can you FEEL me? See me falling away!" The effect is jarring because we finally realize what kind of a song this is--she isn't coming back, but she still "need[s] to come home / Back to me." Then the intro comes back in, washing it all away with that hopeful strain of E's and Esus2's.

So the story that unfolds for me is this: The speaker here is at the brink of despair of ever seeing his loved one again, having just realized that he does love her after all. But kind of figuring they'll never be together again, his yearning to see her again inexplicably increases. Maybe, as in fiction, the improbable should happen and they will end up together again. But as time passes, that hope not only becomes more distant, but also more fantastic, insisting that the speaker keep dreaming against reality.

I began to really like this song when I realized that the feeling portrayed to me in it is very similar to what it felt like a few weeks after my first breakup.

Is it imo? Yes, because the despair is real but the unreal (and even unrealistic) hope is even stronger.

Thanks for reading. Maybe for these posts I can hold off on "Song in my head". What do you think? ^_^

They don't write music like this anymore

Lately I have been doing a lot of cruising on YouTube in order to listen to songs that I may want to cover with the Imaginary Friends. Almost invariably, when I get to a video that features music from more than twenty years ago (mostly 70s classic rock or 80s R&B or something similar), and I read the comments, I read the same line over and over again:

"They don't write music like this anymore."

Now, I've seen this line hundreds of times, both online and in the real world, and I may have even said this a couple of times in different occasions, but tonight, as I read it being said about Champaign, "Try Again", I felt a small but insistent irritation in the back of my head.

For some reason, the fact that I had the most excellent jam session with my bandmates just this past Saturday night where we played and sang the music of our decades (the nineties and this side of the millennium) kind of gave me a different skew on the above line when I read it tonight. When that particular poster said in the text comments, "...they don't write music like this anymore," (correct grammar and punctuation mine), he or she is implying that the music that was conceived of after that time frame intrinsically has less literary or otherwise musical merit.

Now, I know that's not true, because had it been true, we would not have sung any of those songs we sang on our hang-out. Why would we enjoy singing a musically inferior song?

Second, upon more reflection, I realized that the statement is patently true. Of course they don't write music like this anymore. There are now many more artists than there ever were when "Try Again" came out, thanks to the Web, mostly. Now, that makes the probability of hearing a "bad" song much larger than it was decades ago, but it also increases the probability of you hearing a song (or artist) that is much closer to your tastes. That's because older bands and artists couldn't burrow into a niche; they had to appeal to more people in order to succeed as musical acts.

Anyway, in the end, the annoyance passed, because I pictured a time thirty years from now, and we check out YouTube (or a future descendant program thereof) of, say, Usher, "Love in This Club", and I pictured myself leaving a comment, "They don't write music like this anymore." ^_^

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: John Mayer, "Sucker".

A wet guitar

I had the thought that perhaps my grasp on conventional reality is actually a bit less tight than I suspected at first. It always happens that whenever I think that I finally have every aspect of my life figured out and under control, there are always a few areas where I drop the ball, so to speak. The feeling is like checking out nine books from the library and discovering, as you cross the front door to the outside, that you only have space in your hands for seven.

Perhaps it really is a blessing that we do not live forever, no matter how much our bodies yearn to survive for as long as possible. It is the enlightened creature's torment; there is no such thing as turning back to a simpler time, when all you needed were seven books.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Click Five, "Just the Girl".

Inauspicious

Actually, I don't know for sure whether the title for this post is an actual word, and it seems too trifling to actually open a new browser tab to look up a definition, but that's the best way to describe the end of April.

Now that the song is written, it's like a huge load off my back, and now I end up a little richer than before. It got me thinking that maybe I held on to the feeling so long precisely because I felt that there was a song in there somewhere. ^_^ Then again, I don't think that's true, because I am still a bit imo over the whole thing. Then again, maybe that's because I needed to feel imo every so often to be reminded of how that really feels.

Finally, the Imaginary Friends (I'm shooting for all four) will come together and watch Spinal Tap this weekend. That kind of fell together without much fanfare, either, but so much the better.

I think the best thing for me to do is to write "2010" in bold letters and paste it somewhere in my room, as a reminder of what I should have been focusing on all this time. I already changed all my profile pages to say that I graduate on Spring of 2010, and maybe, just maybe, the finality of that statement will allow me to sharpen my focus and hit the books harder than I have this year.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Foo Fighters, "My Hero". The Nickelback spell is over. ^_^

Heard it in a song

Tonight I finished writing a song that was in my head all week. When I realized that this was the case, I turned my car radio back on. You see, during the time that I am composing or writing a song I try not to listen to the radio or any kind of music so that I can hear the music in my head a bit more clearly.

Anyway, that got me thinking about all the things I did and the decisions I made based on what certain songs said. When I started to get really close to someone we'll call Prairie Dawn for now, that was when that song by Jason Mraz, "I'm Yours", was gaining traction in the radio. (This was the version that had a more stripped down, percussion-less arrangement and not the one in We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things.) One of the lines in that song went

I won't hesitate, no more, no more
It cannot wait, I'm sure
There's no need to complicate, our time is short
This is our fate, I'm yours.

I credit these lines for inspiring (if not dictating) my course of action towards P.D., which of course led me to going to the Philippines with her and two of our other friends and the subsequent birth of imo.

Has anyone else had the experience where some lines of a song inspired a decision or some subsequent behavior? Now it may turn out that I'm the only one susceptible to this, and that this is a non-question and should be dropped. I'd be fine with that. But if it happened more often, why does it happen at all?

As I reflected on it, it dawned on me that song lyrics gain power through the order in their composition. (See my previous post for more about order.) Maybe we're more likely to believe song lyrics because song lyrics are usually orderly in some way, and since the universe is also orderly, maybe an orderly song lyric closely describes the workings of the universe. And what, pray tell, makes song lyrics orderly? Well, rhyme, rhythm, the notes you sing those words on, any number or combination of those things.

Could it be that I broke my leg ice skating with a girl and brought to mind a new musical genre simply because of the words to a good Jason Mraz song? That'd be life imitating art, wouldn't it?

And who said that was wrong, anyway?

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Nickelback, "If Everyone Cared".

P.S. Here's another instance of life imitating art. I was driving Sexualspam around one night, when he suddenly called my attention to a scene playing out in front of a house whose corner we were rounding. In the moonlight, he saw some young punk and a girl, and the punk jumped over the gate, unlocked it, and let the girl in.

He jubilantly growled, "I just saw 'Hands Down' with my own two eyes!":

The streets were wet, and the gate was locked
So i jumped in and let you in
And you stood at your door with your hands on my waist
And you kissed me like you meant it

Twenty questions

The strangest insights can sometimes come from the most ordinary situations. Earlier this week, as I was spending some time with the Imaginary Friends, someone mentioned that he was trying to defeat an online "20 Questions" program by saying no to the questions and then giving a wrong answer when asked for the thing. I responded that maybe since the program was online, there would be an "averaging" system in place that ensures that if the majority of players were sincere with the game, the wrong answers would eventually be smoothed over.

That's when it hit me: Twenty yes-or-no questions amounts to 20 bits of data; by asking twenty yes-or-no questions, you can differentiate among 2^20 or 1,048,576 different things! (Actually, when I got the insight, I erroneously thought that there were less than 2^20 particles in the Universe. Exponents were not my thing... ^_^)

The key proposition, I think, in the twenty questions game is that the million or so things you can think of should all inhabit some sort of domain. In my friend's case, the domain was anime characters. I'm sure there are a lot of anime characters on all anime and mangas, but are there a million?

What I took away from this thought process was that quite contrary to my intuition, something as paltry as just twenty questions can hold so much information about an object. That is the mystifying effect people get when the program correctly guesses the object or character they are thinking of.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Nickelback, "Photograph".

Random thoughts I got while walk-jogging last night

I realized last night that Emily Dickinson is one of my heroes. She is one of those people who desired to create something new, and did so by using the things that were available to them. She took the cadence of church hymns (reportedly the stuff she loved to sing) and just the right words and made them express her unique worldview. The result is very much like a small but curiously strong mint; they look dainty and nonthreatening, that is until you put them in your mouth.

Do I also hope to achieve something like this? I don't know. Perhaps it is all about taking island music and making it express my emo side. But as it has become apparent that imo is much more than emo dressed up in island music. It's as if the "island" is influencing the "emo" part, changing it into a substantially different worldview. To complicate things, I now don't believe as strongly as before that we created imo. Maybe we just discovered it.

But I don't know for sure. Having thrown away my empty water bottle into a nearby trashcan, I decide to pick up my feet once again and start jogging.

Song in my head: Francis Magalona, "Kaleidoscope World".

Pink castles

I can't believe that it's been three years since the Imaginary Friends last performed on a stage. That number has to be upped somehow. At any rate, things are looking good and I am hoping that this time around will be an improvement. The stuff sounded good in practice.

For those who'd like to get an earful or two of imo, head on over to the grounds at the University of Guam for Charter Day (March 10) between 13:30 and 14:30. You'll see the Imaginary Friends there.

Off to sleep again.

Song in my head: Jennifer Lopez, "Do It Well".

There are a couple of moving pieces.

In my web exploits today, I came across an article on a blog that is aiming to build their own working internet tablet. It was, of course, no small undertaking, especially for a blog that would attempt this for the first time. When I saw the picture of the rough prototype it struck me as a very no-nonsense design, which the editors contended they would try to make more "industrial".

When I went to the comments section, I came across a bystander who asked, "What are the hardware specs you have defined for the first beta?..." The answer from one of the team was, "we'll talk about the hardware once it's nailed down, there are a couple of moving pieces."

A couple of moving pieces.

Now it struck me that this was an excellent way to describe their device. It's very sensory; it's as if you were holding the device in your hands and as you move it around it makes clanking noises, indicating that the parts have not been nailed down. In essence, it gave an abstract quality of the device (the fact that its hardware specification has not been finalized) a physical dimension (that of the parts not being nailed down).

As I reflected on those words further, I realized that they offer some insight as to why I have so many projects. My life, as well as everyone's life, is always undergoing some major redesign. Everyone does have a couple of moving pieces. I'm beginning to see that my projects are a dramatization of these clanking noises. That is, if I were the TechCrunch Tablet prototype A, and you were to turn me over in your hands, you would hear the sound of Planet Run, of imo, of Kykonian and Samnite, and much more.

I think that it is a healthy thing to have a few moving parts. That way, when the specifications change, when the consumer wants a different functionality, only a few screws will need to be turned.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Abba, "Our Last Summer".

P.S. I will be going around the island tomorrow. (That is not a trivial feat, but neither is it profound.) Let me see if I could take some pictures of the effort.

Prisoner of war

Right before I slept a few nights ago, a clear picture came to my head. It was of a deserted North Korean intersection, with impeccably drab edifices flanking the perpendicular rivers of asphalt. In the middle of the intersection there stood erect a female traffic guard, looking straight ahead. She was smartly dressed, the white belt crossing her sea-blue blouse gleaming white in the unforgiving Sun, the unforgiving proxy of the Dear Leader's commanding gaze.

What would it be like to kiss her?

Would that set her free?

How silly of me to think that! Of course not... it wouldn't set her free. It would imprison me.

Hey, I didn't say the picture made sense. ^_^

In other news I think I haven't decided on a hobby to spend time on this summer, but perhaps SHIFT 2 would be a good candidate. It has taken up at least half an hour of every session I spend in front of my computer. Go check it out, and once you get the gist, come back here and try this level my sister and I collaborated on:

A080Z502125211233212A0522Z0Z10Z10ZAB10Z5Z210ZA03133110Z5213251251C005Z1522416012210Z33112C0050131C005013222Z5Z210Z10Z10ZAB5011210Z10Z6122161211602Z0Z5124210Z5Z15224153Z10Z5311210Z612114024153Z5324210Z10Z60Z23ZC004133210Z122516021150ZC006Z10112153Z10Z10Z10Z31131C0020Z10Z5Z210ZA05Z14Z210Z41122B0Z0225110Z10Z10Z70ZC006012110Z10Z52112B0Z52Z10Z10Z322515311210Z10ZC0053221C0030142311221242132451524510045110Z5211210Z31141A0321220013130122C0090451004514015210Z10Z312417122100Z132223312210ZB045100Z

Anyway, before you load the code, make sure to remove the spaces.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Usher, "Love in This Club".

P.S. Also, the CC is a lie.

Seventeen syllables, No. 62

If you were a boat,
I would rather be your sail
Than be your anchor.

Seventeen syllables, No. 58

The Sun, unmuffled
By clouds, and chirping birds sing
Outside my headphones.

Ten more to go...

Ypao-Matapang walkabout

I know, I know, I shouldn't use a sacred word such as "walkabout" to describe such a commonplace walk through two beaches. But then again, the point is that until now it has not been commonplace.

As I was walking back to my vehicle after having snapped some pictures of the beach, I contemplated on why photography is an art. My first reaction was, "Good question." I decided that songwriting is less like writing than it is like picture taking; songwriters don't go to the songs, the songs come to them. Then the songwriter decides whether that song idea, like a certain unposed composition in a picture, is worth writing about. If that happens, then, well, you have a song. ^_^

Then, I realized that we dwellers of this century have actually put photography in a sort of double-standard: we maintain that the camera does not lie, but then turn around and beg and coax it to tell the truth the way we see it.

I told Jesse yesterday that love is a uniquely human construct partly because it draws its justification from another uniquely human construct: the awareness of our own mortality. However, when I was telling this to him, I still did not have it worked out fully. When I was driving around this morning the answer suddenly came to me, and now I can't wait to put it down on some paper.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: The Frames, "Pavement Tune".

P.S. Check out some pictures from my walkabout at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mathwizard/tags/fffff

Seventeen syllables, No. 52

"How do you know it
Was real?" Sigh, pause. "Because
It hurt when she left."

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. ^_^

The flow of communication

You know, you would think that I've already learned from my mistakes. Apparently not. I kind of wrote some things that maybe it was not a good idea to say in my email correspondence with one of my dear friends. The question to me was innocent enough: "What about you?" referring to how I am doing romantically.

Maybe I should have just lied and said that I was fine with being single. Maybe. But instead I launched into a tirade that probably should never have happened. I think what I did that day was I complained about the right things but to the wrong person. After all, what power did she have to correct my situation? I should not have relied on her to fix my problems for me. I should always be the one to do that.

So here I am waiting in electronic silence, not really knowing just what effect my words have had on my friend. I hope she sees this and realizes the regret that now accompanies my previous communication. I hope that she understands.

It really shows how little I have learned in the past year. Maybe this year will be better.

In other news, I'm overwhelmed with students at the Stairwell, but I guess that it is favorable that the learning center is seeing a lot of business, not the least in the aspect of my paycheck... ^_^ It will soon need to expand, though... for the sake of all students involved.

Song in my head: James Taylor, "Fire and Rain".

Seventeen syllables, No. 50

One single petal
Lies unswept in the corner
Of the white chapel.