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

Thread theory

As I was mending my pants tonight after a night jog, I had an insight. People almost always talk about science and religion as being in some sort of conflict. Where there is science being conducted, people are likely to assume that religion will have no place, and vice versa.

Actually, for me, the real fundamental concept at work here is the concept of order. Human beings expect that the universe operates at some level of order. I would go a bit further and say that the human search for order is one of the things that define what being human is all about. We as a species would like to think that there is a reason things are the way they are.

In light of this, I see both science and religion as tackling this concept of order and broadening our horizons on it. But to me they are not in conflict; they are complementary, because science seeks to ask and answer how the universe is ordered, while religion and spirituality seeks to ask and answer why the universe is ordered that way. Both disciplines take as true the assertion that the universe is ordered in a certain way, and then explore the nature of that order.

Think about it: if we didn't think that the universe obeys some sort of order, and that instead it is randomness and chaos that governs its actions, then what good are science and religion for? What good are books, which seek to tell us what happened before or knowledge gained by others, if we know that such history or knowledge will never ever be useful again? The answer, of course, is nothing--if we did not think there was an order in the universe, we would be indistinguishable from the animals.

So hopefully you find some semblance of order as you leave this page and do whatever you are doing today. Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Nickelback, "Someday".

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".

Are we there yet?

I really really wanted to go walking tonight, but I didn't because I forgot my shoes. So before retiring for the night (or morning, as it were), I placed my sport shoes in my car.

Overall, I think I've grown a lot as a walker/jogger. I seem to have found a good cadence and a good method, and I've stumbled upon a darn good circuit, one that is not too short, always interesting, and is well-lighted. Hopefully I will find the time tomorrow to do it.

I do have other things to do, you know.

Song in my head: Nickelback, "If Today Was Your Last Day". Hey, if you heard it upwards of 9 times, it'd be in your head, too. ^_^

Typing with both hands

I haven't walked in a week, and these days I've begun to feel restless during the night. Perhaps it would be a good thing to start again.

Hearing from an old friend is very much like coming back home from another country. You pick up where you left off and then move on.

The thing I dislike the most about blogging is, surprisingly, not typing with both hands. It's the realization that you've forgotten all those things you wanted to say on it by the time you've turned on the computer. This is the situation I find myself in at this moment. It is not a trivial thing to set up and maintain a blog.

I've started to write a short story in Tagalog, and after having written a few paragraphs I looked at what I wrote. And the strangest thing happened: it sounded foreign. I don't know whether I should be saddened by that, but I know that I am not happier for it.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Beck, "Moon on the Water".

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".

Walking backwards

Now I know what it's like to be carless.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia can only be felt in the future.

Put another way, notice that people very rarely say "Oh, I wish I could be eighteen." Actually they say "Oh, I wish I could be eighteen again." It is only when we leave behind what seems to be the most hardship-filled times of our lives do we really start to figure out how much better we have become because of them, and the many times we were actually contented.

If you put this another way, you could say that youth is wasted on the young. But I don't think that's true, either. Would it be fair to say that there are no youths out there who actually cherish the opportunity that they have? Alas, wisdom does come too late, because usually it is only later that we realize just how much we miss.

So what is the point in all of this? The point is, it is never too late to make your future self be nostalgic for this present time in your life. Give your future self something to miss and do something amazing!

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Survivor, "The Search is Over".