Liberation

What were you doing on Liberation Day? This is what I did.

Song in my head: Tchaikovsky, "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy". If you're going to YouTube, don't miss the trip-hop, dance, and electronic covers of this song. ^_^

Liberation

First of all, Happy Liberation Day, everyone.

The word "liberation" has so many meanings today. For starters, on Guam they say that on 21 July they were liberated from Japanese control and placed back into American control. (I know, right? You ask them this time.) Also, this year being the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon, we as a people were given a break from all the Cold War fear and had cause to be hopeful after all. We as human beings (maybe) stopped looking furtively at each other and became free to all look up together.

Well, I wasn't yet alive back in 1969. So it is with relish that I'm tuning in to We Choose the Moon to hear the audio exchanged between Houston and the Spacecraft. It makes me feel as if I were tuning in to a piece of much older electronic equipment to hear voices coming from more than 200,000 miles away. I'm planning on staying up to get to the tape where Neil Armstrong says, "That's one small step...", then I intend to go out to that section of Marine Corps Drive in Hagat'na to check out (and maybe photograph) the floats and the camps. Will it rain? Nobody knows, man, and that's what makes it exciting.

A random thought came to me as I was driving around today. Has it ever occurred to anyone out there who is a literary type that our preoccupation for aliens starting in the 20th Century could have been a message of hope? What I mean is, if people had to turn to beings from other planets to get aliens, does that mean that we ran out of humans to alienate? That maybe the "Otherness" of every human out there just ran out, and we were ready to see every human being as part of our in-group?

OK, just thinking out loud. Feel free to shoot this down... ^_^ But thanks for reading, at any rate.

Song in my head: The Pussycat Dolls, "I Hate This Part (Right Here)".

All right, now don't bother me. I'm trying to hear what Buzz is saying.

The end of the internet

I got an email today that said that GeoCities was closing sometime in October. It's been a good run, I guess. I did not realize how prolific I had been with GeoCities websites. But, it's all the same; I'd have to either take them somewhere else or lose them forever.

And here I thought that the link to my last known homestead (SiliconValley/Code/4023) would last forever.

Do you know where your Homestead was?

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Michael Jackson, "Human Nature".

P.S. In reference to the title, my favorite "end of the internet" page is at http://mdesmond.com/end-of-the-internet/.

"Carry me to the river Jordan"

You know, since he died at a relatively early age, it would've been appropriate here to say that "the youth is wasted on the young". But that was obviously not true of him. He drank up his youth all the way to the last drop.

Rest in peace, Michael Jackson. You know this now, that I always believed in your music, and I'll still be waiting on your comeback. ^_^

Song in my head: Jackson Five, "I Want You Back". My favorite song that has him on it.

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".

Skill set

The other day, I was waiting in line at a fast-food restaurant. When it came time for me to order, an attendant with the "drive-thru" headset on told me, "Kindly hold, I will be right with you." I was in no hurry, so it did not bother me.

What she did in the following minute and a half was so incredible that even now I can't believe I saw it all. She proceeded to take three orders through the drive-thru headset, two of them one after the other, and the other she inherited from another person at the console who had to leave. I knew she was listening to the headset because of the distant look in her eyes, yet the rest of her danced across that greasy foodservice-grade floor with such effortlessness it was as if she had the whole thing choreographed. Her hands knew instinctively where everything was: the handles and knobs to the hot surfaces of the trays, the point-of-sale console, the debit card device where she had to swipe for two payments, and the boxes. Before I even realized, she handed off three finished packages to two different places: two to two different attendanta who were tasked with giving it to someone who had parked, and the other two out the window. The amazing thing was she remembered the appearance of both cars, and which order belonged to which car.

After this mystifying performance, she went back to the counter and smiled. "How may I help you?" I couldn't help it; before I placed my order I said, "First of all, that was amazing." ^_^

She demonstrated something that I already knew for a long time: Everyone has a skill set--some certain number of things that a person is good at. The attendant from the other day is not likely to know how to play the piano. But her manner at the service floor of that restaurant is something I could never hope to duplicate, even if I had been working there a full year. Why? Perhaps I am just a naturally slow person, who wouldn't be able to handle something like that. In fact, if I worked there, I predict I would be stuck out back at the kitchen, cooking. Or maybe not even that; I'd probably be washing utensils and loading the stockroom.

One of my professors laments that he does not have enough time in his life to study everything he was interested in. After having reflected on that notion for a while, I can now say that I agree.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Rascal Flatts, "Here Comes Goodbye".

Two thousand and ten

This is turning into an epic journey.

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.

Past time

While I was walking by myself maybe about a week ago, I stumbled across a random thought. I cannot remember the thought that ignited it anymore, but the notion is this: We should never assume that the past was a strictly simpler situation than the present. This immediately seemed true, and I started to wonder how the complexity around us could be compared with the complexity of the life of someone living in the 18th or 19th Century. For example, a twentysomething from the 19th Century would not have known or even comprehended what a computer was, but then again, he or she wouldn't have had to keep up with upwards of a hundred "friends" on some social networking site.

It seems to be true that while progress is certainly being made, there are things that remain the same, allowing our brains to relate these to the new things.

I have a feeling I wasn't the first person to ever say that. ^_^

Song in my head: Maino, featuring T-Pain, "All of the Above".