Chutney-Flavored Cake

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Yesterday, we went to the theater to see a movie. After evaluating all of the movies showing (there was Bruno, which I don't really appreciate the comedy of it; there was Harry Potter, which from my perspective is hard to follow since I haven't seen all of the previous movies; there was Transformers, which I haven't seen the first one so I don't know the links; there was also Ice Age, but we were not in the mood for animated weird animals), we decided on seeing The Proposal.

So this is a romantic comedy, starring Sandra Bullock, who at 44, still looks smoking hot; and Ryan Reynolds. If you want to know what the movie is about, just look it up in Wikipedia or something; this isn't a movie review post.

Anyway, let's go to why this entry is titled this way. The thing is, after the movie, my friend asked me how I liked that movie. I said, Well, it's a romantic comedy, and based on my expectations of what a romantic comedy should be, I liked it. I was comedified romantically. Now, my friend asked me, on a scale of one to five, how many stars would I give this movie? I told her that I would give it a five, and she was surprised.

Backstory: the thing is, we watched Definitely, Maybe quite a while ago, which was another romantic comedy starring, yet again, Ryan Reynolds. And I liked that romantic comedy especially, since even though it was a romantic comedy, it had an air of mystery, and it got the audience involved due to the guessing game between the daughter and the father.

So, apparently, my friend was surprised on my evaluating process. Now, this is something I explained yesterday night, that I do not have a universal set of constraints when evaluating whether I like a movie or not. My constraint set is not flat, instead, it is hierarchically structured. I do not evaluate movies in the same way as to whether I like it or not. Yes, I liked Definitely, Maybe because of the ingenious way of presenting the story, but also because it satisfied all the expectations I have of the romantic comedy genre. The thing is, I evaluate movies by what genre they are in. If I know I am seeing a horror movie, I have a set of constraints that do not apply if I am seeing a romantic comedy. I have expectations for what a horror movie is, that is different from my expectations for what a romantic comedy is. And since The Proposal satisfied all my expectations regarding what a romantic comedy should be like, I decided that I liked the movie.

I suppose my thinking pattern is just like how I decide what I like about food. I like my chutney spicy and sweet. I like my cake sweet, but not spicy, and without a lot of icing. Just because they're both food doesn't mean I use the same constraint set for both items. I definitely do not want spicy mango and coriander cake, nor devil's food chutney. I have different expectations for both, and I evaluate both items as to whether I like it or not using different constraint sets.

So, after explaining that, I was asked, given how I think, how is it that I am a human, and not a robot. Well, I explained back, I think, therefore I am. Robots simply follow what they are programmed to do. I just happen to have a very elegantly structured way of thinking.

(Artistic Wall and Pillars, from my DC Memorials Series)

In Pursuit of Science

Friday, July 17, 2009

So I turned in my second draft of my dissertation proposal the other day. I was happy. It was inducing a certain high in my system, the fact that I went to the printers in the library and heard the sound of the humming engines, rolling out with my work. Dorky indeed it is, but at the same time, it gives one a sense of achievement that even supposedly mundane things get one high.

So yeah, the ball is not in my court anymore. Now I need to have my adviser read it, so when we meet next week, he has comments on it and I can refine my ideas.

Sometimes, people can make one think that pursuing a PhD degree is a Sisyphean task, with all the reading, writing, revising, and repeating that goes on, and one sometimes thinks that there is no end. But hey, there are things that never end, such as the pursuit of science. There are plenty of things that humans don't know yet, and I find it immensely self-fulfilling to be part of the whole process.

Ah, speaking of the scientific process, I suppose I never wrote it here that I would be part of a conference in Barcelona. Yup. A presentation that I co-authored got accepted, so my name would show up somewhere in Barcelona this coming September. I am the second author, so I don't plan on going, but it's another line in my CV, so that's good. Basically, the research is the idea of the first author, but I devised the experimental side of it. I was told that if he gets a question on the experimental design and the statistics, he would pretend that he is just the second author and deflect the question. Anyway, joking aside, I am pretty sure we would be talking about it before he leaves for Spain.

I suppose related to this would be what I would do for the next step. After graduation, which is a few years from now, what would be next? I don't want a cubicle job. I want to be part of something on the forefront of science. I never chose a major back in undergraduate because it would be earning me big money. I chose what I studied because I was really interested in it.

Regarding employment, I have been looking into applying for various positions all over the world. Due to the fact that my university funding expires at the end of the year, I need a substitute. I've been looking at various positions in different countries and states. And with that, I took several immigration tests. Apparently, I am eligible to immigrate to Canada and Australia, based on my skills and educational level. Now if only there are job offerings that would like what I can do.

Somehow, being in the job market can be stressing. I suppose I decided to postpone this by going to graduate school. But sooner or later, I also need to face it. Life indeed can be complicated at times. But hey, that's what makes life interesting, isn't it?

(Artistic Pillars, from my DC Memorials Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 10: Syntactic Arguments

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Four years ago, I once thought that I would be a syntactician. But hey, things happened, and then semantics just crept up on me, and now, I do psycholinguistics. I still like syntax, but I find other things that are more interesting than it.

Anyway, let's talk about syntax. Syntax is the subfield in linguistics that deals with how words are combined to make phrases and sentences. Various topics are covered here, and so let us try to tackle the basics with this post.

Languages usually have one privileged syntactic argument per sentence. In plain terms, there should always be a subject. So, in the English sentence John likes Mary and Bob, the subject of that sentence is John.

How do we know this? Because there are certain tests that we can do, one involving agreement. The form of the verb is dependent on a certain entity, and it is the subject, at least in English. If the sentence were John and Mary like Bob then the verb is different because the subject is not singular any more.

There are languages that allow sentences to have no subjects. English is not one of them, so in the sentence It is raining, the subject it is a dummy subject. It does not do anything semantically, it simply is inserted there to fulfill the English requirement that there should be a subject in every sentence. But other languages allow absence of a subject, such as Spanish and Italian, and various Austronesian languages.

Another syntactic argument is the object, which typically is the entity in which the action is done to. So, in the sentence John slapped Mary, the entity that the action was performed on is Mary, which is the object of the sentence.

There is a high occurrence of the subject being the entity that does the action, but it is not always the case. Consider Mary was slapped by John. The subject is Mary but she is not the entity that did the action. So syntactic arguments such as subject and object are not the same as semantic roles of agent and patient (but that is for another post).

There is also the third argument, which goes by various names. Some call it the indirect object, dative, recipient, what have you. So, in the sentence John sent Mary some chocolate, Mary is the third argument. This is used whenever there is a verb that takes three arguments.

The nice thing about these arguments is that you can invert them and make new sentences out of it. Such as Mary was sent some chocolate by John or Some chocolate was sent Mary by John (is that grammatical?)

How about This dissertation is driving me nuts? Can we say I am being driven nuts by this dissertation? Or how about Nuts are being driven me by this dissertation?

Let's talk about syntactic operations in a future post, shall we?

(Behind the Metal Queue, from my DC Memorials Series)

Picturesque Behavior

Sunday, July 12, 2009

So I was at school earlier today. And given it is a Sunday, not a lot of people were on campus. I was busy plonking at my keyboard, growing my second draft of the dissertation proposal. Somehow, it grew exponentially. The first draft that I turned in a month ago was 24 pages long. Now, I am at 38 and I am still working on it.

Anyway, enough of the dissertation for the moment. I wanted to talk about something else, and that is, about people's behavior whenever they take pictures.

See, there was this two ladies on campus, and they were taking pictures around campus like crazy. They were in the middle of the street, they were in front of the buildings, they were everywhere. They flash their fingers in a V-sign, they smile, they frolic.

Somehow, I do not understand that.

See, I realized that there are various behaviors when one takes photos. There is the person who takes pictures only with people in them. I have some friends whose photo albums in Facebook all involve them in front of some building in some locale, often when in vacation. I do not have a problem with that, but I wonder why for every picture, they have someone in it?

Perhaps it is because they want to prove to the people they know that they have been there. Perhaps it is a way of memorializing the fact that for some time in the past, they have been there. That they have walked the pavement in the Trafalgar Square, that they have stood at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, that they have climbed Machu Picchu.

Then, there is the behavior that I exhibit. I rarely take pictures with myself in it. Perhaps, because I usually travel alone, so nobody is there to take my picture, but even when my friend and I go on roadtrips together, I rarely take pictures of my own. Perhaps, it is because the purpose of my taking photos is to document the beauty of the place that I saw, so that when I browse my photos after the trip, I can reminisce on the wonders of the things that I witnessed. I do not need to have myself in the photograph, perhaps because I do not feel the need to show to other people that I have been in places that they haven't been to yet.

Now, there's the third behavior, that I really do not understand. There are people who take photos of themselves, say, standing in front of a Ferrari. Is that really noteworthy? Everyone knows that the Ferrari you are posing in front of is not yours. So why take a picture of it? That is one behavior that I cannot find an explanation for.

I suppose this is just another one of those human behaviors that exhibit the different value systems different people have. For some people, it is important for them to document the fact that they once stood in front of the dressed-up guard at the Buckingham Palace. For some people, it is important to capture the serene beauty of the Andes. And for some people, it is important to document the fact that they saw what a Ferrari looked like.

(Wall Etch, from my DC Memorials Series)

A 300-Year-Old Affair

Friday, July 10, 2009

So, I found this article on the meeting of Benedict XVI and President Barack Obama. And what I found interesting was that what occurred between the two men was rather bizarre.

There was Benedict XVI, pushing forward his agenda, and two of those came up grabbing people's attention: stem-cell research and abortion.

And somehow, I find it hard to process: I find it cognitively dissonant, that this topic would be brought up, if President Obama was simply dealing with the head of the state of another sovereign country, that of the Vatican City. Could you imagine Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, telling the other country's president, "Oh Mr. President, we wish that you stop funding scientific research of stem-cells in your country. Can you also stop terminating embryos and foetuses as well and just let all babies live?" That would be absurd.

But no, it hit me a few nanoseconds later. President Obama was not dealing with just another head of state. He is dealing with the head of the Roman Catholic Church. And that has a wider audience, given the fact that the Roman Catholic Church is the largest Christian church in the world. So, it's more of a religious meeting than a diplomatic one.

So what is religion doing in politics? Is this a repeat of 1633? It is bizarre that the Church are so worried of their follower's faith, that they try to impose an outright ban on deviating ideas, such as heliocentrism in Galileo's age, and stem-cell research in the modern age. Does the Church think that when people are exposed to these ideas, they would renounce their faith? If religious faith really is true, integral, important, and essential for one's existence, then it will stand to the test. Let the people choose for themselves, and let them think for themselves. I find it extremely arrogant that some religious entities can go ahead and prescribe what they think is the common good. I find it disappointing that the Catholic Church took more than 300 hundred years to admit that their decision with the Galileo Affair was wrong. And I find it disturbing that some elements of religion are still trying to repeat something that was clearly a mistake.

(Face the Metal Couple, from my DC Memorials Series)

Book Review: 26A by Diana Evans

Thursday, July 09, 2009

I do not know how to process this novel. Perhaps, I could summarize my feeling about this as blah. Yeah, just like that.

So the story is about this family. The mother is Nigerian, and the father is English. They had four daughters, Isabel, Bessi, Georgia, and Kemy. Bessi and Georgia are twins, and the story narrates their lives from toddler years to when they turn 25.

Sure, life can be funny at times. You laugh at the weird sense of logic that little children look at their surroundings, and this book has presented it so well that I catch myself laughing at times too. And then the twins grow up, they experience boys for the first time, and then they start living apart. One heads to the Caribbean for six months, and another pursues a different interest from the other.

In short, this is a story of a set of twins doing things together at first, and then forming their own identity in the end.

The thing I don't understand is why the author killed one of them in the end. It was weird, killing one of the twins, and then having the spirit of that dead twin inhabit the body of the living for one full year. Was it just all within the head of the living twin, or was it really true, at least in the world of the novel? It didn't really make it clear, nor was it necessary in my opinion.

I suppose this is one novel in which stereotypical female readers would swoon about and like it. In fact, I can totally see my sister liking this one, but I simply cannot like it, not that I deliberately refrain from liking it, but I just do not see myself enjoying it. I give it 3 out of 5.

(Metal Couple, from my DC Memorials Series)

Itchy Feet Version 4.0

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Welcome to my Itchy Feet post for the summer of 2009! For the previous three years, I have posted an entry in the summer of places that I wanted to go to in the future. These perhaps are the product of procrastination, when I let my mind wander away from my computer screen and think of the places around the world that I would dream of seeing.

So, back in 2006, I wrote this entry, and who knew? I actually visited Quito a year after that, and Machu Picchu in 2008.

In 2007, I wrote this entry, and I happen to have visited Mammoth Caves in Kentucky this past Spring Break. Woohoo!

And last year, I wrote about six overland trips that I would want to do in the future in this entry. So far, I haven't fulfilled any of those yet.

So, it is 2009, where would I take my readers to dream about?

Trekking the Annapurna Circuit

This is one trek that I would want to do sometime. The Annapurna Circuit is actually a well-marked mountain trail, skirting around the Annapurna Peaks in the Nepali Himalayas. The trek takes about 17-19 days, and one simply walks, stopping in tea houses along the way for the night. The lodges might be simple, but the views are breath-taking, literally. One can fly to Kathmandu, take the numerous modes of interesting transportation to Pokhara where one can set base for acclimatization and stack up on things, and then start the trek. This is a circular path so one ends in Pokhara, where one can head back to Kathmandu and sight-see, or better yet, see the other holy sites scattered all over Nepal going back. One month is an ideal time frame for this trip. Here's a picture found in the web describing the immensely breath-taking scenery.



Traipsing the Bolivian Highlands

This is another trip that involves high altitudes (yes, I wonder myself why I prefer the high altitudes to the beaches). One can land in La Paz and explore the city, then head over to Lake Titicaca and visit the floating reed islands. Other places to visit include the cities of Cochabamba, Sucre, and Santa Cruz, and of course, one should not leave without seeing the salt flats in Uyuni, which is shown by the following photo. The idea is to fully see the Bolivian countryside in a full circle, and then head back to either La Paz or Santa Cruz for the flight home. Or better yet, cross into the Chilean desert and bus it all the way south to Santiago.



Moroccan Meander

This also involves overland travel, but not so much of the high altitudes. What is common here though is the desert and ancient Roman ruins. The idea is to fly to Marrakesh first, which is the westernmost ancient city in Morocco. Spend a few nights here, touring the place, then one moves heading east. Stop in Casablanca to visit the largest mosque in the planet. Then head over to Rabat to see another imperial city. Fez should be next, visiting the tannery (shown below) and the medina. The final stop can be Tangier, with a day trip to Tetouan in order to see the ancient Roman ruins. Air connections can be done via Spain or France: Iberia flies to both Marrakesh and Tangier regularly. Or one can take the ferry across to the European mainland as well.



I suppose I will limit my trip ideas for this year to just three, since, there are still lots of other places that I have mentioned in the past years that I still haven't visited, and I would not want to repeat myself (I am actually repeating myself with the Moroccan idea). So yeah, my feet still are itchy, and especially when one has a dissertation to work on, things can get bad. Oh well, here's to another year of virtual traveling!

(Metal Queue from the Side, from my DC Memorials Series)

Aphilia

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

I have a hard time dealing with friends and the concept of friendship in general. That I am willing to admit. Perhaps, it is because of the way I grew up, and so I have a hard time dealing with people around me.

See, the thing is, friendships are a type of investment. One invests ones time and effort in getting to know other people. One opens up a certain part of oneself and exposes oneself to the elements, hoping that there is something one can get in return. I tend to believe that friendships start as selfish acts: one identifies another person as someone who one can get along well with, and that this other person has traits and characteristics that one can benefit from. Over time, however, the selfishness goes away, and there are things that people do for their friends that are altruistic in nature. But, overall, this can still be construed as a selfish act, because people do seemingly altruistic things to friends because they themselves do not want to lose an asset, namely, the friend.

Friendship is a two-way street. It cannot be like the relationship of a barnacle and a shark. Friends are not parasites. Friends are not there simply because they need something from you. Friends do not disappear when everything is good, and reappear when they are in distress and they need something from you.

Now let me introduce the factor of change. Even though I tend to think of myself as a pragmatic person, and that change is normal in the cosmos, I have a hard time accepting that. I hate moving before, since that accompanies farewells and the fact that some people I am friends with may not be able to see me again. Ever. So, the most practical solution to the problem is that one should just not have friends at all. Easier goodbyes.

But I have to admit, that is a bad solution. One inevitably makes friends across time. So I suppose I took a new strategy: to be proactive in friendship, and to try to preserve the friendship even though people move on and away.

But, change is still in the picture, and sometimes, people change even though you are still here. You start to wonder, whether this person is still the person that became your friend a couple of years ago. And sometimes, one gets surprised at the difference. One wonders whether this is the thing that one signed up for back in the days.

See, the thing is, it makes me wonder whether I am still a friend, if I am treated like I was unwanted for three months. Then, three months later, I am wanted again. Hooray! I am sure there was a logical explanation for that, but then, I find myself tip-toeing over eggshells and broken glass in the process. I would want to think that other people consider me as a friend because of who I am. So if I need to alter my behavior just to please a "friend", then that would seem ridiculous. I am not a towel, Vicks Vaporub, or any other soothing medication of any kind. Friendships can be a support group, but primarily, it is a partnership of two free-standing, independent people. Yes, it is okay to support each other in times of distress, but it is not the case that one person only makes use of the other whenever one needs the other person. Heck, that is not friendship at all.

In short, I am annoyed, I am irritated, I am hurt. It sucks that of the few times that I open myself up for others to see, then this is the time when someone sticks an emotional knife in my chest and twists it. And I do not know how to process it aside from ranting about it.

(Close-Up of Metal Queue, from my DC Memorials Series)

I Don't Read Minds

Saturday, July 04, 2009

Sometimes, humans are weird. They expect superhuman abilities from other humans.

One such superhuman ability is the ability to read minds. I don't do that, and yet, sometimes, I find myself being accused of being an alien. When in fact, I proudly admit that I do not do things that some humans expect of other humans, like say, not being able to read a fellow human's mind.

Like this one incident for example. Yesterday, I bumped into someone, and we talked about our respective plans for the weekend. I was invited to a cookout by another friend, so I relayed this information. We were to have a cookout, by grilling meat and vegetables, and afterward probably heading out to watch electronically and musically choreographed fireworks. I asked this person what her plan was, and she voiced the fact that she wanted to see the fireworks as well, and she was going alone to watch it.

Now we left it at that, or at least I thought we left it at that. But no, I got an email from this person saying that I should have invited her to the fireworks, because I should have read into that encounter that she was heading alone and wanted company. I emailed back saying that first of all, it is not my gig: I am not the host, and we are not sure whether we were going to see fireworks or not.

The thing is, I do not understand why some people expect other people to know what they want. I have nothing against this person, I am not mad at all, but I am perplexed at how other people cannot bring themselves up to say it out in the open what they want. Instead, it's as if there is this script, this invisible script that only the other person knows, and that if you disobey the lines in the script, you get written off.

Sometimes, I really wish that there were LED moving message boards on top of people's heads, so that you can just read what they are thinking and then everything would be fine. But no, sometimes, human interactions are turned into this eternal guessing game, and there are consequences, since if you guess it wrong, then people would be sour.

Humans are an enigmatic bunch.

(Metal Queue, from my DC Memorials Series)

Becoming Wiser with Indian Names

Friday, July 03, 2009

For the past few days, I have been learning a lot about Indian surnames. Why? Well, one reason is because I have two Indian roommates. And another is because I have an Indian surname guru on speed dial that I can easily consult things with.

So, one of the things that I have learned is that one can tell where the person comes from, just by hearing what the surname is. And upon looking it up in the Internet, sure enough, there are even people who charted all the names and the associated geographical area within India. Wow, I am impressed. I suppose this isn't the norm in the Philippines: when I hear a surname, I cannot place it within the map. Unless, of course, we are talking about very Tagalog names, like Dimaculangan (one who will always have plenty) or Macatangay (one that will stray others away), in which I have a very good hunch that it comes from the province of Batangas.

Anyway, aside from place of origin, apparently, one can tell what caste the person comes from. Not only that, one can tell what profession the family traditionally has. All of this information makes a good trivial pursuit when one is getting sick of looking at the dissertation proposal.

However, I find it a little disturbing that a lot of these information can be gleaned just by hearing one's name. With one name comes plenty of stereotypes, and all the images that these stereotypes carry just pop into another person's head just by hearing what one's surname is. In a way, I find that somehow disturbing. I'd rather be known by what I do and who I am, instead of what my name means traditionally.

But hey, I suppose that is simply human nature, to know where one is from. After all, that's one of the first questions people ask whenever they encounter someone who comes from the same country as one is. I bumped into a Filipino in Lima's Jorge Chavez International Airport last year, as I was heading back from my backpacking trip. One of the first questions he asked was where I was from in the Philippines. It is just a strong desire, to know where one is from, that we ask that to compatriots we meet overseas. However, the Filipino naming system isn't as predictable as the Indian naming system, given the fact that back in time, the Spaniards changed all the names of the Filipinos. They had a book, entitled Catálogo alfabético de apellidos, which listed possible surnames in the country, and people had to pick one. This was done for census and tax purposes.

Anyway, so yeah. I am wiser now with respect to Indian names. Yay!

(Man and Radio, from my DC Memorials Series)

You Have One Minute to Solve this Puzzle...

Thursday, July 02, 2009

...otherwise you're dead.

The other day, I saw one rather interesting movie. It was entitled La habitacion de Fermat, and yes, it was in Spanish. It is a thriller (some sources say it is a horror flick, but I never saw any gory sequences) where in a small room, four mathematicians get trapped and they had to solve various mathematical puzzles within one minute, otherwise, the room gets smaller and so they would get crushed.

So, I enjoyed watching the movie, and the character development was good too. I suppose I like these psychological thrillers once in a while, since in this flick, all the action occurs within the emotional and mental dynamics of the various characters, since the film reveals various connections between the players, something that one does not expect right at the outset of the film.

So, here are some puzzles to solve.

1. If you have two hourglasses, one that is 4 minutes long and the other being 7 minutes long, how can you precisely measure a temporal length of 9 minutes?

2. Suppose there is a room that has a lightbulb inside, and three switches outside. One cannot turn the switches on or off without shutting the door. How can one determine which switch activates the lightbulb without entering the room more than once?

3. Suppose there are three boxes of sweets. One box contains mint, one box contains caramel, and the third box contains a mixture. They are all labeled, but they are all labeled incorrectly. What is the minimum number of tastes that one should do in order to determine the correct contents of the three boxes?

(Roosevelt Wall, from my DC Memorials Series)

Year 5

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

You may have noticed that the title changed. Yes, this blog has been here for four straight years, and is now entering its fifth year of continual publishing.

Yay!

Plenty of things have happened for the past four years. This blog started just as a repository of thoughts of mine, especially when I was about to embark on another page in life, such as entering graduate school. You know, the excitement of being by myself for the first time, for real this time, instead of just pretend, and the fact that I am actually doing things of my own accord now instead of just because it was the expected move for my part.

The past four years have been very interesting. In fact, calling it interesting is an understatement. The past four years have been a series of firsts. The past four years saw the first time I actually traveled on my own, the first time I had to deal with certain growing pains, the first time I saw places I never thought I would reach. The past four years saw me getting lost in the middle of a continent I haven't been to before. It also saw me finding who I really am, and finally able to think as I am, instead of just following a prescribed script.

So, what is in store for the fifth year? I honestly do not know. In the past, the future has always been settled. When one finishes first grade, there is second grade, then third grade, then so on. After elementary school is middle school, then high school. And after high school, there's college. After college, there's graduate school. It seemed that everything until now has been planned, or at least, there is a selected course. A stereotypical next step.

But not anymore.

The future is open, I suppose. There isn't any other logical next step after graduate school. Yes, there's employment, but that is still a huge swath of the unknown. After I get my degree (which I envision in the next two years), I could either go and hunt for a job in academia and get employed in a university. Or I can get employed in the industry (say a research institute). Or I can totally do something different instead, like travel the world and write for Lonely Planet or National Geographic. The possibilities are endless. And because of that, sometimes I feel scared, since there isn't a logical next step.

But heck, that I suppose is also the beauty of it. People simply want to be certain of the future, in fact, plenty of people consult fortune tellers and psychics just in order to have a fake glimpse of the future. But hey, being undefined and unpredictable is definitional for the future.

So yeah. Welcome to the fifth year. Sit back and read what happens next.

(Other Side, from my DC Memorials Series)

My Baby Likes Carmina Burana

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

So I have come to the realization that Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is beneficial for my baby's health (yes, personification is a totally normal procedure in my world view, for further information, read here and here).

Anyway, like what I have been mentioning before, I sometimes find myself in a slump, in a hard time writing and going forward. Don't get me wrong: conducting research for me is fun. I like coming up with concepts to test and devising experiments to test them. But when it comes to reporting the whole thing, and writing up the stuff, then I sometimes find myself stuck that I don't find myself writing, and instead find myself thinking about the immortality of the crab.

Anyway, so I find myself doing that every now and then, and so to feel a sense of progress, I try at least to add or revise a page of the second draft of my dissertation proposal. But today, I inadvertently tried something different.

What I did was plug my earphones and stream Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

And boy, what a difference it made.

I consider this piece to be one of my most favorite pieces to listen to. I had the opportunity to listen to this live three years ago, in Prague. And it happens that the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus are performing this piece this coming July 11, so I even organized a little group consisting of my friends to attend this event with me. Anyway, I never tire of hearing this piece, so I decided to put it on while working. And voila! I found myself adding five additional pages to my second draft. A huge improvement! And I still have more to add. Perhaps the Latin singing just has a weird influence on my thought patterns, and I can actually think and type and move forward with this endeavor.

The thing is, writing a dissertation is a me-against-myself battle. Self-discipline is a huge prerequisite. And I suppose my brain cannot handle the sound of silence, since I often find myself irritated if I constantly sit down for long periods of time and try to work without hearing something. Maybe, my brain's right hemisphere wants something to do while the left hemisphere does my analytical processes. So for best results, it seems that I need to feed both my left and right hemispheres with something to do at the same time, and Carmina Burana seems to work perfectly.

(Roosevelt on Wheelchair, from my DC Memorials Series)

Cookout in the Rain

Monday, June 29, 2009

I never had the concept that summers would invite thunderstorms. We've been having these blitzkrieg thunderstorms every other day: in the morning, the sun would be up, and you would be tempted to just leave your umbrella at home. After all, it's hot, and the sun is shining, and there are no clouds at all in the midst. Why would it rain?

But it does. Suddenly, the clouds go creeping in from the horizon, and then the whole sky darkens. The sun disappears, and the thunder rolls and the lightning strikes.

Then after a few hours, it all subsides again.

Like yesterday, when I got invited to a friend's house for a cookout. We already had the grill out, the tent was already set up, and the food was prepared. Then the clouds appeared and we got wet.

I suppose my idea of summer is hot and humid. The thunderstorms aren't really part of my summer conceptual repertoire. But apparently, here, it is. And I am quite surprised that even after living here for four years, I still find that surprising. Oh wait, I suppose during the summer of 2006, I was in the Czech Republic. And in the summer of 2007, I was in Ecuador and the Philippines. And in the summer of 2008, I was in Peru, Denmark, and Hungary.

Oops.

I suppose this is the first summer in which I am actually here. Actually here because I need to work on this stupid dissertation. So yeah, rain or shine, I am here. Let's see if next year fares better.

(Entrance to the Roosevelt Memorial, from my DC Memorials Series)