Biscuitrat

I know I'm not a hopeless case

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:10:00 -0600

I’ve just about lost my patience with a number of things, so I thought I might as well pour them out with the disclaimer that I haven’t slept well recently, and really, all I want from the world at this point is a cupcake or a strawberry donut:

In no particular order

People who call themselves “social media experts,” but their advice consists of telling people to use social media sites? Wasn’t that implied? Seriously.
Business-y words (a lot of business-y things, actually). Marketing, branding, and a host of others. People use them without knowing what they mean, or proceed to use them in all of their conversations. It is possible to overuse certain aspects of the English language.
Weak handshakes.
People who think weak handshakes actually imply something about a person, other than that they have weak handshakes.
The idea that a perception or first impression is absolute.
Cobras. Why, do you actually like cobras?
Young adult novels.
Arrogance, especially arrogance as a result of authority, and especially especially arrogance without any privilege or authority.
People who look down on other people for any reason and justify themselves in doing so

Those are some pretty generic complaints about society. But none of them bothers me quite as much as someone telling me my major is useless. I am, quite happily, a Classics major — and while it’s annoying having to explain what that is to people, most of whom assume something about literature or “learning languages,” and assume that that’s all there is to it. The reason I chose Classics is because it contains programs of language study and history and literature and anthropology/archaeology. Those are all fields I was interested in before I came to UT, and I was happy that what I loved doing before I got to UT was still viable, and more importantly, a denser subject than I knew it to be.

We’ve being doing this thing at my school called “Career Week” recently, in an effort to get students thinking about their future careers and what they want to do when they graduate. I think the intent is noble: the events publicize the fact that there are other options after college than getting a job immediately. As a result, I sat through a few panels for Classics majors (there aren’t many of us) and Plan II majors (it’s an interdisciplinary honors program/major — that’s the simplest explanation I can give). And I left them awestruck. Both panels told me, essentially, that Plan II and Classics were both augments, and that what I learned in them wouldn’t be directly applicable to any career. They were, essentially, bragging points — resume boosters.

Here’s my take. Plan II is better as a buffer, certainly. If you’re doing a Plan II major, chances are you’ll end up double majoring anyway, because you’ll be taking courses in a preferred field of study, and ideally come out of it with tons of credits. Then again, you could spend the whole time you’re in Plan II enjoying Plan II for what it is, and take courses in so many different areas of study that you can’t even keep them straight in your head. Even this is admirable, and that’s what I love about my honors program.

The thing is, Classics is an actual, full-fledged major. It is by no means an augment. It is something you do for four years. There is a structured, focused course of study, and your degree lends you a certain credibility in all sorts of fields. Incidentally, not even all of the advisors really know what a Classics major is, but it amounts to this: all of the advisors assume is that you won’t be one of the people who ends up going into academia — which is legitimate — but still, the point shouldn’t be to tell someone that their whole course of study won’t get them a “real” job, or to convince them that they have to start exploring all of their interests, in case they find an unusual talent for birdsong or making tiny, mechanical foxes that they want to do for the rest of their life. It’s like saying, “While you were too busy translating Latin, you forgot how much you loved microwaves, until this specific moment when you were making popcorn, and you dropped what you were doing (mostly the popcorn) and went to work for General Electric.” Who does that kind of story benefit? Certainly not those of us who love what we’re doing beyond belief.

I know that, when I graduate, I want to spend some time getting graduate degrees — hopefully a Ph.D., if I’m not burned out at that point. And then I want to do some combination of teaching and writing professionally. It’s really that simple. I won’t make a lot of money — I’m fine with that. If I get a job doing something I don’t like, I’m going to be miserable. Don’t tell me that my major will lead me straight to a desk job with TPS reports and water coolers. Because that’s my choice, and mine alone.

We shine with brightness

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:20:00 -0600

I don’t really talk about poetry very much, nor do I write a lot of it. I usually leave that sort of stuff to Lindsay, because she’s got me beat when rhyme and rhythm are concerned. But nonetheless, I love it to pieces.

I rather like Petrarch and Dante, but in the late Renaissance, sonnets and odes about love and lost love and being sad about lost love start becoming excruciatingly common place, and the tedium of it bores me. I’m going to go ahead and blame England for this one, but come the late 18th and early 19th-centuries, poets like Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Byron start redeeming the sins of the lovelorn — or at least making it more palatable. But I love modern poetry (I’m going to define this as just poems of the 20th century, for simplicity’s sake) just a bit more. I can’t explain it. I know that, for every Ezra Pound or Anne Sexton, there are a thousand, terrible, modern poets.

So I went and scoured the internet for my favorite examples of modern poetry. Sometimes, I picked poems I have read many, many times before. Other times, I stumbled upon a work I liked by an author I had only read in passing before, and found something new to love and appreciate. My compendium includes Eliot, Neruda, Sexton, Millay, Sandburg, and Plath. As you’ve probably noticed, I keep fiddling with the poems I selected, because I keep forgetting which ones I liked, and I keep finding new ones I like even more. Many of these poems are merely excerpts (marked with an …), but I hope you like them!

T.S. Eliot

These are actually two of my favorite Eliot poems. Both Marina and Ash Wednesday are lyrical, solemn, and beautiful, and are some of Eliot’s more accessible poems. I love The Wasteland personally, but it is very abstract. So there we are:

Marina (…)

What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger‚ Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.

Ash Wednesday (…)

VI. Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Sylvia Plath

I actually hadn’t read much Sylvia Plath prior to this post, but I wasn’t surprised to find a lucid, eloquent voice, even in times of bitterness, anger, and anguish.

Sonnet: To Eva (…)

This was a woman : her loves and stratagems
Betrayed in mute geometry of broken
Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,
And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.

Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.

The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans
To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.

Candles (…)

They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they’ll ignore

A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye
In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,
And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.
Daylight would be more judicious,

Giving everybody a fair hearing.
They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon.
This is no time for the private point of view.
When I light them, my nostrils prickle.
Their pale, tentative yellows

…

They mollify the bald moon.
Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.
The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.
In twenty years I shall be retrograde
As these drafty ephemerids.

I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.
How shall I tell anything at all
To this infant still in a birth-drowse?
Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening.

Pablo Neruda

I read Neruda for the first time in English, senior year of high school. I took a poem in the original Spanish and set about translating it into English via Latin. For the life of me, I can’t remember what that poem was, but I found one about a penguin, so that will have to suffice:

Magellanic Penguin (…)

I was without doubt the child bird
there in the cold archipelagoes
when it looked at me with its eyes,
with its ancient ocean eyes:
it had neither arms nor wings
but hard little oars
on its sides:
it was as old as the salt;
the age of moving water,
and it looked at me from its age:
since then I know I do not exist;
I am a worm in the sand.

The reasons for my respect
remained in the sand:
the religious bird
did not need to fly,
did not need to sing,
and through its form was visible
its wild soul bled salt:
as if a vein from the bitter sea
had been broken.

Stuck true to your obsessions

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:35:00 -0600

It’s almost the end of January, and I’m already setting myself deadlines. My calendar is already pockmarked with various page numbers, chapters, quizzes to be completed — and this is just for the next few weeks. On top of that, I’m going to make myself sit down and have a finished, draft copy of my novel ready by June 30th. Right now, I’m sitting at about 83,000 words (thanks to my 50,633 from this year’s NaNoWriMo.)

This seems outrageous, mostly to me, because usually this is where I stop a draft and start over completely. I’ve done it twice before, and I’m terrified that I’m going to pause halfway through, reach back to the beginning, and make my protagonists leprechauns or something, and then the rest of the story wouldn’t work because they weren’t small, mystical, or Irish. This honestly haunts my every waking thought.

Where I stand right now, I’m about ¹/₃rd through the novel. All of the exposition is done, most of the characters have been introduced, everything is screwed up, and a lot of other things are in motion, namely death and destruction and probably some evil babies or something. I’m not quite caught up there. Now, 50,000 words in a month is remarkably doable if you sacrifice a bit of sleep and tranquilize your control-freak inner editor, who says that “squirm” is a much better word than “wiggle,” and that you really don’t know anything about botany, except for what you looked up on Wikipedia to make sure you weren’t putting tropical plants in a tundra setting. (Did you know there’s such a thing as an “Air Potato?”).

But goodness, I need to write at least 100,000 words in five months without slacking off. The word count doesn’t scare me as much as the idea that I will have to constantly motivate myself over half a year to get this done. Considering that formatting alone will take me a month and a crate of Kleenexes and maybe some Lasik, And editing — oh boy, editing. Editing will probably take me the rest of my life. I really don’t have any time to waste. Other than the time I’m taking to write about this. If only novel writing was this easy.

I have learned one thing. If you let the story just race out of you, the plot usually comes together on its own — roughly, but it’s still viable. I’ve gotten away with preparing one-line outlines, or none at all, and my chapters seem to have seamed themselves together. Additionally, because I’ve been working with these characters for so long, I’ve stopped trying to reinvent the characters themselves. They’re set in stone. They won’t change, even if I tried to. But I can change their roles. I leave blanks in my plot for certain roles to be filled, and when I’m close enough to the scene, the right name fits into place. That way, everything that needs to happen is taken care of, and hopefully by the right character.

Editing this beast is going to be hilarious. I’ll post snippets along the way. Here’s one for the road:

“Mercy!” shouted Murron, shaking in her white robe. Elodan did not look for her, but continued to wait for the cold, sharp blade to fall across his neck and sever him from his body. He would live but a few moments after that, his eyes blinking closed and his mouth falling open, forming words that no amount of air could voice. He would say, humbly, honestly, “Show me no mercy.” When the last word rang out in the air, he thought, Here comes the darkness. Here come the nameless gods out to receive me, with their vessels and banners and knowing eyes. They will say that Elodan must live a thousand more lives, must be born lame, blind, and withered, cursed beyond belief for his sins. So too must Ekar Kamo, Elodan would whisper, and the spirits would agree with their heads bowed.

But perhaps, one would add, he has already undertaken his penance.

You are not infallible, Elodan of Trea.

Then what hope have I of mercy? he would plead.

“Mercy!” she cried again, clutching at Ekar’s elbow. The chancellor turned and lowered his sword, watching her quizically. Jeffard covered his mouth in with his hand to hide his surprise and abject terror.

Additionally

I took a crack at illustrations, and I threw some up (more or less) on some of my pages. I’m not sure what aesthetic I want to convey. I always have the hardest time illustrating things for myself, because I could do almost anything and get away with it, almost being the key word. I tried a little grunge, a little bathroom stall, a little whimsy. I wanted them to be somewhat rough, so wherever I’ve colored outside of the lines, it’s not my fault — I mastered neat coloring very early on (except with paints) — I did it on purpose.

Let me know how you like them!

And still this emptiness persists

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:02:25 -0600

There was a moment last week when I thought that I could honestly switch to WordPress and have no problem with it, but every time I design with it, I feel like I’m cobbling something together instead of using the defined framework. It’s a little hard to tell, because sometimes you find regular PHP beside template tags. Granted, it works, and that should be all that matters. But I do love that Movable Type defines most of the things you will ever need for your site in advance. It just helps cement my choice of CMS a little more thoroughly.

There are a few things I would change, and a few of these I have definitely brought up before.

Features
This one is a little nitpicky, since I have no complaints about the bulk of Movable Type’s built-in features, but did you know that Movable Type hasn’t had proper article pagination until Version 4.3 (please correct me if I’m wrong)? I’m talking a simple previous/next entries link at the bottom of the page. I racked my brain trying to find a solution to work on my poor little 4.1 installation, but all of my best efforts failed. I tried about four plugins, and none of them managed to do anything either. Which brings me to my next point:
Plugins
I don’t know what happened to the developer community for Movable Type, but there’s not too many of them left. Just for comparison’s sake, WordPress has 7,965 available plugins. Movable Type has a mere 910. I’ll leave the guffawing and math to you guys. In the mean time, I might start writing my own, although this seems like a bad idea all over. Now, quantity usually doesn’t matter, and there are quite a few quality plugins on the community site, but maybe only one working version, or perhaps two, of the same sort of script. What ends up happening is that you don’t have alternatives to turn to if nothing works out. And when you really want help, the place you turn to first is the community forum:
Support
I can rant and rave about this at length. Fewer users means fewer knowledgeable users, which means fewer people who have answers rather than more questions. It really keeps coming down to the size of the community. You can have all the functionality in the world built into your CMS, but if no one’s constantly surging ahead and syncing it with the latest technologies, it won’t matter at all. There’s not a great deal of dignity in being just behind the baseline.
External Help
A lot of the really great sites for Movable Type help that I mentioned in one of my previous posts, like Movable Tweak, Learning Movable Type, and Movalog have either stopped updating or just don’t work. It’s always a good sign if the company that makes the product has the best support site for it, but it’s slightly more tragic when it’s the only one around. I mean, where do you go to when there’s nothing else?

Solutions

I encourage developers, programmers, and curious minds to try sparking some new life into MovableType.org. It’s a wonderful platform, and while most people aren’t comfortable with Perl/CGI — that’s it, isn’t it? PHP is more accessible? — it doesn’t look too bad. Hell, if I say I’m going to try it, it can’t be that bad.

I think a lot of you guys will get the impression that I’m just punishing myself by using MT, by wearing myself out until I just shiver and hallucinate about WordPress all day, but it’s just because I really like this system, and I hate to see it wear away. Six Apart is doing their part by creating a brand new version which, aside from the admin panel woes, and the catering towards a community site rather than a personal blog — hence the word “site” throughout. Now I think it’s my turn to chip in.

Or perhaps, this is as good as it gets.

Supposed to fire my imagination

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:10:00 -0600

I am happy to announce that my new design is up and running fairly well. This morning, I made a dynamic menu/title (the former, thanks to this article, the latter a result of some very basic programming — but I’m not here to brag). I’ve been working on this for about a month, maybe a little longer, and the final result is a great deal more polished than my original mockup — but it’s not that different either.

My process

Most of the mockups I’ve ever made in Photoshop are unfinished in some critcal way. Maybe the color aren’t quite right — that always takes a lot of tweaking once you have to see them all over the screen — or maybe that logo isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe it’s not your logo at all, it’s a logo that was swapped for yours at birth, and now it’s a hunchback with tentacles, and you don’t know where you’ve gone wrong as a parent, but it’s happened, and now those angst-ridden teenage years are coming on fast and—

That was not the metaphor I had in mind. Moving on…

Mockups and markup

A lot of people have probably already read Meagan Fisher’s article on mockups vs. markup, and if you haven’t, do it right now. Photoshop mockups are extremely inflexible. While I think it’s important to play around in Photoshop just to get your bearings, know that 90% of the work you will be doing will be with markup. Every now and then after I exported the images for my design, I’d return to Photoshop to grab a color (although Colourlovers helped out a lot), or refine an icon, but that was it. When you know what you want to do, Photoshop is pretty much useless.

So as soon as I got out of the whirlwind of possibility that is Photoshop with a decent design, I churned out Version One, which will never be seen by human eyes; then, Version Two, which is similar, but better; Version Three was nearly there. I broke away from the vertical menu to tabs, which I hadn’t done in a while. At any rate, it seemed to suit the theme, and left the sidebar open for content — delicious, delicious content.

Trial and error

I initially tried to get pointed tabs at the top of the page, but the varying widths of my tabs made that a bit more trouble than it was worth. I compensated by…using -moz-border-radius around the place. Because those things totally go hand in hand.

I hadn’t tried rgba before this design, and I wasn’t sure if it was worth it. Within seconds of applying it on the navigation (I thought it would be unwieldy and superfluous everywhere else), I changed my mind. It is extremely easy to use, and very pretty if you use it right.

I also tried out Cufón and @font-face for the first time. I stuck with @font-face, because it was the easiest to manipulate. I could change weights and fonts without having to upload a new Javascript file every time. But I have to say, Cufón is very neat. If you’re using sIFR, Cufón is infinitely easier to use. I mean, for chrissakes, there’s a generator. And it renders very smooth. @font-face renders a bit choppily (this might be caused by other things as well), but unlike with Cufón, I won’t have to worry about selecting text or :hover (this is apparently supported, but I couldn’t get it to work).

Then, I thought about upgrading from Movable Type 4.1 to Movable Type 5, which was released a couple days ago. After a few minutes of playing with my installation, I decided not to. The interface is gray and boring, the navigation is a bit confusing. I’m not sure why they got rid of MT 4’s UI, because it seems infinitely better.

So that’s a wrap! I have a few more things to clean up about this design, but I’m pretty happy with it. Let me know what you think! :)

You never know, it could be great

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:49:11 -0600

I always expect some radical shift in scenery when we cross a state border — the tall, thin trees of Georgia and Alabama and then, suddenly, in the space it takes to get through my entire Queen: Live at Wembley DVD (yes, I own it. Yes, it’s awesome), the Mississippi River is rolling along before us. Louisiana hits us with bright lights and casinos, an overuse of the “-eaux” spelling (for example, “Geaux” instead of “Go”, which I find embarrassingly superfluous). And after that, there’s no point in paying attention anymore, because Texas is a few miles ahead, and there’s nothing to see there that I haven’t already seen.

It disappoints me though, when states just fade into other states, when you cross a border and nothing changes — nothing noticeable. After some time, you might see mountains, which I always freak out about, but the sky doesn’t change colors. Weird animals don’t start popping up behind trees and chasing your car off of their ancestral land (Tennessee has a horrible problem with badgers cropping up in housing developments and chasing off the residents — I just thought you should know). There’s often little more than a welcome center (I’m keeping track of the good and bad ones — that was aimed at you, Alabama), a cluster of fast food places and gas stations, and then I-10 stretches out again like an endless road.

But I’m back! A week in Georgia, and a few days in Dallas, and tomorrow I’ll be back in Houston, hoping for fabled snow, and getting some work done at last. In the past week, I’ve read about six hundred pages (The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice, and The Gathering by Anne Enright), which makes me incredibly happy. There’s nothing better than being able to immerse yourself in a book all day, to read late into the night, and wake up dreaming about the characters. Except when they’re characters in an Irish tragedy, like The Gathering. That was an odd dream.

I’ve made a few adjustments to my test redesign, viewable here. I’m not sure how I feel about a tabbed menu. I think I’ve run that river dry, and the more I try to come back to it, the more banal it feels. They’re not even very interesting tabs. What makes them pretty at all is the fact that I threw in some rgba — which I have been using all over the place now, because it’s so versatile and easy — and, well, there you have it.

What's been on my mind

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:58:13 -0600

Well, there I went again. Easing into the old, lazy routine and saying, “Oh well, one more week won’t do any harm.” Now, the rest of September wasn’t very bad. Nor was October, when I went to Austin City Limits and said, “Well, I can get used to this.” Wrong. In swooped November like some sort of winged mastadon, and stole me away to its horrible nest of tusk-toothed flying monsters to entertain the prehistoric demon spawn. Here’s what I’ve been working on that has kept me from doing anything productive with this site for the past three (THREE!) months. My humblest apologies. I do not speak Mastadon.

November — NaNoWriMo and everything else

I started NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again, and I was determined to win. Two-three hours of my day gone instantly. But I WON IT! Incidentally, the most useful program I used was not some fancy-shmancy writing program (like DarkRoom, which I have always loved), but Google Docs. That’s right! A simple word processor. All that blank space in any other program would have made me have all sorts of allergic reactions (for example, to obligation and responsibility — I have these anyway, but they’re mostly infrequent). Aside from the wonky word count-alyzer, Google Docs was actually fantastic for my productivity. And I got some pretty sweet writing out of it. Here’s a snippet:

In a high corner of the old house, the widowed recluse spun her spider-silk and gossamer - or so the creaks and whispers of the floorboards suggested, and the fragile mist at the window. But her own footfalls were silent. The servants would have called her “Lady Arete,” but over time, she became merely Arete, the mad, old woman in the high, old room. She was attended by her own woman, the daughter of a once noble family of Madra, but over time, as she lost her sight and her beauty and her good graces, she fled in the widow’s company to Kaladan. Now, there was no need for fine dresses or jewelry. The widow spun her own cloth — all white, as it had been for many years — and wore a simple, braided cord around her neck with a knotted metal pendant. Her servant, blind as she was, lingered in the doorway of the room and recounted, when she heard them, the whispers of passing nobles, the laughter of the little princess, and the passage of the emperor Rodim from room to room.

Then, I actually had to do stuff (here I am, reduced to complaining about homework). For everything except Logic, I had a game plan. With Logic, I either messed around with some haphazard guesswork or sat around bawling for a bearded little elf man to turn my quantifiers into gold. You’ll just have to guess which tactic actually worked.

One of the things I discovered about Logic is that it isn’t very logical. My intuitive leap was usually not correct, except in some very simple situations. And proofs are horrible in all situations. But that’s over and done with, and I should make some sort of decent grade in there. And then, never again!. It’s funny how many times I’ve told myself that only to have a similarly horrible class crawl up to my door to say, “Hello.”

“Hello,” indeed.

Other stuff

I made a live development section of my site. It’s called Sandbox — for obvious reasons, and also because I never get tired of using the Sandbox theme for WordPress. I have two projects in the works right now. One of them is a new design for this site; the other is a little site for my friend Erica. Both of them use Cufón, which I have found both extremely easy to use and extremely flexible. Now, some notes:

I haven’t used @font-face yet. That’s next on my list.
I don’t think Cufón is suitable for body text. It works fabulously in headings though, which is where I will continue to use. The lack of selectability is a problem, but not a huge one. And you can use links in Cufón just fine!

Feel free to check those out and leave me some notes/tips!

In closing

I hope I don’t have too many more of these doldrum periods. It’s boring for you guys and it’s boring for me. But it’s tons of fun for demon mastadons, so you guys keep your eyes open, okay? Okay.

This repetition...

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:27:03 -0600

Sophomore year is about twice as much work as freshman year, half as much expectation, and about a quarter the hope. Oh, and there’s that pig fever going around. What is it? Porcine ebola? Something like that.

I remember stepping onto campus, confident that I was going to turn everything around, succeed in things I had never succeeded in before. College picked me up by my letter jacket (it gets cold in Austin too. This might be the single most expensive piece of clothing I own, so I guilt myself into wearing it more than would be fashionably appropriate), set me down on a patch of lawn that will never grow grass because a) bird are hungry and b) there are a lot of birds, and set me straight on the facts. A difficult part of college is the expectation that you will major in something that will turn into a career directly. You are literally studying a career, and then you will enter an industry. There’s a sort of comfort in this. Your path is predetermined, but not necessarily regimented. When I thought I finally found direction at the end of last semester, mired in chemical formulas I never wanted to see again, and English papers I slaved over but completely missed the point on, I guess all I found was a justification for my state of mind.

So I changed my state of mind. I’m going to spend my four years here studying something I love — not something I barely tolerate, not some means that will justify my preferred end. Then I’ll spend another four years perfecting it. After that, I might spend another three years on a fancy title (Baroness, please). When it comes to work, I could teach or act (badly) or live in an attic writing whimsical poems about hornets (I don’t like hornets, but I’ll try). The point is that I don’t feel pressure any more to find something to do that glorifies me, but at the very least dignifies me. And there are so many things I can do with that outlook.

So maybe there’s a little more hope going around this year than I initially thought. I’ll be back with a much geekier post once these thoughts have run their course! Oh yeah, and watch out for pigs. Much more dangerous than hog rabies.

What's with all the screaming?

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:59:59 -0600

Alright, I’ve been found out. I have a penchant for CAPSLOCK. Call it what you want (by which I mean anything but “cruise control for cool,” because I swear, if I hear that again, the entire nation of Andorra is falling on someone’s house) — Internet Tourette’s, like jamming screeching bats in your ears (I would not recommend this) — it really makes no difference to me. The truth is, a lot of things sound better in caps. Some things are angry, vehement, and ridiculous, and there is no better way to express them. Sure, I’ve tried a certain emphasis, but it feels delicate, vague, and undecided. Try this on for size: Oh God, plague rats!

I think not.

I’m not sure why capslock is so maligned, and perhaps you guys could help me with this, but surely in moderation, even capslock has its uses. Then, of course, there are the people who don’t realize that capslock is a toggle, or were never taught about lowercase. For most of that, I blame idiocy — and to some degree, 1st Grade — but there are a few of us who reserve the right to raise our voices every now and then. I do so when I chat, and when I write. It’s as much a part of me as run-on sentences and the word “frabjous.” And delicious, delicious caramel ice cream.

However aggravating it is to see a wall of CAPS, there isn’t any harm in a CRAP or a GOOD LORD every now and then, religious sensitivities aside. I’m perfectly capable of using a thoughtful lowercase, but some things incense me — better yet, some things make me laugh. And sometimes, I want that to pop out from the sea of insanity that is my writing. Some day you’ll thank me for it. Or egg my house.

Which is why I’m buying a house-zeppelin tomorrow.

I'm not here for your entertainment

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:07:39 -0600

Two months of Indian TV — and if I see another ad for Maasilamani, I will hurt someone badly — have gotten me thinking about the quality of the movies and shows I watched. I said earlier that women only play a few set roles in Indian cinema — housewives, lady cops (which I don’t understand — the other extreme?), and pretty young things in search of love. The thing is, men don’t branch out a ton either: The villains are mustachioed; the heroes, also mustachioed, are either too poor or too proud, or, if right in the middle, have no faults.The same characters wind up doing the same things. I have seen three lady cops now, two businesswomen — but no other professionals — and about ninety housewives. This might be a slight improvement over male characters, many of whom only star as bad guys, husbands, and fiances. But it’s still not very interesting.

The national and international scale

An op-ed piece in The New Indian Express was upset that India’s most successful export (in terms of acclaim), Slumdog Millionaire, wasn’t even directed by an Indian — that India is incapable of producing an Academy Award winner on its own. I agree to some extent. There is a tremendous amount of talent and passion in the industry, but not enough diversity — for me or the Academy. Bollywood produces almost one thousand movies a year, and they’re all virtually the same. Most are about love, some are biopics, and I think it’s telling that one of the best movies to come out of India, Black, was about neither of these things.True, it is an Indian adaptation of The Miracle Worker, and it stars Amitabh Bachchan, the Godfather of Bollywood. But it was different. It’s the same with Lagaan, which was actually nominated for an Oscar in 2001. If you have to tell a story, either tell one that’s been told before and tell it better, or make up something completely new.

That being said, Bollywood has made its name on a totally different foundation than its western equivalents. Bollywood is about song and dance and tradition. It’s not necessarily about reality, but idealization. Bollywood doesn’t do grit and anguish. Nor do I think its movies fit nicely into any one genre. Indian movies have a lot of love, a lot of music, and always a happy ending, which is what people like seeing. Believable? Absolutely not. But mildly stimulating and entertaining if you can get into it.

Forget about all your plans

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:57:28 -0600

Something about the way my house looks now makes me wonder if we’re moving in again, but all of the boxes and piles of objects have settled in their places, creased the new carpet, and just that is enough to tell me it’s not quite the same. There’s no longer the idea that everything has its place — that this bookshelf is best suited to this room, that this painting looks better in the light — but rather, a sense that all of the little objects have migrated and taken up residence in some entirely new place, and they’d be quite hard-pressed to have it any other way.

You see, we’ve remodeled recently, and nothing is quite where we initially had it. Yesterday, I was freaking out after I found the much-used toilet plunger on my bed. I promptly emptied half a bottle of Lysol, and I’m still wondering what the workmen were thinking when they put it there? “What’s this, a fancy bat? Who left it in the bathroom? Let’s put it back where it belongs.”

Good deeds will one day be the death of me.

Enough melodrama. I’m pissed. The light and fan switches upstairs are, surprisingly, no longer connected to the light and fan. The lights don’t go past a stylish “dim” that has me squinting at everything in the vicinity to make sure that the vacuum isn’t really an upright alligator admiring the view from the game room (stranger things have happened; also, I watched some stupid Animal Planet clip on alligators yesterday, so I’m on the alert). My brother’s room has been emptied of almost everything, and I’m not really sure where it went either. Probably my room, which until yesterday, had no walking room. I guess it didn’t help that the first thing I did after moving out was dump the three or four garbage bags of stuff I had on the floor, and two days later, got on a plane and went to India.

Did I mention there was a toilet plunger on my bed?

I’ve watched this remodeling take place in stages, most of them pretty much exemplified by chaos, disorder, and some strange brimstone odor that I blame on the rats in the attic, many of whom turned my bed into a communal crapping ground in our absence. Dear rats, I fondly loathe you.

Stage A (The Problem): “I believe your ceiling is on the floor” or “What an unusual skylight!” (I hate hurricanes)
Stage B (The Plan): “Let’s move all your crap around and make big piles of things! It’s like having a fort, only the towers are made of blenders and things!” (We have a lot of blenders)
Stage C (The Unveiling): “WHERE IS ALL MY SHIT.”

I think the hardest part about how disorganized everything is is that the little things I used to see as constant — the fact, perhaps, that the coffee table would not be on the patio, or that the living room would not be a shrine to the Ravager God, Mail — aren’t quite there anymore. I haven’t seen a lot of this house in the past year, what with the hurricane and the remodeling and then India, but I’m hoping I can put it back together, and that there’s something underneath the layer of old carpet and giant boxes that makes the hard work ahead worthwhile.

I'm so far from my home

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:09:03 -0600

I’m horrible, aren’t I? Edging on three weeks here! One thing I realized is that you shouldn’t take internet access for granted in India. Or electricity (which, you know, if I had half a brain, I would have realized is probably a clear indication of whether or not internet access is available) or water in general. There are a lot of things you have to watch out for. Here, however, is a short treatise on Indian traffic.

Because I want to, dammit…

…is the general rule of thumb. From a pedestrian’s point of view, it’s easy to say, “Well, that man doesn’t care if he runs me over or not, he is clearly a poopty-poopty-pants (this is the height of my insulting career),” but when you’re in a car, you hate pedestrians because they’re slow and always tend to walk right in front of cars. Pedestrians call this “being sneaky.” Cars call this “dumb.” My favorite part of Indian traffic is the auto(-rickshaw), which my mom tells me runs on some elaborate combination of diesel, gasoline, and sometimes kerosene — basically anything that burns. You don’t pay for a smooth ride in an auto, but there’s a certain amount of fun in being in a vehicle that seems liable to collapse or catch on fire at every turn, or get hit by buses.

There are a lot of buses here. Did I mention that? And I hate them all. Huge lumbering indignities to—

Pollution can get pretty bad here. You can see the smoke coming out of all of the different exhaust pipes (some of which point directly at you — ahem, BUSES) every time the lights turn red. Traffic lights used to be a rarity, but six years later, not only is Bangalore obsessed with them (to the point where, if you run a red light, an annoying siren starts playing. Man, we just take photos of people’s cars and blackmail them! So much more fun.), but the city is also instituting a variety of “underpasses” — crazy dip-down ramps, and a light rail which is pushing most traffic into one lane. Not that that doesn’t happen anyway. Neither lanes nor the term “oncoming traffic” really mean anything, which is scary if you’re driving, but hilarious if you’re just watching the chaos from a safe distance.

There are these doldrums in traffic when you don’t smell the coal fires of Indian cars or the harsh firewood scent of everything else, but this soft sandalwood breeze, that might be just as carcinogenic as the rest of it, but for that brief moment, it feels like all of the trees and gardens of this city make a difference. There are some gorgeous gardens and parks in Bangalore, especially around Jayanagar where I’m staying. My one complaint?: I’m pretty sure they won’t let me play on the shiny-metal-ferris-wheel-dohickey, and I really want to.

It seems that I’ve caught everything except Swine Flu at this point (and I ain’t scared of no damn virus, but I am occasionally scared of pigs — you know, when they get bigger than me and there’s that scary glint of hunger in their eyes, and they just stare at you—), and providing I don’t get that and end up in a ridiculous quarantine — which here means that I’ll catch malaria in a hospital, find out I don’t actually have swine flu, and be declared some sort of drug smuggler for the large quantity of quinine I’m going to administer to myself over the hard months to follow.

Like you didn’t expect that though!

I'm having more fun

Tue, 26 May 2009 05:01:13 -0600

I’m in India right now (SURPRISE), and the time difference really only hits me in hindsight. Well, the time difference, and the fact that India is like Austin on meth. Well, meth and other things. Austin on meth is really just everyday Austin. Do not mistake my drug analogies for a lack of fondness. I have reached the end of a long, disappointing, and wearisome semester — thank you, Chemistry and, surprisingly, English, for toying with me until the end. I have absolutely no idea where I’m heading or what I’m doing, so I suppose this nice, long break and next semester will help to clear up the smoke and mirrors of the last few weeks.

People keep asking where we’re visiting, where we’re staying, ARE WE GOING TO SEE THE TAJ MAHAL? We have boring vacations. Most people go to India to tour. My mom comes to India to sit at home, apparently feed baby cows at temples (I approve of this practice. Baby cows rock), and argue about who she’s going to marry my brother Ajay to. Really, she’s the only one with choices, and Ajay will just have to deal with whomever she picks. Additionally, and this is the product of having to watch Indian soap operas all day, I have come to the conclusion that the only role Indian women ever play on television is a housewife. Or, better yet! A SPINSTER! Complete with a shady past that has rendered her completely unmarrigeable. How will she perservere?

So, we haven’t done a ton yet. I think the highlights of yesterday (my first conscious day in India) were as follows:

I MET A DONKEY. The king of donkeys, no less. His name is Bertleby. Unfortunately, the king is shy and conniving, and I was unable to get a picture. Fighting Donkey, my traveling companion, is quite disappointed.
Someone left a plate of some gross stuff on the edge of the street, and my mom told me not to step over it, and that we had God on our side, so we would be alright. In fact, I’m not exactly what that whole episode was about, but I thought it was pretty interesting.
I MET A BABY COW. I should probably reconsider Sandy’s pedigree, because I’m starting to think that cow/Labrador/beagle is a little bit more likely than Labrador/beagle/seal/walrus/heffalump.
My mom told me to touch the other cow’s butt (apparently, this is the standard course of action, and I was completely unaware), while I kept shouting, “SHANI (shah-nee).” That means “poop.” Draw out the vowels for fun. Apparently, Lakshmi’s sacred part of the body is… the butt? Somehow, that seems unfortunate.

I was going to write a long treatise on pedestrianism in India, but I think a nap would suit me better. My point was basically that it’s damn hard and if you want to get anywhere, find a friend with a scooter or take an auto. Better than the ignominy of being hit by a bike or a donkey. Except for Bertleby.

They don't speak for us

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:59:59 -0600

I realize that not updating for a month in no way ingratiates me to my readers or to the paltry few who stumble across this site with a crazed-twilit shine to their eyes. I think my previous style of posting on things — that is, writing commentary on interesting things or about my daily life, which I generally boil down to the interesting particulars — isn’t quite working. I almost feel as though I want to turn this into more of a journal — this would mean more regular updates, but on the other hand more vagueness, snippets of my writing, some general observations. I’m getting a little tired of scanning the Internet for something I can cast a second-hand gaze on. And moreover, I want my voice back. I don’t think I’ve had it for some time now, but I do miss it.

Academic writing and stylistic integrity

My English teachers from elementary school on tried to train us as students to find our own literary voice. In elementary school, that meant paragraphs, carrying a thought across an entire story or paper; in short, focus. In middle school, we lost conventions like the “five-paragraph essay” (and good riddance to that!), came face-to-face with literary analysis of plot, style, function. In high school, we were warned that college professors wanted only a certain thing from our writing. These were my most inventive years. Now, here at college, I feel that this muse has begun to peter off. One of my weakness is that I often choose style rather than content. This is easily remedied, I told myself. I just have to balance the aesthetic with the analytical.

This worked for a time. But this semester especially, that balance is shifting all the more from expression to convention. And this is a terrible change for me. Just the other day, I was told to write the words, “In this paper, I will argue that…” into my final English paper. I have not heard those words for so many years that I hardly think it is possible for those words to appear in the context of an honors English class. My essays for another class keep returning to me with adjectives changed, adverbs altered. These are tools of perception, not truth. If I choose to call a man “brave,” it means that I think he is brave. To cross that out and write, for example, “audacious,” instead is a gross interpretation of what I meant. If I meant audacious, I would have written it — I am very capable of using the English language to suit my needs. But I am not used to being told to take a perspective on something that is not my own.

I have always approached my writing with some degree of rebellion — I thought I was capable of literary criticism (as were so many others) in my senior English class, so I wrote my own analysis of “Ash Wednesday” by T.S. Eliot. I dislike being told what I should write and how I should write it — I think I am old enough, experienced enough to at least phrase an idea in my own words. If my professors don’t find me capable now, what hope do I hold for academic writing I will do in my future?

Because I must mention this

I admit it. I partake of Internet fandom-ry. I recently scooped up an opportunity to see Heather Armstrong (Dooce) talk in Austin — because I would never forgive myself if I couldn’t bother myself to take a bus (for free) and plop myself down in a bookstore ten minutes away. The whole trip actually cost me around $26, because in a fit of book-inspired mania, I had to buy a copy of It Sucked and Then I Cried, which so far reads a bit more like her blog than I would like, but it entertaining nonetheless. I mean, the blog is what convinced me to keep reading in the first place, isn’t it? I was fascinated that she sits through and reads every single comment on her site — just so you have an idea, every time you refresh the comment thread on any one of her articles, the numbers skip from 15 to 68 to 107 to 163, and so on. For reference purposes, I read the five I get annually, and I don’t think I can even comprehend the amount of energy Heather needs to make it through to the end of any of the threads. Mindboggling.

A note in conclusion

Treat this post as a disclaimer. I might be experimenting in the next few days with more literary types of content. I still adore commentary, but I would rather it not be the focus of the sight. I was misguided; now I see. Here’s to frequency and quality, and may they never again be forced to compete against one another. Or, better yet, here’s to cheese, because you really can’t go wrong with cheese.

Believe in reinvention

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:08:55 -0600

I thought I would never be able to say this, but I finally beat The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I ended up playing a lot of my little neighbor’s game because he couldn’t get past the beginning at all. And while I found that bit with the cat very frustrating, I think on a whole this game was one of the most fun and challenging I’ve played so far. I haven’t played too many games all the way through, so this isn’t as special a designation as one would think, but on with the review! Some spoilers are ahead, so be careful!

Controls and movement

The Wii is some sort of miracle machine. Playing Zelda on it feels so intuitive (Calculus made me hate this word, but here it is again). I was convinced that I would get carpal tunnel just from the final battle with Ganon, but it is so much easier to kill people when you don’t have to hit [B] all the time and you have that freedom of movement from the remote and nunchuk. The only things that I found jerky about the controls are the bits where you get to ride a giant boar, and you hit [A] to dash, but I imagine that giant boars going at very high speeds are not very agile animals, so I’m fine with that.

I wasn’t very comfortable with Wolf Link, but this is probably the case for a lot of people. Although enemies fall just as fast regardless of which form you’re using, I always found it easier to switch to Link for fights when I could. Still, the best way to handle the twilight beasts is Wolf Link’s AOE. It takes a lot less precision than Link’s charged spin attack. Additionally, I thought that the sensing options were very interesting. I scared the pants off of all of Hyrule Castle Town by tracking the medicine scent in broad daylight, but there aren’t any hard feelings that I know of.

Story

Although Link is always going to be the archetypal fantasy hero, at least Twilight Princess managed to deliver some maturity to the series. I thought the Zant subplot was pretty cool, although having two villains diminishes them both. Still, the Zant fight was very fun. I had to remember how to take care of him in all of the stages, but I picked up on it decently fast. Alright, GameFaqs helped quite a bit in some areas. I usually didn’t use it for boss fights though — only when I hit dead ends in dungeons. That’s a little better, right? Please say yes. I can’t repent my sins now that I’ve beaten the game.

The twilight

This game looked gorgeous on a whole, but nothing moreso than the swirling, seething darkness that looms over Hyrule in the absence of light. I found it nice and gloomy and creepifying, which I had only noticed before in the Shadow Temple in Ocarina of Time. The portals were especially nice. I kept thinking of the portals to Hell or otherwise in Diablo II. I liked the Twilight Realm a lot. And although I kept screwing up the Giant-Floating-Creepy-Hand bits in the left side of Zant’s (Midna’s?) palace by accidentally dropping the Sol (very clever, Nintendo, very clever) or losing it when I fell down from the floating platforms into the mist.

I also thought it was cool that, whenever you were weighted down and you switched to wolf mode, you discovered, much to your disgust, that you were covered in rats (Ah, I’m covered in raaaats!). And the ghost soldiers and castle ghosts looked so sad! And the pointing! Nice and eerie.

Midna

This storyline could have been fleshed out some more. The game was actually pretty short, if you think about it. This is the first time I can say that I’ve finished most of the side quests (still looking for Agitha’s bugs and finishing up my heart count, and I never do well enough at fishing to try those quests out). I thought Midna was an interesting character, and I liked how she was like Zelda’s aggressive, snarky half. But I also feel like I spent most of the game looking for artifacts that I still didn’t know a ton about, like the Fused Shadows. But I really like how violent the game gets once Midna starts to get more power for herself. The last few fights definitely played up the epic side of the whole game, which I definitely appreciate. And how cool was Ganondorf’s death? That closeup of Zant’s face and then the sudden crank to the left as he died. That was amazing on so many levels.

Miscellaneous

I do have a few lingering thoughts. First, I have to ask: who came up with the Oocca? Never have I seen a more ungainly and disturbing race. First, Ooccoo Jr. is little more than a head with wings, and a creepy head with that. Ooccoo herself is a chicken with a gender-neutral human head, and cold, staring eyes. And the way she scuttles after you when you get into the Sky Cannon, or when she just happens to find herself in pots in your vicinity? I also kept getting lost in the Sky City — really a matter of me getting to areas I wasn’t supposed to be in yet, or missing doors, but trying to do stuff in that area anyway (the area with the boss key, where I really wasn’t thinking at all), but I won’t hold that against them.Although I really want to. The Snowpeak dungeon was also on the hard side, but I made it through alright. And I came out of it with Superb Soup and tons of hearts made from good ol’ homemade Yeti lovin’.

My favorite part was probably that Castle Town was FULLY OCCUPIED! There were people everywhere, and all sorts of nooks and crannies. It just feels more alive than it ever has before. Castle Town in Ocarina of Time was realy just the market square and the set of three alleyways on the left side with the dog lady. Clock Town in Majora’s Mask — which I am now inclined to try again — was exceptionally busy, but all the action happened in the town anyway. In hindsight, Castle Town was more of a happy medium between Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, but still, I loved seeing all of the vendors in the streets and the cacophony in the square.

Hidden Skills

My only complaint is that I never found an occasion to use Mortal Draw. I tried to use it on Ganon, but then he kicked me in the face.

The final battle (countdown?!)

The light baseball was fast, and possessed Zelda was really cool, but Phase One was very easy. Phase Two, the horseback fight, was also easy. I managed to get three hits back to back, one of them just before he summoned his ghost riders. I expected that his riders would be chasing us around rather than trying to knock me off Epona. Phase Three was really cool (although, would a single arrow really hurt Pig Ganon that much?), up until I had to switch to Wolf Link. Sometimes, I would be barely off-center, and instead of Midna’s hair working its magic, I would be knocked off to a side. I decided to make the fight last a bit longer so that I could avoid the charges that weren’t optimal for me, and instead waited until he was right ahead of me. Or I closed my eyes and held [A] down anyway. I did like how heavy Ganon apparently was as Pig Ganon (what? He’s evil!). It took at least five seconds of holding down the control stick on the nunchuk to get him to flip over — or keel over?

All things considered, Twilight Princess was a great game and I can’t wait until another Zelda comes out on the Wii. Too bad I only get to play it during holidays.