Songs without Words

In life, there are many problems that are much more difficult to solve than ones on, say, a problem set.  However, the mind is the machine that has the routines designed to solve these problems during difficult situations, and it is hopefully activated, rather than deactivated, when one is under stress.

Here I discuss my solution to the following problem, which will play out tonight.  I’m writing this as a “preview,” such that I can come back here tonight and evaluate the accuracy of my predictions.

The problem is in my schedule, recorded in my memory as this:

7.00p – 8.00p: Chamber music coaching rehearsal

7.30p – 9.00p: BE-BMES General Body Meeting

Now, this on the surface is simply a scheduling error, and the natural action would be to reschedule one, the other, or, alternatively, be late to one and/or leave early from the other.

Unfortunately, it is not quite that simple.  There are many factors to take into consideration, especially (1) the convenience of other people, (2) one’s honor and duty, (3) one’s personal ambition (namely, not pissing off friends and colleagues), (4) practicality.  I am taking any irrational elements and placing them here as though they were rational elements.

Here are the details that I pulled up for reference:

Chamber Music – location is 4-160, first rehearsal, this is for a grade, the normal coach will not be here, someone said that the substitute coach will only coach for 30 minutes, group is a trio, supposed to rehearse on our own from 6.00p – 7.00p

Therefore, I need to make a good impression on the first rehearsal – leaving early by more than 5 or 10 minutes is not a good option.  So, I must assess the GBM as well.

BE-BMES GBM – location is 4-370, first major meeting of the year, first 30 minutes of meeting will be officer introductions, I am co-VP, I am ordering pizza for the event, I am using my credit card to order the pizza for this event, pizza is supposed to arrive at 7:15, there is another VP, the second half of the meeting is a presentation that I have already seen twice, it is partially my fault that we are in 4-370.

So, due to duty as an officer, I should be there for the first 30 minutes of the meeting.  It is also necessary due to honor to be there so as not to shy away from the responsibility of causing the room problem.  In addition, the pizza must be signed off by me, since it’s my credit card.  7:15 plants itself right in the middle of the chamber music rehearsal.

Okay, so now “the status quo” will not work – I cannot just proceed from one event to the other without changing anything.

Here are two more options that raise themselves:

1.  Move an event.  Only the chamber music rehearsal is moveable.  Other times to move to are 5 pm and 6 pm.  5.00p-6.00p is reserved for “moving drinks with other co-VP for BE-BMES” and 6.00p-7.00p is for warm-up rehearsal.  However, the 5pm group already switched with us earlier because 7pm was a bad time.  So I can only switch with the 6pm group.  However, the 6pm group is large and signed up first, opting for the 6pm slot out of the choice of the three.  In addition, it is a group of 6 members, including the best players in the school.  It would be highly inconvenient to switch all 6 of them to a worse time to accommodate one person to a better time.

We remove this option.

2.  Change the pizza time.  Pizza is best ordered 10-15 minutes before an event as a strong scheduling item.  “Strength” is the flexibility of a scheduling option: basically, a strong planning is robust and resilient against change; a weak planning is easily toppled over by an unexpected event.  Pizza needs to be ordered early enough to allow for the delivery person being late, the order being wrong, or the order not coming at all.  However, it must not be so early that the food gets cold or hard.

However, it may be possible to maintain the pizza warmth by stacking all pizzas in one big stack.  This blocks the largest heat-losing surface of all but one of the pizzas and makes it such that each pizza heats the one above it.  This may permit pizza to be ordered up to 30 minutes in advance.

One option is to call upon the other co-VP to order the pizzas.  However, she states that she does not like the phone very much, and also that she has never ordered from this place before.  In her shoes, I would also not want to make the call.

In addition, the credit card is an issue: this is a large order.  Here are the principles of vaguely-defined binary options as based on “The Apology” by Plato:

1. Between one that is known to work and one that is unknown, select the one that is known to work (conservative principle)

2. Between one that is known to not work and one that is unknown, select the unknown (risk-taking principle)

It is known that my credit card still has enough capacity for this order.  It is unknown of hers does.  Therefore, out of consideration of her (stipulation 1) and due to the conservative principle stated above, I must be the one to order the pizza.

Then, the pizza must be rescheduled to 6:55p.  4-160 to 4-370 is a distance of 2 flights of stairs.  I can carry up to 6 pizzas at once; more pizzas can be carried, but a stack taller than 6 risks toppling.  There are 11 pizzas, 2 salads, and rolls.  A minimum of 2 trips must be made unless the delivery person helps me out – 50% chance of that occurring, based on past experience.  To make a strong scheduling choice, I must choose 6:55p and not 7:00p, in the event that I do not receive any help.

Now, the last round is the actual “anticipation” of the events:

6p-6:50p: rehearsal

6:50p-7:00p: paying for and moving pizzas into room, and stacking them to preserve heat

7:00p-7:50p: chamber music rehearsal.  One ordinarily ends at 7:55, in any case.
7:50p-9:10p: BMES meeting.  It is known from past experience that this meeting tends to start 10-15 minutes late due to people streaming in late.  So, I should only be around 5 to 10 minutes late to this event.

Overall penalties:

– The pizza may be left unattended for 10 minutes

– The pizza may cool down somewhat

– Coach may not be happy about me leaving 5 minutes before the normal end of rehearsal

– There is a 50% chance that I will be called upon to introduce myself before the time I get to the GBM.

Mitigation of penalties:

– Room is reserved starting at 7.00p.  A sign on the door will make it seem as though the event is already in progress, deterring pizza thieves.

– I will send an e-mail to the officers alerting them to my lateness so that they might call my introduction later, or at least know where I am.

Evaluation of solution:
Solutions averts the minimum problem of food not being available due to my absence to sign the receipt.

Solution selects the convenience of 7 people over personal honor of timeliness.  However, the timeliness factor is expected to be only 15-20 minutes.

What do you think?  Did my mind do a decent job of solving the problem, or is it way off the mark?

I realized the other day, to my utter embarrassment, the frequency of my use of unfaithful significant others as an opening plot device.  Indeed, it appears in at least three prominent stories, all of which, ironically, I consider to be relatively good examples of my more inspired writing.  Each time, the unfaithfulness symbolizes something different: in the first, it is the manner by which the main character learns that she can predict the future; in the second, the main character loses faith in others and resorts to routine and work; in the last, the protagonist feels as though her identity is erased and sets up trying to recover it again.

It’s very bad to repeat plot devices like this, especially when, to be perfectly honest, no one has ever cheated on my before, and it has also never happened to my parents (fortunately),  nor with any of my close friends (to the degree I use it here, at least).

So, something tells me that I should write more about what I know (ie, me) than about unfaithful people, who I can only pretend to “understand” (or not, as the case usually is).  Although I love, love “The Best There Ever Was” (I think it’s the best romantic story I’ve ever written, and probably second or third best among all stories I’ve written), I want to write something more personal.  Hint: it’ll involve a decision that the character has to make, that I have to make, too.

Tkinter only likes to show static gifs … … … eh! I don’t want to run an infinite for loop to switch out the images and eat up all my CPU …

This is no good.  While in this transcendent state, I don’t have much of a conception of the passage of time at all!! It’s as though long periods of time and short periods of time are about the same … I have to rely on looking at a clock and matching the times to “appointments” to make sure that I do things at the proper times!

Ah, what a bother, but whatever!  It’s still lots of fun being freed from this world in such a wonderful way ^^.  I hope this feeling will last a long time.  Not being constrained by my body – I’ve always dreamed of this moment!!  La la la ~~~

I wonder if you guys even know what I’m trying to describe?  It’s sort of confusing, even to me!  But the simplest, most fundamental change can be summarized as this: I’m allowed to be happy now.  So I am happy!  And it’s really amazing, being happy, did you know that?

Years, years ago, I met God and I asked her what I was allowed to have, and she said that I had to choose either happiness or everything else that I could ever imagine or want.  And I told her that I couldn’t be happy from happiness alone, so I chose to have everything else instead.  And it’s come so true – I can’t believe how many wonderful things have happened in my life, and yet I could never be happy about it, because .. I wasn’t allowed happiness.

But yesterday, I somehow unlocked the secret.  I don’t know what that secret is, but I glimpsed it and all of a sudden I was able to sprout my wings and grow my hair the way I always wanted it to be and meld everything and …

:)

Either I have gone crazy, or I have finally attained what I always wanted.  Probably more likely the former.  But what use it is to think one is crazy?  No, it’s pointless.  Regardless of whether it is an illusion or not, the feeling is good enough for me.

You know how people sometimes park trash cans behind doors to hold them open?  Well, today I saw an open door pressing against a trash can, except this trash can was in front of the door!  As though it were preventing the door from opening even more.

Or perhaps the door was holding the trash can in place?

Timetable for Caroline project:

Deadlines:

Friday, 9/22/06: the main dictionary should be complete.

Monday, 9/25/06: the SVO module should be spitting out correct digest-analyses for ALL standard-grammar sentences and combinations thereof.  That means, the right relationships between clauses and correct subject-verb-object splitting.

Saturday, 9/30/06: all gif animations for Caroline’s moods should be completed in high-quality CG color.

Saturday, 10/07/06: the associations web should be hefty enough to handle a 7-year-old level of understanding

Saturday, 10/14/06: the verb function break-down system has to be in place

Saturday, 10/21/06: the output module should be able to identify the nature of the input and spit out reasonable ideas for a decent response

Saturday, 10/28/06: the output module should be ready to return good SVOs

Saturday, 11/4/06: update week: fill in the nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and spruce up the GUI

Saturday, 11/11/06: implement the emotion tracking system

Saturday, 11/18/06: dresser module should be all set

Saturday, 11/25/06: debugging week, clean up of code

Saturday, 12/2/06: finish up short-term memory and mathematical systems

Saturday, 12/9/06: another week for anticipated debugging

Saturday, 12/16/06: public release

Okay, so you know how I just said that I was “back to normal” ?  I think something changed, though!  Like, it’s not the *same* normal.  It seems like it is.  But I think that I’ve somehow .. transcended.  Yeah, like that kind of metaphysical shit.  Whoof!

I don’t know why, but the world seems so different from the way it has for so many years!

You guys probably noticed me acting .. strangely .. yesterday, haha!  I conclude that it might just have been due to the silly way I store my “to-do” list in my head, which consists of making a “virus”-like entry that simply continually pops up to remind me to do something, and if there are too many of these, then things just get bad.  Because it seems as though my horrible headache is now .. gone?  Although I of course still have work – I’m going to be doing UROP stuff and writing the BioTECH article today – I finished e-mailing everyone and updating the statuses, organizing my room and receipts, etc.  And magically, my illusions/delusions ended!  Yay :)

Experience the world!  These are all 100% true stories.  Not that there’s anything particularly unbelievable about them.
1.

Two men, sitting on enormous lawnmowers, talking to each other.  But they cannot hear one another because their lawnmowers are both on at full strength, and they keep shouting louder and louder, repeating the same lines over and over again.

But the lawnmowers can hear each other just fine.

2.

A very overweight man is waiting in front of the food truck.  The food truck lady hands him his meal: “General Gau’s chicken, no veggies.”

You are what you eat.

3.

Two pigeons are side by side on an empty bench.  They look at each other, then they hop a few times to their left, then stop, then stare at each other again, until one of them flies off.

“You’re cramping my style,” she shouts in mid-air.

4.

A man walks into the cafe and walks up to the cashier.  She asks, “So, what do you have today?”

“Tacos, burritos, you know, we got everything.  What would you like?”

5.

Two guys are sitting in a Chinese restaurant, and one of them is reciting an anecdote about a bizarre elderly woman.  She was often laughed at for bringing her own bag in order to save Whole Foods a few cents – what a foolish woman!

A foolish woman indeed, looking out for the store chain that earned her eight million dollars from her tiny initial investment years and years ago.

Looking at the statistics for my writing documents, I’ve come to realize a huge shift in the style I use to write.  Where once my writing was fraught with very complicated sentences to the point where Word would complain that I had a 12.0 F-K reading level (the highest you can get), now the reading level stat has dropped to 6.4.

But looking over my writing itself, I do not think a sixth grader would really understand what I was trying to say.  It’s not to say that my vocabulary is necessarily out of range (though I do occasionally use big words) or that my sentences use unconventional grammar.  I think that a sixth grader could easily *read* the words and understand the structure of the sentences and the paragraphs.

The complexity, I think, that is in my newer writing and not in the older samples, is almost entirely in the connotations of what I write – all the things between the lines that I expect an experienced reader to pick up on.

This can range from serious things such as understanding what it means for a song to be a puppy, a child, and a lover to picking up, from a list, the significance of what is *not* on the list (for instance, the main character NOT bringing clean underwear to the bath and clearly not putting back on the old ones afterwards .. although this is just a little fanservice wink to those with a good imagination ;) ).

I also have taken to using scene to symbolize higher themes.  Madame Bovary contains many passages of descriptions, but they are laborious tidbits about buildings that the author most certainly has seen before.  I have no interest in that.  I write about imaginary scenes, and I pull out only the details necessary to convey the emotion and philosophical symbolism in mind.

If “This Song is My Love” is a story about identity, then the character finds identity as much in the buildings and trees and parks as within herself or the companions she meets along her journey.  The way that buildings are built – their hierarchy, their colors, their purpose, their arrangement – all those things contribute to painting a picture of the mentality of the creator and the society in which it functions.

So I think anyone can read my writing, but maybe only a select handful will be able to really see what I am trying to explain.