Songs without Words

I just really bombed a pretty crucial exam in 7.06.  But you know what the funny thing is?  I don’t feel sad or like crying.  I don’t feel numb either, or defeated.

Actually, for the first time in ages, I feel the *spirit* inside of me.  It goes beyond happiness or sadness: it’s my will, my very life-force.  No success could have awakened it; it is the cat abandoned in the wilderness that pursues prey with vital spirit and cunning, not the housecat who finds food every day.

As I suspected, it is not happiness or success that satisfies my spirit, but the journey and toil towards those unattainable ideals that brings me to life.  I guess, in a way, I am thankful.  I’ve been talking with God a lot lately, and yesterday, she assured me that she was still watching over me.  And I think today, she followed through on that :).

Now, to make good on my end of the deal ^_^.

I’m beginning work on my fifth string quartet.  I’ve decided to try something new with this piece – form-wise and tonally.

There will be five movements in the following order:

1.  Allegro – in Dorian mode.  Very brisk and quick, carefree.  Key: d do (key signature: a minor)

2.  Improvisatory Passacaglia in Jazz Form – in a minor.  A regular four-bar repeating pattern played by the three upper voices to an improvised cello part.  Ornamentation will occur in the upper voices while retaining the original line on the beats.  A sample cello part may be supplied.

3.  Romance – a traditional Adagio movement in D major, with emphasis on a florid treble melody.

4.  Scherzo – an atonal dance with quarter note near 400.  Key signature in E major, but largely no reference to keys or diatonic harmony.

5.  Fugue in 4 voices – a minor, in the irregular meter of 5/4 (subdivided into 2 and 3 at random).  The subject is 4 measures long and opens in the second violin.

One of the most annoying features of Windows XP is, in my opinion, the stupid start-up and log-on sounds.  The sounds themselves aren’t unpleasant, but coupled with the fact that for whatever inexplicable reason, you can’t turn off or on the volume until you’re actually logged on, it means that your laptop is basically a walking sound bomb.  In the library, you open up your laptop and it emits the sound at full blast.  The embarrassment incurred is comparable to that from farting very loudly during a formal luncheon with your boss.

I don’t understand why anyone would ever think of having such a silly feature.  It’s completely unnecessary and enhance my experience at all.  I don’t need to know when I start up my computer.  I mean, I have to manually turn it on, anyway!  So I already know when it’s starting up, sheesh!  If it takes so long to start up that I need to go and eat something to kill time, then something’s wrong with the operating system and it shouldn’t be sold in the first place.  Thus, there are no situations when such a sound needs to exist.

I didn’t actually know how to disable this sound until now.  I have happily set those sounds to “none,” and I may soon do the same for all the sounds that serve only to disrupt my thoughts or scare me.  I can see very well with my own eyes all the various errors that occur .. I also don’t need sounds to interrupt me then.

I’ve had to carry around headphones for quite awhile in order to plug them in prior to starting up my computer.  It was the only way to shush it if I forgot to turn off the sound before putting it to sleep!  Ah, finally free from that hassle …

J.’s World

NPCs

Let us suppose that my life is like a game. I would say that specifically, it is like a Zelda game – that sort of hybrid between RPG and action. So, there have to be NPCs. NPCs are non-player characters – that is, everyone else except me.

As in any game, these NPCs have particular routines and personalities, and they have certain interests and hobbies, as well as items. Most other people tend to also be highly predictable – that is, you can anticipate how they will act in particular situations (eg., this person is going to try to leave this event early; this person is going to forget to do this; this person is going to ask about this; this person is going to discuss this, etc.). Unlike in games, however, they also have comparably vast bodies of knowledge that are oftentimes non-overlapping with my own.

This last point is very interesting, because knowledge is accumulated in all people. People experience events at roughly the same rate, so each person has a roughly comparable amount of experiences.

An application of this can be stated in what I think are two very interesting stories concerning NPCs:

1. The guy who was lost.

I met a guy who was lost outside my dorm. He wanted to know where the apartment building at 100 Memorial Drive was. Unfortunately, I could not reconcile the facts that McCormick is in the 300s and near the end of Amherst Alley, and that his building was supposedly on Amherst. (In case you are curious, there is actually another portion of Amherst Alley that is not contiguous with Dorm Row’s stretch, and that’s where 100 is.)

I did give the man one recommendation, and it was this:

“If there is one person who knows where this is, it’s the Domino’s delivery guy.” Even though us MIT students are supposed to be smart, I have found that we are largely ignorant of our immediate surroundings. It is not until we must find a place that we feel the need to know of its location.

Conveniently, right down the street was the perennial Domino’s delivery guy, and the man took my advice and ran straight for the car. Although I do not know the outcome of this story, I can assure you that he got perfect directions to his boss’s party at 100 Mem Drive.

2. I get lost, too.

One day, I was at Downtown Crossing, and I was very lost because it was one of my first times being there. I didn’t know how to get to some street from where I was, and I looked around helplessly. “Who should I ask?” I thought to myself.

Some of these people would only be here for Macy’s; others might be new, like me; others would be very familiar with the area but not pay attention to any of the street signs. But there had to be a person with a very good knowledge of the streets. Someone who has traversed the streets over and over again, who intimately knows the area, who practically lives here, despite it being a commercial district.

I dropped the coin into the street bum’s cup and received the most straightforward directions I’ve ever received in my life.

The moral of the story is: the common knowledge is much greater than you might think, and it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that only MIT students are of equal knowledge, but it’s not true at all. Each person has a passion, and in that passion, that person is unmatched in knowledge.

Okay, next time, I’ll talk about threads, quests, and side-quests.

I enter the bathroom.

From behind a stall comes a very loud, wet fart.

Just as the fart fades out of earshot, a man steps out of his stall and begins speaking loudly into his cell phone.
“Absolutely!” he cries.

In a completely different realm from my recent dabbles in Baroque fugues and Dorian mode, I present to you … a love ballad.  Performed by MIDI saxophone and electric piano, with a tiny bit of expression (I set the dynamics for every note .. not a fun task, I assure you).

Inspired by hearing one too many Asian soap opera songs :).  I used my usual format, Intro A A’ B C C’ short interlude A A’ B C C’ improvisation C C’.

The “improvisation” is over the intro and the B section harmonies (listen carefully and you’ll hear it).

I freely admit, not one once of creativity or artistry went into the making of this bland song.  And yet, doesn’t it make you feel a little happy?

(Listen here)

This is kind of scary.  I just realized that the “private” marking in WordPress is more or less non-functional.  So how many of my past private posts have I leaked out?!

If I mark “private” and then submit the post, it automatically changes the status of it.  And then I have to go back and change it again.  What a hassle!  Oh well, whatever.

So I’m happy ^^.

I promised Marilyn that I’d go to the event that she was organizing with Nancy.  It was the “Cena a las Seis” (Dinner at Six) family night (for family weekend) put together by LUChA and APR :).  It was kind of funny being an Asian there, but it was all good.  Marilyn definitely went out of her way to make me feel welcome ^^.  I helped roll up the utensils into napkin bouquets.

The food was really good (gah, I love Mexican and Puerto Rican food — they’re really different from each other, but I definitely appreciate both), and I got to meet a couple interesting people.  La la, and the Mariachi band played such cute songs.  I think it’s really amazing how many catchy songs can come out of what is essentially one chord progression (I V7 V7 I).

Then, I had to figure out how to get into the GBIS (MIT a cappella concert).  It’s a very crowded event (all of Kresge is filled), and it requires free tickets that I did not have.  But I told Tiffany and Will that I’d go, and they’re such nice people .. .  So, I got there and asked the usher if I could be let in at some point later (if someone left, basically), and he said there were actually still 35 open seats!  I was so happy :).  I thanked him profusely and found one of the last open seats.  Yay!

The a cappella groups were amazing as usual.  It seems that I know more and more of the people in these groups.  I’ll probably be attending more of their concerts than usual this term.  It’s really too bad that one of the mics was completely out of sync with the rest, and that some air unit in the back really started to act up.  Nevertheless, the energy of the groups made up for these technical difficulties.

Regarding drawing, I’m going to quit doing CG for awhile.  I’m very frustrated right now because coloring technique cannot mask flaws in the fundamentals.  So, instead, I’m going to sit down and force myself to sketch portraits using non-mechanical pencils, *using references* instead of memory/imagination, until I understand how to really draw people.  I’m sure you’re all sick of my ill-proportioned drawings, too.

Then, I can focus on getting the CG to imitate paint, instead of pushing it around to cover up anatomical errors, which smudges all the colors and ruins any effect that had been generated earlier.

Today, I experimented with making Thai green curry chicken.  Green curry is essentially normal curry (cumin, etc.) supplemented with ~40% powdered green chili.  It’s very strong, especially if you use a whole can (as I did), instead of 3 tbsp.  Indeed, it was impossible to consume it without large amounts of rice, aloe vera drink, and Ponsuke’s flour snack.

I modified a recipe I found online to suit my tastes (ie, added more veggies).  I ended up mixing chicken breast (~3/4 lb.) with mongo-carrot (~1/3 lb.), green pepper (~1/3 lb.), and half a pound of bamboo tips (not the thinly sliced ones – I mean the ones that still look like bamboo.  I cut them into 1~2″ chunks).  The sauce was basically 1 can green curry + 16 oz. coconut milk (*note* NOT ENOUGH), plus lemongrass, Chinese basil, and a sprinkling of sugar, soy sauce, and hot oil.

The result was ridiculously spicy (but not quite as spicy as the Thai curry I had in an authentic restaurant before).  But it was pretty decently good.  Surprisingly, the coconut milk lost its strength during the long cooking process, which would probably explain why 2 1/2 cups (20 oz.) was recommended for approx. 3 tbsp of curry.  I’ll definitely make a point of getting sufficient sauce next time.

I have one more can of green curry, plus one can of red curry.  There are many more types of curry out there, and I plan to learn how to use each one by the end of this year.

One cool thing about curry is that it seems to resist growing mold in the refrigerator …