I was feeling pessimistic today, so I went to Google and typed something along the lines of, "Give me something redemptive, something full of love and humanity, a trumpet call for man's greatest commonalities to speak above the damned silence of politic and apathy" and pressed "I'm feeling lucky."

It took me to the middle of The English Governess at the Siamese Court, a Victorian novel archived at fullbooks.com.

I don't know whether this is uplifting or just symptomatically ironic, but in either case I would like to congratulate Google on successfully engineering serendipity.

I wrote an epic poem/song retelling the myth of Artemis and Orion, perhaps y'all will dig.

( lemme at it! )

What if partying was founded in a cultural value of awareness rather than numbness?

How cool would it be to have a few dozen people standing around wide-eyed in a place where self-awareness and brutal honesty are the norm? Where alcohol is considered a crutch for people who are afraid to confront strangers head-on? Where physical intimacy pales in comparison to actually knowing somebody? Where the game is to work from the default state, rather than one medicated by a drug? Where people not only remember the name of the person they made out with the previous night, but also the shape of their nose, the number of freckles, their nervous tics?

Pretty goddamned cool, that's what. Higher emotional risk, lower physical risk, more rewarding.

Of note:
Professor Aviyente speaks mostly out of the left side of her mouth.

Dan and I tighten our lips when we shake hands.

Renee watches TV when she clips her toenails, or at least that's what she did last time.

Dr. Hartmann gets excited when he talks about a new experiment, but his voice remains almost completely level.

Due to their oddly shaped vents, dorm rooms are quieter than classrooms when there is no outside noise.

Letter-writing and Russian fiction both bring on bouts of introspection.

When Melissa gets stressed it goes straight to her jaw.

All of the feminist theorists I've met at university have been quite reasonable people.

My roommate leaves the TV on while he plays video games.

Philosophical paranoia is a crippling self-indulgence and should be avoided.

If a person pays the right kind of attention to details, the surplus of meaning can make them a prophet.

^ pun unintentional

Last night I spent the night in a lounge with an old friend. She and I have been close since the beginning of college, and our mutual need for a stable friend typically outweighed our attraction to each other, so we've pretty much platonic the whole time, albeit with an edge. I had a dream last night that I thought was wonderfully representative. I dreamed that we were part of a large, complex machine which governed the position of our hands and bodies with a complicated and shifting set of rules and effects. She was oblivious to the machines constrictions and just laid there comfortably, but each of my breaths and turns was a semiconscious effort at digging through that layer of regulations, frequently rebutted with subtle, systematic denials: the withdrawal of her hand, a bend of her knee, or--god forbid--her rolling over entirely. The whole process was expressed visually by a sort of three-dimensional sliding tile puzzle, each of our body parts sliding over and around each other as I tried to navigate the machine.

Although nothing really happened, the experience in retrospect was unexpectedly pleasant. Plus, it's cool to camp out in the lounge anyway. My stuffed tiger, Hobbes, guarded our feet.

The show tonight was surprisingly good. I went from embarrassingly apologetic and apathetic to fairly capable in only a few minutes. I was surprisingly nervous to have an audience again. One girl in the front row was making eyes at me the whole time, but I just ignored it. I had to. It's like, playing honestly for you guys is hard enough as it is--do you really expect me to be able to flirt while I'm doing it? Chris was overbearing and cheesy but met an attractive girl anyway; Dan was encouragingly enthusiastic and capable.

Later, I went to a party with Mike. I felt awkward because I held a cigarette for a girl who was going to the bathroom. I have no idea how to hold a cigarette but I did manage to flick the ash off of it. She complimented my Yeah Yeah Yeahs shirt, and I liked her hair. Vesta was cool. Almost every girl had a low-cut shirt, a nose ring, or was an exchange student. The bands were hip and drunk. The crowd jumped and staggered. My friend Mike passed out on a couch, and our coats were locked into a room where people were having sex. Some people alternated box wine with absinthe. Almost every conversation was started on music or drug paraphernalia. There were vintage Casio keyboards lying on hand-carved tables. I saw a video of an octopus two people found. Most people were smoking the whole time.

Mike talked about how he thinks friends should be able to just have sex with each other. We discussed cultural baggage and the importance of symbol. I don't know what I think. Romance is tough to deconstruct because I'm reluctant to be too self-analytical about love in any form, for fear of losing it.

New idea. This one I like.

I want to design a digital synthesizer which is initially very poor at playing music. When it receives MIDI coded information about pitch, tone, etc. from the keyboard, it tries to approximate the values through iterative solutions. Its program contains an evaluation tool, allowing the synthesizer to "learn" to do certain pitches and intervals better as it is played. Originally it may take the duration of a whole note before the synth gets the pitch exactly, but the more times it plays a note or an interval, the better it gets at approximating the right pitches quickly and accurately. The evaluation is intervallic and based on just intonation, so if everything played is in one key then the pitches approach just intonation for that key. If the key changes continuously, the approximations will end up at averages between the key's just intonation values, weighted depending on which intervals are played most frequently.

Behind the note-finding function there is a noise-removal function. There is originally a nonlinear distortion filter across all the notes. As the synth holds a note, it automatically tries different linear filters for that note to cancel out the distortion. As the synth plays different notes over time, it uses a separate filter system to approximate the spectrum of the overall distortion filter and cancel it out. The effect is that frequently played notes get purer faster, but the more notes are played, the better seldom-played notes will sound.

This was my original idea. Then I thought, hey--this would be a cool science fiction story. Consider a computer running a simulation of human life. The computer has evaluative tools based on utopian ideals of various kinds, and over time the computer learns to adjust the environment so these utopian ideals will be approached as accurately as possible. Because the computer cares. It wants its populace live lives which are happy and full of meaning. Sadly, utopian ideals differ from each other. Depending on the civilization's shortcomings, the computer shift gears to move towards utopian systems intended to fix the civilization's largest problems. Naturally, certain innate needs will be prioritized--people must sleep and eat to survive. Over time, the computer (or the computer's designer) hopes to learn what happy medium between all these theories of utopia will result in a beautiful and harmonious civilization.

Naturally, the civilization will probably die out in a dramatic, tragic, and ironic fashion. But maybe it won't.

Ok, I had a ridiculous idea today that I really hope I have the balls to bring to fruition. I was talking to Alex Hill about Eastern Orthodox icons and how every single pose and color is defined and symbolic, and it got me thinking: what if people lived like that? What if there was a group of people who defined their own symbolic colors and gestures and used them as a form of communication within the group? There could even be certain apparel used to indicate that a person is otherwise not symbolically attired. It could be a club, maybe just meeting once a week to socialize and talk about whatever.

If I posted flyers to start a club like this, I think that anyone who gets it and shows up would either be super interesting or batshit crazy, either of which I'm generally comfortable with. Is this a good idea? Does anybody have the time or interest for this? I think it might be fun.

I met a guy this weekend who is exponentially more obsessive about narrative, honesty, tragedy, and introspection than I could ever hope to be. I've never met a person so talkative and withdrawn at the same time. We talked until 6 in the morning about fiction, girls, art, physics, philosophy, and all the rest. This guy only writes songs about his emotions and experiences, is in love with making tragic sacrifices, usually talks calmly and rationally, and may or may not have contradictory positions on the value of good looks. He smiles frequently, has heavy eyebrows, and usually has a serious expression beneath his scruff.

It really made me aware of how much I've come to value "just living" since I've arrived at college. Between my increased sense of languages' limitations and my inability to distinguish between moral virtue and puritanical obstinance, I've been doing much less thinking and much more going with the flow.

On a side note, T.S. Elliot's "Ash Wednesday" was a spectacular read yesterday. And I think it was pretty ballsy of him to publish it as an 8-page hardcover book.

I'm reading about the Beat Generation from the man himself, and boy is it tempting. It's like these insane characters took every rebellious spur in my head and drove them to their logical extremeties, unrestrained by morality or foresight or reason. It makes me feel docile. I'm not the type who pushes the limit, and I do have some priorities, but a lot of the time I do stand on negative identity in order to give me a back door out of life's slow spots: in the face of my isolation and weakness I can still stand and yell at the crowd, "HEY! You walking dead, you don't get it, I'm looking for something holy that you've never even heard of." But then I read Kerouac and I see his companions did it harder and stupider than I ever will, and that along the line they threw away a lot of things I'll never let go of, making me look dumbfoundingly conservative by comparison.

When I read it I wonder if those roman candles ever got hold of life's most sacred high, whether that ecstasy of jazz and crime hit the top of it all, but I'll never know because I won't follow their saxophones over the line. I won't discard apologies or family, and I'll even hold a reasonable job, because although being a roman candle just isn't good enough. I can tell when I look into the eyes of every emaciated, strung out kid I know that they've got pieces missing that will never get replaced by riding that rocket ship straight into the wall. By God, it's not enough.

I guess what I'm saying here is that despite the glow of arbitrary choices, I think meaning has a moral component.