Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2007 June 19

# (1) 19 Jun 2007, 12:57AM: MC Masala, Weekend, And A Mess of Miscellany: Well, this will get a bit crowded. Welcome to the social!

This week's column is about Kannada, "Indian," and other languages. Did you know that my sister's brushing up her Hindi?

Right now she can get along OK, understand Bollywood movies and hold decent conversations. But now she's polishing it up, doing the fit-and-finish work. She's already got an ear for how a Hindi phrase or sentence should fit together, and now she has to apply that attention to her own speech. How do you get the knack of the tongue? How do you sink into the rhythm, the idiom of it?
I've been trying to remember how Kannada sounds. The other day I raced up to some Indians in a subway station, eavesdropping on their conversation and introducing myself. Then I found out they were speaking Telugu, not Kannada. Pretty embarrassing.

This past weekend, I visited John, Martin, and Riana in DC. Martin summarizes the main event of the visit: Riana, Martin and I saw John play Orestes in one of three productions of Electra. Pretty awesome. Riana, thank you for your hospitality! Thanks to Riana, I tried out the cardiovascular equipment in a gym for the first time -- elliptical machine, treadmill, stationary bike, what have you. Not since high school weightlifting class had I tried to crack the code of the gym. I now grok why people would choose a gym over running/weightlifting/calisthenicizing at home or in the world. Hmmm. Maybe there is a lesson here for me.

I took the Greyhound bus down south and the Vamoose bus back north. Greyhound: preferable, because it's cheaper, the bus stop and ticketing and schedules are more convenient and reliable, and they don't play movies. But Vamoose's staff is more friendly.

Did you know that there's an Irish pub called Fado in DC's Chinatown that serves fries with Utah-friendly fry sauce (except it's called Marie Rose Sauce)? Or that there are two restaurants named Cafe Luna near DC's Dupont Circle?

I got to the Jack-in-the-Box in The System of the World. Ha! I'm in the home stretch for the Stephenson. In other media experience news, the films on the Vamoose bus back to NYC: The Italian Job, a perfectly enjoyable US remake of a British heist film, and Happy Feet, a terrible, strange, uncanny-valley-inhabiting children's film that reminded me of what I've read about Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings film.

My friend Adi, a math professor at NYU, plays an Onion story subject this week. Also this week, I won a $10 Starbucks gift card for winning a copywriting contest at work. It was actually more energizing when I thought it was a random "you're doing great!" gift from a secret admirer/boss.

Leonard was right. I miss Cody's Books on Telegraph in Berkeley. I tried to see Annie Hall in Bryant Park with new friends tonight but we couldn't see nor hear more than a tenth of what was going on so we left. But I don't mind. It's been such a jam-packed pleasant three days, aside from a bit of work kerfluffle, that it's almost a three-day weekend! Goodness, I love social contact.

# 19 Jun 2007, 01:05PM: Notes On Attention And Shyness: An inadequate excerpt from Sarah Brown of Cringe, on hopes laid bare in a teenager's diary:

You want someone you like to come into your room and ask you if you've read all those books and which was your favorite and who is this in this photo and when was it taken, blah blah blah, you want that tractor beam of attention, that teenage feeling.

I'm reading "MU Tales", an addictive serialized novel about a shy girl starting college, and "Nothing Better", an addictive webcomic about a shy girl starting college and they're helping me understand what it's like to be pathologically shy.

But I'm also thinking about the other side of that coin: show-offiness. What's the basis for our scorn of attention-seeking? If it's about selfishness, does it inevitably turn into "Harrison Bergeron"? Is it a collective effort to treat conversations as ends in themselves instead of a means to an end? From The Big Kahuna:

It doesn't matter whether you're selling Jesus or Buddha or civil rights or "How to Make Money in Real Estate With No Money Down." That doesn't make you a human being; it makes you a marketing rep. If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being, ask him about his kids. Find out what his dreams are - just to find out, for no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it, it's not a conversation anymore; it's a pitch. And you're not a human being; you're a marketing rep.

These quotes, links, and thoughts underly my upcoming column on attention-seeking and modesty; that'll be this coming Sunday.

Filed under: Reading

# 19 Jun 2007, 11:53PM: Old News Is Bad News Too: Somehow a little too weighty to go into the del.icio.us feed: in 1989, a guy in Montreal shot 28 people, almost all women, saying that he was "fighting feminism." I hadn't heard of this incident until just now, which surprises me. In slightly related depression, the Wikipedia category for murdered activists. I was just telling Adi about Harvey Milk and Jonestown the other day. What were the 1970s like? How did they stand it?