Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2002 May

# 05 May 2002, 10:15AM: As at least two of you (viz., Leonard and Adam) know, Leonard and Adam and I visited San Francisco's Exploratorium yesterday. I found myself comparing it favorably with Stockton's Children's Museum of Stockton (a more all-around play-with-stuff place) and Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science (where Dan used to work). Perhaps my childlike enthusiasm was a bit influenced by a childhood memory of the Exploratorium. Also, I got the vicarious joy of showing off the museum to Leonard and Adam, both of whom had never been there before.

The hours just flew by! Granted, there were breaks from compulsive exhibit-handling to watch short math-inspired films and eat lunch (surprisingly good, unsurprisingly expensive). But the variety of interesting stuff and clever demonstrations of various scientific facts and principles edified and uplifted me.

I was surprised by the openness about sexual reproduction exhibited by the biology displays, and by the presence of exhibits that taught linguistics or psychology rather than, say, optics or biology or some other hard science.

In conclusion [applause], fun. I especially liked the film Komposition en Blau and watching Adam get lost in sound-experiment goodness. Oh, and the Classic Mac set up as a four-track recorder.

# 05 May 2002, 10:19AM: Last night's Prairie Home Companion featured a wonderful, euphoria-inducing Rhubarb Pie sketch, which almost made up for an awful, superlatively tasteless song infusing gospel into a The-Day-The-World-Trade-Towers-Fell ballad. And I do mean "full of wonder" and "full of awe," respectively. Leonard and I were both awed at how bad that ballad was. What happened, Gar?

# 06 May 2002, 02:44AM GMT+5:30: I finished Twain's The Innocents Abroad last week. Now I've finished Terry Pratchett's Small Gods (I started it Sunday evening) and begun a Philip K. Dick anthology. The Pratchett and Dick I received as gifts from Leonard. Thanks!

I actually found The Truth (My First Pratchett) more moving than I found Small Gods. Leonard had recommended Small Gods as the best of the Discworld lot. Maybe this disparity can be accounted for in the fact that religion (the theme of Small Gods) is to Leonard's youth as rebellion against parents (as in The Truth) is to mine. Or maybe not.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 May 2002, 12:45PM: Today, Sydney Omarr says of Martha Stewart that she's "a remarkable Leo; she has implanted the following thought in many: 'To do things right, it must be done the Martha Stewart way!'....She does things the 'right way' because it is her way."

In less lockstep news, I enjoyed Komposition in Blau so much at the Exploratorium that I saw it again today in the Media Resources Center (first floor of Moffitt Undergraduate Library, the one that looks like a biblio-parking lot). You can watch some of his stuff, too, if you can get into the MRC - Video/C 999:2168 and Video/C 999:2737 are compilations of Fischinger short films. I liked Study No. 12 and Muntz TV.

During his US days (after fleeing German persecution, Leonard tells me), Fischinger evidently made one of his signature films...as the visuals for an ad for a television manufacturer named Muntz. The lyrics to the 1952 jingle include:

Muntz TV
In so many different ways
Muntz TV
Will earn your lavish praise

# 06 May 2002, 12:54PM: Eric S. Raymond, relatively famous open-source software advocate, speaks to the Cal Linux Users Group and other such people tonight at 6pm in Soda Hall (Wozniak Lounge, 4th floor). I may go. I can remember back when I wanted to be him.

# 06 May 2002, 04:15PM: Man, I hope Eric Raymond doesn't talk too long at his 6 o'clock speech tonight. I have to get home by eight for Seventh Heaven.

I think I'm joking.

# 06 May 2002, 09:17PM: Thanks, John, for sending me a link to this ad for Extreme Checking!

# 07 May 2002, 10:38AM: I'm not watching The Daily Show right now because when Crystal moved out she took her VCR with her, so our TV no longer can comprehend the presence of channels above 64, such as channel 70, which conveys the sweet nectar of Jon Stewart to my eyes. Or would.

Yesterday I didn't get to do what I thought I'd get to do -- viz., meet and hear Eric S. Raymond -- but I did get to do another fun thing -- viz., hang out with Seth. Watching Seventh Heaven with him was less painful than it would have been alone. Thanks, Seth.

Seventh Heaven was corny and patriotic and pro-war and glossed over lots of "should we be fighting over there? Are we really fighting for American freedom over there?" - type questions. And these disturbing, incongruous moments (such as Ruthie singing a song by Tom Petty whilst wearing a camo skirt, and the minister's mention of "Sexual Healing" during a memorial service, and "he's a Marine" as though some supernatural invocation, and always using the dead soldier's, er, Marine's full title and name in every mention) disturbed me enough to keep watching for the cognitive dissonance of it all.

Next week will be a standard comic drama with marriage proposals and wedding jitters. I welcome it.

Hey, Seth, you know how you and I went to Berkeley Bowl last night? You left your red bell peppers in my fridge. I'll give them back to you at the comedy show tonight.

Oh, yeah, the comedy show. Tonight, 8pm, the Bear's Lair on the UC Berkeley campus (near the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph), various professional comedians will perform (including one, count 'em, one woman!), and then I'll perform for a few minutes during the open mic afterwards. Tickets are $5 pre-sale (today on Sproul at lunchtime), $8 at the door. I'll try to give you a bang for the comedy buck.

Now I should prepare my routine and eat breakfast and talk with my sister about a graduation party and a Mother's Day scheme.

# 07 May 2002, 03:27PM: Thanks to Lia for showing me Josh Parsons's amusingly cranky and systematic rant on the world's flags.

# 07 May 2002, 03:33PM: "Extreme" and "Teen" and "Bible." Here ya go.

# 08 May 2002, 01:44AM: The comedy night was bad/good. Good: all the professional comedians were quite funny, all four of them (incl. surprise guest)! Bad: my audience was quite unreceptive to all save one of my jokes. I was caught so off-guard that I stepped on their laughter with my next line.

Seth and Michelle and Andy liked it, at least.

Timelily, Kris asks why he sees few or no funny female stand-up comedians. I wrote a while back about the dearth of women in mass-media humor. Now that I've seen Margaret Cho on video and thought, I could do that, and since I've never actually seen Janeane Garofalo perform, I feel more hesitant about endorsing them as good. Popular, yes, but I don't know about good.

Tonight one of the four comics was female. Carla Clay is also black. Her schtick (which was not her entire act) comprised some reacting-incredulously-to-racism-she-encounters-abroad, some Black English, and some man-hunger. Black comedians do the first two bits all the time, and male comics talk so much about wanting to have sex that it seems perfectly normal, and "sexually voracious black woman" is a stereotypical character and one that Carla Clay inhabits quite well. She was funny. She made me laugh. No tampon jokes.

I have rejected proposed stand-up material as "too chick-y." But certainly some material I do is heavily informed by my gender. Tonight I joked about my parents' search for a husband for me. I can't recall other examples. It's late. To bed.

# 08 May 2002, 08:37AM: Argh, college. I want to say, "Mommy, I don't wanna go to school! I have a tummyache!" And yet that's now pretty meaningless. And I'm so tired that that was banal and unfunny. Well, off I go.

# 08 May 2002, 03:27PM: Hand-carry your film when you fly.

# 08 May 2002, 03:55PM: Wow, the last Wednesday of classes of my college career!

The home stretch in Logic: the iota operator, a descriptor. "iota x" = "the x such that blah blah blah." Examples: "The large elephant is happy." I'm glad! "The man wearing no pants is bald."

You'd think, or at least I thought, that one would represent "the man wearing no pants" as "the x such that x is a man and x is wearing no pants." But no -- it's "the x such that x is a man and there is no y such that y is pants and x is wearing y."

"The universe of discourse can't just be people, because you have ... pants. What is the universe of discourse here?"
"The UD is people and articles of clothing."

Peter the TA apologized for his long absence over the next few weeks. "I have to go to Scotland." Job interview at St. Andrews. Fore!

Peter told us that Bertrand Russell came up with a/the method for translating an iota-operated statement into a fomula using "there is an x" and "for all x" quantifiers to express the statement's [fanfare] existence and uniqueness commitments.

I'm going to miss college.

# 09 May 2002, 05:43PM: If you live around Berkeley and have twenty minutes to spare, I recommend that you take part in Lily Liaw's linguistics experiment involving answering machine messages. She can make an appointment with you anytime during the day, this or next week, and my experience with it today was great fun. Note: she especially needs men! Mars Needs Women but 46 Dwinelle Hall Needs Men!

# 10 May 2002, 09:34AM GMT+5:30: Reading In Code by Sarah Flannery. Amateurish and annoying with too many puzzles. But I'll finish it. Even though she, at 16, made a much more efficient algorithm than the RSA's or whatever, at least I know I can write better than she can.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 May 2002, 01:55AM GMT+5:30: I like listening to choral music, especially faster-moving and non-religious stuff. I've known for a long time that I like a cappella of the doo-wop and arrangement-of-pop-tunes varieties, but I also like a bit of the Josquin and the folk songs and "El Grillo" (The Cricket), as I've discovered and come to appreciate in this Basic Musicianship class.

We of our Music 20A class will put on a concert of choral singing as part of our final. You can come! It'll be Wednesday, 15 May, at 2:45 in Room 125 of Morrison Hall. We'll all sing Tallis's If Ye Love Me and Josquin's Mille Regretz together, and we'll break into small groups for other pieces. My group will sing a sea chantey called We Be Three Poor Mariners or something like that. Come on by!

Today a few cool things happened. I finished In Code, which is less annoying than I'd thought. It's more interesting than Dan Rather's autobiography, that's for sure. And it clearly explained public/private-key cryptography better than any other treatment I'd ever read.

Sarah Flannery is a special sort of person, the type of which the world needs more. She's the type who can confidently approach a hard task and try at it and try at it and count her failures as learning experiences and live with the humility and keep going until she succeeds, self-esteem intact. I'm the other type. I've met quite a lot of that Sarah Flannery type over the years, and I always envy them, and now, maybe if I can just accept that I'm not like that, my envy won't have to get in the way of being friends with these people.

I saw a campus showing of the recent French cinema hit, Am�lie. The showing I attended was sold out but, through just hanging around and vaguely hoping for an opportunity and then snagging it when it came by, I found some reluctant scalpers and got a ticket. Yay scavenging!

I enjoyed the film, and of course I wept and shouted at the protagonist to act differently, but I think my expectations of the movie were too high -- the ad said it/she (the protagonist) would change my life! -- and so I didn't walk out of it with the same bliss that came to me at the end of High Fidelity.

The three French films I've seen during my Berkeley career, the ones I remember, are Am�lie, Romance (ugh!), and some quite good and moving picture I saw at the Fine Arts a few years back with my sister. It was about a youngish woman living in Paris (aren't they all?) learning about what's really important in life and breaking away from her unfulfilling routine to form relationships with others and hear their stories. Hmm, a pattern! The gimmick was that she was looking for her lost cat, and I can't remember the title. "Black Cat"? "White Cat"? "Black Cat, Big City"? "La Chat Diabolique" (Leonard's translation of "That Darn Cat")? "My Lost Cat"? These vague, non-Boolean "it was a French movie about a girl who lost her cat" stirrings don't play well at the IMDB. I'll remember the title eventually so's I can recommend it to you.

Later, I played designated driver, dropping off some acquaintances at a party and then driving home (alone! in Berkeley! on a Friday night!) with nary an accident. I will not say that there were not hairy moments, but hey, life without hair would be pretty Golden Age of Sci-Fi extraterrestrial, and in those stories women just faint and overreact and get referred to by their first names, and that's annoying.

I'm continuing the ravagement of The Philip K. Dick Reader (which is what I am too, I guess), as you can probably tell. Yummy stuff. I like that I've now read "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" and "The Minority Report" so now I don't at all want to watch the corresponding blockbuster films. Oh, and I finished that short-story collection I bought at the anarchist bookfair, Down and Out in the Ivy League by J.G. Eccarius. Enough good stories and hours of enjoyment are in there to justify the $2 or $3 and hours I spent on it. I'll lend it to you if you like.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 May 2002, 02:11AM: Google is better than IMDB.* Leonard and I spent about 20 cumulative minutes futilely searching IMDB. One Google search for "french film lost cat" got me this reference to When the Cat's Away. Finally!

*Okay, just at some things.

# 12 May 2002, 11:27AM: A year ago I was visiting Bakersfield for the first time. Right now I'm in Stockton. The heat is the same.

A year ago Douglas Adams died, and Rachel went to the prom, and I helped Frances move, and I had a fabulous time. Today I'm feeling almost even-keeled, which is a contentment of its own.

There once was a mother named Nagu
Who made yummy saru and saag-u
She could pack really well
And she'd raise holy hell
As a girl with a prize-winning jog-u.

Happy Mother's Day.

# 12 May 2002, 10:03PM: I listened to Billy Joel's album River of Dreams a hundred times when I was younger. I listened again today while driving Nandini and me back to Berkeley. Some of the devices I liked now make me wince (if you've heard Two Thousand Years you know what I mean), but No Man's Land still hits me hard, despite the rambling ending. The music stays where it's supposed to and complements the bitter, bitter lyrics, which probably inspired me to hate LA and all sprawl.

Check out the host page for those lyrics -- hey John, she has a B5 quote supporting space habitats! -- and Poetic Devices Illustrated Through Billy Joel. "Hopefully, through Billy Joel's brilliant lyrics, you now have a better grasp of basic poetic and literary devices."

# 13 May 2002, 07:24AM: I'm siiiiiiiick!

Well, maybe it'll lend some pathos to my last Russian final, today.

# 13 May 2002, 07:33AM: I think one reason I yearn for watching Star Trek: The Next Generation regularly is that it was something I was enthusiastic about, and I need something to be enthusiastic about. My own life sure the hell isn't it.

# 13 May 2002, 12:52PM: It would be just like Salon to exaggerate a perfectly reasonable policy in this article about a commencement requirement in the San Fernando Valley of California. I hope that such a process has happened to this story. I hope it's not for real.

# 13 May 2002, 09:48PM: True Berkeleyans want to not only save the whales, but to free them and to organize them as well.

Took some finals today. Watched Seventh Heaven. Agreed with Leonard that 1980s-era shows, such as The Cosby Show, are too recent for proper inclusion in Nick at Nite. Ate some yummy rice-and-mushrooms that Camilla prepared for some Italian get-together tonight. Feeling sick in that everything-smells-bad, sneezing in spates of once-a-breath, stuffy nose, headache, Eustachian tubes have just given up sort of way.

I know I'll get that Logic homework done by 5pm tomorrow. I just can't find it in me to, you know, care, much.

# 13 May 2002, 10:07PM: I just felt a tiny earthquake. No, that wasn't just you.

# 14 May 2002, 10:12AM: As Animaniacs put it: "Whose fault? Whose fault? / The San Andreas's Fault / 'Cause Mr. Richter couldn't predict her / Kicking our asphalt."

# 15 May 2002, 01:27PM: Compare Adam's views on aaahht to Leonard's summary of "Songs With Inappropriate Minimalistic Accompaniments, Part 1: Love Potion #9".

Evidently Leonard's been a reader of Adam's diary since that diary began two years ago! I just found this out.

Half my finals are over. Yay! Tojo, er, Linguistics and Logic, you're next.

# 15 May 2002, 01:27PM: Off now to practice for the concert at 2:45 in 125 Morrison! Free to all!

# 15 May 2002, 03:51PM: I'm actually glad that nobody I know showed up to watch my music class's final concert. My goodness, that wasn't very good!

Tonight: Muppets. No, probably just TV with Leonard.

# 15 May 2002, 10:30PM: "Pope not seeking reelection." It's some guy named Pope, in Texas, in some irrelevant headline, but still.

Also: if the federal government wants to assemble a Super Squad to fight terrorism, it should call up the Infinite Justice League.

# 16 May 2002, 02:42PM: In more-excited-than-I-should-be news, American Chai opens tomorrow at the United Artists cinema in Berkeley. I may see it myself, alone, tomorrow morning.

# 16 May 2002, 08:08PM: Much pleasantness today. Zack and Shweta and I had a lunch at The Musical Offering on Bancroft, which is a spot-your-professor-or-TA arena as much as anything else.

I watched Chutney Popcorn, a film that resembles a cross between American Desi and Chasing Amy. It's an interesting film that certainly touched a chord in me. Some shots, like one of our protagonist (who reminds me a lot of my friend Priya) watching her Indian family dance at a wedding, quite extraordinarily captured the sense of displacement and outsiderness that I feel vis-à-vis India.

Even when it was bad, Chutney Popcorn was bad in interesting ways. As in Chasing Amy, the ending is pretty open, although less controversially so. And the more I think about it, the more I like the characterizations. Quirky, but not in a faux way.

# 16 May 2002, 11:20PM: It shouldn't surprise me that Benoit's list of things he misses about France parallels the lists various tripmates of mine made, in Russia, of things we missed about the USA.

# 16 May 2002, 11:21PM: Seth is so witty!

# 17 May 2002, 12:16PM: Among the jobs the Career Center lists: "Extreme Sports Athlete."

Funny sign at Ned's Bookstore: "We have the MOST USED BOOKS!"

# 17 May 2002, 12:57PM: Cranky Ebert and hopelessly overmatched counterpoint.

# 18 May 2002, 01:32PM: Yesterday, after I read some more of Crime and Punishment, Nandini and I went to the general UC Berkeley commencement convocation graduation ceremony thing. I went mainly to hear my friend Shayna give her University Medalist address. Aieee! Shayna Parekh, I love you like a sister, but that speech started great and didn't live up to its potential, kinda like me, but no matter.

Most of the speeches weren't very good. Nandini suggested that we'd be better off with a limit of three quotations per speech. Oh, and I left just before the Jonny Moseley keynote address, but I still caught three mentions of the September 11th terrorist attacks and two mentions of commencement-as-beginning-rather-than-end. As I told Nandini, "it feels like a drinking game."

On the other hand, hey Jeana, Alan Dundes's speech rocked, actually daring to be intellectual and conceptual and analytic. He talked about, among other things, the abnormal emphasis that US culture places on the future rather than the past or present, and urged us to savor the present and not just think about the future all the time.

Then Nandini threw me a graduation party. Almost all of my favorite Berkeley people came! We ate food from Vik's and played Taboo and drank punch that Nandini and Leonard made and whenever someone wished me a happy graduation or congratulated me I felt very odd. I'm graduating?

Right now I'm at home and my flatmates and I conjecture that the smell of pot is coming from downstairs, since it's not coming from inside our place. But how? The heating vents?

# 18 May 2002, 01:37PM: I think one reason that these episodes of "X and Ebert" are so hilarious is that it's the McLaughlin Group, but about movies.

# 18 May 2002, 05:17PM: Thanks to Michelle and Kate and Andy for letting Nandini and me use their scammed VIP tickets yesterday.

# 20 May 2002, 12:01AM: Hmm, Jeana's thinking of taking Russian! When I did it, I chose Russian on rather a whim. (Japanese and Chinese were too popular; that was part of it.) And now I've been to Russia and I took five semesters (wow!) of Russian, and now when I read Crime and Punishment I wish I had the original text next to it so I could see what the translator is pulling on me.

Hey, in case you're going to Russia: the verb for "to eat" that the textbooks and teachers taught me here, yest', is tough to conjugate and I end up saying "he's going" instead of "he's eating" half the time. The verb that I heard the most in Russia, kushat', is easy to conjugate. And, since regular people say it all the time, it's more folkloric! Or something.

# 20 May 2002, 09:30AM: I dreamt an extraordinary dream last night. I met Attorney General John Ashcroft and he interviewed me to find out what a typical student's life is like. (At one point I asked him what he'd like me to call him, and he said, "Attorney General.") We had quite a nice conversation, and I thought we were bonding, but then I realized that he and his accomplice were just using the interview to get inside our house and steal our stuff. I had one of them in a headlock and was hitting the other one to keep him at bay while my flatmates tried to get back inside.

Then I think his accomplice turned into a rat and I had to kill her. A green plastic rat.

# 20 May 2002, 12:03PM: Inexplicably, I can't find my resume on my hard drive or in my OCF account or in any old email. Since my floppy drive is misbehaving, I'll have to go to campus to use the campus computer labs to look through all my old backup floppies.

# 20 May 2002, 05:43PM: Last night I actually did watch the last X-Files episode. Seven or eight years ago, when I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, my sister and I would watch X-Files on Friday nights while preparing for the next day's speech and debate tournament together. And back then it was fun. It was also fun to watch the random shows that Fox combined with X-Files to make its Friday night lineup, e.g., VR-5 and M.A.N.T.I.S. and Strange Luck. Remember, the protagonist in VR-5 had a long-lost twin sister named...Samantha!

I drifted away from X-Files over the years, because it grew less appealing and I didn't have a TV. But I was curious about the last episode, and my appetite for closure had been whetted by a San Francisco Chronicle article. So I watched.

The last episode did a fine job of summing up the facts-so-far for lapsed viewers such as me. But I wasn't quite as satisfied with the ending as I'd hoped. Those of you who watched the show will understand when I say that Chris Carter seems to be polishing up his resume to work for Crossing Over with John Edwards.

Oh, and maybe Mulder and Scully's miracle alien baby is not just a Christ figure, but also...Anakin Skywalker! And Charles Manson! And a vampire!

# 21 May 2002, 12:12AM: A surprisingly good food day. I ate surprisingly good pesto pasta salad at the Caffe-Strada-run Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus. It had pine nuts! And roasted tomato! And then I splurged on a gourmet Sun-Dried-Tomato-Pesto burger at Smart Alec's at Durant and Telegraph. Quite worth four bucks.

I found old copies of my resume and realized that no newer copies exist because I haven't formally applied for a job in two years.

Went to a worse-than-useless review session for the Linguistics final. I think the TA may have actually told us things that aren't true and focused on giving us facts to memorize, despite McWhorter's insistence that we should be thinking about concepts, not labels. Quote from the TA: "Well, I don't know that, and I'm about to get a Ph.D. in linguistics, so I don't think you have to know about it for the final."

Jade and I ate a cheery dinner at Smart Alec's during which we worked a wee bit on the logic problem set and talked about Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice, sleep patterns, bobos, humorous incidents in our lives, and music. Thanks to the constant ambience of 1980s music, Smart Alec's provides free nostalgia or something close to it along with the cheap vegetarian eats. Today the memory-unlocker was "Jump [For My Love]", which I heard while jumping rope in elementary school assemblies.

But I also talked with Jade about Leonard's music and tried to explain some of the themes in it that make me want to listen to certain songs again and again. Since he hasn't recorded them, that's rather difficult, so I just listen in my head. They convey an end-of-the-road resignation and a piercing analysis of how we got there. They strike at the heart of the incongruities that I keep at the margins of my life, and that, I am afraid, structure my life. And there's more but it's dangerous and hard to explain.

Seth cries out and I hope we hear him.

# 21 May 2002, 12:47AM: Oh, and I missed the Seventh Heaven season finale to chat with Jade, which is a trade I'd gladly make again.

# 21 May 2002, 10:16PM GMT+5:30: I'm now halfway through Crime and Punishment and almost halfway through Microserfs.

I heard part of an Eminem song on the radio today -- "Without Me," I think -- and quite liked it. Am I turning into Simon Stow? Am I going to end up writing papers on Slim Shady in The Republic?

Filed under: Reading

# 22 May 2002, 09:39AM: I'm upgrading my weblog software, so as to make the experience more pleasant for you, my fifteen readers. The asterisk to the left of each entry is a permanent link for that entry only. Fooling around with the URL for that entry is hours of fun.

# 22 May 2002, 02:20PM: My sister always suspects Anne Applebaum (Foreigners correspondent at Slate) of trying to put one over on the reader with oversimplified reasoning. In Deanna Troi's words, "She's hiding something!". Today:

Subject: anne applebaum
so did you see her article? it is just always too easy with her. she drives me crazy, yet I still read her stuff. what is wrong with me?

# 22 May 2002, 05:49PM: Yes, I'm out of my Linguistics final. Yes, it was scheduled for 5-8pm. Yes, it's quarter to six. Curse you, John McWhorter, for acting like a hip, concepts-oriented teacher and all the while devising a memorization-intensive final! [fist-shaking]

Ah, well, at least now I get to watch Enterprise.

# 22 May 2002, 10:48PM: I sent off not one, but two job applications today! Yee-ha.

# 23 May 2002, 10:11AM: Inside joke to people who know the Mahabharata: After last night's West Wing, during which President Bartlet assassinated the terrorism-sponsoring defense minister from Kumar, the President's chariot will no longer float an inch above the ground.

# 23 May 2002, 10:27AM: Regarding this entry: And Sliders! Before that show got into weird story arcs about war with aliens, it was a great show.

# 23 May 2002, 06:11PM GMT+5:30: Got two graduation gifts today, which were, as all of them will be, unexpected. I can't believe I'm graduating, and therefore can't quite believe that I should get gifts for anything.

Jeana gave me Two Tales of Crow And Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability, by Alan Dundes. I'm about two-fifths through it. Jeana said that all the Indians she's given it to have hated it, but I find nothing to hate as of yet.

Shweta-beta gave me a graphic novel: Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb. Once upon a time I evinced interest in this book, and now I have it!

By the way, the Acknowledgements list in Chutney Popcorn included a thank-you to Urvashi Vaid. I'm pretty sure they're referring to the gay rights activist. I remember seeing her once on a morning talk show and thinking, "A female Indian-American activist for gay rights! Wow!" Rock on, Urvashi.

Filed under: Reading

# 24 May 2002, 07:24AM: As I woke up, nearsighted, and looked from my bed to my wall-hooks, I saw this funny plain black dress on top of the whole pile. Oh, yeah, the graduation gown Shweta lent me.

According to Shweta's friend (Conor? Conner?), "su" is Gaelic for either "juice" or "jelly," and "mana" means "creed" or "motto." So now, when people ask me what my name means, I'll feel obliged to tell them not only the whole "good mind, good heart, beautiful flower" list but also "jelly creed."

Yesterday I also finally gave Jeana the Xena: Warrior Princess action figure (Tribal Harem Xena, with the Pillar of Power accessory) that I got for her ages ago. And huzzah for the staff of Bookfinder, namely, Anirvan and Charlie and Wendy, for helping me decide on using the pound-sign (#) for my permanent-link character before each entry. Anirvan had, as I knew he would, mad useful UI advice: "Do what everybody else is doing." Doc Searls uses a pound sign, and so will I. Not that I read Doc Searls, but I know lots of others do.

Mike Carns and I showed up for last night's logic review session. Why? Because it can be devilishly hard to be given an intuitively obvious implication, then told, "prove this using the nine rules we've given you and nothing more." Omar the Pretentious British TA Who Wears a Beret That Makes Him Seem Part of a Paramilitary Group was sort of helpful in suggesting that we sort of do pseudocode first, thinking out a systematic deduction in plain English, more articulate than pure intuition, that we can then follow for the symbolic deduction.

Mike and I gossiped a bit. CS majors, even, find it hard to get interviews, much less jobs, he said. I stunned him with news of Anirvan's girlfriend. A good feeling, laughing and talking with him four school years since we met, back in the dorms, fast friends, when I was young and stupid and awed.

# 24 May 2002, 07:24AM GMT+5:30: Skimmed Neal Stephenson's The Big U last night. Stephenson didn't rerelease it for a long time, arguing that he didn't want people to read his inferior early work instead of reading worthwhile fiction by other people. Then The Big U got rereleased anyway.

He was right the first time.

The Big U's political satire reminds me of the heavy-handed, depressing parts of Wobegon Boy and other works by Garrison Keillor. And I just skipped the subplots about role-playing gamers and the cults and political groups. I just wanted some conversation among the main characters and the exciting fight scenes that were like the almost-last fight/chase scene in Snow Crash. And there's not enough of that.

So, yeah. Stephenson is right. Read something else. Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow, perhaps, which I still don't hate, even though I'm more than halfway through. In fact, it strikes a chord with me, because my mom always got on my case about using my right hand instead of my left (I was born left-handed, but they switched me!*) and various rituals and superstitions regarding cleanliness. Dundes reminds me of Lawrence Lessig, showing me things I've always known in a new light.

That reminds me, I really need to finish Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Maybe during my upcoming unemployment.

*My father recently told me that he and my mother should not have retrained me to be right-handed, "because all left-handed people are geniuses." Thanks, Dad.

Filed under: Reading

# 24 May 2002, 07:28AM: Computer scientists are always talking about the halting problem. Halting problem? What halting problem? When I want to shut down my computer, I go to a prompt and type, "halt", and hit Enter. What's the problem?

Yes, I'm kidding.

# 24 May 2002, 07:46AM: BookFinder's Fifth Anniversary Extravaganza (a history of the company) is laugh-out-loud funny and worth reading.

# 24 May 2002, 10:29PM: Graduation: I graduated today. That is, I dressed up in the cap and gown that Shweta lent me, with a gold tassel from my high school mortarboard (which differentiated me from my blue-and-gold-tasseled classmates), and friends and family watched me take part in a commencement ceremony in the Greek Theater on UC Berkeley's campus.

I have a logic final tomorrow, and I've barely studied, and I'll do so tomorrow morning, when the headache of today's heat has left me. (Is the near-sunstroke, caused by heat and May/June sun and a big black gown, an intrinsic part of the graduation/initiation ritual?) Right now I need to jot down some memories:

I forgave Simon Stow, who just got his PhD, for a long-ago grudge.

I found myself in the processional next to Robyn, an acquaintance from my first year. She's going to get married soon, and she's in a credentialing program to become a high school teacher. We gabbed and joked away the hours, playing Political Science Hangman on the back of my program as the commencement speaker droned on and on and on.

A nearby graduate generously spritzed us with a water bottle/fan combo. The flecks evaporated instantly.

Seth and Charlie came. Seth took pictures of me and the crowd. I was so heartwarmed to see him there!

My parents came. They can't walk very fast, and they were glad that my mother had thought to bring an umbrella to shield them from the sun. Being with them today reminded me that this whole ritual is nothing more than a series of procedures and that when each procedure is trying, the whole ritual can become an ordeal. But once Dad found out about Seth's interest in Judeo-Christian scripture, Dad and Seth got along famously, Dad revealing his pet theory that the Gospel of John was written by Mary Magdalene (Me: "That's such a Salon story!").

The announcer mispronounced my name, even with a phonetic pronunciation on the index card and me saying it first. Ah, tradition.

Nothing was quite as transcendent as the processional. The audio system played a censored version of "Pomp and Circumstance" that looped the famous part and skipped the intermediate parts. The walk would have been a trudge if it hadn't been so exciting. A stadium full of cheering fans waved at us, clapped, yelled, and it was special to all of them, and I found tears in my eyes, standing there, absorbing my share.

# 25 May 2002, 08:50AM: Now I know Unix, and Russian, and close analysis, and some history and literature and politics and economics, and some handball and judo and linguistics and logic. Today I prove that last one, 12:30-3:30.

# 25 May 2002, 08:55AM GMT+5:30: You know what I love about Leonard? Among other things, he writes sentences that I'm pretty sure have never been written or said before. McWhorter used "Admit it, my friends -- the woman hasn't even seen the talking dog!" in Power of Babel. If he hadn't needed cross-linguistic comprehensibility, I could imagine him using "Axis of Pasta update: consensus is that cheese is the missing third ingredient, though this has yet to be verified in field tests."

Filed under: Reading

# 26 May 2002, 07:44PM: So, yeah, I'm done with school. I'm pretty glad about it. I sat between Mike Carns and Jade for the Logic final, and finished among the first few in the room. I did rather well, and almost certainly got an A in the class overall. Whee!

I think freedom will/would feel more free when/if I don't have people, i.e., my mom and sister, asking what I'll be doing with my time. It's mine now! Not yours! Stop asking!

I am more excited about a new item that I own: a bike! Cosmic significance: at the Sober Grad Party my high school held for my graduating class, I won a huge man's bike as a door prize, but couldn't ride it, so my mom and I sold it and used the money to buy a minifridge for my dorm room. This one, I can actually ride, and I basically learned how to ride a bike today. I never did when I was younger.

Leonard and I helped his friend Kevin move (he's now a homeowner!), and he gave me two vests, but more importantly, a bike! He said, "You don't know how long I've been looking for a small woman to give this to." Great! This opens up so many possibilities for me!

tuneup: $20-$40
	rear brake tightened
	rear brake pads replaced
	front tire or tube replaced
U-lock: $10
cleaning: DIY
Having an excuse not to get a car: priceless

As excited I am about the bike (which is rather more excited then I am about graduation), Zack is even more excited about eliminating spaghetti code -- permanently. For now.

# 27 May 2002, 08:20AM GMT+5:30: Leonard loves the crankiness of Losing the Race by John McWhorter. I love the anecdotes. I'd be fine with a book that just contained the anecdotes from all of McWhorter's other books, and lectures, if possible.

Hey, now that India and Pakistan are eyeball-to-nuclear-eyeball -- no, I don't want to think about it -- are we back to calling General Musharraf "leader" or "dictator" or are we still calling him "President" even though he's not? Just checking.

And you've heard of "a recipe for disaster" and "a disaster waiting to happen," but only recently have I heard "a prescription for disaster." Metaphor-wise, who writes the prescription? And where do you cash it in? With a recipe, at least there's the possibility that it's been passed down through the ages, and that you have all the ingredients at hand. A prescription presupposes much more infrastructure than does a recipe. I'll take the simpler one.

Filed under: Reading

# 27 May 2002, 08:31AM GMT+5:30: Oh, and I finished Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel a week ago or so. I'm glad I did so. It's quite enlightening and actually gives one a newish paradigm for history that makes sense and causes one to say, "Of course!" Again, I need to finish Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

Filed under: Reading

# 27 May 2002, 11:12PM: I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge with Seth today, to commemorate its birthday. Before that, I met interesting people, namely, Seth's friends Danny and Quinn. (Leonard was very, very excited about this.) It can be rather scary to find yourself among these high towers on this rumbling thin platform above metres of open space and water. But Seth and I made it across and back quite fine.

We ate at Lucky Creation, a good vegetarian Chinese restaurant on Washington street in Chinatown. (Oh no, Kowloon seems to have closed permanently! It was a great vegetarian Chinese restaurant on Grant; it made me understand what mockmeat and Chinese food are supposed to be.) I endorse Lucky Creation. It took quite a while to adjust to the menu. I couldn't just skip most of the items! Every last one, as Seth said, was vegetarian! So many options!

On our walk back to a BART station, Seth and I noticed weird financial-district sights at Montgomery and Market. I saw a stock ticker that displayed random characters streaming by in the style of stock-market listings. Seth noticed that the Wells Fargo bank's interior resembled a casino: elaborate ceilings that could easily conceal cameras, ornate pillars, ATMs lined up on a wall with a red-gold money glow, inviting rows of people to all play the game at once.

Thus is capped off a quiet and contented weekend of graduating, doing well on a Logic test, hanging out with Leonard, and doing fun things with fun people. Low-key. It represents the fact that now I own and allocate my time myself. Even up till a few days ago, I used to dread this responsibility. But riding that bike yesterday unlocked joy: the joy of riding a bike by myself for the first time, learning to correct for my clumsiness, learning to trust my speed, learning the euphoria of I-can-do-this, eagerly leaning forward and thinking of all the places I can go!

# 31 May 2002, 01:09PM GMT+5:30: The main news is that I made a big mistake and I'm paying for it. I double-counted a class, thinking it could fulfill two requirements, but it didn't, so now I'm taking a summer school class. I'm not quite a B.A. yet. This class, Russia After Communism, really interests me, and Professor Steven Fish is great. But it's Monday through Thursday, 4-6pm, so I can't work full time. Yeah, I feel a bit foolish when I think about the debacle.

On the up side, I finally got an A+ at Cal, in Linguistics 5. Yay!

Job search: (Alexei, upon learning that I'm looking for a job, said, "I hear they hide under bushes and logs.") I've sent out several customized resumes and cover letters in response to job openings, but no one's called me for an interview. I got started working with one temp agency, but business is slow for temps, and another agency told me that they won't handle part-time temps, and I'm one of those right now.

Triumph: I only watched about 45 minutes of random daytime TV on Tuesday. I watched the German equivalent (in English) of "Entertainment Tonight," and I watched the first half of a cooking show. All quite educational. I can now manage a passable German accent while saying "Gerhard Schroeder," and I know a trick for seeding tomatoes (cut them in half and, before slicing them, squeeze them above a garbage bowl or sink).

Biker Sumana: I've been practicing and actually using the bicycle. I can now get going from a standstill pretty well. On Tuesday I rode most of the way up Milvia from a little north of Adeline to Center Street, although at times I had to chant to myself "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay" because I was rather scared of cars and my own ineptitude. By yesterday I basically could ride continuously without too much fear between home and downtown.

As suggested by Kevin, I visited The Missing Link, a bike store and repair shop at Shattuck between University and Berkeley Way. Now I have a fixed-up bike, a lock, and (courtesy of the University and six dollars) a license.

And today: triumph! I used elbow grease and WD-40 and a wrench to remove annoying water-bottle holders from my bike. It's great to exercise control over my environs.

Books: I finished Crime and Punishment and P.G. Wodehouse's Much Obliged, Jeeves. Crime and Punishment had a surprise ending (like Law and Order! You won't believe the twist!), and when I was down this morning, I reminded myself that I really don't want to be like Raskolnikov, letting my romantic-depressed urges make me unproductive and sullen. The Wodehouse, one of his later works, was less masterfully plotted than, say, Very Good, Jeeves. But it still had amusing turns of phrase, and it kept me occupied on the BART, so reading it was worthwhile.

Filed under: Reading