Higher Learning

woops

2009-01-27T12:07:00.002-05:00

been 13 or so days since my last post. what has happened in this time? well, the A key on my keyboard gets stuck easily. That's annoying. I've been listening to a lot of andrew bird and of montreal, which puts me in a sort of pop groove I suppose. I've also been writing a ton of music, but I don't think it bears much surface resemblance to the poppy stuff I've been listening to. It's all shifty and energetic. I'm getting better at playing guitar as a result of often practicing hours a day.
I just realized that I know a lot more hebrew than I thought I did. Like, a lot more. I was watching some of Waltz with Bashir yesterday (in hebrew with english subs) and I basically understood the hebrew without the subtitles. That's impressive. I mean, I would have been a bit lost without them especially in the longer conversations, but I would have held my own. What does this mean? It means I need to go to Israel. When? well that's another question altogether. But it's gotta happen.

I'm excited at the prospect of family visits in the coming weeks. My birthday is in 4 days, too. 21 biguns. I also have a bunch of big projects due at the end of next week. I'm pretty sure I'll have just enough time to do them all well and without hurry if I spend an average of 2 or 3 hours a day, every day, until a week from friday when the last one is due. That actually doesn't sound like a lot at all, so let's break it down: That's 11 days * 2.5 hours = 27.5 and then / 4 classes = almost 7 hours per class. Some will take more than 7 hours (my compilers class project, I bet) and some will take less (my music civ essay, which is to be 4 pages double spaced about how plato, augustine, hildegard, and one other monk whose name I forget consider christian church music). But you can see that even in a period of relatively heavy work, if you start early enough, you have around 3 hours of class a day and 3 hours of homework a day. A 6 hour workday - piece of cake.

Well, the point of this post, in case you missed it, was about Israel. I don't know how I feel about the political situation there, but the language is beautiful (as are the beaches and babes).
Eli

a really good day

2009-01-13T23:57:00.002-05:00

Today was great. I got up early, did computer homework for a few hours, went to a few hours of class, talked to lots of nice people, got home and decompressed for a bit, cooked a nice healthy dinner for me and my roomies, did some more coding and figured out a ton of important stuff for my homework and Standard ML (the language I'm learning) in general, and now I've been practicing guitar and I feel like I'm really conquering this new method of playing that I've been working on for a while, and to top it off I wrote two new verses of one of my songs.

back in hyde park

2009-01-04T13:47:00.002-05:00

I've moved into my new place! I'll try to get some pictures up soon, although no guarantees. I really like it here; things are coming together quite nicely and I know this is going to be an even better living situation than last year.
Last night we had a nice dinner and I met my other roommate Allison, who's very nice. This morning I went out to the gym on my own. It's not too cold, and I'm thinking about taking my bike to get the tires filled.
Writing music is taking up a large portion of my free time right now, and pretty soon I'm going to start recording with my friend Ben (who's got a sweet setup).
Till later,
Eli

winding down

2008-12-12T09:17:00.002-05:00

Last night I had a great going away party in my backyard. I invited most of the friends that I've made here in Chile. My buddy and neighbor Felipe helped me buy lots of meat and then we started barbequeing, and people began to show up from around 9:30 to 1:30. That is to say, they were still arriving at 1:30. It was good I didn't invite everybody I know, since around 30 or 40 people came. We grilled chicken and shishkabob and Felipe's girlfriend Kata made a really yummy noodle salad. Some columbian dude with a guitar and a harmonica played a lot of great music, and me and Doran had our guitars too. The party was a lot of fun - and I just spent the morning cleaning up :)
I have this one last weekend before I go home. Happily, or perhaps ironically, it's a weekend absolutely stuffed with great things to do. Ironically because I get the feeling that every weekend is going to be like this now that summer's here. I'm happy to go, but I've already had to start saying goodbye to some folks, and that's not fun. Twere almost better to forget the goodbyes altogether.

whew

2008-12-07T15:44:00.001-05:00

I just took a 3.5 hour walk through the hills north of my house. I definitely didn't plan for it to be so long, though. Google maps distance calculator says I went 4.42 miles, but of course that only counts the horizontal. I was busy exploring back staircases cut into cliff sides.
At one point I had the strongest sensation that I was a character in a video game - I was climbing up a hill and I passed a man stamping papers from bus drivers (doing so, I'd assume, to later prove that they'd serviced the hill, since it was out of the way). I asked him if the stairs to his right emerged onto another street up above. Sure, he said. No problem. If you go up here, you can get to see the virgin. So I started climbing. A few stairs and turns later, right away the path split into three. I picked the one that was climbing steepest, on the left, because it had a railing and looked well-maintained. About another 40 steps up and I could see that the stairs didn't actually go anywhere. At the top was a house, gate open, 3 ferocious dogs barking me back down the stairs.
At the three-path split again, I asked a different guy, this one painting the side of his house. Sure, he said, you can see the virgin if you climb up this middle path. And what about this other one, I asked. Oh, yeah, that one goes too. They both go. So I climbed up the rightmost path, and, sure enough, after another hundred or so steps up (maybe more - that last climb was like 30 meters straight up), the virgin mary looms into view. ta-da! Game Over.

a long awaited update, 4am style

2008-11-30T02:02:00.006-05:00

Heyo- I just got back from a fantastic show. A friend of mine named Camila plays violin as a guest in this band that plays a kind of "cumbia psycotropica" as they describe it, which is a mix between salsa and reggae and punk. I saw them play last night at a small party/concert in the music school campus patio of my university, but tonight was even cooler - they played a show in a place called "casa okupa". It's a humoungous chile-style house (which is to say, lots of strange big open spaces and long hallways with tiny rooms) that seems to be officially owned by the church, but there's a community that lives there now unoffically. The cool thing is that they govern themselves really well and the place is clean and beautiful (and amazingly bohemian).
First camilia and the band and some other friends came to my sweet backyard to hang out, and then we went to casa ocupa.
This show tonight had comedy, acrobatics, intensely funny + smart monologues, strange political music acts (a guy with weird hair and a bullhorn and a rope chaining together two girls dressed as witch/donkeys, all singing "no seas burro" [lit. don't be a donkey] and other, stranger songs), slide projection and tricks with an overhead projector, interpretive dance - and just when I thought it couldn't get any better, the band took over with a 2 or 3 hour set. Like the early success story of most 60s rock bands (see Led Zeppelin I think) these guys played every song they knew, and then they played them all over again only without stopping in between. More people kept coming, and we the crowd just couldn't get enough; they were on fire. We danced in this big basement space where the show took place until we just couldn't dance and more, and I met a lot of really high-energy lovely people. Whew. It was one of the best nights I've had in Chile, and I've had some great times here.
In other news, I passed one of my harder classes (the prehispanic chilean art history class) with a 5.6, a chilean B+ more or less. Woohoo! no other grades yet, but I'm done with 3/5 of my classes. Now I'm working on a project for graphics class, a rocket simulation. But right now I'm tiiiiired, so I'll try to post again soon.
~love!

fun weekend

2008-11-16T19:24:00.002-05:00

In the last few days I have met three chilean women: maria, mariana, and mariel. They are all interesting, all very different, and range in age from 21 to 35. That's about as far as the coincidence goes.
Today I had a great day - worked on a new song (tentatively titled "rebirth" [I know, not the most inspired title]), went urban hiking (it was amazing! I climbed up a humongous hill, must have been climbing for 25 minutes straight, and the road ended and a dirt path begun, which led into the forest [at this point I was high high above the city] and thus began a series of trails that I'm definitely going to return to and explore. Next time, with camera.), and played soccer with some good friends. In a bit I'm going to go eat dinner at doran's house. And so life is really fun at the moment.
I'm reading Cortazar's Rayuela in spanish, which is amazing and fun and challenging and completely worth it. The book knocks me flat on my back constantly. It shakes my world, gives me great ideas, makes me feel good, makes me feel bad, and makes me crack up at the strangest moments.
Really I guess it's to be expected, but since I've been on my own a lot more now (= broke up) I've met so many people! there are a thousand people just waiting for you to walk up and say hi. Sometimes they become excellent friends.
And time is winding down here - officially less than a month till I'm off north. I will try to post more often again, there's been a bit of a drought here I know.
love
eli
ps. my spanish has been improving by leaps and bounds, inexplicably. Suddenly I find myself capable of improvised flights of poetry (in conversation) in another language. If I think too hard about it, it goes away though, so I'm treading carefully.

from dusk till dawn

2008-11-09T19:13:00.002-05:00

I just watched the movie "From Dusk Till Dawn". It's from the 90s, it's got George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino starring, and it's weird - it starts out about two brothers who rob a bank and take hostages, and it turns into a comedic vampire thriller on (what appears to be but is actually not) a shoestring budget. On the other hand, it has great music, featuring Tito & Turantula before and during the vampire gore scene. I can only describe this movie as uniquely awful.

post election-win let-down?

2008-11-05T06:24:00.002-05:00

I went to bed early because there was no way I was staying up that late last night, and I got up at 7:30 here after a really good sleep. I took in the good news, read a few nice things, and by 8:30 I know all I need to know, have read enough politics to fill me up for a while. Now what? haha.
People are wishing out loud about cabinet appointments made by Obama that don't suck. Lawrence Lessig and Bruce Schnier seem to be the darlings here. That would be amazing - I mean, Obama won with the internet's power, so he should listen now and appoint some intellectuals.
Do you think the Obama revolution will be the intellectual revolution? maybe anti-intellectualism (as paraded by palin, to disgusting heights ) has finally recieved a setback in Gringolandia. Here's to hoping.

sorry

2008-11-01T09:29:00.002-04:00

I haven't posted anything in more than a week. This is a sad, empty failing. It's so easy to just bring up this website and throw words on the page, but the times when I really want to do it are when I'm out and about - not when I'm home with the computer. Maybe I need an iphone...
I've been having a good time these days, meeting new people, getting to know friends better, learning about myself, and checking out lots of good music. I've decided that Chileans (perhaps like most latinoamericanos) have more poetry running through their veins than us, their cousins from the north. It could have something to do with the language, or maybe with the culture. But the point is that I don't see enough poetry in the states, but here it's everywhere. Where up north people read speeches to make their political points, here they write and read poetry.
I wrote something last night. It's not very good even by my standards, but I submit it to your viewing pleasure:

La Princesa de Pomelo
Suddenly on the shelf there's a
wait
look
crooked pigeon, cooing.
y en el fuego de su ojo
encased in glass
una bailarina amorfa y bella
esperando.
I'm a log floating down
bobbing
dark
a river of coconut milk.
Hold me, please:
Smile-
Who are you?
who, me? Soy la princessa de pomelo y mora
Soy parecido a tu mama
pero mas joven.
And you?
Do you need a new friend?

-----
vocabulary:
pomelo = grapefruit
mora = blackberry
parecido = similar
joven = young
new friend = ancient nostalgia
And all the rest are basically cognates.
-e

eli the teacher

2008-10-21T17:22:00.002-04:00

I had my class again today. That is, the english class in which I help out on tuesdays. Today I got there and handed the teacher the tests I'd graded for her (almost uniformly in the top 15% with one outlier who got like a 55% and I'm sure there was a ton of copying because I preserved the order of the tests from when she handed them to me and the wrong answers followed unmistakable patterns between tests that shifted as I graded down the stack of exams). She told me, thanks, this is great, I'll be right back I have to go get a CD can you do these exercises with the class, and then left. Woops.
I was lost for about 3 seconds but I took control of myself and the class - Jumping around, trying to get everybody involved at once. It's hard! The problem is that the classroom is big, it has no echo but neither does sound carry at all, and there are a lot of kids. I'm thinking more than 40. Discipline is kind of a forgotten dream in general there, and especially when I have no disciplinary power whatsoever. But they respected me somewhat, I think for being new and because I had a lot of energy. We read exercises and filled in blanks. The first time I tried to get a kid to speak up and tell us the answer he did so, and then I said, "Ok, did everybody hear that?" It was met with a resounding "No!"
But we worked along, I helped kids with different things, I switched up strategies, and things went smoothly. I even think most of the kids were having fun. Honestly, the teacher didn't come back for a full 15 minutes (leaving me alone is expressly against English Opens Doors rules, but I had the time of my life).
The rest of the class was less exciting, although she did leave me alone again for like 5 minutes later on. For next class, we're going to do an activity together where they'll work in small groups trying to fill in sentences the fastest, and then the group that gets the sentence filled will get a chocolate or something. Is that too "elementary school" for 16 year olds? I know I always want candy, even now...

scones part 2

2008-10-18T19:49:00.004-04:00

A resounding success!

scones

2008-10-18T19:43:00.001-04:00

I just made some delicious looking scones. They were delicious looking when I put them in the over a few minutes ago, anyway. I hope they stay that way on the other side of the fiery challenge.
Will keep you posted.
Eli

monday stats

2008-10-13T18:47:00.002-04:00

0: classes today, due to my one class being canceled
1: woody allen movie watched
1: load of laundry hauled, washed, dried, put away
1: pot of lentil stew
2: bakeries visited
3.5: hours spent walking, first by myself, then with friend Doran, then by myself again
7:45, more or less: sunset, because we've been shoved ahead an hour here.

teaching

2008-10-07T21:00:00.003-04:00

Hullo
Today I helped for an hour and a half in an english class in the highschool down the block. It's the biggest highschool in the region, with more than 2000 students. I found out today that 9th and 10th graders have school from something like 7am-2pm, while 11th and 12th go from 2pm-7pm. It's crazy in there. Loud and busy and a bit scary, but everybody's actually nice, and in the end, smiles all around.
The class I helped in is taught by a woman who I think is the head of the english department. There are about 35 kids in the class, maybe more. We went over past progressive today ("I was walking") and I got to help the class with their pronounciations. The teacher didn't have any idea how to use me, and we hadn't discussed it beforehand, but when I saw her standing up in the front of the room reading example sentences with the students halfheartedly repeating her semi-so-so pronounciation, I knew it was my moment. The next time, I stood up and told her that I could do this part. Ya know what? They loved me. Everybody participated with much more gusto, and I highlighted parts of each sentence where I could hear difficulty. I'd call it a success all around - after that first time, the teacher had me do all the pronounciation. Also, she's not proud at all - when I pointed out to her that "I got off from the bike" was wrong, she changed it right away. I think I actually remember the teacher in Liceo San Jose making the exact same mistake two years ago - I bet it's a typo in some popular English textbook they use in Chile for teachers :)
After that I met up with a friend who comes from Columbia. We hiked around a bit, found ourselves in the old ex-jail, and met a cool Mapuche grandma who served us yummy mate and was very nice. Then we climbed some more, took a colectivo down, and had coffee.
And now I'm winding down for the night. Till later,
Eli

more apologies, borges

2008-10-02T08:58:00.002-04:00

So, sorry again that it's been so long since I've written here. I was away camping for a week, and then school picked up a bit, and then we moved. Now I'm living in a cool shared student house around the corner from my old apartment. It's big, colonial-style (which means double height ceilings) and friendly. Also, it has the best shower I've ever had in Chile and a great backyard on top of someone else's house. A lot of the buildings in Valparaiso don't seem so special from the outside, and you have to go in and check it out to realize that the old colonial style has not been modified, and that (for instance) they are three stories tall inside with balconies running all the way along half a city block on the second and third floors (this was one me and romy stumbled into a couple months ago on the other side of town).
We read a short and interesting poem by Borges in my poetry class called Carniceria, which means "Meatshop" or "Butcher's". This is it:

Más vil que un lupanar
la carnicería rubrica como una afrenta la calle.
Sobre el dintel
una ciega cabeza de vaca
preside el aquelarre
de carne charra y mármoles finales
con la remota majestad de un ídolo.

I'm going to try to do an impromptu translation:

More depraved than a whorehouse
The butcher shop stains the street with its signature.
Above the door
a blind cow's head
presides over the cabal
of charred meat and final marble counters
with the remote majesty of an idol.

What do we think of this poem? Does the last line strike us as odd and incongruent? I read an essay online that says that the poem, more than a comment on argentinean meat-loving culture, is trying to point out that our perception of reality is arbitrary (did you follow that? Because it convinces us that butcher shops are like whorehouses, only to betray our confidence in the last line). Buyers?
Eli

back in valpo

2008-09-21T10:27:00.003-04:00

Hi there. Well, we've made it back to valparaiso after a long and satisfying vacation. Romy and I hitchhiked 3 or 4 hours to a little valley north and east of valpo. First we passed Illapel, where she was born, and then ended up in Salamanca, a pretty small town (but still a town) where not much goes on. Romy's dad works in the mining company in the hills and mountains on top of this valley, which made it an ideal choice for us. From Salamanca we took a taxi 30 minutes farther into the interior, and ended up at a tiny village named Cuncumen. It's pretty much the last village in that direction. The area is all desert except in the middle of the valley, where the Choapa river runs down from the Andes (where it starts out as melting snow) and creates this long oasis wherever it goes.
From Cuncumen we walked about another 90 minutes inward on a long dirt road unti we got past all the private land. There we found a wooden bridge crossing the river, and finally on the other side, in the oasis, a little clearing in the trees, not far from a goat path on one side and the river on the other. It was perfect. That's where we set up our tent and cooked our meals and lived for 5 days and 4 nights. We have a bunch of pictures that I'll try to put up later today.
So anyway camping was great, building fires and cooking our food was fun. We had some great moments - on the first day, two local kids (actually the children of our closest neighbors, who had a farm about 1.5 km away) were fishing in the river near our camp and offered us 3 little trout when they were done, as a gift. They explained that all we had to do to clean them was cut open the stomachs, scoop out all the guts, and wash. "I'll do it!" I said. And they were delicious, too.
Another day we went exploring a few hours inward and upward towards the andes, following the river back to its source. Well, we didn't get anywhere near its source, but we did find a bunch of criollo and indigenous buildings and hyroglyphs, respectively. More pictures to come, again.
I guess this post would be more interesting with the pertinent pictures inline with the text, so I think I'll write more a bit later.
Happily,
Eli

vacation time

2008-09-12T08:49:00.002-04:00

hard to believe that I've been in school here long enough to have a vacation, but suddenly, subtly, I realized that I don't have class next week. Today we're going to take the bus to Calera where Romy's parents live, and tomorrow morning we're heading north and east. Romy's dad works high in the mountains above a town called Salamanca, and we're going to go near there to a little village to do some camping for a few days. When Romy's dad comes down the mountain on wednesday he's going to pick us up and take us back with him, where we'll have family time for the holidays until next week. Good deal, huh? So I may not have internet access for a while.
wish me luck in the wilderness,
Eli

holiday plans

2008-09-10T16:11:00.002-04:00

next week is a holiday for national independence. Everywhere in the country people take a few days or a week off. I think I get the whole week off from school. Me and Romy are thinking about traveling north to a little village called Salamanca, or maybe to Coquimbo or even Diaguitas again. But it's also a family holiday, so we want to include her family. We're stymied because her parents don't want to take more than one day off. Addiction to work = not worth it.

saturday

2008-09-06T08:25:00.002-04:00

woops, been a while again.
I've been having so much fun (mixed with some good old studying) that's I've forgotten to write. Also, our internet was out for a couple days because the landlady forgot to pay. Sigh.
Last Tuesday (or maybe monday?) we went to a free screening of a movie about clowns (spanish speaking clowns, including one chilean) who formed a traveling group and went to palestinian refugee camps in the middle east to entertain children there. Politics aside, entertaining poor and hopeless children is praiseworthy, excellent. The documentary was well done.
I finished the first draft of my poetry essay (on Ruben Dario and the quest for hispanoamerican identity) at 4.5 pages, 1.5 spaced. That's a lot of spanish, for those keeping score. I think it still needs some work.
It's 8:30am saturday morning. Later, Romy's dad will drive us and the dog to Calera, where we shall pass the weekend with family. One of the big Chilean bus companies (basically, the only one now that they've consolidated and monopolized - what happened to free trade??) changed their policies, and now dogs aren't allowed on the bus. This makes life more difficult because we used to take Jacinto in our arms on the bus quite a bit. I think when it gets a little warmer we'll have to hitchhike is all.
So later today in Calera will be Nico(romy's older brother's little son)'s birthday party. We're going to dress up a bit and entertain little kids. I'm going to put on a big funny wig (according to plan), juggle, and give out little candies. This'll be fun :)
Till later
Eli

essays and coincidences

2008-08-31T11:01:00.003-04:00

Hi! I'm getting into school mode again here - I've taken to reviewing all of my class notes around twice a week, which is the kind of strategy everyone should employ - it makes everything much easier in the end. I have an essay due in 10 days, but I don't know what to write yet. I have to pick a topic about south american identity in poetry. First I was thinking that I should write that the major identifying factor in south american poetry is the never-ending search for identity, but I think that actually applies to all poetry - and come to think of it all art - in general. So now I'm thinking about writing about the use of animals - specifically birds - in the poetry of Ruben Dario as an inheritance of indeginous native american culture. The problem with this idea, which otherwise seems ideal, is that half the focus and research for the essay would be on birds, which might not please the professor too much. So I'm still thinking.
Yesterday a friend from chicago named Sam came to visit. He's spent the summer working in a physics lab at a university in Santiago. The other funny coincidence is that he's from pittsburgh. All told, there are quite a few people with the pittsburgh-chicago-chile connection in my life. Romy, my neighbor Ben (who was doing arceology in the north), our new friend Sarah (who I think I've mentioned) and Sam. I guess a lot of people are from pittsburgh, and quite a few of them go to chicago, and Chile is a popular place these days :)
We saw some folk music last night and he's still sleeping on the couch. Whenever we have guests I always wake up 2 hours earlier they do. It's not all bad though - I get to eat a first breakfast nice and early, and then another one when everyone is up and moving, haha.
till later
eli

a full day

2008-08-13T21:51:00.003-04:00

today was fun:
I had my first class of my third class of the semester: art and culture in prehispanic chile. The teacher is smart and strict and fun. When I arrived she asked me what I studied. She said music was good but that computer science would not help, and that lots of computative types have failed her class in the past. I told her not to worry and that I had a lot of confidence in myself. I really like the class, and it looks like I'm going to learn a lot.
Later me and romy went to the mall and bought a blender. We used it to blend the lentil stew I cooked for lunch. We ended up with cream of lentils, and it was so good we had it again for dinner, thus eliminating a huge pot of yumminess in one day.
We also went to a talk held in a leftist org. headquarters just around the corner from the apartment. It was about the current labor laws in Chile. The speaker had a very strong stance against subcontracting. I agree with a lot of the rhetoric, but not all of it. She drew a triangle and said that big companies hire a subcontractor who hires workers (which is definitely the way it works much of the time), and that the workers work for the company but the company pays the subcontractor. That was her problem - that the workers do their work as they should for the company, but the company pays them through an unnecessary middle man.
Here's where I disagree: The middle man is not always unnecessary. He provides vital organization and finds workers for the company. The company can pay a specialist rather than spend the extra resources to do it themselves. This is not bad in and of itself. It can end up badly for the worker, but it doesn't have to.
I'll stop there :) I obviously have only barely touched on the subject.

digging in

2008-08-12T20:19:00.002-04:00

I've had a good few days. Over the weekend we went to calera. That was nice; saw the family. Not much to say on that account except that it inspired me to write something, something which is now about 15% done.
Last night two new friends came over. One is named Sarah, lives next door, speaks better spanish than me, and came from pittsburgh to study in more or less the same program as myself. The other is from canada and also studies in my program. He's named Doran and he plays the mandolin.
We picked up a few things from the supermarket and cooked, with Doran's expert advice, a great ethiopan meal - split pea curry with ethiopian-style bread, something I now know how to make as well. wizard!
Today I went running for the first time in way too long. I've been lifting weights almost every day for a bit now, but cardiovascular exercise has been a bit lacking. Earlier today I was walking the dog and I started running with him a bit, and that reminded me how great it was to move around in a rapid fashion. According to google maps distance calculator, I ran (without the dog, though) 3.43 kilometers. For those of us up north, that's 2.12 miles.
I miss you all
eli

hi again

2008-08-09T10:01:00.003-04:00

I guess it's already been a week since I've last posted here. I guess I have to try even harder.
Last night me and romy had a cool adventure: around 6:30 we got together with our friend (from pittsburgh, incidentally) Sarah (who is also on an exchange program at the PUCV and lives basically next door) and we made Cocadas, which are a traditional chilean food: crumble cookies and mix them with manjar, which is like milky caramel, and then form little balls out of that dough and cover them with shredded coconut. Also, add some vanilla and whatnot to the dough. Then let harden in the fridge.
We made 53 of these little treats and around 11:30 sallied out of the house, tupperware and cocadas in hand. In the end, I think we sold 35 of them for 100 pesos each, and ate another 6 or 7. We just walked around and asked people if they wanted one, and then started going into any bar that would let us and asking at the tables. This is pretty common in Chile - you just ask whoever's in charge, and 9 times out of 10 they're happy to let you - independent and illegal business like this is what makes the country go. I really felt like I was participating in a big part of the culture. Along the way we met some friends we knew in two different places and got lots of smiles. Then, of course, by 12:30 we'd sold all we had energy to sell, so we switched roles from seller of late-night treats to buyers of late-night treats and shared a pitcher of wine. The night was a net gain and a great experience which we plan on doing again.
Till later
eli

pancakes everywhere

2008-08-02T13:33:00.005-04:00

hi there
last night me and romy got together with a couple friends (two of them new, in my student exchange program) and had dinner and then went out to a blues club in the hills for a while. After that we walked to downtown to a huge place called La Trova, where a kid was playing chilean folk on his guitar. that's all they ever play in La Trova. Oh, also, on the way down we passed a group of professional music students that play traditional chilean music on traditional instruments kind of all the time all over the place for free, and they were out of the rain in a big doorway with a group of people watching them. Someone told us they'd been playing for hours. they're called "Tunas" and I'm not sure exactly what the deal is but they wear special capes and uniforms and everybody respects them. The police let them play in the street, even though people nearby were drinking (illegal). Here's what they look like.
Today Romy's friend Caro is coming back from a vacation in the south with her family, so along with Caro's boyfriend Francisco and a few other people, we're going to have a nice gathering here. We made a ton of pancakes and filled them with sweet goodies for the occasion.

School is going fine. I haven't started classes - that's on monday. I'll let you all know how they go.

In other news, Romy dyed our hair blue. Here are some pictures. This if the first time I've ever had strangely colored hair, and I think I like it a lot. It's fun to look fun.

I hope the formatting on this post isn't disgusting. The pictures make it weird.

school stuff

2008-07-30T17:08:00.002-04:00

Today I toured some of the PUCV buildings. They carted groups around in big buses, which also gave me the chance to meet a couple new people.
The buildings are cool - they are all either old and classically impressive, like the history building which is actually a castle with four stories of stairs outside the building just to get to the front door, or new and interesting, with cool architecture that makes good use of space and opens up into cool patios when you least expect it.
Me and romy also donated blood today, which is always a good thing to do.
I met a couple kids from france, some others from germany, and a few from the good old EEUU, as they call it here. I don't mind meeting americans, though it isn't on my list of things to do, but I refuse to have an extended conversation in English. It's on my list of things not to do. Luckily the kids I met didn't mind that. Overall, people seem eager to improve their spanish.
Yesterday I met with the head of the spanish program for what I thought was going to be an oral spanish exam, but what turned out to be more like a conversation. Turns out I got one of the highest grades on the written spanish test we took, so he was impressed and happy to chat in spanish. Here's what that means:
He lent me two books in spanish. This is amazing, because people in Chile seldom lend books. Basically, based on a strange tax and general scarcity they are worth much more than in the US. I plan on doing a lot of reading in spanish.
I'm not going to take any spanish language classes, but I will most likely take a literature class. I think it'll be great.
I'm going to get my spanish language certification in the "advanced" level (the best one) from the cervantes institute, which is equivalent to a TOEFL certification. It'll cost less in Chile, and he says I'm already prepared. It's a four day test. I am certain that it will be extremely useful for years to come.

Good stuff, huh?
Classes I seem to be headed in the direction of taking:
logic in programming
graphics programming
history of chile in the 20th century
modern history of latin america
chilean dance and traditional games
chilean literature
and possibly: metabolism (in the bio dept.).

A good course load, if you ask me. I may end up dropping some, of course. There's a lower limit of 15 credits (around 4 classes) but there's no upper limit, heh. We'll see what reality dictates.
till next time,
e

yay!

2008-07-28T21:17:00.003-04:00

I went to my first day of orientation today and it was easy. It wasn't incredibly exciting, but there were no problems and it wasn't hard and people were nice. I like the buildings and the atmosphere of the place. It turns out that there are more than 230 exchange students. However, there are only 10 or so that have come independently to study. Of those, the only ones at orientation today were 4 german kids. They spoke german a lot. When they spoke spanish or english though they were nice. I had a couple conversations with a few of them. There's a German girl who's studying in the PUCV in order to do something fun in Chile while she lives with her Chilean boyfriend, with whom she's been with four three years. He even goes to the same university that Romy used to attend, studying the same thing. Weird coincidence.
I'm thinking about taking 2 or 3 classes in history - history of valpo, history of chile in the 20th century, chilean dance - as well as a computational logic course and a computer graphics course. maybe 1 or 2 more, even. There's actually no maximum to the number of courses I can take, besides my own time limits.
Other than that, I have internet! yay! It's wireless and inexpensive, so we can chalk this one up as a success. I'm going to be uploading more pictures to flickr (I did a bunch today) and updating this blog more.
Till later
Eli

school about to start

2008-07-27T15:40:00.002-04:00

I go tomorrow morning for orientation. how exciting!
Last thursday me and romy and her family all went to a place called "Eden" where we swam in a heated pool and then sauna, cooked lunch outside on a campfire, explored a nearby hill, played in the grass, and in general relaxed as a family. It was a rarity, honestly, and a lot of fun. I took some pictures, which I swear I'll upload eventually.
Today has been a day of buying and fixing things up around the house. I also baked a wholewheat bread with pieces of dried apricot. it's yummy.
the dog is still peeing everywhere. It's truly like a little kid - you scold it and it gets mad, but you perservere and hold steady and it submits. one day it shall learn to behave!

sunday, cold

2008-07-20T11:42:00.002-04:00

Hello again from Chile. All is well and nice but a little chilly. I'm in Calera with Romy and folks, and we're doing the family thing, which generally includes a lot of eating. On the other hand, Romy and I are contemplating a camping trip soon. I start school a week from monday, so this seems to be the time to do it. We have a good backpack, a tent, a double sleeping bag, and supplies. We are only considering the weather and a good location. There is a forest reserve fairly close to here, so I'm going to call and inquire about weather and wetness to make our decision. If not, the week may not be as interesting as I'd hoped. That's ok though, because I'm pretty excited to start school again too. La Catolica, as they call it for short, is a big University. Its students dominate a large section of Valparaiso physically, culturally, and academically. I'm about to become one...
I still don't have internet. But it's coming. I can feel it in my veins.

a really good day

2008-07-13T18:52:00.002-04:00

Today was a fun day. It was also very sunny. I know my last post was slightly pessimistic, and that I mentioned that it was cloudy, but don't assume that I'm so easily influenced by the weather. Between that post and this have been a bunch of other gray days that I've enjoyed a whole lot.
Romy and I decided not to go to Calera this weekend, which let us check out the coolness that is Valparaiso on a sunday. We walked up to Cerro Concepcion to this old lutheran church where they have a free organ recital every sunday a 12:30. The organ is gigantic and in impeccable condition, and beautiful. It was a delight to hear it played. There was some purcell, and some verdi, and a couple other great pieces.
And who did we happen to run into at the church but Mauricio, the man who taught me how to bake bread. He had with him his 1.5 y old son, who I looked after for a couple minutes a year ago. The son didn't remember me, but Mauricio did, of course. It was great to see him - we starting talking, and then we trotted back to his house, and before we knew it we were invited to lunch with him, his wife, his three young children, and his wife's parents. It was his wife's dad's birthday to boot! Me and romy zipped out to buy some lettuce for a salad and icecream for dessert, and we had a great time. After lunch we zipped back home to pay some attention to the doggy, but we passed by our landlady's dad's house along the way and ended up stopping. I said to Romy: Isn't this the dad's house? And just then Luz Maria (landlady) burst out to say hello.

More good news is that it turns out that although her modem does not do wireless, she can upgrade. I'm going to return the $50 router I bought, and she's going to spring for the wireless, which they install for $25 plus $2 a month. She'll cover all monthly fees (and we will pay her office electricity which is like $6 a month) and I'll cover the $25 instead, and everybody will have internet. Hopefully.

After that me and romy walked for a bit more, but with the dog this time (who really isn't bothering me as much as that one day), and then she went west to walk along the beach, and I went east to a nice outdoor market I meant to check out.
More later!

uck

2008-07-09T12:03:00.002-04:00

well, it's kind of an icky day. I caught a cold recently, and it seems to attack me with coughing fits just as I lay down to sleep, every night. I've been fighting back with various and colorful medications. But I generally feel crappy.
It's cold and wet outside. I'm in the cybercafe down the block, as usual, because the internet is still not about to happen. The plan was to share with the landlady's office which is right next to our apartment, and I even bought a wireless router to install, but their internet hasn't been working. These 20-something year old girls working in this office are completely clueless. They like not having internet, because it means less work for them. Finally today one of them called the company, and now they inform me that someone will come look at the problem - on monday! The conversation went like this:
-So, how's the internet?
-Still not working.
-Did you call?
-She did.
-And? what's the problem?
-They told her the problem was on their end and not on ours, and that they're going to fix it soon.
-Oh, that's good - do you know when?
-They said they're sending someone out to look at our modem on monday.
-But the problem is with them?
-I don't know.
-But why would they send someone here?
-I don't know.

You see what I'm up against. Meanwhile, internet would cost me - all by itself, mind you - $50 a month! That's a ton of money, especially in Chile. The whole situation pisses me off because I dislike the computers in this cybercafe. Windows-*shudder*
More annoying stuff: I finally got my student visa registered at "La policia de investigaciones". Intimidating name, intimidating place, until you get inside and see how unorganized and immature the whole thing looks. I'll say no more on that subject. I then went to get my national ID card, but the line was annoyingly long, as usual, and I just couldn't take it. I'll try again later, I guess. I'm going to email the school to see if it's necessary that I get one. It may not be.
Also: The stupid dog continues to do its business all over the apartment. I'm reaching a boiling point. I think we both are (that'd be me and romy, not me and the dog).

So, lots of annoyances. Not all is bad though. Yesterday a friend of Romy's named Sarah Rafson, who has spent the last year in Chile and is now returning to pittsburgh in a couple of weeks, came to Valpo. We had lunch and hung out for a while, and then she went to take a walk through the city and Romy and I went to see Wall-E. I really liked it- some parts of the movie were truly amazing, although some of the plot was a little annoying. Especially the very end.

Enough writing for now. Hasta luego.
Eli

another update from Chile

2008-07-03T10:09:00.002-04:00

Hello World:
We've moved into the new apartment! yay! I really love the place. I've taken some pictures, but I can't upload them very easily yet, as we still lack internet. I'm in a cybercafe right now. They don't even have firefox- ew.
But yeah the apartment is awesome. Romy and I have been spending the last few days exploring the neighborhood, getting situated, buying odds and ends that we need (plants, cushions, a broom, shampoo, a whiteboard, etc. [actually the whiteboard is cool because we made it ourselves kind of ghettostyle but it looks really nice and now we won't forget import Stuff To Do]), taking care of Jacinto who's a bit ill, and relaxing. Romy's friend Caro's birthday was this week, and few friends of ours are coming over tonight to celebrate. They're bringing a cake, and then we'll go out somewhere.
Yesterday on a whim I took a free tour of a few hills offered by the city. It was interesting, although I'd already explored everywhere we went. I did make a friend on the tour named Omar though, who's my age and goes to a nearby university. He might end up coming over tonight as well.
The apartment is right in the middle of downtown (I bet I've mentioned that already) and more and more I realize just how great the location is. We can walk to anything, just about.
Let's see. Yesterday we went shopping for fruits and veggies. Now we're super-stocked. We're gonna try to keep to a strict fruit-vegetable-legume-dairy-wholewheat diet, although I'm probably missing a food group in there. We're doing this because it's cheaper, yummier, and healthier. For the first time we both have almost complete control over what we eat, so we'll be able to try this out. Oh yeah - and seafood. And the occasional cookie/icecream.
Last weekend we went to Calera, and we're going to go again this weekend on Saturday. That'll probably be the last time we go for a couple weeks. Also we may go travelling north at some point to visit diaguitas again, but we're still not sure.
This morning I had an unhappy adventure. I went to go get my ID card as a foreign student. I arrived 30 minutes early at this huge government building, and even still had to wait another half hour once I got in. I'd already asked the day before where I needed to go, and this building was what they told me. Finally I got to the front, only to be informed that there was another building I had to go to first. Great. I think I'm going to leave it for another day because I've had enough bureaucracy to last me a week.
Me and Romy found a big party advertised on the street for tomorrow night - some sort of Drum+Bass exhibition/Ruckus. So that might be fun.
And um, not much else to say right now. Still working on getting me some internet love. I called the local wideband monopoly - it'd be easy to set up, but it costs 24000 pesos a month - a bit more than $45. Kind of ridiculous when you consider that for this 75 minutes of internet access that I have here right now, I'm paying 80 cents. I have another option that I'm exploring though, so it may work out ok.
Drop me a line, add a comment, and we'll be in touch.
Eli

vacationing

2008-06-28T09:59:00.003-04:00

hullo! Yesterday Romy and I took a daytrip to a beach far up the coast from valpo, next to a town called Horcon. We woke up this morning and Romy suddenly decided we should go, so we packed a bag and hopped on the bus, dog in hand. It was easy and really cool - horcon is a tiny tiny little town, but they make somre great seafood empanadas. The beach is big and nearly always deserted and far removed from the town - I'd neglected to bring my camera, but to get down to the beach we had to climb down some 75 stairs made of wood and mud, half of which were falling apart. It was more adventurous than we'd planned for, but we had no problem in the end. Later, after we got back home, we went to ¨Cine Insomnia¨. This is every friday night in a tiny dirty little theater downtown. They show 2 artsy weird movies for 1000 pesos - like $2. They make their money on people buying beer at the attached bar. We were smart though and brought food and liquid, but we ended up buying some tea and coffee in the end.
Thursday night we met up with Romy's best friend Caro and her new boyfriend, who turned out to be pretty cool (and had a bewildering number of things in common with me) and we went to our favorite hangout, El Ritual. After that we all walked along the beach for a while. Nice times.
Pretty soon romy and I will go to calera for the night. The dog has a vet appointment there at 5. Tomorrow night we're back- Monday morning at 10:15 I'm to meet an old, old man that we met who makes and sells these great fur slippers. Romy's sister bought a pair from him once and loves them - we talked to him the other day and he said to come monday, and then he told us about how he loves to play guitar, so I said I'd bring mine. It should be fun.
Right, so I probably won't have internet until tomorrow night. Love,
e

Hello from Chile!

2008-06-25T15:34:00.002-04:00

Hi everybody-
I'm temporarily settled in Romy and her siblings' valpo house now, and I'm comfortable and content. Temporarily because starting monday romy and I are renting a new apartment downtown. We went and walked past it the other day - it's in a great place, just a block and a bit away from Plaza Victoria in the middle of the city. It's also on the fifth floor, and it has a balcony with what looks to be a pretty nice view.
We're both excited to have a place to ourselves, be able to shop and cook for ourselves - it's interesting that these little pieces of domesticity are suddenly starting to look fun and exciting to us, but the thought of cooking a simple meal and sharing it alone, or entertaining friends on our own schedule, and the thought of being able to go out to concerts or whatnot at night and then come back to our own pad - it's exciting!
Today Romy and I took two big walks. First we walked downtown and I fixed up the cellphone I had from last year. All I have to do now is buy some minutes and I'm set to go. We walked a long way and took some detours, and then came back. Carla cooked a nice lunch, and then after that we left again, this time with the dog, and walked along the ocean for a while. We played some training games with him, where we called him from one person to the other and rewarded him with treats. We got him to go from one person to the other when called even over fairly large distances. He's only 2 months old, but he figures stuff out fast.
Now we're back home. We might paint the wall a little for fun. It's time to relax. This weekend we'll go back to Calera again for a while.
More to come,
Eli!

south america

2008-06-19T10:47:00.002-04:00

so, I'm sorry I haven't posted in a long time. News in my life:
I'm learning to be myself.
I'm going to South America again on the 22nd of this month. That's on saturday. That's in 2 days. Wow. I'll be studying there from July 28 to late November. Then I'll be vacationing a bit, and then Romy and I will hopefully be gallivanting off to Argentina where she will be studying and I'll find some job/study/something.
Once in Chile I plan on updating this blog more often than I do now. I'll be further away from home and as such more responsible as far as keeping people updated goes. Your job will be to comment once in a while so that I know people are reading. Although writing, regardless of whether the writing is read or not, can be quite relaxing.
Hasta pronto!
eli

ants

2008-06-03T10:24:00.003-04:00

Yesterday while walking with my friend Zak in front of Ida Noyes hall we spotted a cloud of black shapes on the ground, by a kind of short wall/embankment. On closer inspection the cloud was hundreds and thousands of ants, coming together in three different black confluential masses but ranged across maybe 5 feet of wall, in the crack between sidewalk and wall. The light of the streetlamps, mixed with shadows and moonlight, cast a really strange yellow band right over the ants, but nothing else. It was odd.
We bent down to look at them. Sure enough, it was an ant battle. They weren't attacking any food that we could see - they were climbing all over each other, ripping and tearing and biting. They were just little black ants, but they were vicious. I kept trying to follow just one with my eyes, because it was more exciting that way - these ants would rush into a battle, bite all around, and then rush out and try their luck somewhere else. The ground was littered with the dead, such that at the three main battles, the ants were walking exclusively on their fallen soldiers and enemies. I had leaned my arm against the wall, and don't you know it but I ended up joining the fight as well - a couple enterprising little buggers bit me on the wrist! Luckily these were just small black ants, and it didn't hurt.
Humans are not the only warring species.

What a weekend

2008-05-26T09:38:00.002-04:00

Well, I got home from Summer Camp 2008 last night, a music festival in southern Illinois. What an amazing time! This was the first big music festival I've stayed at (50,000 people, dozens of acts, in a campground in the forest) and I was shocked by how cool it was. First of all, the music was amazing. My favorite act was the Flaming Lips, who are epic and brilliant. Their show was a mix of great music and amazing energy and pyrotechnics, and they are silly and wonderful. I danced for hours to different shows, and then after the official shows were over I wandered into the forest and found a humongous drum circle and danced for hours more - I was just one more hippy in a giant mass of dancing hippies.
Everybody at the festival was so nice! In a group of that many people I thought I'd be overwhelmed, but any time I walked up to a group of people they said "hi! welcome! what's up?" and were eager to make me feel at home. Everybody was walking around meeting everybody, and everybody was smiling.
I got a little sunburned, but not too bad. Now I'm back in Chicago, relaxing and trying to work up the courage to finish a couple mountains of homework. I think breakfast comes first.
Fondly,
Eli

my fifth class

2008-05-22T17:03:00.001-04:00

I just finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a long and amazing novel. It's so long, its footnotes - the last few hundred pages of the book, in smaller type - are a novel all on their own.
I highly recommend it.

the nailclipper

2008-04-29T00:19:00.003-04:00

So my nail-clipper, which I think I originally stole from my father, has been missing for a week or so - which means my nails have been long, too long, for about a week or so - ever since I first realized I needed to clip my nails. I just found it though, in my roommate's toiletry bag. I didn't even have to root around; it was visible from above. Now my nails are short, but my sanity is shot.

deep thoughts late at night

2008-04-15T01:49:00.002-04:00

Just had a long long conversation with friends re: energy as a representation, on any and all levels (that is, as the spin of an electron or of a moon, for instance, although spin is not a necessity) of information (that is, of 0s and 1s, yeses and nos, although of course this is a human concept and could be replaced with anything els - a wave in the ocean is not a zero or a one, but by the way I'm defining information, it does carry significance, even if not to us), such that the idea of energy (which is, you'll remember, finite in the universe) is synonymous/analogous to the idea of representation of information (which, interestingly, is not finite theoretically - we could posit an infinite string of 0s and 1s, but NO amount of energy, no matter how large, could ever represent it in a bijection [that is to say, one-to-one]), which is interesting to me because it points to the analogous relationship between (for instance) the human brain and the universe, where the individual neurons in our brain have no idea of their function but nevertheless do represent patterns of information (which [incidentally or not] become something even more complex), just as the universe itself might end up being one big brain/computer/calculator (which is obviously a human conception that could easily be replaced by some other idea but you get the point), spiraling on its way towards eventual heat-death, only waiting to spit out, with some final spin of some final quark in some final, ultimate, concentration of molecules, a yes or a no or maybe even a maybe (which is most likely, I suppose, because if you look back at the brain part of the analogy, our brain doesn't really come up with anything at the end and of course we all discover that there is no answer to life and such, so I don't know why I would expect our simple universe to be any different).

Hello.

2008-04-05T08:41:00.002-04:00

It's 7:45 this lovely Saturday morning. I'm going to work in 5 minutes. I have my humongous math textbook (whose formatting appears to have been laid out by a blind chimpanzee) and my lovely and even more humongous computer systems textbook (which is just plain huge). I also have my computer - I'm going to watch No Country for Old Men on one of the big screens in Harper if I get my studying done.
Schoolwork is multiplying at steadily increasing rates, leading theorists in Elilandia to worry that the exponential rate of increase will outpace the intellectual firepower of Eli's Getting Things Done chipset. Most scientists refuse to comment on the subject, already hard at work as they are on the latest math homework.

obligatory update

2008-03-28T00:17:00.002-04:00

Well I'm home for pittsburgh, as some may have noticed. Though not many - I've been sitting around reading and writing for the most part.
Classes for next quarter:
1) computer science systems course
2) introduction to the workings of the human brain (yes, it's a mouthful)
3) music theory for majors part 3
4) analysis 1 (this is what mathematicians consider to be real, actual, you're not in highschool anymore math)
As far as 4) goes, I have no need/reason to take this class besides the intellectual challenge. That's a great thing. That is a luxury that most of human life has never, ever had. I'm glad I'm mature enough to recognize it; I only hope that when these four classes are ripping me a new one in a few weeks, I won't forget it.

what do these artists have in common?

2008-03-17T14:03:00.002-04:00

Question: what do these artists have in common?

Gilberto Gil
Devendra Banhart
Donovan

Answer that is unexpected but obviously true in hindsight:
They are all the same person.

sunday

2008-03-09T19:21:00.004-04:00

hello all
I've had a decent week. This quarter is winding down - I have but 3 days left of school, followed by a couple finals.
This morning I woke up early and did two loads of laundry. Then I ate breakfast (yogurt, oats, apricot-bar thing) and read some email. I worked on my computer science project for a bit - I'm making a kind of tomogatchi for the computer, and so far it can run all around through your file system, and if you end the program and start it up again, the program can remember how the pet is doing - is it happy, hungry, etc. The user can build a pethouse and fences if they don't want the pet running all over the place. anyway it's fun.
I finished reading Anthony Burgess's adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac into English - it's fantastically done. I only recently discovered that he wrote such a thing, and it's certainly the best version of one of my favorite plays that I've ever read. Maybe one day I'll read it in the original french and change my opinion.
This prompted me to return all my library books, so I trekked (is that even right?) out to the library with about 20 or 25 books in a big bag. It was exciting.
I went to an examination for the lab portion of my music theory class, and now I'm sitting in one of the student run coffee shops listening to some Irish folk music. They have a live band - these guys are good. I don't remember there name because it isn't english, but it's something like Gulrua...
in a half hour or so I'm going to call Romy, and then I don't know what to do with the rest of my night. Maybe I'll see if any of my neglected buddies want to hang out...
later
e

the internet I

2008-03-03T20:03:00.002-05:00

You know, it takes a lot of time to keep the online version of myself up to date. I have this blog, I have my writing website, I have my music website, I have my private diary, I have my numerous emails, I have my facebook profile (but who really cares about that one anyway?) and I have my flickr pictures. What a mess. I really oughta integrate it all on a personal web site. I'm enough of a nerd that to be able to play around with web design and to have everything all together would be well worth the cost. Of course I would still link to hosted files on flickr and perhaps even for the music.
Although even still, I don't know if that would ameliorate my problem of having too much stuff online. What I really need is still a direct internet connection in my brain. Right.

Today I went to three classes, I ate lunch, (turkey + cheese, clif bar, personal pizza, naked juice) - I know, it's humongous, but it was spread out between 11:30 and 1:30 and I had a really small breakfast and I haven't eaten since - I did homework including composing something in four voices, I went to my CS lab where I worked with two partners and we started to implement a lindenmeyer system drawing program using turtles, and then I finally came home, a few minutes ago. Woo for awesomely long sentences - although I guess if you read this blog you're used to those.
I'm working on getting more new music onto the download.com/elialbert site. I've written a couple brand spanking new songs recently, and updated an old one. I'm really happy with them - the music theory class is improving my songwriting immensely. I understand what I'm doing with different chords and progressions, and I can confidently modulate keys. Last night I recorded a song that I'm calling "strawberries" with my friend ben who lives downstairs - he got a new digital 8-track for his birthday and it's a lot of fun.
In a little bit I'm going to campus to see his jazz band play. They're really getting a lot of gigs, it's cool.
Ok, off to flickr to update some tags and descriptions. gnight.
e

sadness

2008-03-01T12:39:00.002-05:00

Romy has left the building.
She's in the airport, ready for miami and chile. I'm home, trying to be cheerful, and probably going to take a nap. I'll have a longer update later if I get a chance.

Romy goes home soon

2008-02-24T12:21:00.003-05:00

Hello everyone.
All is well, although the atmosphere is sad here at E+R headquarters due to Romy's impending departure. We've had a good weekend - we went to the aquarium, we went out to a korean restaurant, we went to a friend's benefit party for habitat for humanity (the tagline: "get hammered and nailed!"), and yesterday we went to an anime convention and an experimental movie/sound mashup screening, both on campus, before meeting up with some other friends. Somehow in all of there I've finished most of my homework, too. Today we're going to go food-shopping and relax a little in anticipation of another busy week.
Till next time
E

a fancy dinner

2008-02-20T00:07:00.002-05:00

I just got back from a fancy dinner for my class where we got to eat catered food and talk with faculty members in our fields of interest. The computer science table had 7 students and one faculty member, which was as expected. The food was nice but not outstanding. The dessert buffet was a blast, as usual.
I know I don't update often but just to give an idea of what today was like, I had class in the morning, I did homework until lunchtime. At 12 Romy and I went to a talk about drugs and social justice (takeaway lesson: it's because crimes, and especially relatively minor drug crimes are more harshly punished in the inner city areas that minorities are disproportionately represented in our criminal justice system more than because of racism, among other things [sorry, my sentences tend to become unreadable when I try to write after recently working on CS stuff].) where they also had some good eats. We went home, relaxed, painted the mural, went shopping, more homework, etc - a normal afternoon - and then I went to this faculty round-table discussion.
I'm working on a program that takes files with formatted names and organizes them in structured folders based on the specification you give it: useful, for instance, in structuring mp3 collections. I'm writing in bash.
tomorrow I have lots of class, I'm going to hang out at Emily's radio show and convert a les mccan album I bought (Second Movement, $3.49) to digital, and I have work at 4:30 followed by a P. Almodovar movie with Romy. She has plenty to do too, mostly involving coffee with various friends at various times. And then Thursday we're going to the aquarium YAY!
ok now I'm tired- goodnight!
e

plans, an update

2008-02-17T12:11:00.002-05:00

Hi Everybody. With spring break fast approaching, and the end of Romy's vacation approaching faster still, the smell of change is in the air. School is going well. Computer Science homeworks are attacked and defanged with skill and speed. Music Theory midterms fall as well to the mighty pencil.
What am I doing for spring break? I'd like to go somewhere cool. I have a free round flight on SW. Not sure where to go though.
I had a cool idea for a blog. It would highlight guitar songs that are fun to play and sing for solo guitar, as well as giving lyrics and chards/tabs. I think more blogs like that are sorely lacking on the internet, or else I haven't found them. On to another digression: We say "on the internet" so casually, but in hindsight it's pretty amazing that it didn't develop just like countries - with tangible borders.
Um, right. Anyway, just thought I would also mention that I'm thinking of taking next year off.
e

20

2008-02-04T11:36:00.000-05:00

I'm older than I've ever been (and now I'm even older).
I've been keeping really busy. I don't really feel like writing now, but I feel bad that I never update. I'm sick, sitting in bed. I can't lay down because my nose gets stuffed. Romy is sleeping.
I had a really good, exciting weekend - for one thing, my apartment building threw a party friday night. We had at least 350 people over. At the end of the party, around 1 or 2, I was ready to go to bed but decided that I might like to play some music. I met two friends up on my 3rd floor porch and we started playing some jazz - me on bass, piotr on sax, and brad on bongos. Soon, the remnants of the party drifted up the stairs, and everybody danced and swung for more than an hour in the cold, cold night.

an update

2008-01-20T20:07:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone. Things are fun but hellishly cold here in chicago. I have an extended weekend right now because of dear old Martin L., and I've spent some of it doing computer scienceing but most of it being very unstressed with Romy and other friends. I'm enjoying good cooking and good company in spades. I've also been going to a lot of interesting talks and lectures and such - one on the history of the blues recently, another about feminism and matraphobia, and another upcoming on social change in the justice system (those three are just a sampling). The best part is that all of these talks have great food.
Me and romy went to the school ballet today and decided that ballet is not out thing. She leaned over to me and said, "eli? el balet no es mi tipo de cosa." I told her it wasn't mine either. They did, however, have the school's Jazz X-tet playing Duke Ellington's Nutcracker for the second half, which was cool.
Right now I'm at work, babysitting the building. The alarm went off in a room in the basement, and I managed to disarm it using the code that I found in my work binder. Romy is here with me. When I get out, we'll meet up with some friends and ... well something, anyway.
In other news, I've come up with an interesting working definition for art:
"That which expresses the otherwise inexpressable."
e

oops

2008-01-14T15:36:00.000-05:00

oh man oh man has it been a while since I've posted here. Too much has happened to even begin to recap, which is sad, because there are such great things to say. Anyway, I'll try to get back on target. Meanwhile, here are some highlights:
Romy is here until march.
I really like computer science - right now I'm learning bash, which is a shell in unix.
I started writing a pretty song last night.
The story I've been working on hasn't seen progress in about a month.
New years was fun.
In general, I'm enjoying myself.

winter break

2007-12-09T00:35:00.001-05:00

I'm here in pittsburgh for winter break, until the 29th of december. And romy's coming! Things to do this break:

Finalize application to study abroad in Chile this coming summer.
Learn Python.
Finish my story about the kid who gets hit by a bus
Read: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, some book I found about bats and echolation, and excerpts from The Federalist Papers (those three to start, anyway).
Paint the house wherever mom asks me to.
Go on some sort of photography adventure with my newish friend Ari who lives in my apartment building (and also lives near Pittsburgh), hopefully in Panther Hollow.
Build snow things (men, forts) with Romy.
Go mitten hunting with Romy.
Go to the Williams' Christmas party with Romy.
In general, spend every possible minute with Romy :)

See ya later!

this idea not related to anything else on this blog

2007-12-07T11:30:00.001-05:00

sometimes ideas pop into my head and I have to write them down before I forget, and this blog seems like a good place.
Remember that Simpsons episode when Mr. Burns finds out this his aging body has so many diseases, he's OK? that he has every disease known to man, but all the diseases cancel each other out and as long as nothing disturbs this balance, none of them will harm him?
Well, I see a direct connection between that idea and the Bush government's scores of scandals.

a funny memory

2007-12-04T12:41:00.001-05:00

When I was in (6th grade? seventh grade?) middle school, my hippie english teacher Ms. Marx (who has since moved to Mexico, or so I hear) played Three Dog Night's Eli's Coming on January 31st, my birthday, for the entire class, off the computer in the back of the room. I was so embarrassed, but in hindsight, she was a great person. I wonder what she's doing now? I thought of her a few months ago because I remember she was obsessed with the PT cruiser, which I heard has recently been discontinued. She saved up on her paltry salary for years to afford one, and finally did buy it, I think. Huh.

a quick update

2007-12-04T11:54:00.000-05:00

Hullo. Just wanted to share what's up right now: In a couple hours I have my last final exam. Today I have a good schedule: I'm going to meet a friend for lunch, take this bio exam, finish early (the professor promised it would be short), go for a walk with this really precocious girl in the class (she's that girl if you know the terminology) who insisted that we talk about our differences (once I offhandedly made fun of her for being that girl - ok now I guess I have to explain the terminology, since I couldn't find an easy link online).
It's a U of C thing - those kids in the class who have the answer for everything right away (and take pleasure in shouting it out), nit pick at every piece of info that surfaces, and don't realize that it's annoying to everyone else - not to mention that they usually only excel at the rote memorization, and almost never say anything truly interesting - this is a college phenomenon.
So we're taking a walk, and I'll be blunt with her. I think she can handle it.
Then I'm going to go to work from 4:30 to 9, where I'll read more of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which so far I'm enjoying. Then I might meet up with some other friends, because lo and behold, I'll be done with the quarter. The rest of this week should be fairly simple. Thursday I'm working all day, so that'll be fun, since I have nothing else to do anyway. Friday I'm coming home to the burgh, hopefully in time for dinner. And that's the update.

what's new with me?

2007-11-26T20:17:00.000-05:00

Life is good. I'm wrapping up loose ends in all my classes: a final homework set and final exam for CS, a large paper for music history, and one big test in bio and a big test in music theory and a smaller quiz in bio (I'm sure I've missed a couple things).
Romy is coming to pittsburgh in 3 weeks. This is kind of all I can think about right now, despite the above paragraph. Somehow homework will get done, anyway.
So, in a previous post, I mentioned that I've been getting more responsibility at work. Now I've been promoted (should have seen that one coming). It means more money. This is all good.
I've been saving money like crazy, such that I've come out hundreds of dollars below budget for this quarter. The point of saving money is to then invest the money, I guess. I don't really know why I'm saving money. Probably for something Chile-related. And despite the fact that my parents are perfectly willing and capable of paying my room, board, and tuition for all of college, I like the idea of slowing starting to take care of that on my own.
This weekend I went back to teaneck and saw all my old friends, all but 2 of whom I had not seen for 2 years or more. I hung out a bunch with Kevin G., who still competes against himself to have the shortest cellphone conversations ("Hi. Yeah. Ok. Bye." click). I chatted with Amanda S., former very close friend, who left me with some sound advice: "don't think too much." I chatted with Andy L., former very close friend, who is also majoring in CS, also using the SICP textbook, and also currently studying metacircular evaluation. It's a small world. I spent an afternoon bumming around the Garden State Plaza (archetype megamall - it is new jersey, after all) with Max S., former very close friend and fellow guitarist, and decided that Best Buy is a haven for scum, and that the humanity is Oh!
I'm currently eating turkey, which my flatmate very nicely left up for grabs in the fridge. I'm listening to some strange brazillian stuff by Gilberto Gil from the sixties or seventies. I don't know if he's famous or not - I just found him on my hard drive. Oh, and I bought a new comforter, and for the first time in my life I truly understand why they are called that.

ps- I think that this post was a quality post. Maybe I'll start a little program where I put a star that says "quality post!" on all the really good ones. Then we can have a compilation when I get to post number 1337.
e

Recent Thoughts; Aphorisms

2007-11-15T17:02:00.000-05:00

Today I'm having a busy day. I left my apartment at 8:45 for my 9 class, and I won't be back until 1:45am. That's many hours (I have work from 9 to 1:30). This is good though - I like to keep busy. In fact, "I like to keep busy" is the first line of a new song I wrote recently, but that's neither here nor there.
Things you might call phrases to live by:
"The means justify the end."
"Everything in moderation, including moderation."
"A true friend is one who will risk the friendship for the good of the friend."

Another thought - every day I feel more and more connected to the internet. Symbiotically, tightly, gloriously connected. This is poetic, I know. But it's all google's fault. This thought of mine isn't going anywhere so interesting. Yet.

ideas, work

2007-11-03T19:06:00.000-04:00

I'm at work right now. Going with the theme of my superiors giving me more and more responsibility all the time, I'm in charge of Ida Noyes today, alone, for 7 hours. I have 2 hours to go. So far, I've averted one furniture-related crisis, helped direct the cleanup for a conference about the environment, and set up for a folk music concert/dance later tonight - I managed to get together a whole AV system on my lonesome, which is a skill I'm pretty sure will come in handy for many, many years. I've also had plenty of time to get ahead on a week's homework.

I had a thought, although it's a little hazy and I'm not so sure it'll make sense. It's another biology related thing - I scribbled it down in my bio notebook last week and promptly forgot about it until now. What I scribbled down was:
"Evolution is abstraction". What exactly does this mean? I guess this thought is a synthesis of what I've been learning in computer science class and bio class. When you write computer programs, an important part of making usable code is abstraction. Abstraction involves writing lots of pieces that work together under a more general control scheme. Or at least, that's how I'll define it here. For instance, instead of having every town in this country make all of its laws, we've abstracted the very basic ones up to the state level, and the states up to the federal level. This makes things more efficient.
The idea that hit me is that although evolution tends to lead to organisms that are more complex, they are also more efficient in the same way as the above example - as we evolve, we take parts from simpler organisms, and we put them all under more complex systems of control. The human brain is a perfect example of this. As animals evolve, they tend to send their control systems to more centralized control centers.
Entropy is the opposite of abstraction - so although the universe tends towards equal distribution of energy (and thus an utter lack of intelligent life/order), we will use all available energy in the meantime to keep creating order, to keep abstracting. So I guess the point of this whole thing is that evolution is just one more manifestation of the intelligent ordering of the universe, that grand fight against decay and death.

random idea of the day

2007-10-27T14:22:00.000-04:00

Economic competition is mirrored in nature by the competition inherent in sexual selection. To explain: if males didn't have to attract females, they would have more energy for other endeavors. This energy they waste (growing fancy plumage, fighting, etc) makes survival harder. A communistic point of view would say that we should all mate in a more community-oriented fashion, without competition.
Would this work? More likely, it would defeat evolution. And animal nature wouldn't really conform to that idea. I think the same applies to economic communism for the same reasons, unfortunately.

But to take the idea further - do we as humans have reproductive socialism? If we define economic socialism as imposing centralized constraints on the free market, then reproductive socialism would be something like centralized constraints on competitive sexual selection. Subsets of humanity do do this: arranged marriages, for instance. However, animals have all sorts of strange rituals and habits when mating is involved, and I'm not sure whether or not these traits fall out of the metaphorical box: yes, a prearranged marriage doesn't always take physical traits of the suitor into the picture, but sometimes it does, and even if it isn't the male itself doing the selection, the parents are, which is pretty close.
Could there exist a stronger form of reproductive socialism, something completely out of the box? I bet some cults do things like that. Oh! of course - governmental limitations on number of children (or similar things) do it for sure. There we have it.
So to recap the metaphor: communism doesn't really work economically or sexually. Socialism is prevalent in both with humans, though not so much with less social animals. Being a social animal must naturally entail socialism - this was actually vital for our development as a species - so socialist sexual selection is, for all intents and purposes, no more or less "natural" than economic socialism (or the other way around).

Anyway, I don't know if that recap added anything. I feel like I could take this much further, but I'm not sure if I want to. The idea is enticing enough to make studying for biology right now absolutely useless.

An Adventure

2007-10-20T16:58:00.000-04:00

This morning I met up with two friends, Nic and Danica. I think that's how Nic spells his name - if it is, than Danica's name has Nic's inside of it...
We (at my urging and cajoling) walked down to 75th and something far west, where we found the restaurant Soul Veg that I wanted to visit. Walking there has been my dream for the last 8 months, and now that I've finally gotten to live that dream, I must say that I'm supremely satisfied. The walk was a constant surprise - rundown churches and dollar stores surrounded by a nice, vibrant community, and nice stores surrounded by ugly, busy streets. We chatted with a few people on our walks, and the funniest comment by far was, while passing a man working on his front lawn (and I quote):
"Man I gotta admit I look up and see three white motherf***ers yall scared the s*** out of me!"
It's an interesting commentary on the segregation in this area, only 2 or so miles away from my University.
I'm going to put up some pictures in a bit. Right now I'm chugging through homework, and later tonight I'm going to go over to the apartment of the head of the Folk Festival, where we are having a waltz dance music type get together. I think I'm going to be playing some waltzes with Ed Wallace, who some of you may remember as the Volunteer Coordinator from last year's Folk Festival. Another random note: Tomorrow I scheduled myself to work from 6 to 12, AM. I have no idea why, but I'm sure it'll be fun.
And now,
check out this link: (I promise it's nothing bad)
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thoughts

2007-10-15T22:57:00.000-04:00

Some recent thoughts I've had:
I wish amazon kept a running total of the cost of my wishlist, maybe even subdivided into categories.
I bet the worst part of getting your bike stolen would be the walk home - as opposed to the stolen bike.
How do people describe pertinent details about me when they are trying to remind someone else of who I am?

And a lesson I learned when I accidentally erased my hard drive: I am not the contents of my hard drive.

My Day

2007-10-14T23:18:00.000-04:00

Today was only slightly hectic. I will describe it to you. I woke up at 8 am, having gone to sleep around midnight on saturday. I know what you're thinking - what was Eli doing asleep at midnight on a saturday night? But by some twist of fate I'd stayed awake till almost 3:30 on friday, and I wanted to get a good start on sunday, so there you have it.
I breakfasted (vanilla yogurt and some toast with chumus) and did a bit of Computer Science homework. Then I hit the road to Krav Maga practice at 10, which is a fun thing. I started doing it because Romy says she wants to do it when she gets here (there is a student group that gives free lessons) but now I really like it.
I got home and showered and prepared lunch (toast with chumus and lettuce - I know it's boring but I was in a hurry) and left at noon. I took the 6 bus down to the red line down to belmont (and ate my lunch on the bus), where I spent a couple hours wandering around, looking for clothing boutiques that might want to buy knit woolen hats from Chile (this is a very long story, better saved for tomorrow's post). I found quite a few. Then I took the ashland bus down to division and walked around Wicker Park for another few hours, doing the same thing. I finished my tour with contact info for 16 different stores. Then I took the blue line to the red line to the 55 garfield home (I had great CTA luck today - almost no waiting). Home, I typed up my info, talked to Romy for a while (who, incidentally, will be having more surgery on her knees very soon - scary! wish her luck.), and made dinner: omelette with green peppers and a side dish of tuna with fresh cucumber and some more peppers and a dash of olive oil (that was to make up for lunch). Then I put in a few more hours of homework, and I can now say that I'm once again on top of my homework for the (very) near future.
Some highlights of my trip:
I found a doll-house accessory store/workshop in Belmont. That was sweet. These are people who have taken the hobby of creating miniature houses down to the slightest detail (electrical outlets, paint swatches, different types of molding).
I found a group of guys and girls just a little older than me having a small urban camping trip - they'd set up a green mat (like fake grass) and some potted plants in a parking spot on Milwaukee Avenue in wicker park, and they were offering smores to any and all interested passerby that they were cooking on tiny gas grill. They had only had a bit of trouble from the cops; they said they'd been there 4 hours. I ate some smores.

Food

2007-10-03T10:03:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I made a great college-casserole: 1 big can of tuna, 3 grilled mushrooms, 1 half-box of spaghetti noodles (how long had that been open?) and 1 half bag of frozen corn. Cook the noodles and corn (adding corn a bit afterwards so it doesn't overcook) in a pot just a bit too small for everything. Realize this and spoon out some water to avoid overflowage. Meanwhile, grill mushrooms and add them to large bowl with tuna and a dash of olive oil; mix. When noodles and corn are done, separate them from the hot water and mix them in with the tuna and mushrooms. With knife and fork, cut through the mass in the bowl until the noodles are in bite-size pieces. Eat a big helping and refrigerate the rest (enough for about 5 more big helpings). Tell the roommates.

Then, after work, I was informed that an event in Ida Noyes (where I had to report to after work) had left a lot of free food. It seems that almost every big event leaves extra food (because who really wants to run out of food?) and it either gets thrown out or eaten by the workers, one of which is now ME! Oh, and, not to mention that I had already picked up a pizza pie from another group meeting while I was working - they came away with 5 extra pies and through one my way. So I went upstairs and filled my box with lots of lox and cheese. Then I managed to get home without spilling anything.
So now I have a fridge full of food, and to top it off, I have a peapod shipment coming in today.

First week - survived

2007-09-30T19:56:00.000-04:00

Well, it's 7pm, I've finished all my homework, I just got back from a free barbecue for students at a church (= yummy), and tomorrow's monday. Homework highlights included programming tail-recursions in Scheme and endless music theory exercises involving key signatures of odd major scales (like e flat). My new job is great too - I am working for ORCSA, which I think I might have mentioned, and the work is easy, fun, laid back, and involves plenty of sitting and waiting for my help to be needed, during which I can do my homework. I've already worked 10.5 hours, and I will schedule for the next two weeks tomorrow.
Living in the apartment is working out great. I had a bunch of friends over friday night and I got to play host. My roommates are both pleasant and we have no problems.
I feel like this post is too boring because there are no conflicts. If this were a short story, I would have a twist right here - last night I went to a jazz concert, and on the way back, around 52nd and cornell, I found a cat in the road. I brought it home and called the owner (there was a phone number on the collar), but a policeman answered. Turns out that the owners mysteriously disappeared the night before (it was a young couple) and the police had been called when a neighbor heard "suspicious yelling and crashes" coming from next door. So now I have a fat, yellow and white cat that I don't know what to do with - the name on the collar is "Mushy".
Think you can figure out where I went from truth to fiction in that last paragraph?
e

Classes

2007-09-25T19:24:00.000-04:00

Well, I've had all of my classes now, so I think it's time for a little recap of how things are going:
Advanced Music Harmony/Theory: The professor for this class is really cool. He's smart and capable, obviously knows a ton about the subject, and has an obvious love for it as well. We walked into class day 1 and were met with the end of a jazz song over the speakers that are set up in the room (it's a music class and it's held in an acoustically wonderful music room with a piano, blackboards set up to write music, and great sound system). The class is part 1 of a 3 part series that can go all year (I was only going to do part 1 originally but now I'm considering more; we'll see how this one goes), and I'm going to learn a ton. It's really high time, in any case: I should know more music theory than I do.
Western Art Music: This is an intro class, held in the same room as the above, and I'm taking it to fulfill a core requirement. Luckily, the class does not suck. The professor is cool - a young guy, good at playing the piano, funny and erudite. We'll be listening to lots and lots of music ranging from the 1600s (or earlier?) to now, and dissecting it.
Honors intro to Computer Science: So far I really like this class, though I haven't had much class yet. I'll have another first thing tomorrow. The professor is a very short, very capable woman. This in itself surprised me, but not overly so. After describing some administrative stuff she lectured us for about 25 minutes on the language we'll be starting with, Scheme. Then, monday afternoon, we had a lab in scheme: The lab had us write a function in Scheme to take a number x and draw a face (yellow circle, 2 black ellipse eyes, rectangle mouth) with the circle radius x, such that the face scales depending on x. Knowing next to nothing about scheme, I managed to do it in under an hour, though there were some kids who finished in 15 minutes. There are always people like that though... Anyway, I like the speed of the class. I'm tired of being bored.
Bio: This class takes the above sentiment and runs with it as well - the professor is awesome. He's a really smart, really funny middle-aged guy, and he told us right away that the class would be harder than the other bio sections (I knew that already - it's why I picked it - this is accelerated bio, and although it won't show up any different in my transcript [which isn't fair], I know I'll enjoy it more). He launched right into a description of biological macromolecules and cellular respiration, and we took notes for almost 3 hours straight, with only a ten minute brake in the middle (the class is 3 hours, twice a week).

As you can see, I'm going to be learning quite a bit. I have a job interview tomorrow at 3, for "building manager" for ORCSA (office of reynold's club and student affairs) - I think it's for managing Ida Noyes, which sounds like a mix between bureaucrat and janitor. Not a terrible thing, I think. We'll see how it pays, and if I can get the job.
Anyway, if you don't hear a word from me for the next three months, you'll know why.

The New Place!

2007-09-20T14:23:00.000-04:00

I think it's fitting that for my hundredth post here, I get to tell you all about my new apartment. I moved in two days ago, and I've been cleaning and arranging and building and unpacking and setting up frantically in preparation for the new school year. When I got here, the place was a mess. My roommate had been living alone for more than a month, and he is not a clean guy. Luckily, my other roommate who gets in tomorrow is even more organized like me, so we'll have a counterbalance.
The apartment is really nice. It's got plenty of space, plenty of furniture (except for a dresser for me), a great deck, a decent kitchen, a nice bathroom, and my room is sweet. I like having my own room again. I like being king of my space. I've been acting handyman as well - yesterday I fixed the doorknob to the apartment, which was about to fall off.
Also, yesterday I bought a bike. It's used and old but good with new tires and has a basket. The whole thing with a new heavy duty lock cost $75. I found a good place to lock it up on the side of the building, off the street, so I don't think I'll have to take it up the stairs too often.
I've been spending lots of time making trips to the hardware store and other such necessary things. Today I have a frisbee pickup game at 3. I've also been looking for a new job. I have a 5-7 job training/information session for the old telefund gig today, but I don't think I'm going to go. I've heard some awful things about the telefund. We knew there would be changes, but we didn't know they would be so crappy - fixed work schedules, increased minimum hours, dress codes - what's next?
Anyway, I'll put up some pictures pretty soon. Right now I've got to go make myself some lunch.
E

Home

2007-09-16T10:57:00.000-04:00

Well, here I am, back in P-burgh. It's kind of fun. Seeing family is fun, anyway. Baked another cool bread with my mom, this time with yogurt.
I've been packing a lot and preparing everything for the new school year. I feel like I've been doing a lot of stuff at once compared to Chile. I guess I have to get back into the multitasking groove.
This post is going nowhere, so I'll sign off here. Oh, and in other news, I think I've finally found a copy of Moe Tucker's Playin Possum (her solo debut LP).

bread, shakespeare

2007-09-11T11:15:00.000-04:00

One thing I forgot to mention in the last post is that I also read three of Shakespeare's plays: Hamlet (again), the Tempest, and As You Like It. I've decided that I like the tragedies much more than the comedies. Maybe it's inherent in the nature of the form and the restrictions therein, or maybe I just don't get it...
The bread baking has been going wonderfully. Yesterday I baked a bread, totally from scratch without recipe, with these ingredients:

White flour
Water
Yeast
Milk
Oil
Salt
Oats
Zatar (a spice that I like, a bit like an exciting oregano)

It turned out amazing! I just got back today from a walk to my bread-mentor's house, where I gave him what was left of yesterday's baguette. He was very impressed. He told me I did a great job, and that the fact that I could take what he showed me and in just a few days make something so cool said a lot about me. I, obviously, was flattered.

Thursday I fly home. I spend the weekend with family and friends. A week from today I fly to Chicago. The monday after that I start classes. It's good to keep busy, but I think it'll take some work to get me out of my Chilean vacation attitude and back to my studies.

Things I've done this summer

2007-09-03T14:28:00.000-04:00

Things I've done this summer:

1) Gone to a foreign country (Chile)
2) Improved my Spanish, a lot (achieving fluency at any age past 9 or so is like a exponential decay function - the closer you get, the longer it takes, and you never quite achieve complete decay/fluency. But I'm definitely past my half-life).
3) Learned to cook (it's not so much about recipes and materials as it is about experience and, most of all, confidence).
4) Taken Flamenco guitar lessons (this was fun but ultimately not life-changing).
5) Introduced my parents to my future in-laws (success!)
6) Traveled to the north with Romy (living independently in a brand-new place with someone you love is one of the best things in life).
7) Taught myself to program in C (it's a fun programming language, but definitely not the easiest nor the most efficient one out there).
8) Learned to bake bread (This was today. I recently made friends with a fun brazillian dude named Mauricio who bakes bread out of a brick oven behind his house, and I spent the morning over there. I was tutored by a master, and I'm going to try my hand at it in an hour or two).
9) Played guitar at a worker's union rally (don't ask).
10) Went horseback riding (twice).
11) Fallen even more in love with Romy.

So, it's been a pretty wonderful summer (I'm sure I forgot a couple things from the list). I'm comin home in a week and a half, and though I can't wait to start school and see all my family and friends, I really don't want to leave Chile.

I just took a long walk

2007-08-30T12:02:00.000-04:00

I started out from romy's house and walked uphill. I'd done the walk once before, but veering uphill to the right. That had led me to a cliff, more or less, so I veered left this time. The hills just kept coming. I think I walked uphill for about 70 minutes before I realized that the damn outskirts of the city are much much bigger than the city itself, and that I could just walk forever. Luckily, right then a bus passed that I knew would pass near Romy's house, and I went down the whole way in 10 minutes or so. It was a sobering walk because the place just gets dirtier and the roads are mostly dirt and the buildings are mostly projects but you know, the people don't look sad, and they have lots of good fruit and vegetables, and the sky is blue.
I wrote a new song. It's called "The Rosebush Knows." It's confusing (the song, not the rosebush). That makes 3 songs now for a new cd.
Tomorrow or saturday me and romy will migrate back to her mom's house for the weekend. Saturday night Anisol's school is having a big neighborhood party with lots of empanadas, dancing (mostly shows put on by the kids) and mulled wine.
Then we're winding down, Chiletrip wise. This is painfull. After this weekend Romy and I will have one more, and then I leave on thursday. Luckily, no matter what we'll see each other again in 3 months. We realized yesterday that we are really extremely lucky to have the money to do this, flying back and forth all the time. Are we better off than a lot of people, or are a lot of people worse off than us?
I had a cool idea: I'm going to go back to this brazilian bread baker (he makes great bread from his homemade brick oven) and ask him if I can hang out and watch how he makes the bread one morning next week.
Right now I'm just waiting for Romy to get home. I'm going to make her one of her favorite foods (lettuce with lots of lemon and salt).
till next time
e

Recent stuff

2007-08-04T15:21:00.001-04:00

I've certainly been enjoying myself here. Yesterday a friend of Romy's from pittsburgh named Sarah came to stay the weekend. She is spending a year in Chile to study in Santiago and was a very good friend of Romy's, so this is really nice.
I picked her up at the bus station while Romy finished frying some veggies, we had a great lunch (I also cooked a cool rice-pudding ish dessert), and then we left to explore. Romy and I showed Sarah our grand route down out of the hills and into the city, we met some cool folks who live sort of nearby who were painting a new mural on the wall of a house (they invited us to stop by today at around 6 to chill and play guitar), and we took a furnicular up a different hill (that the right word?). We explored Cerro Alegre, looked at all the shops (Sarah swearing that next time she'd bring money to shop for real) and then eventually headed back home. We had a nice chilean dinner, relaxed for a few hours, and then headed out for the night.
At 10 we met Romy's friend Caro in the plaza Victoria. We walked to a jazz club a few blocks a way and saw a cool 2 guitar 1 congo drum trio there. They were playing Flamenco fusion, but really it was jazz with some andalucian overtones. Also, I got to drink a Kunstmann Miel - my favorite beer.
A side note - in one of the stores, Sarah had met another cool dude and obtained his number. After the jazz we walked back to Bella Vista (bohemian neighborhood) and went to a couple bars. Oh and also we ran into 2 cool canadian dudes in the jazz club who came with us. On the street I bumped into my Flamenco teacher Miguel, and he also decided to hang out for a while. So by now we were a huge crowd of 7, and then 9 when Sarah's new friend and his friend came.
Later they left, we hung out at a more local, older pub, and then decided to go dance. At around 3 we arrived at a nice little club (that is, not little, but not overly loud nor overly crowded - maybe 75 people) that only cost 2 bucks to get in. We danced for a while and Sarah ran into that same guy. Fate, or something. Finally we left around 4 and thanks to MY streetsaviness, found a collectivo that took us right to the house for a buck each.
This morning we slept late. I just got back from a walk into town where I bought a couple things for lunch and for the house, as well as a kite for the next good opportunity. Now I think I'll start to cook a late late lunch: super omelettes with cheese, tuna, and veggies. Sounds good to me.
e

An update

2007-07-28T13:03:00.000-04:00

I haven't written in a while, but life keeps hurtling on. Amazing, that.
Things that have been happening recently:
I spent all of a night and morning picking avocados. We might end up selling them in valpo for profit, not sure.
This morning Romy and I walked down to the farmers market (which is a humungous thrice-weekly affair) and spent $13 on fruits and vegetables. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but it was enough to fill two torso-sized sacks with everything from carrots peppers tomatoes lettuce to olives lucumas hot pepper and fruits whose names I don't even know in English. I really like this market - it's got everything you could want fruit or vegetable-wise, and it's surrounded by other booths selling random crap, and inundated with lots of cheap prepared food for sale (empanadas!).
I haven't really said much else about our trip north. We went to a party saturday night for the birthday of a cool 28yr old dude we met while hitchhiking to town. Turns out he's related to Romy's uncle's wife, or wife's friend, or something. He invited us to his birthday party and said it would be cool, so we bought a cheap bottle of Pisco Papaya and showed up around 10:15. It was already full of fun 20 somethings, eating, drinking, milling about. Then they had a barbecue. Then a gypsy-jazz band began to play, kind of out of nowhere. They had 3 guitars, 2 different drums (a wooden box thing and a snare drum), 1 violin, and 2 flutes. There were only 5 members of the band... And the first song they played was a haunting interpretation of Summertime! Anyone who really knows me knows that I love that song and collect covers. We stayed at the party until 1:30 or so. Good times.
These days Romy and I have been relaxing at the family home. However, one can only relax so much, so we are thinking about returning to Valpo tomorrow. I'm ready for a change of scene, myself. I've been eating like never before - I think I need more work. But I'm having a blast, anyway.
e

Vacationing within my vacation

2007-07-23T10:40:00.000-04:00

I've just returned from a wonderful vacation with Romy about 4 hours north of here, in a place called Elqui Valley. We took a bus up to Coquimbo, a port city up there, and then another to the interior of Chile, which is basically the beginning of the desert that is the whole north of the country.
It was a ton of fun - we had a house to ourselves about an hours' walk from the nearest kind of big city (basically a town), such that the little pueblo we were in was basically just a couple streets and 6 stores. Or was it 5? But we didn't get bored at all.
The town was called Diaguitas. It was cool because there were hardly any cars, but when they did pass they were almost always happy to pick up hitchikers, so getting to the bigger town down the road was easy. Also, although there were only a few stores, just about every house sold something. The lady down the way sold fresh cow's milk - 60 cents a liter. Fresh Lucuma - not sure what they're called in english - were equally abundant. The house we rented had a huge patio/backyard with a sweet orange tree.
The valley is surrounded by tall scragly hills - we climbed a new one each day. Everyone in the village was so nice and helpful. Also, the valley is famous for its stars - it seems that it is one of the best civilized places with almost NO light pollution. Looking up on a clear night was an epiphany of sorts.
I won't go into all the other details of the trip right now because it's really cold in here, especially after the warm sun over there.

Visas and Vacations

2007-07-12T17:13:00.000-04:00

The huge news first: Romy got her visa to vacation in the states! Yay! Actually, it was completely easy, which is annoying, because they made her get about 10 different documents beforehand about things like her dad's job and other proofs of wealth. In effect, because she has money they had no problem letting her in and in the end didn't even look at any documents. It was enough that she had been an exchange student and that her dad comes up on a google search as a scientist/executive. Meh.
So though this left us with an ugly taste in the mouth, it's great that she can come for her summer, our winter. Way exciting!
In other news, we decided not to take a bus north. 18 hours in a terribly uncomfortable bus just to get most of the way to where we want to go at a cost of $60 per person, per way (so that's 240 for the both of us for the trip, to get partway there) is pretty terrible. We have other plans though. We're going to spend a more relaxed, slightly (but only slightly) less adventurous 2 weeks, first relaxing at romy's mom's house, then taking a tent to a fairly nearby (and humongous) nature reserve to do some camping (hopefully), and also spending time in val paraiso fishing and playing guitar on the streets. Then, the second week, Romy's father gets a vacation as well, so perhaps we will be able to spend some time with him. If not, we can go somewhere else nearby.
Today after we got the visa Romy and I walked through a good chunk of Santiago. Especially in the business district where the US Embassy is (by the way it was pretty funny when we got there because of course they had to be really nice to me the whole time, and one of the guys was like "come in, come in, this is your house [but in spanish]" which was fun), the whole place is almost exactly like any big city anywhere. Boring. Furthermore, they have starbucks, and the prices are (almost) equivalent to US prices. I would've thought no self-respecting south american would pay that, but the place was packed.
And other news, my parents are coming to visit in August. Also cool.
chao for now
e

Tons of happenings

2007-07-06T16:15:00.000-04:00

Well, Plan B is still on the back burner, and thus still secret. Plan A has seen no progress whatsoever, because I've been happily busy. However, my vacation has now undergone the additions of a Plan C and Plan D!
Plan C is already underway - I found a sweet school that teaches all sorts of fun hobbies, and I will be taking weekly lessons in Flamenco Guitar. I'm super excited; I should be starting this tuesday.
The whole thing costs about $35 a month for 4 hours a month, which, when I consider that I payed $50 an hour in the states, is a great thing. We shall see how it works out.
For now, Plan D shall also be kept secret, although it also involves my guitar and money.
And now, I'd like to introduce plan E - Romy and I are planning an adventure similar to our backpacking experience last year, but this time in a northerly direction, perhaps even to Bolivia. ¡Vaya!

Nature vs Man

2007-07-03T18:11:00.000-04:00

Late last night I stumbled into the bathroom right next to my room and woke up a sleeping black cat, which then leaped out the window and into the adjacent lot.
Also, we have bed bugs. This morning I caught one with my bare hand. Those things are impossible to squish! ...but when you finally do, you find out just how much of your blood they steal.
In other news, there was a giant parade/religious festival yesterday for the patron saint of the fishermen. I took lots of pictures, which I'll upload as soon as the internet here catches its breath. I don't think a DSL line shared among the entire neighborhood (or maybe the entire country?) was ready to meet the needs of a nerdy american. Maybe I should move to Japan.

Other than that, just watched Michael Moore's Sicko. He's always struck me as patently greasy and manipulative (and just plain whiny), but this one does have quite a bit going for it. I recommend it, with a healthy dose of skepticism. On the other hand, this skepticism is not to say that I didn't finish watching the movie with a strong urge to hunt down and lock up (at best) all private health insurance execs.
Hasta luego-
E

A fun weekend

2007-07-01T11:46:00.000-04:00

Friday night I went to a concert with Jon (Romy's foster brother who's visiting for a while) and Esteban (Romy's sister's boyfriend; a cool dude). Romy had to study.
The concert was more of a talent show/open mic at a local University. It was organized entirely by students. It was a lot of fun.
Yesterday Jon and I walked from the house to La Sebastiana, Pablo Neruda's Valpo retreat in the hills. It's a museum now. It was fairly interesting - you could really see how the man made the house out to be exactly how he wanted it. The museum put his poetry all over the place, too. I took a few pictures (though indoors pictures were mostly forbidden - how gauche). The walk from the house to the museum was long, made longer by the fact that we didn't know exactly where the museum was, and so navigated by touch and go - walk, guess, inquire, repeat. This leads me to my new spanish word of the weekend, peregrinaje = pilgramage, because that's how it felt.
Last night we all went to a friend of Romy's house where we cooked (well, fried) up french fries, ate cake (and ate the french fries), and watched a movie - El Perfume. What a strange, strange flick. I wouldn't say I recommend it, although I think I enjoyed watching it. The ending was too strange and annoying for me to call the movie good. Interesting how endings always matter more to us than any other part of a movie, or anything else for that matter.
Today is going to be a lazy sunday, I think.
e

Oh, we also visited a national park/botanical garden. I've been busy!

Higher Learning of a different order

2007-06-28T14:38:00.000-04:00

I feel like I've really started to enter into Chilean life. Yesterday I walked downtown (about 20 minutes of walking through the hills) alone to do a few errands. I bought food for dinner (sushi ingredients, which I then made myself for Romy and her friends), I bought myself lunch (empanada and bakery treat), I investigated a few gyms I ran across (none fit the bill), I changed some USD into pesos, and I had a picture of Romy and I blown up and then bought a small frame to put it in. All that on my own - the point is, it's obvious that I'm not from around here, but I no longer feel like people don't understand me.
So when I got back I made this surprise for Romy, the picture that is, and hung it up all pretty in her room. I've also been spending time working on a few projects, creative and educational and otherwise, but I think pretty soon I'm going to start something new. I have two plans:
Plan A is to get a job during the day, part time if possible. I don't hold much hope for this plan because I have no work visa. However, I do think that I have something that most Chileans don't, which is a mastery of English and computers. So I'll see. Something like a tourist-focused internet cafe (these do, in fact, exist) might be the place for me.
Plan B is top secret.

Chile: Take 2

2007-06-24T18:06:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow will be one week in Chile, out of 12. I'm living with Romy in her apartment in Valparaíso, which is a beautiful city in the middle of Chile, on the west coast. You can see the ocean from EVERYWHERE. Romy lives in an apartment just a 5 minute and 75 cent busride away from the center of the city. It's great to live independently - Romy shares the house with her two older siblings, which means that there is definitely no one around to take care of us. As such, I am receiving a crash course in cooking (yay!).
So, I've been spending my time (when not cooking or eating) with Romy, exploring the city, going to her school, and simply enjoying my vacation - in Valparaíso you can run for miles and miles along the coast on beautiful wide running paths. It's great!
Romy goes to a very fancy and important school called Universidad Adolfo Ibañez. It's probably the best business school in the country (if not in all of South America) and it's fun to see how they do things there. Basically, they have a lot of work. Even still, it seems like one definitely gets only and exactly what one puts into the experience.
I'm absolutely enjoying myself here. Being with Romy is, of course, fantastic. This goes without saying. It's even better, then, that I love this country and that I can entertain myself endlessly just wandering through its streets and looking at all the people and graffiti. It's a little cold, this being the coldest part of their moderate winter, but it'll get better soon and I'm not complaining. After a Chicago winter only 6 months ago, I think I can only describe myself as battle hardened.

On Friday Romy and I had a date. We took the bus to Viña to see a movie, but it turned out the instead of the new Woody Allen flick, they were showing The Queen. So nix that. Instead, we strolled for a bit and found a fun little five story shopping mall in shape of a snail and investigated. Cool stores abounded, including one with these neat little shoes handmade and imported from another part of the country. I think I'm going to order one special for Charna. Then we went for a longer walk around the area (I mentioned that I like to walk) and worked up a nice hunger (and sweat). Romy took us to this amazing restaurant/bar/ice creamery. They had dozens of exquisite flavors of ice cream, which we duly sampled at large. The whole place was really romantic - over the water, glass walls, lighting from the floor up, and fancy service. And it didn't cost much at all - but we realized that we should have ordered one double scoop fancy ice cream with whippedcream and cookie for the both of us.
After that we went back from Viña to Valpo, where we investigated the nightlife side of things. Originally we were going to look for some music, but we didn't find anything immediately, so Romy showed me her favorite bar, where we partook of some hot spiced wine and relaxed with what I must admit was the greatest selection of bar music (and party music in general) I've ever heard. They even played the Velvet Underground song After Hours, off the self titled album (last track). Then we made our way, cold and full of wine, back to the house, where we put on some more music (so inspired were we) and had our own dance party.
So as you can see, I'm enjoying myself.
I look forward to staying in contact with everyone, and you can leave comments on the blog or email me, of course. I should have internet access just about every day.
Yours from far away,
Eli

Things that worked out recently, Things that did not

2007-06-06T16:55:00.000-04:00

Some things these last few months went quite well. Some things just didn't work out.

Things that worked out as or better than planned:

I found a great apartment
I managed to get to Chile for this summer
I managed to sublet my apartment at full price for the summer
I learned a lot
Linux
I discovered (rediscovered?) my major
I made a ton of new friends
I improved myself as a writer and musician
Going to the gym
Learning how to clean wax off of hard carpet (don't ask)
I'm sure there are plenty of others

Things that didn't work out:
My arts council summer fellowship ("sure thing" my butt)
Dad's chairmanship
Midterms
Econ class

Things are happening

2007-06-06T14:13:00.000-04:00

Well, I just moved my stuff to my new apartment. This included 1 large plastic bag, 1 small suitcase, 3 medium boxes, 1 cardboard tube, and all the stuff inside of all the containers. I had to borrow a friend's car, and Tom (roommate) helped me.
Now I'm left with stuff to take to pittsburgh, which includes stuff to take to Chile. It was tough packing for three different locations at once, but I've done it. Everything is under control, and I won't have any trouble at the airport on friday.
Also, I wrote a new story, called The Painting and the Sketch
So, thursday at 4 is my last midterm, I'm studying hard, I hope to pull off a B in everything, and then it's off to Chile for the summer. I'll be keeping this blog updated throughout.

Anthony Burgess

2007-06-02T21:47:00.000-04:00

Anthony Burgess is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I've read three of his novels and now I'm rereading "A Vision of Battlements" which is hilarious, brilliant, poetic, his first novel, and apparently, it gets its title from a quote in The Illustrated Family Doctor:

"Warning of an attack may be given by tingling sensations in the limbs, impairment of vision, flashing lights, a vision of battlements, noises in the ears, mental depression or other phenomena."

Burgess' novels are not for the faint of wit.

Eli's three laws of philosophy

2007-05-25T16:18:00.000-04:00

1. Ideas cannot be created nor destroyed. All ideas are – all ideas exist in an n-dimensional “idea-space” defined by who we are as humans. This space, being n-dimensional, is not confined by time. That is, the contents of the idea-space do depend on the capabilities of our race (as long as it is solely the idea-space for our race, and not for all existence or something equally hard to define), but they do not depend on the current progress of our race – they represent all ideas that our species/existence could possibly create or hint at, at all times. Thus, if all ideas are represented and in effect are, ideas cannot be created nor destroyed.

2. Philosophy is utterly human. That is, human philosophy is utterly human – the ideas based on our existence depend completely on us to further them along and make them mean anything at all. Put another way, they depend on social interaction - since human self and self-consciousness is intricately linked to society, ideas only have effect in groups. The converse of this is that a single idea by itself is near meaningless (or has only infinitesimal meaning). If we do not exist, our ideas, and even the physical manifestations of our ideas, will eventually lose meaning in this way. If our ideas are left alone, they tend to quickly lose power and spread out into the larger "existence" until they approach a uniformly constant level of dissipation.

3. This constant level of dissipation is absolute ignorance.

I'm pretty proud of this. Thoughts? You have to realize, for anyone who didn't take or forgot 10th grade physics, that these mirror the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.

p p p programming!

2007-05-17T19:02:00.000-04:00

So I've decided that I think I want to be a computer science major. Hurrah! It just came to me in a flash while I was eating dinner, and now that I've realized it I feel much better and happier in general. I feel pretty confident about computer science, is what I was trying to say.
I'm signed up for the honors introductory sequence starting next fall. I told a few older friends, who promptly informed me that I would need to know C (the programming language) because on the second day of class there would be a test on C. So, starting two nights ago I taught myself C. Obviously I haven't learned all of it, but I have learned quite a bit - an impressive amount, if I may say so myself. I just wrote a program that takes a word, assigns each letter a number (in this case, a=1, b=2, c=3, etc.), adds the numbers, and finally displays the total. (So robinhood = 100, as does afghanistan). I remember that Charna once had a homework assignment to find as many words that equaled 100 as she could, and Mom and I created a program that automated the process as mine does. Next we had it search through a dictionary, so that's the next step for me too. The other thing is, though, that my program works in the command line, and just keeps prompting for word after word and displaying the sum until you type, "end", at which point it ends (but not before it displays the sum of "end" as well [geek humor]).
Next quarter I'm also going to take the accelerated (which is like honors I suppose) biology introductory sequence, at the advice of my grandmothers, an intro to music theory course (which will be hard but certainly worthwhile) and, if I get in, a course on world music (to satisfy my core art requirement). It's the life of the mind, as they say.

Nerdiness +10

2007-05-13T15:57:00.000-04:00

My laptop now dual-boots Ubuntu Linux. I'm in linux right now; the nerds were right - it really is about 3.5 times better than windows, regardless of the price. Then you realize that it's free...
Of course it isn't for the faint of heart. It wasn't running in my native full resolution at first, and to make it work I had to run a bunch of stuff from the terminal. I had no idea what was going on, and this other thing opened, and at first I tried to read all the questions it was asking me but they just started coming so fast one after another and I had no idea what anything meant until finally I just started clicking "yes" or "default" to everything, when all of the sudden up popped a question regarding screen resolution, and I found the one I wanted from a list, and etc I rebooted and lo and behold the new screen resolution was in the options menu and it worked! I have no idea why, though.

A dream, the weekend, projects

2007-05-11T11:59:00.000-04:00

Last night I had the strangest dream. I was lying on my back on top of a hot air balloon with my roommate Tom and then later my neighbor Vicki as well. We floated along over the Atlantic ocean, moving slowly but surely, and the sky was beautiful. There were a few clouds, but mostly just blue, stretching in every direction. Inexplicably, the Beatles' Rubber Soul was playing in the background, but only when Vicki was lying on the balloon between me and Tom. The whole thing was incredibly realistic, even when another hot air balloon (there were only these two in the whole dream) was floating right above us. Later, our balloon started to descend, and we dropped off a couple feet into the drink and swam to shore. There I toweled off, and there were lots of inner-city kids playing basketball in my room, which looked like a giant lunchroom, and I had to elbow my way through the various games to get to my clothing. As I was wondering how I would change back to dry clothing, I woke up.
Tonight is Looptopia (right now the site is down, not sure why). Chicago is bidding for some future Olympics, and looptopia is just one expensive way they'll try to win. I remember that whole controversy a couple years ago about whether Olympic bid-winning cities really ended up gaining anything, but I guess it doesn't matter regardless - the Olympics might be a worthless and fabulously expensive gold ring, but it sure is shiny.
I'm starting various projects:
1) learn to draw, from that book with the word brain the title (don't know if I have the patience for this).
2) Continue with soap-carving
3) Furnish new apartment. Turns out the current tenant is poor and thus must take his bed with him, which means I have to find one for the summer subletter (which, by the way, now that I have two bites, should be taken care of soon).
4) Heal shin - using lots of ice and some voodoo magic.

There are other projects, but it's lunchtime.
eli

Alice in Wonderland

2007-05-04T18:52:00.000-04:00

So I just came back from a lecture on translating Alice in Wonderland into spanish and other languages. It was fantastic! I left with a few really interesting ideas.
1) If you take every translation made by man of any famous book, like Alice or the Odyssey, you get an international bookcase describing quite well all the cultural differences between languages.
2) Alice in Wonderland (the title) translates into spanish as "alicia en el pais de las maravillas." This emphasizes the wondrous nature of the place itself, but "Wonderland" in English seems to emphasize both that and the fact that Alice herself is full of curiosity and wonder. This, one should probably argue, is the more important meaning anyway - in a work that satirizes many aspects of life, thus seeming to say that life itself is absurd, the fact that the world in which Alice travels is absurd doesn't make a whole lot of difference. On the other hand, the fact that Alice is ultra-curious is of tantamount importance. A better retranslated title might be "alice in the land of inquiry."
3) This brings us to an interesting thought - I'm not sure if this is true, but the lecturer (a famous Spanish translator) said that one etymology of "alice" is "truth". Thus we get a phrase that will be my favorite phrase ever from now on,
"Truth in the land of Inquiry"
4) Another fascinating thing about the two Alice books is that they NEVER mention God or religion. This brings up some difficulties with translations when Alice says something like "Oh dear!" - which she does often - because in spanish that should be "dios mio!" which is a god reference. So most translations do refer to religion, but this new translation done by the lecturer does not.
A conspicuous example of godlessness is in Through the Looking Glass, when during the chess game, every piece is mentioned except for the bishops.
5) A synthesis of some of the above points can be summed up in one sentence:
In the land of inquiry, truth finds no God. (This is my creation).
6) The lecturer brought up another great point about two different types of translation in Alice when dealing with the absurd objects and elements in the book, like the Treacle Well of the Caucus-Race. Most translations dealt with these quite literally, calling treacle something like "molases de pozo" and caucus race something similarly nonsensical. The lecturer pointed out that the nonsense words make more sense in english than in other languages, due to already existing associations with other things - treacle, for instance, refers to medicine. This leads to the pun when Alice asks the Hatter (I think it's the hatter) if, since the people in the well lived on treacle, these people weren't very ill, and the hatter tells her that in fact they were quite ill (it's like a 3-level joke). That wouldn't make sense in spanish with a literal translation of treacle, so a better translation would be simply, "medicina."
The conclusion is that sometimes, in a translation of Alice, deciding on the more sensical choice actually leads to a deeper meaning and more punnage, which only add, of course, to the overall level of nonsense.

So this was quite a long post - but I find the whole thing fascinating. Especially that phrase. Now I'm going to do some homework, go to an a capella concert that a few friends are in, see a movie upstairs, and do more homework. I also got four good looking books from the library that I'm excited about.
later-
e

2 things

2007-05-03T00:23:00.000-04:00

Here are two pointless things I find myself very interested in:
1) Jazz songs (or other genres) with the famous Rhapsody in Blue main riff thrown in. I don't know how many songs I've heard with this (at least 6 or so, and I suspect there are many more), but the most recent was Art Tatum's I know that you know. In fact, he even through in a different riff from the same song at the end. I would LOVE to see a collection/list/anthology of songs that all share this characteristic. I think it's a fascinating example of past culture as a constructive force and whatnot.
2) I doubt I'm the first to have this idea: I think it would be neat to have a standard set of axioms, say for all of math, although perhaps just algebra (maybe geometry?), calculus and trigonometry to start, with which one could prove EVERY already existing theorem. That is, every step in every theorem proven today would be broken down into series of axioms. Perhaps some axioms would use variables; that's fine. The point would be that you could show someone the list of axioms, and then using only that list they could go through an entire mathematical theorem (even something complicated like the fundamental theorem of algebra) and UNDERSTAND it completely. Is this possible? Seems like it should be. Then, of course, the implication is to teach the axioms to a computer.

Changes

2007-05-01T00:28:00.000-04:00

Look - my blog posts have titles. I've always wanted titles, but I've been too lazy to figure out how to do it.
Also, somewhere on this site in an "about me" section I've posted a really weird thingermasomething. Random thought, you might say.

Look tomorrow or day after for a fun description of the game my house is playing right now, called Assassins.

2007-04-29T12:45:00.000-04:00

I want to point out a great podcast online - a political internet radio show consisting of interviews, done by a friend of mine. Tomorrow with Alex Beinstein is smart and interesting. He interviews some big politicians and knows exactly what he's talking about.
I can't figure out how to copy the proper itunes podcast URL, but it's free on itunes - just search the title. His most recent interview is with Mike Gravel, one of the democratic candidates for '08. Anybody who saw Gravel in the democratic debates knows that he's as left as it gets - he tries hard in the interview, but Alex shows how nebbish and slightly loopy he really is.
Free on itunes - check it out.
e

2007-04-27T15:58:00.001-04:00

An email to my father:

hey pops -
I dunno how often you'll be able to check your email in the holy land, but I thought I'd email you the first draft of the intro to my soc essay on Freud and Marcuse - I'm pretty proud of it. It's a mix of funny and smart, I wrote it in exactly 8 minutes, and as a result I'm well on target to finish this essay about 2.8 hours from now:

A Marxian Interpretation of Freud (But Don’t Say “Marx”)

Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization was written in 1955, seven years after Marx’s Communist Manifesto. It is significant that Marcuse’s argument is based on communist ideas of class struggle, but it is also significant that Marcuse, while making this abundantly clear, does not make this explicitly clear. Neither will I. Marcuse’s argument concerning the social and historical nature of the individual psyche, as differentiated from Freud’s instinctual understanding, is based largely on the economics of human civilization and culture. Thus Marcuse’s argument agrees with Freud’s in most places, but appends to and extends Freud’s original ideas (and sometimes changes them). The biggest differences between the two – the best way to differentiate and explain the basis by which Marcuse makes these additions – can be seen by focusing on Freud and Marcuse’s treatment of repression, the reality principle, Eros, aggression, and death.

how are you?
e

2007-04-24T13:23:00.000-04:00

My morning:
I went to class and learned about how Freud's theory of repression is perhaps even more historical than he himself thought, based on the writings of Marcuse. Then I went home and looked at my bank statement online and discovered that Citibank decided to start charging me $12.50 a month, despite the fact that in my contract they aren't supposed to do that. So I went to the gym and got sweaty, and then dragged me and my magazine over to the local bank branch. Luckily I only had to wait 3 minutes, and then I got to ask the nice woman at the desk what happened. Here's the explanation:
"That's true, you are a student, so you shouldn't have a monthly fee. Usually we put a waiver for that fee on your account, and it should be a permanent waiver, but" and get this - she really said this - "sometimes the waiver falls off." That's right, folks - my waiver fell off. So I told her to fix it and reverse the charges. She said she couldn't, but a banker at the branch could, so if I would just wait on that couch over there they would be with me as soon as possible. I asked her if she would pay me for my time, and when she said she would not, I gave her all my info and she told me they could fix the problem without my further assistance, which was a much better solution.

Outside, I found the guy who always sells fruit and popcorn by the bank, and I bought 6 bananas for $1. I think it was a great deal; the bananas were excellent. I ate three and gave away three to whoever would take them as I walked home. There, I finally got to take a shower.

2007-04-22T20:41:00.000-04:00

I went to a concert last night in my friend's large basement. This is the beginning of the rebirth of the underground music scene in hyde park. He calls it 'Pataphysics Internationale.
Midway through the concert I decided I needed a haircut, so we went upstairs, I dunked my head in the shower, and then we reentered the concert and I had a haircut by committee. I think it turned out really well.

(the funny faces are completely necessary, especially in a before and after feature of this nature)

2007-04-17T12:00:00.000-04:00

I think I almost got fired from work last night. Almost. But it makes for a funny story:

At this job we have a whiteboard set up in front of all the cubicles, and about 10 minutes before the 5:30 shift starts, every day, a supervisor writes a question on this board. Then everyone writes their answer and name on a piece of paper and puts the answer into a box, from which one answer is drawn before work starts; the winner gets an extra 15 minutes on the time card. This is an incentive to get to work early.

Well, a few weeks back there was no question on the board with 4 minutes to go until 5:30, so I took it upon myself to write a question - I just walked on up, grabbed a marker (we as employees do write on the board occasionally during work itself, so this was not taboo) and wrote the question: "Who is your favorite supervisor?" as a joke. Funnily enough, everyone took it seriously, including the supervisors, who treated it as the real question. No problem.

Well last night we had two minutes to go until 5:30, the board was blank, so I grabbed a marker and wrote, "If all the hippies cut off all their hair, would you care?" (obviously the answer is "I won't care, I won't care"). People started to answer, some of them no doubt remembering my previous joke, and I didn't think there would be a problem. Unfortunately, the head supervisor was in that day. She's stricter.
So this woman came into the main room and said, "Eli, would you erase the whiteboard and then come into the office?"
In the office, she proceeded to very literally explain to me why I shouldn't write on the whiteboard. It took her about 2.5 minutes - you know, it's the supervisor's job, we'd like the supervisors to do it themselves, I understand if you were trying to help but that is unnecessary, etc. I don't know if she really believed that I didn't already know what she was saying or what, but of course the whole time she was using that same patronizing tone of voice she always does, the one that says, "I'm in power and you ain't."
Well anyway, after she finished this speech I stared at her for 4 seconds and then said, dead-pan (I'm getting better at controlling my facial expressions), "it was a joke." She took this in stride and said, "well, that's fine then. But now, if you think this whole job is a joke, we can have that conversation."
Honestly, can you believe this woman? So I said, still dead-pan (here's the part where you say "Eli, you never were able to deal with abusive authority"), "that last comment was completely unnecessary. Obviously I don't think this job is a joke, I do good work here, and I don't appreciate that you would say that."
This took her aback and left her speechless, but I guess she realized she couldn't fire me for that, so I was left with the last word. Needless to say, I was on my best behavior the rest of the night.

2007-04-08T19:08:00.000-04:00

Here's what's going on in my life these days: I finished a new story. The only thing it's missing is a title. I like it a lot: it will be one of the final stories in my new collection (this doesn't mean I've written all of the earlier ones though).
Friday night I went to a party with a few friends. This party was at a frat with a nice sound setup (I've been to other parties there, and written about them too). It was great - at one point I found myself in the basement with a guy I barely knew on the drums, myself playing guitar and singing into a mic, performing for a few other friends.
Last night I went to an underground concert, literally. It was in the basement of my friend Terrence's apartment. The music was good, the atmosphere was nice, the people were cool, and my ears only stopped ringing ten minutes ago.
Today I'm done with homework. I just watched a movie (Serenity, third time). Dinner soon, and then I'm not sure. Maybe I'll attempt to get ahead on my math. Next weekend I have another frisbee tournament. My shin is still hurting a bit, but I'm staying off of it and taking countermeasures (targeted muscle workouts in the lower leg) so hopefully I'll be able to play.
That's that-
E

2007-04-03T14:35:00.000-04:00

I've been getting a lot of exercise lately. Last weekend, of course, I had a frisbee tournament. This was fun, though we didn't win any games. I learned a ton though and had a good time. I was in the game for more than 2/3 of points, I would say, which means that I'm relatively good. I play the position of handler (the guy who throws the disc a lot).
So Saturday and Sunday were filled with lots of running punctuated by bagels, bananas, and water. Then on monday I ate a ginormous breakfast and threw a frisbee around with some guys on the team and later went to the gym for 45 minutes. I thought I was done exercising for the day, but then at 10:30 some friends grabbed me for basketball in the gym. I thought it would be chill, but as soon as we got there we were challenged by 5 guys we didn't know, so it became a 5 on 5 full-court game of basketball, after which (we lost, barely) we played 3 on 3 by ourselves. And now I'm off to frisbee practice in 2 hours!

2007-03-26T17:14:00.000-04:00

Break is over. New classes are fun. I finally found an apartment. The sun is shining. I have work at 5:30.

This post brought to you by E. Hemingway.

2007-03-13T00:06:00.000-04:00

This will be my courseload for spring:
Math 163 - I have to change sections, unfortunately, due to a time conflict. I've made so many friends in this class, and the teacher is so great, that this is disappointing.
Econ 200 - The first required class in the econ major.
Soc 3rd quarter - In which we will read books relating to "self," now that we have explored "culture" and "society" as part of "self, culture, and society."
Advanced Narrative Strategies - the super cool writing course which meets once a week for three hours, for which I have to change math sections. It has the same prof as my current CRWR course.
The verdict: no class fridays, FTW.

2007-03-11T18:00:00.000-04:00

Here is that video I mentioned. The ninja-looking guy playing the twangy instrument (that he made himself) is a real live TUVAN. He sings in multiple octaves at once, and sometimes harmonizes with himself. The sound quality of the video isn't perfect, but that high pitched whistling that sounds like an artifact, as well as the bug-like noises - those are him.

Today I played frisbee. I watched TV. I studied for math. I ate. Now I'm going to eat again in a bit. At seven there is a free concert (irish music, I'll try to take pictures/video) at a nearby coffee shop.

Last night there was a false fire alarm at 6ish (well, 5, except bush had to leave his mark). We were outside for 20 minutes. It sucked.