Will goes to College

My $5,800 Blog Entry

2009-07-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

This summer has been tough for lots of college students. The juicier internships have dried up, career-advancing summer jobs are on hiring freezes, and even spots at crappy companies are sometimes scarce. As the school year ended, I thought I was going to have a job. It didn't work out. I thought I was going to be doing an English program. Was rejected. So I started the summer thinking I'd be doubly out of luck: not only was I not making money, I was going to be spending money taking summer classes. But don't worry, I wrote a blog entry.

Here's the story. In high school I signed up for one of those websites that finds you scholarships. Tucked in among all the other essay contests was a weird one: "The George Walford International Essay Prize." I quickly browsed the details. There's this political theory a British guy named George Walford came up with called "Systematic Ideology." Write an essay for, against, or about the theory and you can win £3,500. All the material about the theory was on the website. From what I could tell, systematic ideology was trying to answer the questions, "Why are there still communists when everyone knows communism isn't going to happen? And why are there people so conservative that fascism can erupt at the emergence of a Hitler?"

The essay only had to be 1,500 words long, but I didn't have time to read all the arguments about systematic ideology enough to enter. I put it on the backburner, saying to myself that next year I would look at it again.

Fast forward to this May. I was in Belize on a mission trip brainstorming about how I should use my time this summer. I had signed up for beginning German, but that would only take up the mornings. What should I do with the rest of my time? Play minesweeper? Read books? And then I got to thinking. I had just had a dry editorial published in Orlando's newspaper. Maybe I could do something with writing. Slowly I remembered the systematic ideology essay contest. I won an online video contest in the spring, so I wasn't afraid of the sketchiness of it being only on the Internet.

When I got back to America, I found the website. Yep, the contest was still going. Yep, the prize was still amazing. What really attracted me to it was that for a few of the years, on the page where it displayed the winner, it just said "No qualifying entries." And everybody knows that's a code word for "No one entered." Just to make sure, though, I sent an email to the guy in charge expressing my interest and asking if they expected many people would enter. I was encouraged by his reply.

"Dear Will:

Yes the George Walford International Essay Prize is worth entering!
We never know how many entries we will get, but I can say that some
years there are very few. Very, very few.

- Trevor"

I had three weeks until the deadline. Each of the two founders of systematic ideology wrote a book, so for the next two weeks every day after German I read their books and took notes. Then the next week I wrote my essay. It ended up being 22 pages. All told it was a lot of effort, but the whole time I was like, well, if I won, the £3,500 prize would more than make up for not having a summer job. In today's market, £3,500 is about $5,800.

The makers of the contest wanted a plain-text version of the essay, so I made it into a blog entry. I was kinda embarrassed that I was even entering such a no-name, no-hope contest with something I had worked on so hard, so when Facebook found my blog entry, I deleted the Facebook version. My mom proofread the essay. "At least one person will have read it by the time everything is over," I told her.

And then I won! The lead judge wrote this about my entry: "I nominate 'Chiropracting Systematic Ideology' by Will Penman as the winner of the 2009 GWIEP. He shows a deep understanding of the theory and a deep understanding of its history. His criticisms constitute new grounds. He links the theory to other theories. Far above everything else this year and perhaps ever, including my own work."

I got the check yesterday, but have already been spending like a winner. I bought a belt. Went to The Melting Pot with Stephanie. Am planning a roadtrip to Boston. I can't go crazy since I do have to think about paying for summer school, UF's increased tuition next year, and grad school apps, but still. I won!

Here's a link to the contest: George Walford International Essay Prize. If you click on "Prior Winners" you'll see a page with my essay lined right up with past winners. All the information is on the website if anybody wants to enter next year. The contest sure has made my summer.

Symbolism in the Movie UP

2009-06-21T13:45:00.000-07:00

People ask me a lot what it is literature majors do. One way of putting it is that we explain the feelings you have when you read a good book or see a good movie. I just saw UP for the second time today. It's the only animated movie I've seen where there's a miscarriage. There're some deep emotions, and some of them are difficult to verbalize. One of the most poignant shots is at the end when you see the house landed right next to the waterfall. You feel a sense of satisfaction, but it doesn't seem to fit in. Sure, they always wanted to go there, so it's nice that the house eventually landed there, but Carl goes back to America and Ellie's gone.

Many people distrust symbolism. The idea that one thing can mean more than one thing seems suspicious, they think. But everyone understands symbolism in daily life. Say there's a husband who says "I love you" every day to his wife. Through thick and thin, he always says it. Until one day he catches her cheating on him and they have a big fight. And that day he doesn't say "I love you," even when she prompts him. On one level, it is just him not saying something he usually does. But after all the years, his saying "I love you" has come to symbolize the continuity of their marriage. So when he doesn't say "I love you" this day, he is symbolically discontinuing their marriage. He hasn't divorced her yet, but it's coming.

See, when something symbolizes something else, the two follow each other like Carl follows his house. Most of the time Carl leads, but sometimes the house does. In the same way, if the man wasn't as persistent as he was, then it wouldn't mean anything special for him to change. But it's his constancy that establishes the symbol. It gives the symbol momentum the way Carl's pulling gives his house momentum, so that when the man doesn't say he loves her, that symbolic action indicates that personal action is coming.

Sometimes symbolism is easy to see in movies. For example, there's a nice article in the New York Times that explains some of the visual symbolism in UP. The friendly dog Dug isn't shaped harshly like the other dogs--and he isn't harsh. Russell, the Wilderness Explorer, is soft and round--and his emotions are soft and various, too.

But the real interest in symbolism in UP comes from the house. Because as the movie gets going, we see that Carl's house comes to symbolize an attitude. It's an attitude that thinks love has to accomplish. Here's what I mean. When Carl meets Ellie as a little kid, he's smitten. And bowled over. Ellie is pretty intimidating, and when she makes him swear that he will take her to Paradise Falls, he takes it more seriously than she intended. She runs off undisturbed as soon as he makes his vow, but he solemnly remembers his promise for the rest of his life. These early experiences contribute to Carl's understanding of love as something you have to accomplish. In order to love Ellie well, he thinks he has to do a bunch of things. He's always trying to accomplish: he brings up having kids, he starts the fund to go to the falls, he buys the tickets to go right before she dies. And once he's in South America, he goes to Paradise Falls even if he has to abandon a kid.

So that's the attitude. Carl thinks that love needs to accomplish. The symbol of that attitude is his house. Watch the house, and you're watching the attitude. As you can guess, by the end of the movie, the house is left behind just like the attitude is. But let's follow it through.

At first, the house just sits there, resisting everything that wants it gone. And considering how isolated Carl is, it's no wonder his attitude on love is safe. You can't find out you're wrong about love if you don't have anyone to love.

But then Carl uses his balloons to move the house. So we see that Carl's house goes with him through space and time. His attitude goes with him, too. Even though Russell tries to get him to open up, Carl refuses to let go of his grumpiness. Accomplishing-love has to mourn ostentatiously, you know, and if Carl was more friendly to Russell, it would be like saying he'd gotten over Ellie. She was the source of his happiness, and he'll be darned if anything else makes him happy.

For a while Carl and his house tug together effortlessly. Russell complains about having to walk all the way around the peninsula, but Carl walks contentedly. He pulls his attitude easily, too: he's accomplishing! He's finally showing his devotion to Ellie! It's hard work, of course, as they trek through the jungle, but Carl's task-oriented attitude has the situation under control.

Until Russell makes him promise to help the bird, Kevin, get home safely. Now Carl has pledged accomplishments to two people, and they don't mix. In the morning, he has to choose which way to take his house. Does he take it toward the bird, or toward the waterfall? His house, his attitude, can't go in two directions at once.

You have to give Carl credit for trying. All through his dinner with explorer Charles Mutz he tries to avoid the conflict between filling his promise to Russell and his promise to his wife. But Charles calls him on it and they have to flee. The house is roughed up quite a bit getting away, but Carl's house and attitude stay in tow.

They follow Kevin, but as the dilemma becomes more pronounced, you see that Carl isn't wholeheartedly into it. If he keeps helping Kevin, his house is going to go up in flames. Here the house as "house" and the house as "his attitude" are conjoined: if his house burns down, he won't have a house; and if his house burns down, he also won't be able to hold onto the idea that he should still earn his love for Ellie.

Carl chooses the house, chooses to cling to his old dreams. Russell, betrayed and dismayed at how he abandoned Kevin, trudges after Carl. Finally they get to the waterfall. Russell is angry. Carl is tired. But now he has time to evaluate his house. He tidies up the debris a little, then sits comfortably back in his chair. His attitude has been challenged quite a bit by the immediacy of being able to love Russell, who as a kid with no father, laps up any attention Carl gives.

We're pierced with the sense that Carl's attitude is heavy. His house has lost its lift, his friends are gone, and all he has is a heavy sense of a scorecard of life.

And that's when Carl finds the rest of the Adventure Book. In a heartbreaking moment, he sees that Ellie didn't need his accomplishments to savor their love. The whole scrapbook is filled with average, unstory-able joy. There is no accomplishment in the scrapbook, only love. And that finishes his attitude.

Follow the action, and you follow the symbol. As soon as Carl reaches this internal revelation, Russell flies away and the only way Carl can follow him is to practically destroy the house. He clears it of sofas, drawers, tables, chairs: everything of weight is evicted. This is a reenactment of Carl's attitude transformation. And once his heart changes, the house is incidental. Carl flies to save Russell, ends up saving Kevin and Dug, too, but in the process the house floats away. It's a difficult moment. Little kids in the theater saw the sadness of the house floating, but adults could see that Carl actually had everything that's truly important.

And so his incomplete view of love drifted off and all he was left with was love in its glory. He still honors Ellie, giving Russell her pin as a badge, but he doesn't feel driven to accomplish. They eat ice cream together and count cars. Meanwhile, he has a new house: Charles' dirigible, contrasting with his old house in its natural weightlessness. And his old house? Abandoned. It's a poignant scene when we see the house lodged right next to the waterfall because that had become a symbol, too, of perfect happiness. And so the symbols work together to show that even though Carl doesn't have perfect happiness--he's not living in the house--he still does.

That's how Carl's house is a symbol for his conception of love. I didn't conjure it up. There are little hints at the beginning to start the association. Carl being set in his ways corresponds nicely to the house set. Physical dwellings naturally correspond to mental states of mind, so it makes sense that a house represents, in a way, Carl himself. And when Russell comes inside for the first time, he remarks on how it was smart for Carl to bring his house along, because then he gets to take his "TV and clocks and stuff." The incongruity of grandfather clocks and adventures parallels the incongruity between Carl's attitude and his world.

Thinking about symbolism is useful because it lets you feel the movie in more ways. Sure, we could say that Carl has a difficult time adjusting to being with such loyal, lovable companions as Russell, Dug, and Kevin. But it's a picture for our minds to think that it's as difficult a burden as pulling your house everywhere you go. Sure, we could say that he learned something about love. But it's much clearer to see it as the difference between a blimp and a house with balloons attached. In the end, it's like watching the movie twice at the same time: once in words, and once in symbols.

Chiropracting Systematic Ideology

2009-05-29T14:17:00.000-07:00

CHIROPRACTING SYSTEMATIC IDEOLOGY

By Will Penman

Respectfully submitted for the 2009 George Walford International Essay Prize

In 1947, Harold Walsby wrote The Domain of Ideologies; a Study of the Origin, Development, and Structure of Ideologies. About forty years later, George Walford published Beyond Politics: An Outline of Systematic Ideology. If these two books form the backbone of the socio-political theory known as "systematic ideology," it is a backbone seriously in need of realignment. Systematic ideology is now kept alive by a website, an occasional newsletter, and the financial incentives inherent in an annual essay contest.

A simple summary of the theory goes like this: "The basic premise of systematic ideology is that ideology is the central motivator in human affairs; that the characteristics that make up the major ideologies come in sets; that those sets of characteristics form a series; and that the ideological series forms a system" (Blake 1). (Page numbers within HTML pages are given from the default "Print Preview" feature in Mozilla Firefox.) Since ideology is defined to be so broad as the "state of each human being's mental organisation" (Walsby 95), it makes sense that ideology would be considered the central motivator in human affairs. As for the "major ideologies," Walsby considers seven: fascism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and a final "ideology of ideologies." Although Walsby goes to great length to show that ideology affects more than just politics, the politically oriented names he gives his major ideologies don't allow him to develop that theme. Walford accommodates for this by distilling each ideology to what he considers its essential characteristic and renaming the series: expediency, principle/domination, precision, reform, revolution, repudiation, and the same "ideology of ideologies."

Observation now takes the helm and notes that when the major ideologies are arranged in this order, several characteristics happen to be arranged, too. The size of each group becomes exponentially smaller with each move. The power of each group similarly declines along the scale. The desires sought also change, from stability being paramount in fascism toward revolution being the foundation of anarchy. The ideologies shift from economic freedom to economic control, too, and from political control to political freedom. (That is, anarchists want complete economic control and complete political freedom; fascists want the opposite.) Finally, there is a progression from relying on action toward relying on theory.

These observations transform the set into a series. If you reorganized the ideologies by placing anarchy next to conservatism because, for example, you thought they were both wrong, the neat alignment of the scale would be disrupted. There would be no order with respect to size, stability, economic and political leanings, or intellectualism. The only way to show those relationships is in the order they are given. Walford concludes that this consistency of characteristics "comes close to being proof" the ideologies listed are connected (Walford "The British Political Series" 9).

I should add two things about terminology. The observant reader will have noticed that the scale of ideologies implies that the majority of people in society are fascists. Walsby meant something more along the lines of "latent fascist," since fascist movements arouse what is already present. Walsby quotes Dr. Carl Jung to argue that Nazis gained power because "Hitler is the mirror of every German's unconscious" (50). Walford helpfully renames these fascists "non-politicals" and assigns them the ideology of expediency. Still, the assumption is that most people are willing to be told what to do.

Secondly, Walsby claims that not only are the more intellectual ideologies smaller than the more action-oriented ones, but that each one is smaller by a factor of ten (Walsby 39, but see his confused commentary on the graph at 26: rather than a linear decrease in representation along the range, "it can be more accurately represented by a hyperbolic curve," which would seem to imply an infinitely populated base of non-politicals/fascists and an infinite number of increasingly extremist ideologies). Establishing a clear relationship between size and extremism is crucial for later claims, but Walsby and Walford pass over it as if it weren't important. I, for one, do not intuitively accept that there are ten times the number of socialists as communists, or ten times the number of conservatives as liberals. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem unreasonable to go along with the idea that there are more of each closer to the beginning of the scale.

In the formulation of systematic ideology that opens this essay, since we see that the set of ideologies form a series, we jump to saying that it forms a system. That jump is systematic ideology. Walsby is thorough and moves slowly. Walford, on the other hand, is so excited by the possibilities of a "real and significant" system that he jumbles concepts and connections together faster than the reader can sort through the wake of his enthusiasm (Walford "The British Political System" 9). Together, the too-philosophic Walsby, who at one point feels it necessary to prove that protozoans can and do assume things (Walsby 121), and the too-impulsive Walford, who worries that a digression might "verge on the philosophical" (Walford "The Origin of Ideologies" 8), construct a theory that is tangled by years of unpruned speculation. This is mentioned almost as a matter of pride in the website's introduction: "Systematic ideology seems utterly skim-proof" (GWIEP 1). It is the goal of this essay to provide a concise, coherent, and readable explanation of what systematic ideology is and what it thinks it is.

A system explains things in terms of other things in the system. By far the best sentence in Beyond Politics is this one invoking the wonders of a system: "It brings within one coherent system of thought, to name only three items, the facts that Democritus assumed his atoms to be indivisible, that the USSR and the People's Republic of China have moved towards official acceptance of competition and private ownership, and that policemen were invented before psychoanalysts" (Walford "Introduction" 2). A system that encompasses science, politics, and anthropology? Finding the warrant for this claim drives readers through Walford's book. He quickly comes to the same premises we've already covered: everyone has an ideology, ideologies fit into categories, and these categories make a series. But the link between series and system is elusive in the rest of the chapters. In the third-to-last paragraph of the book, Walford finally asks why this structure is the way it is. Why don't people simply all become liberals, communists or anarchists? "Systematic ideology provides an answer, as yet only in general terms, and needing far more development, but supported by reason and evidence and opening the way to a new understanding of social development past and future" (Walford "Conclusion" 4). So, whatever the reason is, it's backed by reason, evidence, and will be helpful for understanding history. The "undertaking" of finding this reason is assigned to the ethereal final ideology: the ideology of ideologies. But other than peg it to another category, the vague "answer" Walford talks about is only that the ideological series exists! We'll see that systematic ideology in Walsby is much more precise, but we start from a foundation of murkiness.

I admit, "why?" is a difficult question to answer. But a simpler, more direct question, when applied to the whole school of thought, will be the chisel that separates everything into manageable chunks. That question is this: What is ideology a property of?

An analogy will explain what I mean. Imagine a man climbs onto his roof, peers over the edge, and drops a sandwich off. It falls. Somehow, this man has never noticed gravity before and is intrigued. He could, of course, ask why the sandwich fell, but his answers would obscure his own conclusions. Imagine he said, "The sandwich fell because I let go of it." The conclusion he really means is "Everything I let go of will fall." If his answer is "The sandwich fell because it was a sunny day," the implication is that everything will fall on sunny days. Even if his answer was as unhelpful as "The sandwich fell because God made it fall," it would be more beneficial to hear him say that only what God wills to fall will fall.

The difference within each pair of answers is that the first closes understanding and the second opens understanding. If the sandwich fell because the man let go of it, that's that. Further questions would be intrusive. But if the man says that everything he lets go of will fall, that makes any reasonable person ask, "Everything?" Similarly, if the man says the sandwich fell because it was a sunny day, you'd shake your head and think he was silly. But if he said that everything falls on sunny days, you would intuitively reply by asking why the man hadn't fallen himself. And even in the last example, if the man argues that the sandwich fell because God wanted it to, his answer has filled the gap in knowledge which "why?" creates and implies no need for further investigation. In contrast, by saying that only what God wills to fall will fall, follow-up questions immediately arise about what, exactly, God wills to fall. Coffee cups? Giraffes? Thus the "what" in "what God wills to fall will fall" makes its own hole which asks to be filled.

The more useful second statement of each doublet holds the answer to "What is gravity a property of?" With a little thought, if everything you let go of falls, then gravity is a property of height. If everything falls on sunny days, gravity is a property of the weather. And possibly gravity is a property of God's will.

Discovering what something is a property of is the process of finding the boundaries of something. Is gravity a property of ham sandwiches? Every ham sandwich the man drops off his roof falls, but that's only sufficient to show that gravity extends at least that far. When the man drops a sub sandwich off and it falls, he knows that maybe gravity is a property of sandwiches in general. And so he experiments. Is gravity a property of weight? Well, heavy and light sandwiches both fall, so it doesn't seem so. Is it a property of tastiness? Moldy sandwiches fall, too.

Gradually, the man comes to realize that gravity is broader than he had realized before. Not only does all food fall, but everything people make falls. And everything falls! Well, it seems as if gravity is a property of being a thing. Of course, the earth is a thing. So the man needs to re-define "fall"--it isn't precise enough for his added understanding of gravity. He decides that when he says "fall" he really just means "come closer to." And if we fall toward the earth because we're a thing, then it should fall to us because it's a thing. But he should probably re-define "weigh" since the Earth doesn't really weigh anything--but it does have a lot of stuff. Eventually, through experimentation and thought, he concludes that gravity is a property of distance and mass.

Maybe the man you know who drops sandwiches off of roofs doesn't follow exactly the same train of thought. But the point is that asking "why?" isn't always the best question because answering it isn't always the best answer. My man is on his way to calculating the gravitational constant, while the guy who was satisfied saying "It fell because I let go of it" has probably never dropped another sandwich off his roof since.

Let's apply this method to systematic ideology. It seems clear there is some phenomenon to speculate about: there is some kind of a scale, or hierarchy, with popular, unthinking movements of capitalism at the bottom and unpopular, intellectual movements of collectivism at the top. What is this a property of? Some people might think that since each individual has an ideology, ideology must be a property of the individual. But in, say, a basketball team, each individual has a number, but that number might not be the individual's decision: current teammates' numbers might be unavailable, or certain numbers might have been retired, or players might be assigned numbers based on how many years the team has existed. In the last case, an individual's team number isn't a property of the individual at all; it's a property of the team.

Similarly, ideology doesn't have to be a property of the individual. In fact, the one thing most systematic ideologists agree on is that it isn't a property of the individual. As for what it is a property of, having scoured two books and several articles, I can tell you that systematic ideology gives four distinct, contradictory answers to this question and operates as if they're all the same. It's back-breaking work, but in the end, only one answer is interesting and consistent. Unfortunately, this answer has fascinating but limited application.

We begin with the thing almost everyone agrees: ideology is not a property of the individual. If it were, we would expect that something about that person would govern their ideology--if we were Marxists, we would say it would be socio-political position. That is, I'm a rich woman, so I will be conservative (because who doesn't like things the way they are when they're on top?). Or, I'm a poor worker, so I should love communism and its possibility of instituting a better, fairer life. What Walsby points out, though, what Walford praises him for, and what reviewers praised Walford for, was rejecting this idea that a person's economic condition determines the person's ideology. On one side, this is proven anecdotally: rich people sometimes sympathize with communism. And on the other side, it's been evident to everyone that many well-informed, intelligent poor people do not appreciate communism. This is unexplainable in the communist mindset except by saying that the poor people who disagree with them are so oppressed they can't see what's good for them. This is a dangerous argument on a number of levels, and suffice it to say that systematic ideology dismisses it. As Walford puts it, people from each level in the ideological hierarchy "vary among themselves in income, status, personality, ethnicity, nationality, age, sex, diet, geographical location, heredity, physical constitution, accustomed climate, toughness or tenderness of mind, language, education, upbringing, toilet training, relation to the means of production and particular ideas about political matters." (Walford "From Politics to Ideology" 1). Ideology is not a property of the individual.

This is an important idea because it gives ideology some autonomy. Perhaps, systematic ideologists think, if society isn't creating the ideological series, the ideological series (caused by something yet unspecified) is creating society. That's the direction Walford takes his book, trying to lasso society into the realm of ideology's influence. And yet, we still have the ideological series floating in our minds. Non-politicals, fascists, conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists, ideologists. Whether the series is responsible for society or not, where does it come from?

The first answer is that ideology is a property of the activity. Daily life, Walford says, is done in the mode of expediency (characteristic of non-politicals), that is, in the simplest possible way. Expediency is not concerned with theory or consistency, but with immediate benefit. "This usually means taking care to preserve some items (such as clothing) and destroying others (such as pests), but only because this is usually the easiest method; we sometimes reverse ourselves, throwing away out-of-date clothes and keeping a rat as a pet" (Walford "Ideology Beyond Politics" 4). I assume the air around me isn't poisonous not because it isn't, but because the "balance of advantage" lies that way (Walford "Ideology Beyond Politics" 4). Donning a different ideological mode--precision (characteristic of liberals), let's say--would mean assuming that if I only measured the air and researched its particular qualities, then I could be safe. That's clearly an unsustainable mindset to operate all of life under. Thus, as far as daily life goes, the ideology we all operate under is that of expediency. It is the activity that determines the ideology.

Walford gives a chapter full of examples. Technology joins housework in the ideology of expediency. Social life--education, medicine, law, religion, police work--is done in the ideology of principle (characteristic of conservatives). Each one has an established, principled way of operation that respects authority and consistency: equal treatment under the law is a cornerstone of our legal system. Science transcends these by operating under the mode of precision: the world can be modified, and with greater understanding we will improve our condition. Though Walford doesn't go beyond this on the scale, presumably an activity like editing an essay would fall into the mode of reformation (characteristic of socialists), invention would be done in the ideology of revolution (characteristic of communists), and though Walford says "repudiation [characteristic of anarchists] is used for practically nothing other than an attempt to spread the ideology of repudiation" (Walford "The Origin of Ideologies" 7), suicide seems like it would be an act of repudiation.

Ideology being the domain of activity is problematic for three reasons. To begin, if the activity governs the ideology, then it doesn't make any sense to say that a person is an instance of any of the major ideologies. One morning an "anarchist" (we have to put it in quotations now in view of what he's about to do) eats a bagel, and in eating, doesn't repudiate the act of eating but goes along with it because society does it and it's the most immediately profitable course of action--he is hungry, after all. Yet in this act the "anarchist" is acting according to the ideology of expediency, and earns a fascist pass for the duration of his breakfast. If not at that moment, then unavoidably sometime: "this ideology accounts for the greater part of intentional human behaviour and plays a part in all of it" (Walford "Ideology Beyond Politics" 5). It seems similarly silly to call someone people socialists because they edit their homework before they turn it in. If I'm expedient 90% of the day, principled 9%, precise .9%, and so on, then what makes me belong to any of the ideologies? Every time Walford speaks of people as belonging to a major ideology, his words are incompatible with this division of actions into ideologies.

Furthermore, if activity is the determiner of ideology, then what separates one political opinion from another? What ideology does "voting" have? If one person votes for the conservative and another votes for the liberal, which activity dictated the vote? Trying to divide the world into political and non-political to resolve this problem completely destroys the unity systematic ideology is supposed to bring.

Third, it is false that an entire job can be categorized into one ideology. There must be more sophisticated modes of thinking in the legal profession or in education than Walford gives them credit for. The prize-winning essay from 2008 was written to answer which ideology judicial independence fit into: precision or domination. Its answer? Both. Not only do some activities not fit into either, but some fit into more than one. Walford admits that while religion naturally goes in the mode of expediency, people can be religious through principle, so that "easy outward compliance comes to be replaced by a more serious concern" (Walford "Ideology Beyond Politics" 6), and then adds "non-conformist religion" because that kind of religion operates under an even later mode. It appears, then, that categories such as "religion" serve more as ideological microcosms than as examples of one ideology or another.

If ideology isn't a property of the activity, perhaps it's a function of history. Both Walford and Walsby curiously fit this into their theories by means of verbal legerdemain such as this: "There is every reason to believe, however, that - as in biological growth - the development of the individual broadly recapitulates, and sometimes extends, the series of evolutionary stages passed through by the group" (Walsby 135). That is to say, since an individual's ideology moves from action to theory along the scale, the ideology of the society similarly moves. This conclusion "is forced upon us," Walsby continues, "by a broad historical survey of the growth of religion, science, philosophy, politics etc., and the study of savage behaviour, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by the study of the intellectual growth of the individual in modern society." Walford devotes several chapters of his book to the same idea, even clarifying that his idea of ideological evolution in history is not biological evolution--ideology is not passed on genetically.

It does seem like an attractive proposition. Walford details how human society started out as hunter-gatherers (a model of expediency), gradually progressed to small villages (principle), then to empire (a mode of domination). Most recently, our power to influence the outside world has become so great through science that we need to use the ideology of precision to reign ourselves in. Society isn't bad, necessarily, but dangerous. These three ideologies (for some reason Walford separates domination and principle as stages of development, but they represent the same ideology) all view society as essentially good and the cosmos as essentially bad, and so even if society is modified it's still within the framework of society being good. For this reason, they are given the label "eidostatic," a neologism Walsby created to distinguish them from the later ideologies, which are called "eidodynamic." The "dynamic" part of "eidodynamic" is shown in the names themselves: reform, revolution, repudiation. Each one says that what we have doesn't need just tweaking, it needs to be remade.

Walford says that past the ideology of precision, people realize that health care, global warming, and other social problems can't be fixed piecemeal in the same way that a war is won by attacking; these social problems are excesses of society, and fixing them requires fixing the society. From here, the cosmos is good and society is bad. Thus socialists, communists, and anarchists seek a return to nature, global economic restrictions to protect the environment, and a continued call for individual recognizance of social harm.

What will happen to these movements? With chagrin in their voice, Walsby and Walford repeatedly admonish us not to expect them to ever take power. Walsby says this as if he hopes he's wrong, Walford tries to give a reason. The reason principle dominated over expediency, he says, is because the stability of planting increases the potential size of a group, and thus increases their power. Similarly, domination supersedes principle because with an army, any band of people can be taken over. And with a British empire on which the sun never sets, the only way to improve is to limit power in the ideology of precision. Wars, like the Cold War, are no longer out of fear that the other guy wants to dominate you, but are out of fear that the world will end. Reform and the other eidodynamic ideologies, Walford says, has no oomph to it, nothing to get it off the ground.

This is where the problems with the historically based theory of ideology emerge. Walford is insistent that each stage "enables its successor" (Walford "The Origin of Ideologies" 8). In the era of expediency, the idea of political individualism was literally "inconceivable" (Walford "From Village to Empire" 4). And the idea that power should be reigned in "could not have been said" before that phase (Walford "After the Empires" 2). Yet Walford never elucidates what it was that allowed people to think beyond their mode. It doesn't do a good job explaining why we can imagine the violent overthrow of the state that communism seeks, or the independently occurring statelessness of anarchy.

Second, the historical model is notably artificial. One pervasive critique of systematic ideology is that the division into seven categories seems arbitrary. The artificiality of the historical argument is of a different kind. Since most of Walford's discussion centers on the development of man before there was writing, small details that he got wrong could skew the entire picture. For example, part of his rationale for calling the first societies ones of expediency instead of communism, is that if they were communist it would "render the course of social development incomprehensible" (Walford "The Beginnings" 4). That is, he interprets history to justify his preconceived ideas of the way he thinks it should look. Again, he says it can't be anarchy because then "it follows that anarchism produced the state" (Walford "The Beginnings" 5). That is, expediency is allowed to produce the state, but anarchy isn't, because Walford thinks anarchy goes at the end.

Third and most important is that ideology being a property of history doesn't account for any differences within eras. If history is a principle factor in determining ideology, then since we're in the ideology of precision, we should all be liberals. Walford tries to account for the lower levels by saying that people fall back on them, but these are mostly examples of depravity: police officers have an ideology they should operate under, but some of them don't. There are bad (expedient) teachers and doctors and lawyers. But in transforming moral questions to sociological ones, Walford does nothing to explain the presence or persistence of crime. In fact, from his perspective, the sin that religion says humans are born with is the only way to explain our failure to act "up to" the ideology of our age. Knowing what age someone is born in does not predict that person's ideology.

This is an unfortunate conclusion, because both Walford and Walsby justify their work by their characterizations of social progression. If ideology isn't a property of history, though, then nothing can be said about what will follow. Walford's ugly, inspirational closing to his book is hogwash: "More than ever before, our world is a boiling, bounding, bubbling ferment of ideological novelty, and the rate of change is accelerating. If the ideological system has reached completion it is only in the sense that a newborn child is complete" (Walford "Conclusion" 5). Walford feeds us the image of the world as a newborn child because we know how a child develops. From our place in history, however, Walford's claim is as unsupported as saying that our world is like a tadpole, ready for its metamorphosis into an adult. Walsby more modestly hopes that we will somehow transition to "master" ourselves (149).

Perhaps ideology is a property of something more modest than history. The only group that is mentioned as having the spectrum of ideologies is in politics, so it's easy to imagine that ideology is a property of society. According to this idea, ideology doesn't emerge except in the largest possible group dedicated to the government of the people--the society. On the face of it, this is incomplete. Certainly the ideological spectrum exists in society--that's where we found it--but it extends to other groups as well. A reminder of the definition of ideology as the sum of all opinions about the world might be helpful for realizing the implications of the social argument: if ideology is a property of society, then people should agree on everything that doesn't have to do with politics. This is obviously false.

One real-life example is a juggling organization called the International Jugglers' Association. Its membership is several orders of magnitude smaller than the population of the US at only about 1500 members currently. Also, its goal, "to render assistance to fellow jugglers," has nothing to do with economic or political collectivism. However, IJA members are far from being in agreement with each other about marketing, festival production, services to offer, financial openness, organization of leadership, and so on; and the disagreements do not necessarily follow their political ideology. Most members are essentially "non-political." They like to juggle and stay out of the in-fighting. They show up for the fun and don't care about the rest. They are no less active in politics than others. That is, their ideology within the IJA does not correspond to their ideology politically. Others are principled. They faithfully attend the business meeting every year. Others are precise, and seek to improve the organization by tracking various membership and global metrics. With each level, the number drops. Some think the IJA is worthless the way it's structured and would like to completely reorganize it, with permission of the members. Others think that's not far enough, and want to make a new IJA whether people like it or not. Maybe one or two people would rather not be a member because of the strictures it places but is a member anyway for some reason. Each category is composed of Democrats and Republicans, and a significant number of others. But if ideology were determined by society, then the socialists should be the only ones who could want reform in an organization like the IJA. And since the IJA has been sued twice in the last ten years by its own members, I can confidently say that the IJA did not need to import socialists to do its reforming. Some people active in politics might not participate much at all in the school PTA, or someone who never votes might be the most campaigning member of a video game organization.

So it seems like ideology is a property of something less encompassing than society. We know that, despite what some arms of systematic ideology suggest, it isn't specific activities, and it isn't history in general or society more particularly. The fourth plan, and the breakthrough logically, is that ideology is a property of the group. Walsby touches on this lightly, Walford ignores it. But the reasoning at this point is what propels systematic ideology from a hope of a theory to the reality of a theory.

Walsby explains: "[I]ndependence of thought [is] incompatible with group or collective expression, but it positively tends to disrupt it and threatens to break up the unity - even the very existence itself - of the group. Hence the intolerance and hostility with which the group meets all attempts, on the part of any individual, to be objective, analytical, theoretical, critical and independent in thought" (41). Since humans need groups, evolution has placed within us a universal dread of the group that inhibits this group-threatening intellectualism. Walsby here uses Freud: "'The fear of the super-ego [individuation] should normally never cease, since it is indispensable in the social relations in the form of moral anxiety, and it is only in the rarest instances that an individual succeeds in becoming independent of the community'" (45, quoting New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 116). People who do break off, either from within by becoming a leader or without by forming a new union, are risking the condemnation of the group. Breaking off is worth it only when the anticipated pleasure of being leader of the group or of yourself is greater than the anticipated pain the group will try to inflict on any non-conformists.

Different qualities give different people their cost-benefit analysis. Someone who is smart, strong, and personable is most limited by the least common denominator mentality of the group and will thus have the most to gain from breaking off and will be most likely to do it. As society advances, physical strength is less important and intellect becomes the dominating trait. The more intellectual someone is, the more likely he or she is to not follow the group blindly. At this point it may seem like breaking away into a different group--the fundamental action to define one's ideology--is a property of the individual: his or her intellect and personality. Systematic ideologists deny this for two reasons: first, not all smart people are eidodynamists; second, many dull, stupid people are. Intellectuals may have the edge in breaking off, but it is the group that gives people the chance, and once the chance is there, there will be leaders or rebels.

With the understanding that everyone has a dread of the group, it's easy to see why the majority of people are willing to be herded by the collective decision: it's a psychological instinct! Fascists thrive on this. "'The structure of the Third Reich cannot be understood', says Konrad Heiden, referring to the Nazi Gestapo, 'without this monstrous apparatus for intimidation. In the beginning is fear, the state is all-powerful, obedience is the fount and source of all things. And yet it would, be a mistake if we thought of the German people's fear of its government as synonymous with aversion. No, there is enthusiasm. This contradiction between mob-enthusiasm and police rule is one of the mysteries of dictatorship, and seems almost to suggest that the object of enthusiasm is police-rule itself. Does the slave derive happiness from the presence of the jack-boot on his neck? It is certain that relief from responsibility has always been a substantial element in the happiness of the mob - the submersion of the man in the mass, no matter whether he be high or low, educated or uneducated.'" (Walsby 50, quoting One Man Against Europe 105-6.)

Of course, the bigger the group, the more levels of breaking off there can be. The group of people who break off have a certain homogeneity, but when that group reaches a certain size, it can chafe to accord with that many other people, and the drive to break away from the group who have broken away begins. And so the non-politicals, human lemmings, have a strain who would rather decide for themselves. Many of them like banding together, but some of that strain think that being a conservative who follows authority misses the point. They break off and become liberals. And so on. Notice that each departure is simply one of restlessness: searching for a return to absolute happiness which Walsby says we got a taste of in the womb, each rejection of the group before it comes with some idea of how to make everything better. Rather than imply seven levels of ideology and a super-level beyond that, the tension between a person's dread of the group and desire for personal independence accounts only for the existence of different strata. All we've proven is that there is always a fringe.

At first this seems disappointing. Of course there's always a fringe, we think. In any group there are weirdos and people who think they've got it all figured out. But there is an interesting application of this idea. If ideology is a property of the group, where each person's ideology forms based on how everyone else in the group's ideology is formed, then people's ideology is based less on some objective truth than it is based on their perception of others' ideologies. For example, Walsby quotes Freud in saying that the "perception" of others getting excited makes you excited and creates a closed feedback loop (Walsby 37).

In fact, psychological studies indicate that despite living in a modern age in which freedom of speech and thought is supported and encouraged, we still want to fit in. During the 1950s a psychologist by the name of Solomon Asch showed that our desire to be part of the group is so strong it even appears when we think we've trained it out of us. In the Asch conformity experiments, a participant was ushered into a room with other people and told he was taking a vision test--a set-up which established not only that he didn't need to be like the others, but implied that he should be completely independent. A vision test in which you lie is of no use. The people in the room were then shown a line and next to it, three lines of various lengths marked A, B, and C. Then, one by one, the people verbally indicated which of the three lines was the same length as the original one. Each room went through eighteen of these trials. The test wasn't tricky. Each answer choice was either clearly wrong or clearly right. But what the participant, who "happened" to be seated last or next-to-last, didn't know was that everyone else in the room was in on the experiment and at pre-determined "critical" trials all answered with the same wrong answer. On average, participants conformed to the majority in 33% of trials. 75% conformed to the obviously wrong answer at least once, and 5% conformed every time. (Asch 1). If dread of the group plays such a powerful role when the group is unimportant, we can imagine that it plays an even bigger role when there's more at stake. We can also imagine political conspiracies in which each individual is manipulated by the appearance of the group's opinion, creating the very condition the conspiracy initially fabricated.

Finally, we can look back at the other three ideas of what ideology comes from and account for them. The first idea was that ideology relates best to the activity at hand. With our new understanding that the ideological series comes from dread of the group, we can see that ideological speciation only matters when there is a group. Housework is relatively unencumbered by outside pressures: whether you turn on the washing machine and then get the clothes or vice versa is not dictated, ever, by anyone else. Thus, there are no clothes-first camps or washer-first networks. With no group, ideology is all the same. As for Walford's other activity-categories, they were mostly arbitrary and reflected the fact that there actually was an ideological spectrum present. Religion was a good example: lots of people believe unquestioningly, but lots have also considered it quite a bit. The problem isn't quite airtight: sin (inconsistent, irrational deviations from the proper course) still goes unexplained.

The second idea we looked at was ideology as a function of history. Since ideology is governed by properties of the group, though, history is too big to be predicted. The best we can do is say that there will always be disagreement, always a fringe. Walsby and Walford both work hard to keep content (like economic collectivism/individualism) separated from mode (intellectual individualism/collectivism). If we know there will be more than one mode, that doesn't mean anything about the content of those modes. It is instructive to imagine that a bunch of communists happen to wash up on a deserted island. With no stasis to resist, could the "eidodynamists" simply form a communist community? If people are as flexible as Walford says they are, then in the same way that yesterday's revolution that the Sun is the center of the universe is today's commonplace, perhaps today's revolution of communism could be this island's commonplace. And yet Soviet Russia has fallen and Walford argues that no society with a commonly owned means of production endures. The fear should be, maybe ideology isn't a result of any of these: maybe ideology is a product of truth. It's a boring answer, and it's kept in check by the fact that there is always a fringe. If people really judged based on the truth, you would expect us to be people with better ideology than earlier ages, and I don't think that's true.

Third, we considered that ideology was a derivative of society. We felt close, but not specific enough. Armed with our current conclusion, though, we see that since society is just a really big group with a specialized purpose, there are differentiated ideologies. And since society is so large, there are enough people to have seven layers. (If the 10:1 rule does hold, there would need to be one million people, statistically, just to have one sane anarchist.) Not many groups are big enough to have such a rich array of ideologies. Furthermore, since one purpose of society is to allocate resources, the economic propensity of our ideological series comes about. Walsby spends almost half his book explaining that the eidodynamists assume that people are going to somehow see the truth not because their truth is true, but because everyone has faith. Eidostatic ideology has an ideal material world (heaven), eidodynamic ideology has an ideal group (agreed-on classlessness). Faith in the masses begins as faith in the spiritual dies. The ideology of ideologies is when we can get past faith in some "truth" and analyze things objectively. Thus, society is perhaps the grandest example of the heterogenization of ideologies. As populations increase, perhaps more ideological levels will become apparent.

Systematic ideology, then, offers a lot it doesn't have to offer. It doesn't offer historical accounts with any rationale. It doesn't compute rankings for activities as if we were making a résumé showing the distribution of humanity's time. And it doesn't just say that there are lots of political parties and they don't agree with each other. Rather, systematic ideology takes principles from psychology to make a system out of a series of selected ideologies. It accounts for their presence and continuation, and partially accounts for their general content and membership. From there, small but meaningful conclusions can be drawn. This summary represents the alignment of reason and work on systematic ideology. Its intent is to guide further students in their understanding of the ideological structure of systematic ideology. And with that, perhaps the author has demonstrated the all-elusive "ideology of ideologies."

Works Cited

Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. In H. Guetzkow (ed.) Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press. Summary at . Accessed 26 May 2009.

Blake, Trevor. GWIEP. "What is Systematic Ideology by Trevor Blake." 26 May 2009 .

Blake, Trevor. "GWIEP Notes and Quotes." 26 May 2009 .

"GWIEP.NET New Readers Start Here." GWIEP.NET. 26 May 2009 .

Walford, George. Beyond Politics. London: Calabria Press, 1990. (Accessed 26 May 2009 chapter by chapter at )

Walsby, Harold. Domain of Ideology. Glasgow: William McLellan, 1947. (Accessed 26 May 2009 at )

Obama's Royalty

2009-05-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

Obama gave a third press conference Wednesday. It was the one Fox didn't cover because they like Lie to Me more. I don't know if anyone watched it. I was home from UF by then, so in the real world where the Internet is not used as the primary news-carrying device a few hours after the fact, my parents had the press conference on. As an English major, I was paying more attention to the way Obama said things than to the things he was saying. I noticed that Obama doesn't know how to talk about his own power very sensibly.

I'll walk you through the scenario. A New York Times reporter cutely asks what has most surprised, troubled, enchanted, and humbled Obama. Obama cutely copies them down and goes through them one by one. He's doing quite well until he gets to "humbled." What he wants to say is that he is humbled by not being all-powerful: being President seems like an omnipotent position from the outside, but he is actually limited by other people since we have checks and balances. But he has a problem, because if he's trying to downplay his own power, he doesn't want to attach a bunch of "I"s describing it. So look at what he says instead:

"Humbled by the -- humbled by the fact that the presidency is extraordinarily powerful, but we are just part of a much broader tapestry of American life..."

Folks, that's what's known as the Royal "we." Originally, like practically everything, it started as a Latin term: royalis maiestatis. Roman emperors used it, popes used it, and English inherited it the same way: as an expression of power. I remember from one of my classes this semester that Shakespeare uses it relentlessly. For example, in Hamlet, the King's first line uses the Royal "we":

"Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe;"
Blah blah blah.

Don't be confused. "Our" dear brother's death means "my" dear brother's death. The King is the country (as Shakespeare will later use when he calls the King of Norway "Norway"), and since he's practically all the people combined, it's appopriate to use "we."

So you see it's ironic that Obama uses a rhetorical device that asserts power when he wants to say that he isn't powerful. As Americans, we're so unused to the Royal "we" that I wonder if anyone else did a small double-take to figure out what Obama meant. "The presidency is extraordinarily powerful, but we are just part of a much broader tapestry." At first you think maybe he means Americans in general, but that doesn't make sense: we are the larger tapestry of American life. Then you think maybe he means presidents in general, but that's deliciously impossible: we only have one President at a time. When I listened to it, I tried to construe the "we" as the set of all Presidents of the US, but then I picture George Washington, John Adams, and all the rest, back from the grave in a meeting with Obama to discuss how much power the President has. Nope, Obama meant only himself.

He makes up for it, of course, in his next sentence. Once he's started talking about the limits of his power, he can say "I" as much as he wants. Notice all the "I"s:

"And so I can't just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want or, you know, turn on a switch and suddenly, you know, Congress falls in line."

Ha, ha. You're such a joker, Mr. President. Having a button--or, or better yet, a switch!--to get people to do what you want? How ridiculous! People aren't mechanical products like that. It takes a press conference to get us to fall in line.

Now obviously, Obama didn't mean to mean what he meant. It just came out on the fly because he had to come up with humility on the go. But let's face it: Obama's hot stuff, and if he has to step into the Royal "we" to show he isn't royalty, perhaps that says something about the kind of power a charismatic, smart President really does have.

Back in November, I said I was voting for Obama because when he became emperor, I wouldn't be able to. I think I might have to revise that slightly. In accordance with Obama's own words, I would like to say, "Hail to the King!"

My 3-5 pg Paper on the History of the Word "Cow"

2009-02-08T19:33:00.000-08:00

Our first assignment for "History of the English Language" was to use an etymological dictionary to talk about a word for several pages. People thought I was kidding when I said on my Facebook status that I was writing an essay on the word "cow," so I wanted to show the final product.

--

Will Penman

ENG 4060 – History of the English Language

Professor Paxson

Feb 6, 2009

A History of the Word Cow

When you hear "Old English," the word "cow" isn't the first thing that comes to mind. At first I wanted to research the word "noise," since I thought it was interesting that a word so basic to expressing life – a name for sound in general – carries an unshakable negative connotation. As it turns out, "noise" is Anglo-Norman and thus unsuitable for this assignment. Instead, I looked to a word even more essential to life: cow. Coincidentally, as benign as cows are and as stable as the word might be thought to be, "cow" has also come into a pejorative meaning. Unlike "noise," however, "cow"'s decline is closely linked to its feminine denotation. But creativity in employing "cow" doesn't stop at insults; the word is still productive today. From AD 800 in a Latin-English dictionary to a 2005 reference defining "cow-tipping", "cow" is alive and mooing (although it must be added that cows couldn't "moo" in literature until circa 1550).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "cow" is older than English. A Common Teutonic word brought into Common Indo-germanic, "cow" enters Old English as cú. The root of it, though, is so old that the Aryan branch split to form the Greek and Latin equivalents. So "cow" is related etymologically to "bovine"! What's interesting, though, is that just like our loanword "bovine," outside the Teutonic languages the word was of both genders.

"Cow" had a rocky phonological start. Early on cú bifurcated to leave speakers in Scotland and North England saying ky and kye. Southern England took an extended form of kyne which means they had two words for "cow." I'm a little confused by it, and others were, too. In 1877 the Holderness Gloss said this: "Kye, cows. In West Holderness, kye is used to denote particular herds, kine being used for cows in general." That's manageable enough but for the spelling variants. The OED has several categories of spelling the plural. There's c©e, c©, kij, kuy, and several more as the centuries past. There's also cun, kyn, kuyn, and more in a similar progression. A third category lists an easily recognizable form: cows; and a fourth a variant used only in Cheshire pronunciation.

Semantically, "cow" is assured of at least one meaning: female bovines aren't going anywhere. And for most of the word's history, "cattle" has supplanted any need for an abstract reference to the species, but that's plural. It surprised me at first that we don't have a good word for either of the sexes. We have "dog" and "cat," I reason, so why don't we let "cow" mean "cow or steer"? I think my perception is based on a life that is so far removed from interaction with farm animals that I want to collapse my vocabulary as a result. About all I know is the rumor that cows have three stomachs. Similarly, for me the only use of having "chicken" and "rooster" is to make good riddles. (A rooster lays an egg on the roof of a barn, slanted at four degrees, with a wind blowing perpendicular at 10 mph. Which side of the roof does the egg land on?) Life in America is getting to a point that needing gender-specific names for animals is as specialized as needing the word "bitch" for female dogs.

Along those lines, though, I personally feel uncomfortable using the word "cow" to refer to a steer. Steer have horns! I think to myself. I can't give a feminine word to such a masculine creature! I have no problem, on the other hand, gracing a female animal with a masculine word. I think it reveals a bias deep in my thinking that prissifying a male is worse than masculinizing a female. Perhaps that's another conserving factor in the meaning of "cow."

"Cow" seems to have become a model for the feminine by the eighteenth century, since for certain other large animals (elephants, rhinoceros, seal, whale, etc.) the female is termed the "cow" and the male the "bull," and sometimes "cow" is even used as a "she-" particle, like "cow moose" or my favorite, "cow alligator": "In dimmer recesses the Cow alligator, with her nest hard by" (OED cow, n.1.3b 1946, 1880).

Speaking of large animals, by 1696 "cow" had come to mean "woman," although unlike today, the comparison was not one of girth but one of character. A woman was "likened to a Cow" if she was a "Lazy, Dronish, beastly Woman" (OED cow, n.1.4b 1696). It's been used as a general insult to women ever since. One later dictionary glossed it as "a woman; a prostitute," as if a woman were a kind of prostitute instead of the other way around. I'm surprised both at how late and how early this way of insulting women appeared. "Hen" had been applied to women almost one hundred years earlier, but as a cutesy term of affection (though "hen-pecked" appeared soon after in a decidedly non-affectionate sense). I wonder if men didn't appropriate "cow" for so long because cows had so much domestic use that it wouldn't be much of an insult.

Cows figured largely enough in people's lives to spawn a plethora of cow-related compound words. Simple words like cow-beef, cow-breath, cow-flesh, cow-hair, cow-shed, and cow-thief are all attested to, as well as words in the objective case: cow-driver, cow-farmer, cow-lifter. I myself have never lifted a cow, but I assume that if you had the right amount of strength (or a forklift) it could be done. Less obvious are words which would be important to cows: cow-pea (fodder in the southern US, apparently), cow-cabbage, cow-clover. A dialectal name for Silene inflata is cow-cracker, which is not a Latinate skull-basher but a purple flower cows might eat.

There are such classics as cow-pie and cow-lick. Paging through the OED I also came across some fun ones: the "cow" compound cow-blakes, a cow compound of dried dung used for fuel; and cow-sucker, which is perhaps a hedgehog.

I had hoped that the verb "to cow" was related to "cow" by functional shift. Unfortunately, the verb "to cow" (as in "to intimidate") came from Old Norse and didn't appear until Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth that cursed be the tongue "hath cow'd my better part of man" (OED cow, v.1 1605). Interestingly, though, "cow" as a verb has a secondary, opposite meaning arising not out of a fancy category of semantic change, but out of confusion with the verb "to cower": "Instead of ending like a man, he now cowed before me quite spirit-broken" (OED cow v.1 1844). "Cow" is a pretty exciting thing to be, I guess.

Thus "cow" is broken up, dissected, examined. I leave the consumption to you, because without it, "cow" would have been just another word. On the other hand, "cow" is just another word, and the changes – pejoration, generalization – that have accompanied it accompany language like the waves accompany the ocean. From our small spot on the beach of present-day we can see linguistic causes splashing in the distance. That process may have noise along the way, but it certainly includes a "cow" or two.

FAIL

2009-01-03T13:27:00.000-08:00

For old geezers who don't know the modern meaning of "fail," there's a website with thousands of examples. You'll notice it's never used as part of a sentence: "fail" encapsulates a situation. Who needs verbs when one word can do that?

I always thought "fail" was kinda harsh. It's anti-sarcasm that shuts down communication. Walking down the road, you trip. "Smooth," your friend says, meaning the opposite. "Fail," he could've said, labelling you just as thoroughly.

But then I was playing Chinese checkers with my cousins, and now I understand:

Why I Need to Know Everything

2008-12-24T22:01:00.000-08:00

I guess late Christmas Eve isn't the time I expected to resume blogging, but I wouldn't have expected the whole family to not have a single present wrapped yet, either. "We're a family of slackers," Melanie said. As it turns out, I didn't expect to be enjoying winter break so much, so I guess that makes for a whole round of unexpectation. Since I only had a few days to transition from studying in Beijing this summer to going to school, I haven't had a break longer than four days since June. Each day I wake up and am amazed that it's still vacation.

Vacation is always tough for me, though, because I never know how that relates to accomplishment. I usually define "rest" as anything that doesn't feel like work, but I have to watch out because the pleasure I get from doing personal projects is really similar to the pleasure I get finishing work. For example, I've been making a computer game intermittently over the last few years. It's almost finished. Andrew and I were playing it tonight. It's to the point, though, where the work the game needs is difficult and not that important. So it's mostly my perfectionistic streak that's making me continue. And I enjoy writing, but if I think of blogging as a duty then I feel overloaded. I was actually very conflicted about blogging tonight because I anticipate feeling a sense of accomplishment, and that worries me.

One thing I have been doing, though, is going to Barnes and Noble to read. I read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. It's a boring hypothesis (successful people have other things--parents, wealth, luck, culture--besides their own grit and intelligence going for them) but he cites so many interesting studies. In one page he happened to mention an IQ test for really smart people, and gave an example. "Teeth is to hen as nest is to ___"

I don't know the answer. And I think the problem is not because of my analogical skills, but because I don't know enough about teeth and hens. What's the relationship between teeth and hens? Hens are female, do teeth have something to do with that? Teeth have calcium, do hens have something to do with that? And once I did figure it out I'd have to be able to apply it to nests. I don't know anything about nests.

A few nights ago I was reading online about a study that concluded two things about octopuses: they prefer HDTV; and they have no personalities. If I only knew more, I found myself thinking, about the differences between regular television and HDTV, I'd be able to assess the researcher's results. One comment mentioned pixels and frame rate and went on to a complicated discussion about persistance of vision that I wish I had the background knowledge to follow.

That's all I'm asking for, really. The background knowledge for the world. Some people consider knowledge to be an end, but really it's only as good as you can apply it when wanted.

The point, of course, isn't to know about HDTV per se, it's to know that "hens' teeth" is a phrase as is "mare's nest." Neither of which I'd heard of before I googled the analogy, and so according to Hoeflin I might not be the smartest person ever. Wisdom is applied knowledge, so to become wise I have something to work on. But maybe I should wait until after Christmas break to do the real work on that.

That Giggly Phase

2008-12-07T22:26:00.000-08:00

Blogging's fallen by the wayside in the days leading up to the LSAT. It didn't go as well as I hoped. I think I'm going to be disappointed with the score. My current schedule isn't much more conducive to blogging. I have two papers due by Wednesday and they are both in the beginning stages, shall we say.

I think I've reached my limit of fruitful output tonight. It's late and this is as far as I've gotten in my paper on Joyce.

look at my thesis!! this is my totally legitimate second (that is, thesis-ical) sentence, devoted entirely to hugh kenner and his dead faults, not to say that his deadness, that is, his death or dying or in the process being in a state of no longer declining through the abyss of human temporality, can be contained by what is now known to be the most extravagent expression of joyce's voices (so to speak) in his pocket at this time which is unavoidably long, however inextricably tasty the sentences might be. it is large and powerful and has voices. many voices.

Then the said creature began to laugh and laugh and laugh (indifferent voices). You are no good wife.

I wish myself well in the coming days. And a merry Christmas to all.

Katy Perry Hates Women or Gays

2008-12-01T19:27:00.000-08:00

I'm warming up to writing my English papers. Let me practice by doing a "reading" of Katy Perry's song...

Before I start analyzing a pop song, I need to clarify that I know hits don't need to be deep for people to like them. I'm okay with "Grillz", appreciate the cohesion of "Hey Ya" even if the chorus has one and a half words, and love word play, self-centered or not, like Chamillionaire freestyling. But I do expect that a song doesn't contradict itself. In logic, there's a fundamental proposition of non-contradiction. Literary analysis has that too. People don't love nonsense, so if a work looks like nonsense, there must be an explanation for why. Let's examine what's strange about the lyrics of Hot N Cold before we propose an explanation.

The #1-charted hit in America's Top 40 this week is "Hot N Cold" by Katy Perry. It's a catchy song sung by a woman who seems to be empowering women to take control in relationships. Her significant other (in the music video, her fiance) won't commit and the singer is finally doing something about it.

At least, that's what the song is about. But if you look at the lyrics, Perry's words clash with this theme of gender equality. I'm pasting the lyrics in full; if you're going to be offended, pretend it's the word "blitch."

You change your mind

Like a girl changes clothes

Yeah you PMS

Like a bitch, I would know

And you overthink

Always speak cryptically

I should know

That you're no good for me

Chorus [

'Cause you're hot then you're cold

You're yes then you're no

You're in then you're out

You're up then you're down

You're wrong when it's right

It's black and it's white

We fight, we break up

We kiss, we make up

You!

You don't really want to stay, no

You!

But you don't really want to go-o

You're hot then you're cold

You're yes then you're no

You're in then you're out

You're up then you're down

]

We used to be

Just like twins, so in sync

The same energy

Now's a dead battery

Used to laugh 'bout nothing

Now you're plain boring

I should know that you're not gonna change

[Chorus]

Someone call the doctor

Got a case of a love bi-polar

Stuck on a roller coaster

Can't get off this ride

You change your mind

Like a girl changes clothes

[Chorus]

Frustration in a relationship is nothing new, and the song's metaphors are hardly poetic enough to sustain the theme. Instead, Perry speculates as to the underlying causes of her frustration. The song starts and ends with the declaration, "You change your mind / Like a girl changes clothes." It's feminine capriciousness that's the problem. A few weeks ago I had these lines in my head and posted my status on Facebook as "Will changes minds like a girl changes clothes." I received several comments accusing me of chauvanism.

How curious that a woman would pen them! In fact, the association between women and uncurable, undesirable character traits is stronger when we consider the next line. "Yeah you PMS / Like a bitch, I would know." Again, the problem is the masculine acting feminine. Behavior that is reproachably unnatural in a man is an unavoidable biological determinant of behavior in women. The singer cites personal experience as a testament both to her conclusion that he should change and to the accuracy of her comparison.

The message appears to be, "Don't act like a girl." Perry's identification of herself as acting bitchy, taken with her yet-confident tone, inclines us to believe that she doesn't consider women themselves to be bad. It's just that two women in a relationship is too many.

It's not good enough that one person act womanly (inconstant, sentimental, irrational) and one act manly (stabilizing, shepherding, reasoning). That's the relationship already! The singer is the man of the relationship: she's addressing the problem, she's not letting emotion get in the way of breaking up, she's not changing her mind, she's annoyed at indecision and opaque statements.

What's dissatisfactory about this situation isn't the singer's (masculine) character. We cheer on the singer. What's wrong is that the singer isn't free to be herself. A relationship with this unmanageable guy limits her self-expression, because if she acted feminine things would devolve even further.

She needs him to be opposite. At the beginning, the singer relished her "twin" who was "so in synch," but once the initial fun wore off, the pair is "a dead battery" because there are no more differences to convert from chemical energy to eletrical energy. Love is complementary.

Interestingly enough, Perry used to be on a Christian label. In the church there's a split between views of gender relations called "complementarianism" and "egalitarianism." The first is more traditional and sees men and women as two halves of a puzzle, each with respective roles and responsibilities. The second thinks of men and women as being faded pages which, when laid on top of each other, gives greater clarity than each individually. Thus, under complementarianism, women might take care of the kids, and under egalitarianism, women might be pastors. Apparently Katy Perry is a complementarian.

My only question is, after listening to the very liberal "I Kissed a Girl", it seems Katy Perry can't decide between being shocking and being conservative. Has she found true womanhood?

Summarizing Myself

2008-11-29T18:47:00.000-08:00

Despite de-summer-izing myself recently, summarizing myself was long overdue. Facebook lets people casts themselves however they want to in an "About Me" section.

Some people say it simply. Andrew Schatz used to have, "I'm a licensed Platinum Member of the Republican Party. I even have a card, my member number is 559629888-S892." One of the best About Me's I've read.

Jessica's is pretty good, too, but a different style. "I love my people. I love. a lot. Im happy and bubbly and kind of really ridiculous.

I'm a ball of energy. I dance in my underwear and love to sing at the top of my lungs. I drive with all the windows down and the radio all the way up. Im a hopeless romantic. I curl up and just read for fun. I take pride in being a professional partier. I eat crackers in bed and dance till I drop. I like being myself, being stupid and honest and real."

Mine has been out of date, however. Check out my old About Me:

I wrote a first draft of this paragraph. I used to dislike eating fish. I have generally poor taste in girls, am often tempted to provoke people because society covers up who we are, am working on not sounding arrogant, do my best thinking in the shower, would analyze your socks off if you'd enjoy it, am an aspiring writer (if i will become one), am unsure how to judge the flexibility of my ambitions, am dazzled by wit, and spend hours a week learning Chinese without knowing why. I love God, enjoy summarizing myself because it is inexhaustible, and am romantic about the idea of being romantic.

I read that and barely recognize myself in it. I was so aggressively difficult. Wanna judge me? Bring it! I challenge you to say I'm doing life the wrong way. I can face me, why can't you? I can confess myself tenderly but honestly. Criticism? I already know it.

Now I look at my About Me and it feels foreign. I guess those things are true of me, but I would never summarize myself like that. Except I did. A year ago I considered my change in how much I like fish to be important, somehow, to who I was. I don't study Chinese any more. I'm still not sure why I did. And what was all that about my taste in girls for? I can't believe I needed to say that.

I know why people include random things. Partially, I think, it's a cultural incline toward post-modernism, which is incredulity toward grand narratives. People don't really think there is a theme to their life. But to the extent that they do, random facts juxtaposed with core values (did you notice how I slipped in the phrase about believing in God?) questions the reader's ability to distinguish important from insignificant. And if you think it's stupid that I like The Office and admirable that I donate 90% of my income to the poor, then you should be wary of weighting the first little and the second a lot. For all you know, watching The Office determines my value as much as donating all I own to the poor. Don't judge me, the About Me says.

Anyway, I had to compose a more up-to-date About Me. Wouldn't want the Internet falling behind in knowing me. But it's difficult to get the right tone. Too pedantic, too narrow, too effervescent, too depressed. My old one at least captured my life pretty well. But in the two or three days I thought about it, this is what I came up with.

I really like About Me-ing because for a writer a definition is a creation, and I am always being made new. I like neologisms (the awkwardly new), kids (the newly awkward), and applesauce in blue Gator Dining bowls. It's tasty. I lived in China for seven months but am still American. I hear I'm more mellow than I was in high school, which makes me nervous. I don't want to be a squash. Recently I've regressed some, I think, like a golf swing gets worse before it gets better. I look forward to heaven because then it's all better. I try. I try.

It's not very good. That's okay, though. People don't friend me for my About Me.

Eat Cats! with Litotes

2008-11-24T15:41:00.000-08:00

In Turlington today a woman dressed as a chicken passed out vegetarianism propaganda.

We must infer that the "me" of her sign refers to the general population of chickens, not to the woman in the costume herself. Apparently the woman considers herself similar enough in nature to chickens to imply that eating one is linguistically equivalent to eating a person. Who's "me"? We're all "me"! Only this "me" knows how to read and write and stand in Turlington because the "me"s who walk by are the ones with power to change circumstances and the "me"s that go cluck cluck aren't capable of embracing any kind of ideology.

I haven't taken any literary theory courses, but I think that's deconstruction: using the "text" to show how the text undermines itself. The woman wears a costume for solidarity but in doing so necessarily shows disparity.

Well, the chicken let me take her picture, so I felt obligated to take the card she handed out. On the front, there was a cat's cute head facing a pig's cute head. In large letters, the postcard questioned, "Which do you pet? Which do you eat? Why?"

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by. See, I think propaganda relies on politeness. Hear an entire argument before you respond, politeness requests, and then don't be nit-picky if you must criticize it. The problem is that propaganda tiptoes and politeness only tackles runaways. I pet cats and eat pigs because society has conditioned me that way? Because cats catch mice and pigs don't? Because pig fur is coarse? Because I don't like snorting or mud? Because there's more edible meat per pound on a pig than on a cat?

Politeness, if I had taken that road, would absorb the intended effect of the argument: we are inconsistent with which animals we decide to eat. We should be consistent.

But you have to go further than that to find the meaning. Consistency isn't inherently good! In between the flier's conclusion and the flier's logic is a gap. The implication is that we shouldn't eat pigs because we don't eat cats, but one could just as logically reply, "You're right. I should add cats to my diet."

In literature, there's a technique called litotes that has the same gap between what it says and what it means. "Litotes" (pronounced lye-toh-teez, with the emphasis on the first or second syllable) sounds like a kind of legume to me, to be served with lentils, cous-cous, and cats, but in fact it's a name for understatement. More specifically, "understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary." For example, you see Florida demolish the Citadel in football last Saturday 70-19, and you say, "Not bad." That's litotes.

In Anglo-Saxon poetry this rhetorical device was "not uncommon" (to quote from my translated copy of Beowulf--I hope the translator consciously used litotes to describe litotes). One king in Beowulf was found as a baby abandoned at sea, and when he died years later they set his body off to sea, loaded in a boat with all their tribe's treasures.

With no fewer gifts did they furnish him there,
the wealth of nations, than those did who
at his beginning first sent him forth
alone over the waves while still a small child.

Logically, this is a tautology. "His gifts were greater than or equal to the gifts he had at the beginning--that is, none." Duh! The use of litotes adds an element of irony, which is the knowing distance between what is meant and what is said.

What I find fascinating about the Eat Cats card and the Anglo-Saxon use of litotes is that in order to understand what is meant, you have to already know what is meant. In another situation, the statements could have the opposite meaning. In South China, for example, they eat cats and dogs, so if I got the flier from them, I'd think they were trying to win me over. The dead man's treasures are a harder example, but if I didn't understand the poet was doing it on purpose, I might think it was just a stupid line to fill up space.

What are we reading when we come across phrases like these? Devoid of content, these strategies, I think, give us a chance to practice the point of view of the author. We have to think like a vegetarian to read arguments about why we should think like a vegetarian. It's enticing. Next thing you know, I'll be out in Turlington dressed as a chicken myself.

Toward a More Perfect Score

2008-11-22T18:24:00.000-08:00

The LSAT is two Saturdays from today; I'm in high gear preparing for it. I'm excited to take the LSAT for the same reason that I'm nervous: since it tests fairly inflexible skills (you can't learn to reason in a day), the LSAT will test my aptitude more than my achievement. If I score well, it'll be extremely gratifying; if not, I'm just not the person I thought I was. How's that for a reality check.

What's fun, though, is that even though I'm studying, I'm not really studying. It's like I've made a juggling routine, the tricks of which I can all do individually, and just need some practice before I can do the routine flawlessly, too. That's fun because I'm practicing the nuances as much as I am the big picture.

The LSAT testing conditions are very strict, you see. In fact, I think I need to fax them Monday to say the name on my government-issued ID is William I Penman instead of Will I Penman. They wouldn't let me in otherwise, I don't think. Taking the LSAT will be like going to camp, only in the winter and with one bathroom break. There's a checklist I received by email:

Test takers are allowed to bring into the test center only a clear plastic ziplock bag containing the following items: #2 or HB pencils, LSAT Admission Ticket stub, valid ID, wallet, keys, medical and hygiene products, highlighter, erasers, pencil sharpener, a beverage in plastic container or juice box, and a snack (for break only).

I can't wait to pack my clear plastic ziplock bag (maximum size, as the extended rules say, of one gallon/3.79 liter).

To get in the zone, I've scanned a sample answer sheet so I can get used to the layout of the scantron page. And, of course, I've been using pencils. I don't want to get to the day of the LSAT and be flustered by good ol' #2.

I hit a snag, actually, when it became apparent that America does not sell pencil sharpeners. I was halfway through my week, felt stressed out, and needed to just do some practice sections. My pencils, however, were all blunted beyond acceptable multiple-choice-ability. I searched our house--no pencil sharpener. I walked over to a bookstore--no pencil sharpener. I walked further, to another store--no pencil sharpeners. They had pencils, but no pencil sharpeners. Mechanical pencils, may I remind you, were out.

At this point I was wishing I was just taking the LSAT in China, because in China they know how to sell pencil sharpeners. For cheap, too. There was a store right down my street, and I could've bought ten of them, with ten different designs. And they all would've broken after one use, probably.

I eventually cut my losses and used (gasp) the pen I had in my pocket the whole time. My fight to study for the LSAT was not over, though. Confident that the overpriced UF bookstore in the student union had Gator-ified pencil sharpeners, I made it to the union a few days later (after asking all my friends if they had a pencil sharpener I could have and being told that no one in America ever needs a pencil sharpener) and bought one. For $4. They had an 89 cent version, but the expensive kind had a "high quality carbon steel blade." It's like Excalibur. I will vanquish the LSAT. And, it has a second hole in case I need to sharpen crayons. In case there's a surprise drawing section after the logic games.

To complete my LSAT paraphanelia, I dropped by Walmart today to buy an analog (non-digital) watch. I tested all the watches in the $9-12 range for ease of time adjustment. As long as it can go from 12:00-12:35, the watch can serve all my purposes. It's a good thing my standards are so low, because the watch I bought is pretty ghetto. I ripped off the band because I don't actually want to use it as a watch, and the metal came apart no problem. The watch itself aspires to telling the date but is unmoveable from the 16th and tells the days of the week in Spanish.

But now I have my watch and pencils. All I have left to do is be me. And not forget to bring my bilingual timepiece.

The Unspellable Word

2008-11-20T20:52:00.000-08:00

When I was in China, I thought it was so limiting to use characters (where each character codes for a syllable) instead of an alphabet. How could they invent new words with a fixed and already assigned number of words? But now I can't speak with complete disdain; I've found a new word that's unspellable. I don't mean appropriating a word from an African language with clicks, which we obviously can't pronounce, and thus can't spell. I mean a word whose pronunciation is so common you wouldn't even think about how unusual the unspellable word really is. In fact, it's half a word.

"What's up?"

"The usual."

But speaking with complete words gets boring sometimes and we leave off the end sometimes. Instead of "whatever" girls say "whatev." One girl in my English class actually asked a guy, "So what are you doing over Christmas vaycay?" The stress was on the first syllable. "Vacation," she clarified. So it shouldn't be strange that we do the same thing with the word "usual."

"What's up?"

"The "--us? youj? yuj? uzh? us(ual)? There's no way to spell the first half of "usual"! We don't have a good way to spell it in any case. "Vision" writes the sound as "si." It's "uge" in "luge" (but not "uge" as in "huge"!). It's "s" in "treasure," "z" in "azure," and "g" in "rouge."

My favorite is taking the Chinese pair "zh" and making "uzh." What's ironic about that is that Chinese doesn't have this sound. My Chinese teacher in Chengdu spoke great English but never mastered "usually." "Youyou-ly," she would say as an approximation.

To solve the problem of the unspellable word, I called Marian, my go-to person for all the linguistics questions I have. "Oh," she said. "The voiced postalveolar fricative. That is an interesting problem." The symbol, as it turns out, is ʒ (which is itself spelled "ezh"). If I hadn't pulled up the Wikipedia page, though, for the "voiced postalveolar fricative", I wouldn't have been able to copy-and-paste the character in. I can't type "ʒ." It does look like a 3, but u3 looks like an energy drink or Bono's upgrade, so I can't forsee people writing "the u3." If it happens, though, I called it.

In the meantime, we have an unspellable word.

The Penman Hummus Theorem

2008-11-18T20:58:00.001-08:00

You can learn a lot about people from what they emphasize in life. If life was everlasting, emphasis wouldn't mean anything, since all proportions are equal when the denominator is infinity. But luckily I'm going to die, and you can know me by what I do. In other words, I only have so many entries I can write, and this one is about the Penman Hummus Theorem.

I wanted to give this blog some time, let readers accumulate, before I unleashed the idea. Didn't want to start logging in the forest of life if no one's there to hear the sound of the trees falling. But I'll graduate in a few semesters and Wikipedia doesn't know I exist. Infamy, here I come:

The Penman Hummus Theorem: The best single indicator of the degree to which an American is Democrat or Republican is the degree to which that person likes or dislikes hummus.

Let me give an example before I rigorously defend the theorem. I was raised in a conservative home notably lacking hummus. When I turned eighteen and registered to vote, I think I put Republican. But this spring and summer, during the excitement of the Democratic primaries, I studied abroad in China. I had one friend there, a British girl (thus outside the theorem's scope), who was adamant about the wonders of hummus. I tried it, swallowing a huge piece of bread tipped with hummus, and was stoically unconvinced.

Like things usually happen once hummus gets involved, though, events were transpiring beyond my knowledge. I relied on the New York Times for my news--liberal. I read Dreams from My Father--fantastic. And when we couldn't take Chinese food any more, we went to the Turkish restaurant to eat overpriced hummus.

Now I enjoyed hummus on limited occasions. That is, I voted Obama for president and Republican for everything else. Everyone I know is the same. My roommate, a closet Democrat, likes hummus only when he's eating by himself. Matches aren't often so specific. Rank yourself 1 to 10 on how liberal you are and 1 to 10 on how much you like hummus and the numbers are freakishly united. No formal studies have been conducted--yet--but I've tried to ask lots of different kinds of people--friends, enemies, girls, my black friend--and almost all of their answers bolsters the results. R²is better than any other factor I know of.

Well, even if there is a correlation, you argue, it could probably be explained in terms of geography. But they call California a blue state for a reason--they gobble the stuff over there. The Penman Hummus Theorem is a better predictor than red or blue state statistics would be. Florida is a swing state, but if I want to know who you supported, I wouldn't look to your age, or your gender, or your race, or your height. I'd ask if you like hummus.

I have my theories about what causation underlies the Penman Hummus Theorem's correlation. Republicans don't like foreigners or their food. Hummus is mashed-up babies, and Democrats like abortion. In the movie Aladdin, when they're escaping the Cave of Wonders, the lava shoots up to form the word "hummus" (subconsciously linking the ill-effects of estate tax on the government to a food--those cunning liberal Disney animators who want to limit Republican taste).

But I don't have to be right about why the Penman Hummus Theorem is true. It's enough to have contributed one theorem to the repository of human knowledge (and if it were to show up on Wikipedia, I would humbly bear the fame). I can die now, happy and hummus-ed.

A Moral Dilemma

2008-11-16T19:25:00.000-08:00

I went to go see The Dark Knight at the student union Friday. Every week they have showings of recently out-of-theaters movies which are mostly attended by foreign students who probably don't understand them very much. (For example, I saw Tropic Thunder a week or two ago, and there is no way a non-native speaker would understand the bare outlines of the plot: that actors were trying to make a movie but it became real and they had to become the mature band of brothers they were pathetically acting.)

Well, the last showing was at 11:30. I couldn't get there until 11, and when I did the bulging, informal line wrapped to the end of the hall and was starting to snake its way back. A line heading two ways with no physical marker distinguishing them is like marriage: as soon as the doors are opened, the two become one and what looked like a civilized arrangement becomes unfairly entangled.

Knowing all the people I do, though, on my way to the turgid back of the line I saw a friend. A back-up friend, anyway. One of those friends who you're friends with when you don't have any real friends. The feeling is mutual, I'm sure. No offense, Lauren.

I stopped for a friendly hello and we chatted for a few minutes while we both knew I was analyzing the line situation. I finally confessed I was thinking of just standing there and being a tag-along, which Lauren encouraged me to do. But the moral determinants of my decision were too great to avoid thought. Lauren didn't believe it could possibly take me longer than ten seconds to decide.

"It's an easy decision," she said. "Either you do... or you don't."

"Either you go to war, or you don't. Either you marry somebody, or you don't," I retorted. "Easy." I'm taking the LSAT in three weeks and will be more pleasant once I don't impose logic on my relationships.

But now I feel like I need to explain why it was such a difficult decision, with lots of ellipses to show how long I thought about it.

Why not be Lauren's friend for the night? I asked myself. Well, since there are a limited number of seats, by taking one of them I'm effectively taking one away from someone else... but since the end of the line is screwy, the seat that I would take might just as well be taken by the last guy to start standing in line...

of course, other people cutting doesn't justify me cutting, but it certainly cuts back on the harms involved: if half the people in line didn't start at the back, then there's only a one-in-two chance that the guy I'd be taking a seat from would deserve it more than me...

and if he didn't deserve it more than me, then it comes down to connections and me having friends in line ahead of him...

on the other hand, all the foreign students probably don't know how this works and will stand in line because they don't have friends they can stand in line with...

but maybe that's the cost of being a foreigner, since I'd expect something like that to happen if I were in China...

but maybe I would count that kind of injustice as something contemptible about China...

but life isn't fair...

but that's a stupid justification...

well even if the guy I'm cutting out did start at the back, the only reason I think it's wrong for him not to get the seat is because he was expecting it, but with a crowd of 300+, no one's expectations would be disappointed because no one could accurately tell if they'd get in...

plus, I had planned to join my brother and his friends, and would have felt no qualms about jumping in line with them since I had asked them to save me a spot...

but since I didn't plan on seeing Lauren and her friends, maybe that doesn't count...

but I was planning on going...

but planning can only carry you so far in deserving a space...

but maybe desire can carry you the rest? I was in China when it came out, after all, and didn't have access to it...

well, it's certainly something I could do, since I've been standing with Lauren for almost half an hour now, and no one knows or cares that I didn't come with her...

And so I end right where I started: with the ability to get it, and a lack of wisdom about doing it. I decided that the decision wasn't clear-cut, and that the part about joining my brother and his friends convinced me that it's not always required to start at the back.

So Lauren introduced me to all of her friends, and we waited another few minutes, and then we went in and saw The Dark Knight. I didn't like it. But I did have my own soul-searching moment getting in, so that made it worth it. Or did it...

Victoria's Secret

2008-11-13T21:34:00.000-08:00

I was lost looking for Borders the other day. I had gone online, found the store closest to me, read the vague directions ("just off 75 by the Oaks Mall"), found the Oaks Mall, circumnavigated the mall by car, walked inside hoping it was there, and headed toward Waldenbooks instead when I saw it wasn't. Waldenbooks ended up not being what I needed, but to get there I had to pass by what seemed like the largest Victoria's Secret in America. I'm talking a twenty second walk for one side, even if you don't slow down to see--for curiosity's sake--what's offered through the invitingly large doors. The store's strategically located on a corner in the mall, so to get to Waldenbooks I had to walk another twenty seconds to traverse the other side.

I surmised that we have such a large Victoria's Secret to accomodate the nation's #1 party school. And then thought about how I'm probably anomalous for using "surmise" in the same sentence as "Victoria's Secret."

Well, as I was lightly examining the construction of the underthings on display, I realized what was attractive wasn't the underwear; it was the models. I mean, you walk by a leather jacket and you think, "Wow, what a sweet leather jacket." Doesn't matter who wears it, the jacket looks nice. But if you aren't Victoria, your secret is probably not best hidden by her products. I admit, Victoria looks pretty good in plastic.

Going to China teaches you things, though. I just gave a presentation last night to some kids about studying abroad, and was explaining that when Chinese people travel, they don't settle for a suitcase. Most of them, I think, don't have suitcases. Instead they use burlap sacks stuffed with food, provisions, a tent, family members, Communist pamphlets--you can fit everything in one of these sacks.

Well, when I was in Xinjiang sightseeing I saw a woman waiting at the bus stop with several bags by her. But what caught my interest wasn't her prodigious packing skills, it was the rest of her cargo:

That's right. It's Victoria's secret, cloned, bisected, sliced into thin strips, and tied together. Made in China! And I thought "Victoria" was an English name.

Needless to say, this revolutionized the way I view women. As I was walking past Victoria's Secret in the Oaks Mall, trying not to lust from the lingerie and succeeding surprisingly well, I thought wistfully to myself, "It's just not the same when you've seen the mannequins naked."

Kill Your Darlings

2008-11-11T20:14:00.000-08:00

In fiction writing classes, critiquing stories means giving people the hard truth about what works and what doesn't. "Rules" don't work very well for fiction. There's the "gosling rule," which says that the first person you meet in a story should be the main character. But some really good stories don't follow that; the gosling rule just happens to work well most of the time. That's the tricky part about writing fiction: finding what works.

The author usually isn't very good at determining what works. In fact, sometimes a particular paragraph or phrase or idea seems brilliant and necessary--but it doesn't work in the story. I've had an idea for a story that's evolved so that when I start writing the story the inspirational idea is a clunky addition. If I force it in, someone needs to tell me to take it out.

Those are the changes that are the hardest to make. "Kill your darlings," they say. It's painful, but your story is much better for it.

Well, when I drafted a script for the Crest commercial Ben and I made, the slogan was "People buying Crest is not like Crest." Toothpaste comes out a tube and won't go back in. People buying toothpaste, on the other hand, are free to return it. So I had in mind juxtaposing shots of a guy trying to make toothpaste go back in the tube with the shots about the craziness of the video. But that made the video even more difficult to understand, because you had to infer what about people buying Crest was not like Crest and how that mattered. We filmed it, strung all the scenes together, and it didn't work.

Ben broke the news to me that we had to change it. And so we killed my darling toothpaste squeezing scene and the commercial was better for it.

But I still like the scene so much that I'm resurrecting it so everyone can enjoy Dan making a mess on Julie Vaiarella's table. AGHHH!

Tied for First

2008-11-10T21:59:00.000-08:00

Several entries ago I posted the commercial Ben Rush and I made for the Jungle Smash video contest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9pcjYiN3fw

Our video sets up an elaborate, ridiculous situation about people buying toothpaste and then contrasts it with the serenity of actually using toothpaste. I thought it was a pretty good commercial. It was at least good enough to be criticized in the comments for the contest.

Well, the winner was supposed to be announced November 3rd. November 3rd came and went with no update from the creator. Then a few more days went by. People began asking in the comments whether the contest was still happening or not. No response.

I thought the contest must have been a scam after all. Ben and I spent so much time and effort making our Crest commercial and then it was for a contest that wasn't even going to be judged. (I was crestfallen, perhaps.) I emailed the guys from the blog I heard about the contest from and they said they'd pass it on to him.

And then, late last week, our video appeared with a few others as a finalist, with the winner to be announced in two days. Four days went by, and then I got an email saying Ben and I had tied for first. Where do we live so he can mail us a check?

Wahoo!!! Ben and I allotted 80% of our $1000 prize to ourselves--it's like a part-time job that I don't have!--and the rest to our amazing actors. I thought it would be a nice touch to give everyone a celebratory tube of Crest in a gift bag, but then I remembered I can't even wrap presents very well, let alone give a pretty token of our appreciation.

Our video starts with a guy buying some toothpaste so he can enter a contest, and when he sees someone else at the store he somehow gets in mind that if both their videos are good, they could each get half of the prize money. And then in real life the prize is split and we get half the original prize. Correlation or causation? I think Ben and I have a future making commercials together if we can dictate people's responses that closely. We'd be the new wave of marketing: like hiring a Jedi to advertise your product. A Jedi that makes a sweet buck for his work. And one who actually brushes with Colgate.

Wahoo!

Education and Racquetball

2008-11-08T21:13:00.000-08:00

A friend I'll call Sarah and I like to play racquetball together. Sarah isn't very good at sports and has in mind that I'll teach her how to play. We've worked our way into a rhythm of hitting the ball around a bit and then playing a few games. Yesterday Sarah got frustrated because she couldn't return my serves and declared I wasn't doing a good job teaching. I was certainly able to admit that could be true, but I didn't know what to replace it with. Sarah didn't have good form hitting the ball, didn't have good timing, didn't use the back wall effectively. She knew it, too, but couldn't fix it.

I thought about our lesson the rest of the day and realized that there were several factors contributing to my ineffective teaching.

First, I don't know how to correct the bad habits Sarah can't correct. Simply put, she hits like a girl: her arm moves like a shaken hose, only having force at the tip. I noticed that was different from the way I hit, but we haven't made much progress getting her to be less noodly hitting the ball.

Second, I learned racquetball on my own, so I have no authority in telling people what's good and what's bad. In juggling, for example, if you can do a pattern, you must know how to do it. Racquetball takes two people, though, and just because I frequently beat Dan doesn't mean I actually know what I'm doing. I feel bad telling Sarah she's doing something wrong when I might be doing something wrong, too, and just not know it.

I mention this only because it made me think about a theory of education. I think education is naturally like this picture:

The dark red is your knowledge area, and the light red is your ability to communicate it. The most basic parts can be communicated easily: there probably isn't a lot of difference in the way I explain the rules of racquetball and the way an expert would. His dark red square would be five times the size of mine, but my light red is almost as dense as his would be at the middle. The closer you get to the limits of your ability, the less able you are to explain what you're doing. I can barely juggle seven balls, so if I saw someone struggling, I'd just be able to root them on. What's wrong with their pattern? They're not doing it right, I guess. I don't know. Why can't Dan beat me in racquetball? I don't know, I'm just a little bit better than he is.

If someone teaches you something, you have an additional layer of knowledge: you remember how you learned it.

Now your light red has paths so that if you barely understand something, you can still explain it to others parroting the way you learned it. I'm not great at differential equations, but I can still talk people through my notes.

And so, since I never learned how to play racquetball and didn't have to fix the same problems, my light red area is pretty thin. Now to just convince Sarah it's not my fault I can't teach her, it's just that I don't have a lot of light red...

De-summer-izing Myself

2008-11-06T21:08:00.000-08:00

Florida doesn't have seasons. It has "hurricane season" and "Christmas season" but there's only so much fall and winter you can impose on a place which is called the "Sunshine State." We've given up on fall, but I have a pet theory about Gainesville's winter: we get two weeks of winter spread over "winter" in 2-3 day spurts. That's important, because if you're slow to warm up to the cold, it'll be over by the time you're wearing your coat. People don't really have more than one coat here.

Now that it's past Halloween, I've transitioned to wearing pants. I have two pairs of jeans, and that should last me the month or so in between trips to a washing machine. But now I have to re-calculate.

Look at these rails:

Pretty sweet, you say. I'd like that yellow for my pants, you say. Been there, brushed against that:

I vigorously scrubbed, but I'm not sure if the paint will come off. Don't you have to put signs up in America when there's wet paint?

I also have to improvise when it comes to wearing more than a t-shirt. I've recently gone for the t-shirt scarf look, which I'm not sure is just native to people who've never needed to use a scarf or if this has always existed and we just never progress past it here:

In China I heard the phrase "a scarf is half a sweater." I think it's supposed to be a cute thing to say when your family is cold and all you have is a lousy sweater, but coming out of Gainesville's mini-winters, it's too warm for a real sweater and too cold for nothing. Hence my chic fake Burberry. And that's how I dress in between the rainy season and the not-as-rainy season.

A China Moment

2008-11-04T20:30:00.000-08:00

I picked a winner in this year's election. Go Obama! Now we can go back to having only opinions that don't really matter. All this individual equality thing was going to my head. I'm not experienced and wise; who cares what I say? Now no one does, again.

I've been stressed out the last few days. I'm not sure why, really. Taking 12 credits isn't conducive to stress. But I've been on hold for a lot of things, and that's taken a toll on me: the election; the Crest contest; a date; another contest; the impending LSAT. This morning I couldn't make myself do any work, so I decided to go mail my friend's book back to him. In the summer I traveled to a remote part of China with my friend Alex, and then when he had to leave I went to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan by myself. He had a phrase book (which ended up being useless) which he lent to me on the condition I return it to him when we both got back to America.

Today was the day, then, but in my fragile state the best I could do was go to the store on campus, Do it Reitz (a pun on the name of the student union), and have them tell me what kind of packaging and postage I needed.

While I was there, I had a China moment. It started lightly: I felt like I was barely keeping my head above the water of life. I mailed more things in China than I have in America, so it was also understandable that I wasn't confident in the store. They type the label up for you, so I recited Alex's address to her. Then she asked for a phone number. "What?" I asked, and was reminded of how I was much better at Chinese when I knew what question was coming next. Apparently that's true for me in English, too. "A phone number," she said.

I don't have Alex's phone number memorized, so I wanted to tell her that I didn't have one. For about a second, though, all I could think of was an answer in Chinese: "没有。" I stuttered, knowing that wasn't right.

That's a pretty good China moment. I don't often have the urge to reply to people in Chinese. But it consummated itself a minute later.

"That'll be $12," the girl said. Mind you, the book I was sending is post-card size with fewer than 50 pages.

"That seems pretty high," I ventured.

"Well, we're a private business, so we're not allowed to compete with government prices," she said--or something like that. She spoke in English, obviously, but I didn't really understand what she meant. I only understood the general idea: she wanted $12 from me. I thought about leaving and going to the post office on the other side of campus, but rejected that because I didn't have the stamina for it at that moment.

In China, I was glad to be a rich American, because it meant I didn't have to sweat the small stuff. If I got ripped off a few kuai my budget wasn't off-kilter. Of course, the longer I was there the more I became able to live like a Chinese person would, and the less my spending would be out of the ordinary. But while I got adjusted I explicitly allowed for what I termed my "foreigner tax." That is, if I were Chinese, I'd know not to buy that brand because it sucks and I wouldn't have just wasted three dollars.

Anyway, the girl at the counter told me I'd have to pay a ridiculous amount to send Alex my package, and I knew vaguely that it was way too high. And as I brought out my debit card to pay for it, I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a pretty high foreigner tax."

But then I remembered I'm not a foreigner here.

A Culinary Adventure

2008-11-02T18:04:00.000-08:00

One of my friends, Mike Braverman, enjoys cooking. He does life slowly, and I think that's why. I have no patience for cooking, but that's why people have friends. I screw up Mike's dinners and he teaches me that speed doesn't equal quality.

So a few nights ago we decided to make dinner together. Dan joined along, so the three of us trekked to Publix to select food there. Mike had a plan. "A meal has meat, a vegetable, and a starch," he said. Dan thought anything that wasn't steak wasn't real meat, but I convinced him legitimate meals could be made with chicken. I don't love squash, but after living in China, can eat anything I need to and didn't protest that being our vegetable. French bread topped off the meal. We needed to use spaghetti sauce. Dan and I didn't know if we had spaghetti sauce. I forgot to add that this is the first time we've cooked this school year. I make sandwiches, and Dan's used his George Foreman once or twice, but the stove has basically been out of commission. Maybe that's why I feel comfortable playing music from my laptop there when I'm cleaning:

But no more using the stove as a table. I flattened the chicken with a brick, Dan sliced the squash, and Mike set up an elaborate process to make garlic bread.

Looking back, I think I get frustrated when I don't have proper equipment. We realized that Dan and I do not have a spatula. To Mike's great amazement, though, we do have a garlic press (left over from the great fall purge):

And then we didn't have any serrated knives. After trying to slice the bread, I got too aggravated and we ended up ripping off pieces.

The meal tasted okay. The squash was a little soggy, the bread had too strong of a flavor, and the chicken tasted average--no offense to Mike's cooking experience. I expected that since we were doing things ourselves it'd be really cheap, but it wasn't. I have to say, I'm not inspired to cook more now. In fact, now that I've seen the limitations of our utensils, I feel less inclined to spend time doing something I'm not good at. Maybe I could find a girl to give me lessons.

Does anyone want to get me a spatula for Christmas? Then I could make omelets. I already have a dozen eggs in my refrigerator that I haven't touched from the first week of school, so I'm all set there. Then I'll practically be a chef. After all, I do have a garlic press.

To the Masses: about "Epic"

2008-11-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

My post is going to be short since I'm at home this weekend and blogging isn't high on my list of priorities compared to watching UF cream Georgia, seeing Melanie do really well in her marching competition (well, seeing the band do well anyway; it's hard to tell who's who among 300 kids in the same outfit), and talking to all my family. Plus, tonight's daylight savings, so I'm losing an hour doing this. It's an epic night.

I try to be open to new uses of good words, but I admit it's a struggle. "Epic" was a good word. Lord of the Rings, Virgil's Aeneid, Paradise Lost--great epics. And when you know what an epic is, then it makes sense to apply the word to, say, a literary work or a movie, or even an effort. "He's writing an epic poem." Cool. I'm okay with the adjectival use.

Then you figure, well, if "epic" describes an effort that will be remembered for all history and takes place across generations, that you should use it to mean a situation that you think is cool. "That was an epic pass from Tebow." Mm, I resist.

Here's why I resist: I'm not against language changing for new meanings, but I do resist changes that are a crutch for those with small vocabularies. Using "epic" trivially conflates its meaning and forces it to be just another way to say "good." I don't have a voluminous vocabulary, but I don't think it's hard to be more specific than "good." And if you have to make up words so it doesn't look like you have dull-witted, repetitive ideas, then I think you're wasting you're time because people will eventually notice. Ooh! Epic burn.

But it gets worse. Give the masses an inch, and each person pulls for a mile. (That makes for a lot of miles, distributed over everyone.) "Epic" is now acquiring a colloquial adverbial sense. Yes, I hate to break it to you, but I have heard, in real conversation, "That was epic cool." At least the masses discard all semblance of grammaticality and skip "epically cool."

"Epic" in this sense means "really." "He's really ticked off" becomes, "He was, like, epic pissed off." So, for anyone who likes to use the words "good" and "really," but not really, then "epic" is the word for you. It's epic good, dawg. Can't we all talk like this instead of like this?

The Crest Commercial

2008-10-30T21:55:00.001-07:00

At the beginning of October I heard about this video contest. This business guy named James Altucher wants to see if normal people can make commercials that are as good as ones made by professionals who make a ton of money. So he picked a random brand--Crest--and said, Go make a commercial, and the best one wins $2000. That's a big enough incentive for me to try it. Being an English major, inspiration hit me that night and I jotted down the elements to a script. I'm no good with a camera, but my friend Ben Rush is, and joined forces. I had the vision, he had the skills. I think the skills are more evident than the vision, but Altucher is a nationally ranked chess master and hopefully won't be confused by our abstract message.

I now present, after weeks of hard work, "My Share of the Prize."

I'm really happy with the way it turned out, but Ben and I have been involved in it for so long that we can't tell if it's any good at this point, so if you don't hate it, let us know by commenting on YouTube. The winner will be announced November 3rd, so if I seem on pins and needles until then, I'm just waiting to see if my fate is in writing commercials.

Why I Voted for Obama

2008-10-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

Deciding breeds rationalization. I initially favored Hillary over Obama, but was impressed that he won. When I read his book, I decided that he understood America better than McCain did. He wrote his own book, see. On the other hand, from what I understand, McCain was written by his book (which made me want to read it, but not vote for him). As an English major, I value the ability to encapsulate America in words. From Indonesia to America to the black movement to Columbia University to Chicago's poor to Harvard Law. Spending several years as a community organizer convincing people that their landlord really will give them a new heater if they all work together gives a man a kind of experience that isn't reflected in military warfare and years in Washington.

I have other reasons now, too. I've rationalized quite well my decision. I shudder at Palin's make-believe, playing-house approach to life in which sincerity equals rationality. I can imagine her talking to her dolls in much the same way she conducts interviews: "Oh, my $150,000 suit? Thank you, I like it, too. It's not really excessive, you know, since I'll be campaigning all over the country. A girl's gotta have clothes to wear, don't you agree Mr. Teddy? It's not like I could walk out there in my normal-person clothes! That would be ridiculous."

I've even developed a distaste for McCain, who as my friend Mike says, seems like a "cantankerous, stubborn old guy." I predict that if McCain wins, we'll all start using the word "doddering."

But I'm voting for Obama still, and not just against McCain. I lean Republican economically, because I think I can manage my money better than anyone else, but there are things that I can't do individually (ensure health care for everyone; wean car makers off a dependency for oil; restore a responsibly distributed military; etc.) and when I see someone who looks capable (Obama) asking to be in charge, I'll let him.

It's strange how much support he has in other countries, too. I don't trust the Chinese view of anything outside one person's experience, but this whole spring and summer it was only O-ba-ma and Xi-la-li. I tried to explain that there was another party, but they didn't get it. (It might also have been because I couldn't say "government", "party", or "McCain" in Chinese.) Obama went to Germany and wowed a crowd of 10,000.

Most striking to me is this one Obama supporter I met at here at UF at the beginning of the semester. He was pitching Obama to me, and I asked him about his accent. "Oh yah," he said. "I'm from Ialand." Ireland? Then he can't actually vote, right? "Yah," he assented. "Boot this is the most important election of our lives." It turns out he is a poli-sci major who came to America to work for the Obama campaign for a semester unpaid. He's not American, see, so he's not allowed to be paid.

The world loves Obama, and while I'm voting and "the world" isn't (couldn't declare an address, I'd imagine), it's still striking to imagine that we could be really proud of our next president. I'm not a Bush hater, but I'm sad that our figurehead acts like a bobblehead.

You notice, of course, that the one piece of Obama's mind conspicuously absent from his book (the first one, right out of law school) is his ambition. He's America's Ender (pun unavoidable).

I voted for Obama for President because I won't be able to vote for him when he becomes emperor. I'm pretty happy with that line, myself.

I already arranged to have my vote cancel Elizabeth LaBoone's. So if I can keep her from voting, Obama should have it in the bag. November 4th, baby...

Debating and not

2008-10-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a debate Accent put on over the origins of the universe. About 1000 people came, I think. Most of the time debates like this are like football games: no one is going to think less of themselves if their school loses, but you sure will think more of yourself if your school wins. At the beginning, the Christian debater, Dr. Jacoby, asked the audience how many were open to the idea that God could have created the universe. About half raised their hands. I thought he made a good move by establishing that about half the audience were lying to themselves, because then he knew where to go with his presentation. You don't go to a debate to decide, you go because you want to hear your thoughts amplified smartly.

Dr. Jacoby did a good job amplifying my thoughts. Why do people think that evolution and the Bible are at odds with each other? Well, Dr. Jacoby was trained as a historian, so he gave us a very interesting historical answer: apparently the dominant thought was a long-earth theory, and after Darwin published his answer many Christians were in agreement with it, until one of Darwin's proponents aggressively came after people as if it were a choice. Ever since, people have had to choose between God and evolution. After that five minute historical overview, he spent the rest of his time talking about how evolution was unlikely without a God.

The other guy, Dr. Shermer, did a really good job amplifying Alex's thoughts: you can't prove God doesn't exist, but you can keep pushing him back. Why do planets orbit in a plane? God. Until you figure out the math behind it, and then God has to be crammed into the next smallest unsolvable problem. You can claim Christianity and evolution can coexist, but if the mechanism for the origins of life can be explained by repeated observation (that is, science), what does "God" even mean?

Dr. Jacoby framed the debate well by saying (in different words), "How the world came to be is important, but not really." Religion doesn't exist to compete with science; it competes for our souls.

Then they had a question-answer time. I lined up and listened to ridiculously stubborn questioners press their enemy for answers: "But if life can't come from nothing, then where did that first cell come from? Huh? Huh? Where did life come from, then?" And so on.

I had a reasonable question. One other person had a good question, too. There weren't any good questions to ask the athiest; we've had our whole lives acclimating to that mentality. The one guy's question had to do with the theological implications of evolution: doesn't evolution mean that things died, and that in the time of Eden (whatever that means) the world wasn't perfect?

Dr. Jacoby said that sin results in spiritual death, and that physical death isn't that big of a deal. In a way, I can see what he means: just eating breaks down plant life. However, God killing the lamb to cover Adam and Eve's sin wasn't new just because it was killing. It was new because the lamb died. To me, the problem is still unresolved.

My question was similar in spirit. I wrote it down so I wouldn't fumble at the mic, so I can quote exactly: "The Biblical account of creation details six days of God working and one day of his rest, and that's the foundation for the Israelites observing the Sabbath. So whether we interpret the days of creation literally as days or figuratively as eons, the process according to the Bible is finished. But as soon as we accept any level of evolution, species are no longer static. If God used evolution until now he still is today. Are we in Day 6 of creation?"

Dr. Jacoby answered unsatisfactorily by saying that if God doing anything is him creating, then obviously he's still creating. (But I wasn't calling anything God does "creating"; I was talking about species of animals.)

I do want to say that the part I remember most about the entire evening was the girl in front of me. I actually didn't deserve to ask my question. Time was running out and the moderator said there was time left for three more questions. I was the fourth one, and lightly pressed the usher guarding our mic to extend it one, which he said was out of his power. But then the girl in front of me, who I had talked to a little bit ("There haven't even been any girls!" she said when it looked hopeless for us. "Yeah, I think they should just move you to the front," I agreed.), turned around and asked what my question was. I gave her the gist of it, she thought for a second, and then she declared, "Your question is better than mine" and walked away to my faint protest.

And I remember her kindness more than I do the athiest's jabs at Bush or the Christian's facts and dates. Who knew that the best part of the debate for me was the part furthest from debating?

Phrasal Verbs are Low-Class

2008-10-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

What is a word? Normally, it's easy to tell because we separate them by spaces. There were eleven words in my last sentence. But we also have the idea that if something is a word, you should be able to look up what it means in a dictionary. So what about "to look up"? It's one unit of meaning: here "up" doesn't indicate the direction opposite to down; it is a preposition you add which changes the meaning of the verb. You have to look at the phrase as a whole. "To look up" is a phrasal verb.

Phrasal verbs get pretty tricky in English because they often have multiple meanings. For example, "to hold up" means either "to delay" or "to rob." (Jokes follow easily: "Sorry I didn't call you back until now. David held me up." "I didn't know he had a gun.")

I've compiled a list of all the phrasal verbs I can think of that come from "to put." I lifted two or three from here, but my list is more complete. Check it out:

put
	aside	to save: "Ever since they got married, they put aside half their income every paycheck and now they're millionaires."
	at	to estimate: "I put the painting's value at about six dollars."
	away	to incarcerate: "After he murdered that girl a few years ago, he was put away for life."
		to tidy: "Put away all your toys once James leaves."
	back	to delay: "If the construction guys don't finish today, it'll put us back a whole week."
		to spend: "Filling up my tank put me back over a hundred dollars."
		to return: "When you're done borrowing my computer, could you put it back where it was before?"
	back together	to repair: "Dad's going to be home in five minutes and I don't know how to put the TV back together."
	behind	to forgive: "Even though you ate my last Oreo, I'm willing to put it behind us."
	down	to criticize: "Why do you put me down all the time?"
		to commit: "Put me down for a batch of cookies."
	forward	to suggest: "I put forward the idea that we should market to the elderly, but it didn't go over well."
	in	to submit: "I put in for reinstatement yesterday."
		to expend: "But I've already put in fifty hours of community service!"
	off	to tarry: "I've put off doing the dishes for so long they're starting to grow moldy."
		to be offended: "I was really put off by his comment about my weight."
	on	to deceive: "Front row tickets to Anberlin? Are you putting me on?"
		to blame: "You're the one who said we should try the gallon challenge. If you feel sick, don't put that on me."
		to perform: "Tomorrow I'll be putting on a magic show in my living room."
		to organize: "Madame Fleury is the one putting on the event, so ask her if you can bring guests.
	out	to extinguish: "Put out the fire now!"
		to give sexual favors: "I like going on dates with her because I know she'll put out."
	through	to connect: "Please put me through to the principal."
		to pass: "He was failing, but I put him through to the fifth grade anyway."
		to make suffer: "We're breaking up because I couldn't put her through a long distance relationship."
	together	to assemble: "I put together this report like you asked me to, Sir."
	toward	to contribute: "We each put $75 a week from our jobs toward a nice car."
	up	to score: "In the basketball game last night, Wilkins put up seventeen points."
		to house: "Maybe Jenny could put you up for the night."
		to post: "I put up fliers, but no one's found Fluffy!"
	up to	to convince: "Did your brother put you up to this? I can't imagine you'd steal on your own."
	up with	to endure: "I put up with your shenanigans every day."

That's 32 meanings of "put + preposition." I even left out uses in which the preposition is used as a preposition, like putting clothes on. But notice that these meanings are defined differently than usual: they are exact synonyms. Substitute any phrasal verb with my definition and there's no denotative difference. (The only exception is "to put back" which I glossed as "to spend," but compare "I spent ten dollars on a meal" and "Buying the meal put me back ten dollars.")

Since phrasal verbs have exact synonyms you never need to use them. In contrast, most words have a niche. I use the word "hover" because I don't want to say "to hang fluttering in the air or on the wing" every time I want to talk about a helicopter. But in America culture, where there is similitude, there is ordering. "Big" and "enormous" mean the same thing, but "enormous" is considered a more educated word. Each phrasal verb is exactly equivalent to another verb, but since the phrasal verb is simpler, it is considered casual, informal, and lower-class. Just think about it. Presidential candidates these days try to relate to the average Joe--explicitly--so think of their aides instead. Can you imagine a McCain aide letting out a press release to say Senator McCain was "put up to" selecting Palin as his running mate? Of course not. Phrasal verbs aren't dignified.

I phrase my verbs sometimes to give this blog a conversational tenor, so don't think it's me being picky. I'm just suggesting that parents teach their kids how to use silverware and how not to use phrasal verbs so when they're on a date with the President's daughter they won't be embarrassed.

The Three-Day Weekend

2008-10-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes people blame time for the amount of things they get done. "If I had more time, I'd be way more productive." Three-day weekends exist to show that, for the most part, this is a lie.

On three-day weekends, you have more time and do less. I'm fairly regimented in my approach to the week: Monday through Friday I have class and take of homework, Saturday I rest, and Sunday I go to church, hang out with people, and get a good start to my upcoming week. But when we have Friday off, I'm confused. Is Friday a work day or a play day? If it's a play day, then is Saturday still a day of rest or can that take the load for some of the homework that I need to get done? And even if I count Friday as a half-work day, then I probably won't feel very rested by the end of the weekend.

Here's how it's playing out now. This weekend is UF's homecoming, so we didn't have class today. I woke up around 10:30, had breakfast by 11, and got some things done by the time I was ready for lunch. By "things", I mean clearing my inbox (since I use Gmail, I can "archive" emails so they still exist but aren't in my face all the time, leaving my inbox with messages that I still want to respond to) and replying to a Facebook message. I read about ten pages of my assignment for Medieval Lit and felt accomplished because the story is in English that's really similar to modern-day language, so it won't be hard to read when I do commit time to it.

And that's it. I couldn't be bothered to make lunch, so I walked to Papa John's for pizza and accidentally saw five minutes of the homecoming parade. I played racquetball with Dan. And then my fun began and I went to a guy's house for dinner, then to somebody's birthday party.

So now I'm unsure where I stand with my workload. By the time I decide that I should stop trying to work and just relax instead, the weekend will be over and I'll have to lurch back into school mode.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not advocating that we have class to avoid this problem. I'm more lamenting the presence of transaction costs in vacation time. I hope that's the right word. I mean that students can't fully enjoy the time because, in its novelty, vacation time is wastefully allocated.

Not every break is this way. I measure time by weeks because my schedule repeats weekly. When spring break comes and we have a whole week off, it's easy to adjust to because there's one whole week which you can wipe off the map. With only one day, though, the week's rhythm is thrown off. For example, I realistically am too busy Friday and Saturday night to have time to blog, but I like to post a new entry at least every two days, so Friday afternoon when I have some free time I'll blog, or something. But today I let my time slip away because when you don't have class you assume the day will last forever, and now it's 3 am and I'm tired.

But it's a three-day weekend!!

Hardcore Blogging Skills

2008-10-22T15:51:00.000-07:00

Imagine you're in the woods putting the finishing touches on a passionate picture of Nature in All Her Glory, when you hear your brother call from the house. "Jean-Claude!" he says, since artists need artistic names. You don't reply because you're contemplating the effects of that crinkled leaf in the lower left corner of the canvas on the human condition, but he repeats, "Jean-Claude!"

"What?" you shout shortly, sending flocks of nature-filled birds scattering.

"There's this guy just in town today who's looking for paintings!"

"The legendary art critic Tomas Refian?" you ask, since every artist knows his art critics.

"I don't know," your brother says, "but he has a nice blue suit on."

You snatch up your supplies, blow on the paint to make it dry faster, and run to meet fame himself in a blue suit.

I feel kinda like that, except the only woods near UF have signs for the girls that say "Don't go in at night or you'll be raped" in more polite language, and I don't paint masterpieces in them day or night. Rather, I heard about a blogging scholarship today and I'm checking myself out for the man in the blue suit.

"Do you maintain a weblog and attend college?" the website queries. Why, yes, I do. "Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs?" Hey! Over here! Judge me! The deadline to enter is the end of the month, and I'm scrambling to make my blog presentable to the ten-grand-giving powers that be.

I took the first step and bought a domain name for myself. (A domain name, if the old geezers don't know, is something so complicated we just buy one for ourselves instead of using others'.) That's right, you can now read this blog at www.willgoestocollege.com without a trace of Google in the address. Don't think I'm too hardcore; I paid $2.50 more so Google could give me the convenience and Googly austerity of a Google-bought domain name. I was even logged in to GoDaddy.com with my selection checked, with another tab detailing how to link Google's hosting to a domain name bought through GoDaddy, and I chickened out.

I'm not just making urgent cosmetic changes, I've started the blog death march of explaining everything I've ever said on my blog. Someone who makes a joke and then explains it isn't a comedian; he's a bore. But still: old geezers? That's just a joke, see! I use it as a conscious stereotype. And my parenthetical explanation of a domain name? That was a joke, too! I linked to the Wikipedia page, see, which gives about as good an explanation of a domain name as you can get, but then I also linked to the defining document--which is incomprehendible, and that's a joke, see, because in a way the words were correct, but not in the way old geezers would take it to mean, so for those in the know who clicked on the links, it's a funny way to defend the statement I made about the sil--

And the subtitle of my blog? Facebook readers won't know, of course, but my blog's title is "Will goes to College" followed by "Your mom goes to college." What's that about, right? No, see, that makes sense, too, if you think about it! There's this movie Napoleon Dynamite, 'kay?, and if you haven't heard of it that's okay because I like explaining culture to people and Napoleon Dynamite is definitely culture. In the movie, Deb is going door-to-door selling boondoggle key chains ("a must-have for this season's fasion") to raise money for college. Napoleon says he doesn't want any and from the background Kip, Napoleon's brother, shouts, "Your mom goes to college." And you think to yourself, "That doesn't mean anything and probably isn't true," but Deb is mortified that her already embarrassing endeavor has been mocked. See, because "your mom goes to college" is a retort, only no one is sure why. And that fits perfectly with this blog, because you read the title "Will goes to College" and you're like, "So what?" And then BAM! you see the subtitle and you're chastised. So, like, my blog is probably insignificant, but at least I know it and when you make fun of yourself first then no one else can, really. And I talk about culture pretty often, and it's a popular line from a movie, so it all fits together. Get it?

And did you see the crinkled leaf in the lower left-hand corner and how it symbolizes love and justice and all that's good about paintings? No, but really, you should look at my crinkled leaf. It isn't half-bad, I suggest.

Ambidexterity

2008-10-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

Jugglers place a high amount of emphasis on ambidextrous juggling. Asymmetrical patterns, say 3 balls in one hand, are fine, but only if you're able to juggle them on both sides. This is a strange idea in a way: if you have 3 balls, you can only do 3 in one hand from your left hand and your right hand at the same time. In fact, if you saw a guy performing, you wouldn't know if he could juggle an asymmetrical pattern both ways unless he emphasized that he could.

Our focus on ambidexterity (in the limited juggling sense of the word) results in a very balanced mix of valuing what a juggler can do and what he does do. If you can only do a 5-club half-shower to the left, there's no shame in performing it. And yet, if you could do it to the right, even if you don't put it into your routine, it'd be better. Ambidexterity would open up more possibilities for you.

I've carried that mentality into other parts of life, too. It bothers me that I can't comfortably eat a meal with the fork in my left hand. That reminds me of how in China everyone can use chopsticks with both hands, and they sometimes have a different grip depending on the hand. One night my Chinese mom and dad had a whole discussion about what each grip meant and when it was best to use their left hand to eat.

I tried to learn to write with my left hand, but it's hard. Andrew is left-handed, but since we grew up using the computer mouse on the right side, he can do both equally. Academically, too, I shy from specialization because I don't want to develop one skill at the expense of another. I make sure my foot imprints on my flip-flops match. I knew a guy who played tennis seriously, and his right forearm was muscular and his left was normal: disgusting.

Here is my picture of success in life:

That's right. Left hand brushes at night, right hand brushes in the morning. A perfectly symmetrical toothbrush when it's worn.

The LSAT and Limits of the Law

2008-10-20T21:57:00.000-07:00

Senior year of high school, if I remember right (and if I don't then it was junior year), I thought that it would be nice to be Supreme Court Justice when I grew up. And, knowing practically nothing about what that meant, I decided the best way to give myself a shot when the time came was to read Supreme Court decisions, so every day for a month or two I read a Supreme Court case opinion to become Supreme Court-worthy. We'll see if it paid off, I guess, because I signed up to take the LSAT this December.

The LSAT stands for the Law School Admission Test. It's graded from 120 to 180 and is normalized, so a 150 is the 50th percentile. Before I learned that it was a multiple choice logic test, I thought that you had to know legal concepts to do well--hence my reading strategy. I had just read things that talked about studying for the LSAT, and thought to myself that it must involve law, because who can study for a logic test? Either you think logically or you don't. That'll make a delicious story if I become Supreme Court Justice.

Multiple choice is a different story. I downloaded an old LSAT off of the website and took it over the next several nights. I didn't time myself, but that seemed like something you could improve on. Then I scored my practice test and saw that I had gotten a 171. 172 is the 99% percentile. Three quarters of Harvard law students score under a 175. I figure if I get a 180 I'll be safe. I'm willing to accept a 179 and maybe even a 178.

I know, out of the 120,000 people who take the test per year, 8-18 get a perfect 180. But I'm just putting it out there because everyone's expectations for tests are different, and once you know how someone wants to do, then you can encourage him well and be proud of him when he finishes. So be my parents until the end of the year and root me on even if I'm the slow kid who tries his best to win the race.

When I signed up online, I glanced over the fine print for the admission ticket. Right after "I certify that I am the examinee whose name appears on this ticket" there's this curious phrase: "I plan to take the LSAT for the sole purpose of being considered for admission to law school." I'm surprised that the council that tests potential lawyers would write such an ugly clause. Sole purpose? As if we college students knew why we did things. And as if, if we did know, we'd only have one reason. I'm taking the test because I might want to be considered for admission to law school. I'm taking the test because I have $123 to blow. I'm taking the test because I want to see if I'm awesome. I'm taking the test to see if I could have a part-time job teaching a prep-class for Kaplan. I'm taking the test for God, gold, and glory.

I'm taking the test for whatever reason I want to, and their disclaimer encroaches on my motives because they don't know how to specify what they want to prohibit. Restricting my purposes is only to preempt whatever action they don't want me to do. Honestly, I don't know what they're worried about. Taking the test with the intent to memorize questions and sell them to others? That's already covered in another clause. They would really be better off saying, "Don't take the test if you plan on doing something that isn't allowed with it afterward." It's clear and makes sense. The way it's phrased now, though, implies that something about my wanting to score well on a test for test's sake is wrong.

They're just fearful and are trying to protect themselves at my expense. Where's the balance? Ask me after December 5th and I might be qualified to train to give you an answer.

Speed Dating

2008-10-19T14:15:00.000-07:00

Next time I play "Never have I Ever" I'll have one more weak spot. When I went to RUF's fall conference this weekend, I didn't expect the schedule for the first evening to include speed dating. Listening to a pastor's message, singing Christian songs, waking up groggy because we went to bed too late--those were things I was prepared for. About 10:30pm, though, one or two hundred chairs were set up in long rows facing each other, each with a girl sitting ill-at-ease, waiting. It looked like a human Bernie Bott's Every Flavor Beans (from both sides, I'm sure).

There were strict rules: guys had to ask the first question, and it couldn't be about our schools (we had several Florida schools attending), majors, hometowns, name, or sports. After two minutes, all the guys would shift down a seat and we'd begin afresh.

It was nice that everyone was eligible: Christian, my age, same state. Well, almost everyone was eligible. A few sentences into my conversation with one girl I notice that the guy to my right has edged his seat close to his girl and has his hands on her thighs, talking to her in an indistinct love-mumble. "I don't think we've made it that far in two minutes," I deadpan to the girl I'm speed dating. The guy next to me is quick to clarify that this girl is actually his real girlfriend.

The beginning of each date was the most difficult in some ways. The guy had the responsibility for the conversation, and I felt bad asking the same litany of questions to each girl, so I tried to let something spring up naturally when I introduced myself. Sometimes girls' names were difficult to pronounce, or they had on nice jewelry, or they were right in front of the fan. Then I could blab about "Penman" being easy to pronounce but difficult for people to spell (an extra 'n' looks so much more regal, doesn't it?), or how last Valentine's Day I was in China and didn't even realize people in America were giving each other presents, or how it was hard to hear in the room with everyone else talking.

With most people, though, I had to go for a random question. I tried, "What's your favorite band?" a few times, but since I'm clueless with music I couldn't lead the conversation very far. I got confused when I got to the end of the row and ended up sitting next to Dan, so I asked one girl what his first question had been to her. "'How many kids do you want to have?'" she recalled. I guess that's one way to speed date.

What surprised me was that, with some people, two minutes was too long. As the guy, I tried to lead the conversation, but there would come a point where I had to pause for a second so the girl could reply. That was the critical second. For some conversationally-adept girls, that pause never came, but if conversation didn't flow perfectly there would happen the most important second of our two-minute relationship. And some of my relationships didn't survive... such is life.

I find it interesting that in some cases, you only need two minutes. Obviously it's a sufficient test of compatibility (one girl I thought my speed date went well with ended up not having anything to say when I talked to her later), but it is a helpful test for incompatibility. I used to think that everything would be a lot easier if marriages were just arranged, and to a large extent I think relationships are dependent on willingness, but there's still a significant chunk that comes from personality. I didn't find two-minute true love, but I gave it a shot. I'm working on being desirable.

When it doubt, though, just balance a table on your chin to show your manliness. Where was speed dating, round two?

New China Experience

2008-10-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm back from seven months in China, and have been ever since school started mid-August, any new China experiences are emotional ones through the rear-view mirror of memory. On Monday, I was walking down the street and saw an Asian couple zooming by me on one of those popular motorized scooters. The guy was in front, the girl was clutching onto him from behind. Something about the way she was latched onto him reminded me of how in China it's popular for the girl to hold a guy's arm above the elbow, so you can feel his bicep. And then I missed China for the first time.

Sure, I've thought of China often since I've been back, but I've been so guarded that every time I think of China I first steel myself for the challenges I faced there. Wow. As I typed that last sentence I noticed that it's really similar to something I wrote in my journal when my family first moved to Florida. My journal is back in Orlando, but it went like this. "Transition is when you accept that there's good and bad where you are and where you were." A few days or weeks after you move, your mind pitches your old home against your new home in a war, and there's a whole period of transition in which your mind ensures that your old home wins. I'm in a weird place because I don't know whether to call America my "new" or "old" home. It's my most recent one, but also my most distant one. My reaction so far to coming back, strangely enough, has been as if I've just moved to China! I'm fiercely protective of how hard China is to live in for a foreigner and how easy and rewarding American life is in comparison. But you're not really moved until you have the ability to miss both.

So I think it's a really important step for me to start missing China. It's not a logical decision: my little experience shows that! I mean, who sees a Korean couple on a motorbike and thinks, oh, that reminds me of the way they hold hands in China. And then who misses that? I mean, one of my friends from Beijing recently reminisced about the restaurant we used to go to almost every day after class. That would be something I would think I would miss: good food, a routine, daily feelings of success in ordering, good friends. But when she mentioned it, I only remembered the time in a shallow way. I remembered that it had been fun, but I didn't experience it again in mind, I didn't re-live it. That's what missing is: the disconnect between living and re-living the good times.

I wonder if the arm-grabbing gesture was something located in my mind really far from all the difficulties of being in China. I can feel someone holding my arm that way, but I can't think of who it was or when. I think once or twice when I went out to eat with my Chinese family, my Chinese mom would hold onto me like that, the same way women would if a guy was holding an umbrella, only I didn't have an umbrella.

I feel wary of letting myself miss China, because from there it seems a hop, skip, and a jump away from wanting to do it again, and I don't want to do it again. I've relied on the tension between my fluency in America and my insufficiency in China to maintain my need to say, "It is finished", but the tension isn't just an abstract one. I'm tense from it. I've been tense all semester; that's why I'm down to twelve credits. I can't handle any more stress because I'm already stressed figuring out where my life is going as it relates to the last seven months of my life.

But now maybe the pressure is starting to drain as I learn to miss China.

What I do with my Life (Fall 08)

2008-10-15T17:41:00.000-07:00

It's no good knowing crème brûlée exists if you don't know what it tastes like.

In my class about the works of James Joyce, we learn that Ulysses was banned in America for a long time, but now it's judged the best book of all time. We read and analyze hard passages:

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long upon the contramagnificandjewbangtatiality. Illstarred heresiarch! In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hindparts. (Ulysses, 32)

And easy passages:

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of fless: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. (Ulysses, 71)

In my Medieval Literature class we started with important Latin works in translation, did a brief stint in Old English, and are working our way through seminal Middle English texts, modernized and not. Some of them are boring:

The road was stone-paved, the path led
the men together. Their mail coats shone
hard, hand-linked, bright rings of iron
rang out on their gear, when right to the hall
they went trooping in their terrible armor.
Sea-weary, they set their broad shields,
wondrously-hard boards, against the building's wall;
they sat on a bench--their byrnies rang ou,
their soldiers' war-gear; their spears stood,
the gear of the seamen all together,
a gray forest of ash. That iron troop
was worthy of its weapons. (Beowulf, trans. Liuzza 63)

And some parts are interesting:

Lo! Here the duchess dere - today was sho taken -
Deep dolven and dede, diked in moldes.
He had murthered this mild by mid-day were rungen,
Withouten mercy on molde, I not what it ment;
He has forced her and filed and sho is fey leved;
He slew her unslely and slit her to the navel. (Alliterative Morte Arthure, line 974-9)

In my Elementary Differential Equations, we take math a step further by not solving just for variables, but for equations. Some of our problems are abstract:

Solve the equation:
dy/dx = e^(x+y)/(y-1)

Others have easy applications to the physical world:

A 3-kg mass is attached to a spring with stiffness k = 48 N/m. The mass is displaced 1/2 m to the left of the equilibrium point and given a velocity of 2 m/sec to the right. The damping force is negligible. Find the equation of motion of the mass along with the amplitude, period, and frequency. How long after release does the mass pass through the equilitbrium position?

In Numbers and Polynomials, we prove a lot of basic truths about numbers. Some problems are crucial:

(Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic) Every natural number greater than 1 has exactly one prime factorization.

Some problems aren't as important:

If a divides b and b is not equal to 0, then the absolute value of a is less than or equal to the absolute value of b.

That's everything. I've taken up swimming this year, as I've mentioned, and I'm involved with RUF. Academically, though, you've just had a taste of my semester. Diff EQ, Proofs, and Medieval Lit: MWF; Joyce: TR.

The Movie "Fireproof"

2008-10-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

I hate central Florida's Christian radio station. It plays old, peppy, effusive songs with little variation and less regard for persistent, deep problems in people's lives. Needless to say, playing worship music as background music is one of my pet peeves. I say that so no one thinks I'm a Christian culture pushover. There are great songs (with great music videos), of course, but they aren't all.

And there are good movies, too. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Fireproof (here's the trailer) wasn't bad. If you haven't seen it yet, you probably won't, but here's the plot spoiler warning anyway: may reference scenes not in the trailer. Plot "spoiler" is actually too hefty for this fairy tale kind of story: a firefighter is good at his job, bad at his marriage. His dad who recently converted asks him to follow a 40 day plan before he goes through with a divorce. It's a difficult plan to follow. The wife cries. And at the end of the story, guess how their marriage is?

One thing I found fascinating, actually, is how the story didn't have to end happily. I would've loved to see them play out the relationship if his heart had warmed toward her and she still pushed him off. Or if he couldn't carry out the plan and they both ended up embittered. Or if he couldn't finish the steps but she still saw the light. See, Christianity isn't a bubble of church-approved stories that will pop a positive witness to the world if a story doesn't end cheerily enough. The story has a happy ending, but not all of them do.

Still, Fireproof did a very good job portraying the reality of a normally bad marriage. The every-day mutual insistence on self-satisfaction that cements separation. She doesn't leave dinner for him; he doesn't tell her his plans. She starts flirting with a doctor; he can't stop looking at porn. It's all one-sided, of course. By that I mean any third-party observer can see that she's always right, and I think in real life it's grayer than that. But he's the bad guy, so let him be the bad guy.

The challenge in evaluating the movie is that there's a difference between saying things that are false and not saying everything that's true. A movie is not a theological treatise, so I give it a lot of leeway in not presenting every trial and urge and doctrine and pitfall of the faith. There was a lot of struggle shown when their marriage was failing. Nevertheless, I wish they would have shown any of the Christians sin.

Once the Caleb, the main character, converts, he is able to, in one unceasing rush of effort, stop his addiction to porn, love his wife, not even beat up the guy she's seeing, give up his dream of owning a boat, and have unflagging patience with her resistance to his attempts. It's a little too heroic. It would have only taken an extra line or two for him to sin, repent to his flawless firefighting buddy, and been told that sin is a struggle for life.

That's my main critique. I have other comments that don't fit in really well. I was impressed that about half our audience was black. I think the racial relations in the movie might have been one of its best features. White Christians and black Christians are afraid of each other, you know. The metaphors Fireproof drew between marriage and God were so powerful that I wondered how people share the message of Christ to unmarried people. I liked the way fire's symbolic meaning had inverted by the end from one of destruction to one of renewal. I hated the few songs they played in the background.

Oh, and one last thing. Dan took the bad acting as fundamental, but I saw the acting as unprofessional. That's not quite the same thing. There was one scene where an older woman who seemed really similar to my mom in like twenty years (but cheesier) confronts the wife on her lunches with the doctor. The woman wasn't trained as an actor, but she meant what she said. You could tell that she was wise--I read that they cast lots of roles after people volunteered from a flier at church--and that gave a level of sincerity which was almost inartistic in its brute mimicry of life.

I'd be really curious to hear if the movie actually inspired couples to change their habits toward each other. With the kind of integrated (profit-garnering) approach they do--the movie, the book, church promotions, etc.--it might give the level of community support to a couple that would be needed to buttress an empty relationship while it undergoes renovation.

Football Dominates

2008-10-11T21:54:00.000-07:00

I haven't ever tried to write sports commentary, but it's hard to blog and not comment on sports when that's all you do in a day. I mean, I played racquetball early this morning, but that doesn't count because anything you do on a Saturday before noon is bonus activity. I ended up stopping by Andrew's dorm at 2 and he said he had just woken up.

After my morning extra credit awake time, I picked up my Chinese friend Yang from his apartment to introduce him to the aspect of American college culture called "tailgating." First I had to explain what tailgating was as he carefully documented the experience with his camera.

"Those people in purple and yellow are LSU fans," I said, pointing out some already-toasted Louisiana State supporters. "I hope we beat them."

"Me too," Yang said. "Is it okay if I take picture them?"

"You want to take a picture of them? Sure, go ahead."

He leaned out the window like the foreigner I used to be when I was in China and snapped a shot before we drove away. I introduced him to so many Americans when we got to the RUF tailgate that he gave up on any hope of remembering people's names and loosened up a bit talking about himself. We also worked out a system where I would introduce him to someone. When the person said his/her name, I would repeat it in really clear English so he would hear it better. I started doing that after one guy's name was Chuck, which Yang thought sounded identical to the word "truck." (They don't have the "tr" sound in Chinese.)

Yang and I tailgated for a while, and then when he left I stopped by the Cru tailgate and hung out with more people. Then tonight was the game we had been getting all pepped up for.

I can't decide whether I like the Associated Press summary of it or the concise, straight-up version from ESPN. Regardless, UF played an amazing game. This was an important game, since we've already lost once this season and if we had lost again tonight our season would've been over. On the other hand, LSU was ranked #3 so winning would seriously boost our pitiful 11th place. And then we won, and won by enough that Tim Tebow could sit out our last few offensive plays and let the second-string quarterback try to bring the ball in for a touchdown.

Understanding football strategy is a large part of your football experience. People who know things about football can get outraged at a ref far better than we normal fans. For them, when the ref blows the whistle for a penalty, they already know what the ref is going to call and are shouting about how it can't be true because we saw it and because we're UF and UF doesn't deserve penalties because we're awesome.

Sometimes their rhetoric gets a little shaky, but that's why we have a band who drowns them out with honor and distracts everyone until the next play with our cheers.

It's taken me several years of coming to UF games to let my mood be influenced by a football game. Now, though, if we lose I feel like I've lost, and when we won tonight I felt like I deserved to go to sleep because we had just done a great job.

Great job, Will. Now let's get some sleep.

The Gay Guy and the Fat Girl

2008-10-09T22:34:00.000-07:00

Today's theme is contentious, so I start with an anecdote.

I had dinner with April tonight and she asked how I was doing. "Pretty good," I said. "I late-added a Chinese class, then dropped that and another class to be able to adjust back to America better."

"I know," she said. "I read your blog."

It's tricky, this blogging thing, trying to be interesting but not so much that I'm boring in real life. I have to think deeper for people who read my blog. Just wait till you get a fake name from me, April.

Take, for example, my friend I'll call Ron. I imagine he'd be shy about hearing his real name because he this is a story about rejection, and he isn't used to it. I, on the other hand, am rejection's right hand man. Fresh off rejection, it always helps to go back to the basics, so Ron and I have been theorizing about how relationships develop. Or don't develop.

It sucks to realize that the girl you're interested in doesn't even have you on her radar. Ron and I have decided to call this being the gay guy: a different kind of male to girls. One who can be confided in, one who is nonthreatening, unarousing, removed. It's like a girl clapping for Pinocchio's performance and then laughingly skipping away with a brawny man while Pinocchio is left protesting with wooden lips, "But I'm a real boy!"

Don't take me to mean that I expect girls to flirt with every straight guy they know. I just mean that it's nice to be on a list even if you don't want to be selected. For example, consider this dialogue:

"I'm so mad at Francine."

"What for?"

"She didn't invite me to her party."

"Sharon, you're out of town that weekend."

"Yeah, but she still should have invited me."

Ron and I phrased it differently, but with the same message: each country must have some kind of a list of how much any other country is a threat. Would a country want to be a threat? Of course not, but you at least want to be considered. And even if you've had a summit at which you decide that you're not a huge threat, and are just going to be friends, at least you earned a meeting. Guys don't want to be human Switzerlands.

Then Ron and I realized that guys do it, too, stereotypically to the fat girl: you just expect her to know that she's out of the running and treat her like a bystander in the great race for a spouse. She's less than a girl.

I remember in junior high there was a girl I liked who was way too cool for me. She liked one of my friends, and I would ask her to tell me about it because I'd rather hear her talk about liking someone and pretend it was me than not hear about it and puff myself up to thinking I was under consideration.

I'm not sure if I chose the best path. Currently dispassionate me would say neither approach was good and I should've just gotten over her. But if you could just get over someone, you wouldn't need to invent explanations like Ron and I have for why it hurts.

Orthography: Its Killer

2008-10-08T19:37:00.000-07:00

How do you read the title to this post? And by "you," I don't mean the vague, "people" you that we use a lot, nor do I mean you the hypothetical reader; I uncomfortably address the person currently absorbing these words, because this post is powerless for an audience that isn't composed of individuals. Okay, now hold that thought while I lay out an introduction.

Each major has its own realm of assurance. Physicists insist that we follow physical laws, economists insist there are rules of incentive, historians disagree with people regularly enough that it's like a rule, and so on. English majors have an obligation to assure the world that spelling conventions are important. It's a loaded statement, I know. "Important!" you exclaim indignantly. "Well, it shouldn't be." But here's the thing: symbols aren't bad. Obviously, letters aren't bad, but I mean symbols generally. The ability to write a sentence according to society's standards of spelling and grammar is currently a symbol of a good education. I could argue that it's an end to itself, but I don't think that's necessary. All that's necessary is to say it's a symbol of it.

And symbols not being bad, seeing spelling as a symbol for a good education isn't bad either. Now, you can argue that there are more accurate, equitable symbols, but that really just hints at most people's problem with valuing spelling: people don't believe that good education exists. Because if good education exists, and it's marked by good grammar and spelling, and you don't have good grammar and spelling (or "don't care"), then you must not be getting a good education. People's first reaction to that thought is to get defensive and think it's an attack on their worth. Just to be clear, I personally value you as much as a person whether you can write flawlessly or, as someone writing to me recently brought into play, whether you honestly confuse "to" and "two."

If you can admit that good education exists (and if it helps you, Teach for America's starting proposition is that there is an education gap) then there must be a symbol for it. Diplomas exist because employers haven't lived college with us: they need the symbol, even if it is distorted.

And when you consider it, spelling and grammar as a symbol for good breeding is a pretty fair deal. You don't need to be rich, or wear the right clothes, or have a proper accent. Grammar and spelling are pretty robust, as statisticians would say. Jessica got me a shirt for my birthday one year that says, "Good grammar costs nothing." I always apologize for wearing it when people ask me. "A friend got it for me and I like the color," I demur. But the message is true: wealth (and lack of it) is not an excuse.

So that's all the theory I can make up for one day. Let's talk application: it's and its. The paragraph was coming, you knew from the beginning of this post. I'll just tell it to you straight:

1) It's a great day today.
2) Tomorrow is its own problem.

There's no excuse for the first one, really. Contractions use apostrophes.
"I'm not very good at orthography." [I am]
"I don't even know what that means." [do not]
"It's spelling." [it is]
"Really? I never would've guessed." [would have]

Please hear me: just because you use an apostrophe doesn't mean something is a contraction, but when you have a contraction, you use an apostrophe. For example, just because I'm a person doesn't make me a student at UF, but if I am a student at UF, I'm also a person.

So you look at your sentence and you ask yourself, "Is there an extra word I'm not saying?" If the answer is yes, it's a contraction and you need an apostrophe. Just to be obnoxious, I'm going to highlight all the contractions in the rest of this post so you know what I'm talking about.

Let's move on to the possessive case. I have some degree of sympathy for you if you get this one confused. For most things, indicating possession requires an apostrophe. "The cat's bowl is dirty." "Will's tone is not condescending." And so on. But pronouns are different. Just look: "His cat is in the freezer." "Our house burned down yesterday." No apostrophes!

It's the same thing with "its." You have to hunt to find a good neuter subject (like groups), but then it's a piece of cake. "Apple remade its laptops." "The History Club is on its own for funding."

Now for the pop quiz. I didn't make it easy, but there's only one question and it's an open-book test. Partial credit probably not given.

In the title of this post, do I mean "Orthography: it is really tough" or "Orthography: how it is dying"? Pass your papers forward with your name in the top right hand corner...

Omnipotence and Milkshakes

2008-10-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

I didn't do a very good job explaining in my last post what Stephen (from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) meant in the quote about not taking communion. That's all English majors do, really: explain why you should like books. So I'll try again for a sentence or two. Stephen knows that he--the part of him that is him--is incompatible with taking communion when he doesn't believe it, because he can't dissociate the symbol from the act. If he did, he fears the "chemical action which would be set up in my soul." I was hoping to pun off of Joyce's convenient "chemical action," but that part isn't as important.

Well, Stephen might think that's a big deal, but today I bought a chocolate milkshake. I used to think I had a choice when I bought a milkshake, but then after about a year of only ever buying vanilla, I realized that my choice wasn't of the quality I thought it was. I'm almost incapable of buying a different flavor. I come to the decision fresh every time, and every time I have in mind that occasionally I buy chocolate, and occasionally strawberry, and occasionally vanilla. But then I always come away with vanilla.

Then today came. I went to the Chick-fil-A on Archer because they sell milkshakes there, and without thinking about it, I ordered chocolate. I'm pretty sure I'm not even the same person I was several weeks ago.

I was at a barbecue Saturday with a bunch of people and tried to explain the change that's come over me recently, only I was too eager to tell and didn't think it was important that I had only known the girl I was talking to for about twenty minutes.

"I don't love people," I summed up earnestly. "I only love myself. Is that a problem?"

She balked.

It's difficult to tell which changes are me returning from a seven-month stay in China and which are permanent modifications to my temperament. And I just bought a chocolate milkshake.

It reminds me of God's omnipotence, actually. People out for a riddle often wonder why, if God can do anything, can he not sin? Ever since I was little I looked a little skeptically at the "temptation" of Christ since God can't sin... right?

"Can" here is the fuzzy word. When we say God "can" do things, we mean there's no force external to him that would limit him. When we say we humans "can" do things, we mean it in a more nebulous sense, especially in English. (In Chinese they divide "can" into 能 (unrestricted ability) and 会 (learned ability). So I think if you're talking about driving a car, if you 能 drive a car, you have the keys and gas in your tank; if you 会 drive your parents have taught you and you know how to make it down the street without crashing.)

We as humans are changeable, and so on one day I might be in the mood to wear green and on another day in the mood to wear red. I can choose green or red. Or both if it's Christmas.

Some things about us change less. One season I might decide to watch Survivor, the next year I might prefer America's Next Top Model. It all depends on whether I have a girlfriend or not. Or whatever. I can choose to watch whatever show I want.

Some things barely change at all. I don't really like beans. If I'm pressed, I'll eat them out of politeness. I can eat beans--I guess.

And still other aspects of ourselves we regard as fundamental. One day I might snap and kill someone in cold blood. An extreme example, you say, but only because you're so secure in yourself: hat makes you different from a murderer? I can commit murder.

Here you would stop me. "I could not commit murder," you say indignantly. "Never have, never will." The idea here is that no circumstance imaginable would induce you to stab someone to death. But two factors make this uncertain: you don't know yourself perfectly; and you are mutable.

In contrast, God is self-aware and immutable. His can is not one limited by circumstance (there is nothing outside his control) but by character. God doesn't sin because that's not who God is. I'm tagging all the people I know with theological training on the Facebook version of this blog so if I'm totally off-base they can let me know. But here's my summary: God always chooses vanilla milkshakes. Thus proving by algebra that I am not God.

Underwear and the Eucharist

2008-10-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

I'll phrase this hypothetically since the real party I was invited to I was later uninvited to.

Consider the concept of an underwear party. It could be a race with a skimpy cause thrown in for legitimacy, or a birthday party at which people are only allowed to wear underwear. The idea fascinates me because underwear is a socially constructed taboo. There's nothing inherently sexual about that fabric in that shape. In fact, now that I've taken up swimming, I see (very tan, attractive) people every day wearing less clothes to swim than they would as underwear. I myself am only hardcore enough for "Jammers," which are like Speedos with three inches appended for your legs.

So logically, going to an underwear party is just another fun theme-based party, like a "wear your prom clothes" party or a "50s-wear" party. And yet. I don't think I'd be able to go to an underwear party lust-free, and I admit that for most people that's the whole point. But I should be able to look at things from an objective perspective. If I could do that, it would give me the freedom to go to an underwear party or not.

That would be fun. Flirtatious, obviously, but in a pseudo-serious way, as if the whole house was in on the Emperor's new clothes. Pretending like nothing's unusual but snickering after every sentence from the titillating atmosphere.

It reminds me of a passage from Joyce. Stephen Dedalus has grown up in the Catholic church but recently decided that he doesn't actually believe it. His mom pleads with him to go to the Easter mass and take communion, but as he talks over the matter with his friend, he comes to the conclusion that he's too attached to the Catholic idea of communion as a sacred act to partake when he doesn't believe. The symbolism behind underwear and the Eucharist is too great to become immune to.

--Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?
--The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set upin my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

Doing the Deed

2008-10-03T21:57:00.000-07:00

I turned in the drop form yesterday. My schedule is now short CHI3410 and CHT3500. With both of my Chinese classes gone, I'm down to 12 credits and a theoretically much easier semester. But I still feel tense, and it's tiring me out.

On one hand, I feel really accomplished. I aced my Medieval Lit test, finished my math proofs in time to turn them in, wrote a pretty good essay for Joyce. I even sent something in the mail yesterday, and that takes stamps and time and everything.

And yet, I've shied away from several things. For example, I wanted to clean the everlasting stack of dirty dishes. In the last week or two I've shrunk into a habit of using one cup, one small plate for my breakfast bagel, and one large plate for lunch. I have one knife with butter remnants and one with peanut butter traces, and one for cheese, too. So no matter what I'm hungry for I have the tableware needed to make myself food without cleaning anything. But I don't really like that habit and think when I have the time and energy it'd be nice to tidy up a bit.

The light in my room has grown finicky. I didn't know lights could be finicky, but recently when I turn on the switch, my light will take up to ten seconds to turn on, or not at all. Right now it's unwilling. I tried to be scientific about the problem, but it's difficult when you don't know anything. The problem can't be with the lightbulb, because the light will turn on sometimes. I tested it out with the fan on and off, but that didn't do anything. So maybe there's a wiring problem that magically popped up.

There are other deeds lurking, too. I half-intended to go to a coached swimming lesson with the triathletes someone invited me to, but by the end of today I felt scared somehow. Too much assessment, maybe.

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but coming back from China has been difficult because in America it's not an accomplishment to be average. In China, me just living got respect. Now I'm back at college with thousands of other people who are also going to college and I'm drowning in normalcy. And drowning was supposed to be my comparison for my courseload before and after dropping Chinese, so it's worrying that I'm still using it.

It's difficult to read Joyce's perfect sentences, exquisitely crafted in endless variety, and with every one see my failure as a writer. Usually it takes a whole book before I admit that I can't do that. Joyce proves his superiority every paragraph afresh.

I guess I'm in a pretty disheartened mood. I used to call these 2am moods, because in high school 2am was late and lamenting my girl troubles then felt like I was baring my soul to the world. Now I do that less often.

But tomorrow I'm going to help build a wheelchair ramp, so that might be fun.

Witnessing a Paper

2008-10-01T18:58:00.000-07:00

I decided to write my 8-10 page midterm for my Joyce class on one paragraph of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a famous book about a boy growing up and figuring out who he is. It's really difficult to write an essay for a class you don't like. This paper has come smoothly but I think that's because I don't think it's a brilliant essay. It's actually a pretty boring paper:

At the end of book one of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, young Stephen Dedalus reflects on his encounter with the rector. "He was alone. He was happy and free." Then, "he wished that he could do something kind for [Father Dolan] to show him that he was not proud" (64). Underlying this thought is Stephen's idea that conflict resolution is possible: he succeeded in complaining to the rector; he can succeed in convincing Father Dolan that he isn't really a bad boy. In book two, though, we quickly learn that the respect Stephen thought he received from the rector was only patronizing indulgence. When Stephen participates in a school play, he has a new mentality that happiness, which is still conceived of as being "alone" (85), proceeds from withdrawal. This other extreme is no more satisfying or lasting than the first, but a close reading of Stephen's explanation for isolation reveals a stubbornness for insignificance that, a contrario, is an encouraging statement of empowerment for downtrodden Irishmen.

At least, that's my first paragraph while I only have five pages finish. By the time I reach my conclusion, I might have changed my mind and think Joyce is actually supporting Irish despondency.

If you want to read the rest of the paper, you can:

I think if you click on the picture, you can see a full-size version where you can read all my notes. This is how I write essays. There's no spatial organization, but I do find that I write bigger when there isn't anything on the page, so my final comments before I started a draft are scribbled in between other, less relevant things. You might be able to tell I started this essay in Library West. Where else would I encounter freshmen girls who were desperately cramming for a pre-calc exam? I can do absolute value problems!

Math is a surprising portion of my schedule. Mallory and I take a math class together every semester, but I have to catch up since I was in China in the spring, so I'm in diff-eq and my proofs class. We took our first test in the proofs class, and I was marked down for not being thorough enough proving that anything times zero is zero. I love that class.

But back to my paper. You might be able to tell I'm having trouble focusing. I've channeled some of my non-focus into Facebook messenger, which sucks as a messenger unless you really, really want to procrastinate and don't care if you're talking to your best friend from second grade's cousin because you both happen to be online. But it's okay, because the girl I was talking to is in my class working on her paper, too. So it's practically like I'm writing my essay.

Since my essay is boring and hers is about Spanish, we talked about religion. I got to share with her about what I believe ("witnessing," to use the Christian parlance). I thought it'd be weird if we had a deep conversation online over Joyce. Last night at RUF the preacher was talking about how we shouldn't be afraid to get in conversations with people about God. Then I was pulled over coming out of the parking lot because my headlights weren't on, and the cop asked where I was coming from. "RUF," I began, thinking of the sermon. "It's a Christian ministry..." But the cop left without converting and I left without a ticket.

But for tonight, all people will be witnessing is someone doing a fantastic job finishing up his Joyce paper.

Homonymy

2008-09-29T18:21:00.001-07:00

I had an appointment with the head of the Chinese department to plead for her to sign off on me having completed a minor in Chinese. By all my calculations it should have worked out, but I was nervous since none of my other calculations about credit transferring had summed to the Chinese department's standards.

And again I was thwarted. I have the number of credits for Chinese, but apparently, they have a new policy this year that six credits of the minor (not including first-year Chinese) must be taken at UF. I have five. So they want me to take one more Chinese class, which I will do before I graduate but don't have the endurance for this term.

But in my Medieval Literature class later today, our teacher was talking about how he might reference books we've read earlier this semester. We should bring them to class, therefore, but no points would be deducted for not bringing our books.

"I am certainly not that kind of--" he said, pausing to find an appropriate adjective.

Draconian, I said to myself. That's the perfect word.

"--draconian taskmaster."

I grinned smugly for the rest of the lecture on Beowulf and the decline of the Anglo-Saxon expert.

That leads me to a topic that I hope will cheer me up before I start an essay for my Joyce class: reverse homonyms. Here's the idea. When you hear a word and don't know how to write it, it's a homonym (or homophone; Wikipedia confuses more than helps here, but introduces the fantastic word "homonymy"). For example, to, two, and too all have the same pronunciation. Or awl and all, rye and wry, licker and liquor. There are words that sound really, really close: eminent and imminent; our and hour.

But in rare cases, you can see a word written and don't know how to pronounce it. Read and read. (I'm about to read the book I read yesterday.) Bow and bow. Present and present. (Present your present with a bow on top and then take a bow.) These are reverse homonyms.

I thought of this idea when I encountered them in Chinese: 了 can either be le or liao. 地 can either be de or di. Some characters have four pronunciations! You just have to judge it by the context. In English, I think reverse homonyms are pretty uncommon, which makes it a challenge. Marian and I had a game coming up with reverse homonyms until I was ahead by so many she couldn't catch up.

Just last week, I realized in class that pervert is a reverse homonym. If you pervert my intended meaning, it's very different from being a pervert who has aberrant sexual practices. On a more mundane level, I also noticed from a girl's shirt that object and object is one, too.

I don't think reverse homonyms are really deep, but they can be a fun diversion. It's like a deer walking around in the woods, and his dear friends come up and are like, "What's the matter? You're just walking around doing nothing."

"Oh, no," he says. "These woods are where I would wear the fabric of nature for all four seasons if I didn't have to worry about deer life."

"Deep," his friends say. "I guess if you want to frolick in the middle of the forest, that's your deal."

"Deal. Really, though, it's important to me. You might even say it's the hart of the matter."

This is Why We Shun

2008-09-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

Recently I used the word "shun" and the guy I said it to used it the next day in an unrelated context. I think "shun" has a very high niche factor, a term I just made up to describe when a word could be used more than it is and when you hear it, you feel like using it more. For example, I'm taking a class on James Joyce, and his ginormous vocabulary expands mine: I could use the word "sordid" more. I think I used it on a test Friday; I'm tempted to use it practically every day. Sordid has a high niche factor.

I remember the first time I heard someone say "shun the nonbeliever" as an aside to me disagreeing with something, and to have his friends hiss back, "shunnn." I hadn't seen Charlie the Unicorn. (The relevant part happens a third of the way through for old geezers who can't stand to watch the whole thing. You'll see what I mean.) I thought the phrase was weird and "shun" was a harsh reaction to my position. But once I caught up with the culture, I realized they were actually being friendlier than I thought by lightening the conflict with an allusion to something I should have seen. And people think allusions are only for ancient Greek mythology.

Here's a huge example of how pop culture divides geezers (and much younger) from geezers-to-be: http://www.snorgtees.com/ This website sells t-shirts for pop culture (I counted thirty three shirts inspired by media). The beauty of the digital age is that really small markets measured proportionally are large enough measured straight-on for business. Only a thousand people in the country might buy a shirt (which is less than a tenth of one percent of America's population), but it's enough for them to make a profit. Take, for instance, the blue shirt almost halfway down:

I like this shirt because, if you're under 25, I'd say, you agree that it's hilarious. The top part comes from a level in the earliest Super Mario Brothers games (early 90s), which you know because the flower is really pixelated (video game graphics weren't good back then). The flower gives your character the ability to shoot fireballs at enemies. Obviously, your video game character having firepower doesn't make his temperature increase--video game characters don't have temperature! But when you think about firepower, you have to have some heat to make that work. It's funny to apply such rigorous scientific logic to a game, like trying to explain why a dog or shoe can buy property in Monopoly.

But that's only half the joke. The caption says "this is why i'm hot." (Geezers-to-be shun capitalization in informal use.) It isn't enough to know about Super Mario Brothers, you also have to know the song "This is why I'm hot". Anyone who listens to a radio the right way has heard this song. And you need to before you keep reading. "Hot" here is a synonym for "cool": accepted, admired, successful. In the song, Mims (that's the rapper's name) cites among other things his rapping skill, his blindly loyal fans, and his shady connections to prostitutes, drugs, and cars as reasons why he's "hot."

And then we have Mario and video games. Can you see the connection? A really catchy song that made it to #1 on the Billboard chart and was played endlessly in clubs is the setup for a bad pun. I can just picture it: some geek coming out of his cave of the latest video game console and being informed about the song "This is why I'm hot." And all the geek can relate himself to is video games. "Well," he says in an atrophied voice, "I'm hot when I have firepower." He grimaces as a stand-in for a real smile at his joke.

This shirt is for the self-aware, slightly self-deprecatory person to argue in fun that you can be cool and play video games, too. But it takes so much cultural understanding to get it that old geezers wouldn't even understand there's a conflict. And it's too bad they don't, because they want to tell kids what coolness looks like (tell me again, why shouldn't people smoke?) but can't follow the arguments about it on a practical level. On a t-shirt level. And are frustrated when kids accuse them of not understanding.

And that is why we shun, that is why we shun, that is why, that is why, that is why we shun.

My Take on the Debate

2008-09-26T20:13:00.000-07:00

It's debates like these that make me question democracy. I watched ninety minutes of our future President and some other guy, and don't know what to make of it. I was in debate all through high school and have a pretty good debate meter. I could watch the state finals match and have a solid opinion of who won and why.

But with McCain and Obama, I didn't know what was true. Voting habits, for one. McCain says Obama didn't vote for this, Obama explains why and says McCain didn't vote for that, McCain says Obama's misconstruing what the bill was about, Obama sometimes flat out says McCain has his facts wrong. They argued for at least five minutes over whether Henry Kissinger--McCain's renowned advisor--supported or didn't support talks "without preconditions."

What is a precondition? you ask. I didn't know either. To McCain, having preconditions means making a bad country tell admit it's bad before you'll meet with its leader.

Obama counters: first logically (that strategy hasn't worked with North Korea); then in a more potent way: Kissinger recently said we should meet Iran without preconditions. (Palin got tied up on this point, too, in her most recent interview.)

McCain changes things, it seems, and says that that isn't what Kissinger meant. He's known Kissinger for twenty-five years and apparently knows him well enough to rephrase him: Kissinger would never support the US President meeting a crazy foreign leader without secretaries of state first meeting.

Hold on, Obama says. That's preparation, not pre-conditions. Obama had already mentioned preparation, and while I didn't know what he meant then, it seemed reasonable to fit all your underlings meeting into that category.

But McCain disagrees and calls Obama on semantics. Obama says he's just using the terms as McCain's advisors use the terms, and that's when my buddy Jim Lehrer moves to a different question.

Fascinating interchange, but I as an above average college-educating citizen don't know where we ended! I don't want to need the pundits to have an opinion.

McCain says Obama should have visited this place in the Middle East as part of his duty on some committee. Obama says that it's a subcommittee, and that this place is so important it's taken up on a committe level. "But this is Senate insider baseball," Obama complains. Welcome to the debate. I don't think half of America could tell you how many members the Senate is composed of. Obama's annoyance at how deep he had to explain the world to us non-politicians for us to follow the argument is not because McCain pursues the trivial. We just don't know what Presidents know.

At one point in the debate Obama says he would threaten Pakistan. McCain is incredulous that he would be so open. "That's not something you say out loud." We titter nervously. It's phrased like a joke, and it does seem unusually frank for a politician to announce he would invade a country by happenstance in a debate. But how else can you talk about Pakistan? It's a foreign policy debate; how can you talk about the world with no substance? And is McCain allowed to say that there are things you aren't allowed to say? This was probably McCain's high point of the night, when his experience (he started every story with, "I've spent significant time in ...") and judgment seemed unassailable. I said to someone, "If Obama wins, he should hire McCain as his foreign policy advisor." But my impression was sullied by the finer points which went over my head.

I'm an Obama fan, of course, and couldn't resist giving the silent comeback to McCain's foreign policy stance that Obama didn't have what it took: John (as Obama called him), the world loves Obama. In China, everyone asked about O-ba-ma or Xi-la-li. You weren't even on the radar. I tried to tell them there was a second party but they hadn't even heard of you. Obama went to Germany and was so popular all you could do was say that people liked him too much. One of the leaders of UF's register-people-to-vote (for Obama) group is an Irish political science major who isn't even allowed to vote but came to America for a semester because he has a mission to convince America that the world needs Obama.

McCain could emote, Obama could think. Obama's triumph, in my opinion, came after McCain had told a sentimental story about a mother giving him her dead son's war bracelet as she implored McCain not to let his death be in vain. Obama's turn, "I've got a bracelet, too." This one was from a mother's dead son, but her command was not to let other mothers cry the same way. There are well-turned phrases on both sides, Obama's saying, and if I have to wear a cheesy bracelet to show you that I'm all in, then I'm willing to do that.

I was excited that Jim only had to push them for the first ten minutes to talk to each other, and after that couldn't get them to stop rebutting. There was clash, we would say in the debate world.

This is College Life

2008-09-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

I've wanted to do this since my junior year of high school, when I took a tour of UF and saw trees that looked perfect for being a college student in. This is college: perching out over the landscape of life; absorbed in who you are more than the book that already is; climbing trees for pleasure and profit; developing a respectable elitism over those not in your branch; escaping the ground. I think if we could read in relief--seeing everything but the text--everyone would get A's.

If I climbed one of these trees, I don't think I'd be as assiduously un-self-conscious about it as this guy was. I passed by him slowly, decided to take a picture, got out my camera, set up my shot, and left, and in the whole time positioning himself, he didn't look up once.

Other parts of college life are less poetic. I'm taking Differential Equations (Diff EQ--pronounced "diff ee cue") this semester and thought I could get by without doing any of the homework problems. I can't. We had our first test last week, and since I knew our final would supercede our lowest test grade, I wasn't too worried. Let's just say it's a bad sign when you get your test back and hope it's graded out of 50 points...

What once was lost has now been found, and what was found was not lost. My hat, which I lamented the loss of a few posts ago, ended up being right under a sofa in the Hub the next morning. I've worn it doubly fervently ever since. Yesterday I ran into Ferdaouis, who mentioned my "trademark" hat. My hat the lady-slayer is back.

I found something else recently, and thankfully it hadn't been lost. I was in a hurry to go to an RUF meeting, got there a few minutes late, rushed in and had a good time. When I came out a few hours later, though, I couldn't find my keys. I checked under my chair--no luck. But it wasn't a problem. They were right where I left them: in the ignition of my car. Which was still running. Save gas. Don't be in a rush.

And on that note, I retire to my bed, which hasn't seen me in far too long.

Pushing Girls into Sprinklers, Etc.

2008-09-23T22:52:00.000-07:00

Kim raises an interesting question: isn't it presumptuous for me to think that what I saw in my last post as a triumph of spontaneity--pushing a girl into a sprinkler--was an experience she enjoyed? Kim, I'm afraid the answer is no. You may not be aware, but girls have a special look of ecstatic outrage that is every flirtatious guy's reward. Girls from elementary school on perfect it for better mating success. The proportion of ecstasy to outrage varies by the girl. Some like the shock to be dominant, some prefer the barely-contained laughter. In any case, the look gives the same message.

The look--eyes bright and wide, mouth agape but curving toward a smile--is a rare one because it corresponds to a narrow line of thought. Angry faces, for example, are a response to the vast array of circumstances that can make someone angry: lack of sleep, late bus, bad test, etc. This look, however, only maps to one thought (personal internal rephrasing permitted): "I can't believe I'm special enough to deserve such attention!"

I have to take the time here to note that adults always peg the attention-grabbing on the boy. He--the one pulling the girls' hair or running through their jump rope game or otherwise causing a disruption--is "just trying to get attention," they say. But pay careful note: the girl's look is her acknowledgment of being singled out. The look is a heart-fluttering response to being noticed. The boy isn't trying to get attention as much as he's trying to give attention. The look is the girl's appreciation of that. It's not as simple as the lustful boys trying to corrupt the girls on the playground with their dirty tricks. It's sub-verbal communication of desire on all ends. Realizing this equalizes the situation: "it's all about attention." Duh. The teachers playing wise aren't immune from the game either if they've noticed.

But I digress. That was a lot of abstract verbs. Let's bring it back to sprinklers. You may wonder why boys are always doing such horrible things if all they want is to talk. The answer is that they don't want the situation to be unfair. A guy being sweet to a girl equals him being sweet on the girl. And he doesn't want to play his hand when he doesn't know how the girl feels in response! You can see, then, that love is only developed against the neutral backdrop of slightly mean things.

Here's an example. One year in school, a guy I'm really tempted to use his real name on but will resist and call Tyler instead knew that a girl I'll call Stephanie liked him. They had been "talking" and would go on to date. But at this point in the relationship Tyler just wanted to test the waters. It was homecoming season and practically the only thing anybody talked about was who was going with whom. Tyler, knowing this, walks up to Stephanie during the passing period and asks her a question. "Hey Steph, will you go to homecoming with me?"

Stephanie, who's ridiculously longing for Tyler, instantly agrees.

"Oh," Tyler says. "I forgot, I'm not going to homecoming."

And then he didn't.

If naivety is a good defense, Tyler's original planned called for this as a warm-up to the other girl he wanted to try it on. He was a little disappointed that Stephanie was friends with the other girl and cried to her about it. The nerve of some people.

My point is that I don't consider Tyler a completely horrible person. Mostly horrible, maybe, but he got most of the steps right. He wanted to make Stephanie feel noticed. He showed great forethought in his timing, word choice, and so on. His problem wasn't even that he wanted her to know that she would say yes, he just didn't contribute to an even distribution of knowledge. He roped her in but stayed out himself.

But as long as you're willing to engage, anything is fair: sprinklers to be pushed in, toilet paper to be lovingly wrapped around houses and cars, Facebook statuses to be updated with cryptic inside jokes. It's the still certainty that comes with a defined relationship that can capsize some people. But Kim, who could resist a face full of Florida sprinkler water? You should find a guy and try it out some time. If you want to sub-verbally communicate and all that, you know.

Just a Little Spontaneity

2008-09-22T20:23:00.000-07:00

I hastily arranged to eat lunch with some people at the Hub who were bringing a bag lunch. I was at home when the plans were made, so I said I'd have a quick lunch and then head over to hang out with them. But after I started eating I realized that if they were going to bring a lunch in a high-school throwback, it'd be fun to join them.

Four wasted Ziploc bags and a short jaunt to the Hub later, I unpacked my already partially eaten lunch:

The idea of wrapping a half-eaten sandwich amused me to no end. All the Chick-fil-A stuff in the picture is what my friends ate. So much for the picnic.

I think embracing a little spontaneity can go a long way. If your life always has to be planned out, you're not going to know how to handle it when you just can't plan it. So when you do things spontaneously it's like practicing being impulsive. Impulsiveness is a skill, of course, which sometimes you succeed at (I pushed a girl into a sprinkler last night--she loved it) and sometimes you don't (I drafted an eBay ad to sell my skin ball and donate the proceeds to charity--it's not even allowed).

But if you don't learn how to be impulsive, then when you really get seized by an impulse, like dropping two of your classes and quitting Chinese, say, then you just do it and might regret it later. So I packed a lunch to stave off withdrawing from a class today. Just wait till Wednesday comes...

Too much spontaneity can be overwhelming, of course. Like when your hat spontaneously disappears. That's right, one minute I was eating my sandwich and debating the theological implications of The Shack, the next minute I'm at Library West and my hat is nowhere to be found. I loved that hat.

Bought in Kashgar, Xinjiang, China, that hat has a long history with me. It's made it through a trip with Alex, who had previously only accompanied me on hat-losing adventures. It's been to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, various parts of China, and back to America, to rave reviews. I was standing in Turlington recently when I noticed a girl staring at me. I tried to figure out how I knew her and couldn't. "Oh," she said when she saw me looking back at her. "I just liked your hat."

And now I'm pretty sure my hat has gone on to other heads. But if you find a blue derby-ish cap with a label on the inside in faded Chinese characters describing the size (56 公分) I'd be so excited I'd even think up a reward for you. I bought too many souvenirs, for example, and don't have as many friends as I do presents. I'd give you this really cool pipe I have left. It's extendable and everything. As my good friend Ron told me today, "Put that in a blog and smoke it."

The Apple Twist Game of Life

2008-09-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

I offered Ron an apple today and he did what I, for lack of a better term, am going to call the apple twist game. You know it. You have some girl you're interested in, and you convince the apple it's meant to be by twisting the stem off as you recite the alphabet. When the stem comes off and it happens to be on the first letter of the girl's name (or, if you're desperate, her last name, or middle name, or any of the letters in her name or that make you think of her name...) then you know it's true love.

That's kinda how my week has started, only my twisting has met with a lot of resistance. Now that I'm in Advanced Chinese, I realized that I really don't want to take Chinese any more. I started taking Chinese freshman year because I hated Spanish but thought cultured people should learn another language and study abroad. So I learned Chinese and went to China, and had crazy experiences and sucked at Chinese in decreasing amounts for seven months. And now I'm back and I can have a brief conversation with any Chinese guy I meet at the pool. I can impress my language partners because they don't know an American with as good of Chinese as mine. I can talk about Chinese culture and life.

And I'm still horrible at Chinese. Some people ask me if I want to go back, but right now when I think of going back I dread not being able to say anything. This sounds silly, and I might've said it before, but in America any word I can think of I know the word for. "Drowning"? It's "drowning." "Recoil"? It's "recoil." "Magical"? I know that one, too. Taking another year of Chinese would make a dent in what's left to cover, but not enough for me to set a goal to do it. I don't think there's anything to be gained by continuing.

I haven't done anything drastic, although Dan urged me to. I get to withdraw penalty-free from two classes every 60 credits and I'm seriously considering withdrawing from both my Chinese classes. Culture class is a waste of time, and I'm coming into language class a month behind. If anyone has any wisdom, speak now or forever hold your peace.

And with that matrimonial phrase, I return to the apple twist game. I remember when I was little I liked some girl whose name started with 'e'. My twisting skills weren't highly developed at that point, though, and the stem didn't come off when I got to 'e.' So I kept twisting, subconsciously making my fingers slip so it had an air of legitimacy when I finished the alphabet, came back to 'e', and broke the stem. "Wow," I thought. "It's meant to be." I think in some way this is a good analogy for my life right now.

Before I end this post, I wanted to mention a few housekeeping issues. First, I've decided to start labeling my posts, so when you visit the real website and not the Facebook version, you can sort all my posts by the labels. So any post where I've used a fake name you can see already catalogued with the "fake names" label. Or entries in which I talk about entries (or almost blow up my house) under "housekeeping." And so on.

Also, my blog has Gator colors now. In fact, I looked up on UF's website what the official hex codes were so I'd get the color right. Links, even to my old blog, have yet to appear in the sidebar because life is too stressful for that. Next twist, please.

My History with Sports

2008-09-19T15:48:00.000-07:00

When I was little, every year Andrew and I (Melanie wasn't old enough yet) got to pick a sport to play. We could pick anything but soccer, which Mom thought was too time-consuming for a parent. So I played t-ball for three years. I wasn't very good.

Then I played ice hockey. I wasn't very good, but my coach was Wayne Gretzsky's brother.

Then I did basketball. I was so bad I didn't even make the elementary school team.

Then I did track for the rest of elementary school and both years of junior high. I wasn't very good, but not many other people wanted to run the two-mile. And the coaches knew that I'd at least show up to the track meet, so I was placed on our elementary school 4x800 relay and we set a district record despite my being the slowest. And actually, after a quick google, I found a document that shows our record is still standing:

It makes me a little sentimental to see all our old California schools--those stuck-up kids from Stockdale. And "Stine" always sounded snotty to me, like you had to say the word from your nose to get the "i" right.

My freshman year of high school I did wrestling. I wasn't very good, but not many people weighed less than 103 pounds, so my hard work had little opposition. And when there are only three kids in the district (county?) who wrestled that weight class, including yourself, it's not too hard to get second place.

For the rest of high school, I laid low and withered to a puny scraggle while I tried to get good at debate.

When I came to college, I took ballet for a year. Have you seen Step Up? Also, when the state of Florida is paying for your education, learning to dance isn't a waste of time for a juggler. But I wasn't very good.

So this year, I decided I wanted to take up a sport again. Not because I expect to be good--as you can tell, that never really deters me--but because since I'm not taking ballet, I needed something physical to do with myself. I considered racquetball, since I had about a 20 game win streak against Dan before I left for China. But in China I got sunburned and heard that I looked a lot better when I couldn't double for a ghost. I needed an outside sport.

Our whole time living in California, we got free swimming lessons every summer from someone who coached swimming full-time. That led me to believe I had good swimming form, even if I had no stamina or strength.

And hence I took up swimming. It's fantastic. Every day after class I go to the pool and wear myself out in about 40 minutes. Objectively, I suck. No question about it. Dan swam in high school and mentioned off-hand that their warm-up was a 500m. My whole workout is only a little more than that.

But I'm getting a lot better. Today I felt tired instead of just out of breath. My cardiovascular ability has finally reached a point where I'm not gasping for breath by the time I reach the other side. Now I can see that I'm just weak!

Such progress comes at a cost: I still check myself out at least three times a day in the hope that overnight I've gotten buff and tan. Hopefully, though, that tendency will fade as I actually do become buff and tan. When I get there, let me know, so I can stop posing for anything mirror-like and just walk around instead like I'm all that.

I don't have a well-defined goal for swimming, which means I could theoretically quit any day and never regret it, but for the semester or year or two it lasts I'm glad I'm doing a sport again. Any fast swimmers want to set a district relay record with me?

A Grocery List

2008-09-17T19:40:00.000-07:00

In the Facebook comments to my last blog entry, Kristina challenged me to write an interesting entry about a grocery list. Actually, she was kidding, but I'm going to try anyway.

First, some advice for grocery lists:

Don't make yours until you've received the care package your mom sent up with your brother that's been sitting in his dorm for a few days, because otherwise you might buy apples and then have twice as many as you need.
Just include a line for the "Buy 1 get one Free" box at the front of Publix. It's practically irresistible. Who knew I needed graham crackers until they were there, tempting me with their bland peanut butterability. They should just call those boxes their sirens. Or, they could just install a normal siren. But that wouldn't lure me as much.

That said, here is the only grocery list I've made this year:

It might be hard to see clearly. I have a difficult time uploading pictures that are left with sufficient resolution. But there are several things to notice about this list:

Shopping is not the only thing I do with my life. There are, as you might notice, other notes on the page besides the column on the upper right describing what all I need.
Cooking is not the only thing I do with my life, either. This is the only shopping list I've made this year because half of it wasn't food items. In fact, after the candle-burning-gone-wrong incident last week, I only realized yesterday that there's still some wax left on the actual burner, and that cooking gourmet scrambled eggs wasn't going to happen until we cleaned it. Needless to say, I have yet to use the stove.
The word "socks" is capitalized and given priority. That's because when I was in China people thought that Americans eat cheeseburgers as much as Chinese eat rice--that is, every day. So me wearing socks that went halfway up to my knees wasn't a huge misrepresentation of American fashion, though my sister disagrees:
I use legal pads a lot. That's because spiral notebooks eat up my books and I need a divider. So this legal pad accompanies my backpack pretty faithfully.

But now you're asking, what is all this stuff that's on Will's grocery list? And I'm not surprised. I am a fascinating shopper. I buy things like tacks to hang posters with (which didn't work, but I was really impressed because in America people understand English and I know the word for "tacks": it's "tacks"). I employ logical statements: (cereal and milk) OR (bagels and butter). I went for cereal and milk, of course. And butter.

What you should be asking, though, is what else is important enough to invade a grocery list's domain? I'll tell you:

A rough map of Gainesville. It only has three roads on it because that's all I know of Gainesille. And that's if I have the legal pad with me. And have already gotten lost going to Target once this year because I didn't know that Archer was the road that curved off SW 13th, but have made up for it with a beautifully curving Archer on my map.
Notes about Dubliners, James Joyce's first book.
A quote about being a genius.
Homework assignments for various classes in various stages of completion.
Notes for the speech I gave at the re-entry meeting for people who studied abroad last spring.
A critique of Buddhism's "Eightfold Path."
A quote from my Chinese culture teacher, on how to reconcile what he says about Buddhism with the book's contradictory summary: "Maybe I am correct, because I am from China." Teachers don't use the word "maybe" in America.
A link to http://freerice.com, a fantastic way to save the world, improve your chances of knowing what words like "macerate" mean ("to soften"), and look like you're paying attention during class.
A girl's name from one of my classes. I write people's names on my tablet according to where they sit in reference to me. I think "Christina Iglesias" (spelling my own) sits behind and to the left of me. In some class.
A line celebrating my mastery over Chinese culture class: "Dunhuang--I've been to the whole slide." Since all we do in that class is go through a powerpoint with no power or point and then watch more than an hour of a kungfu movie reinforcing Asian stereotypes.

And that's my grocery list, and several lists about my grocery list.

Chinese Credit and Hymns

2008-09-16T15:17:00.000-07:00

I fully understand now why UF makes you get a form signed by practically everyone before you leave to study abroad, because transferring credit is thorny once you've returned. I filled out the forms, of course, but since my program was a "UF approved" program and not a "UF" program, I had to agree to take a test to prove that I learned something while I was gone.

I took one and a half years of Chinese here, then went to China for the spring and summer semesters. In theory, I covered three semesters-worth of Chinese in the spring (for a total of three years-worth), and then was enrolled for a two-month summer session as well. Testing out of third year Chinese, as one of my Chinese friends in Chengdu put it, is just a piece of cake. (Idioms--close just doesn't cut them. Or should I say, close but no cigars.)

But then I came back, took the test, and bombed. Harder than I've bombed any test I can remember. The test I was taking was the final exam for the third year class, which is highly tailored to having been in the class. I wasn't in their class and didn't study their book, so even though I learned a lot, the Chinese I learned wasn't the Chinese they would've learned. I failed this test so bad I wasn't even phased that I had forgotten to fill out the essay portion on the back. The teacher, who's usually very stern, was really nice about my (rightful) unconfidence. "There's a speaking portion to the test, too," she said. "So even if you didn't do well on reading and writing, your interview could bump up your score."

That afternoon, I received an email from her which said, in effect, that we didn't need to bother with the interview.

Before that could happen, though, I had to turn in my test and leave. I had remained pretty composed while I was failing, but then I went outside, called my mom, and cried like I haven't since elementary school. It was so hard to go through my whole time in China knowing that my efforts might not be good enough, and then they weren't.

My situation got worse. The email that afternoon followed the brisk assessment of my test with this sentence: "The next issue is will you be able to get the credits necessary for Intermediate Chinese second semester." Let me remind you, kind reader, of what this means. I was being asked to take a second test to make sure that me being in China for more than a semester studying Chinese full time taught me enough Chinese to match being in America for a semester taking one class in Chinese.

My reaction, ironically, was rather Chinese. I felt like, while I could see how this would follow the rules to a "T", that just asking the question was demeaning and would only make me lose face. I was sure that this test would be structured exactly like the last one: highly specific with little chance to succeed. And what if I did fail? No credit for all the Chinese learning I had done. Furthermore, if I didn't take third year Chinese now (which at this point was my best option) then I couldn't be a Chinese major.

I admit, I didn't expect to even have a Chinese major when I entered college, so not graduating with one wouldn't be heartbreaking. But to go from thinking that I would just take an easy placement test and then be three classes away from fulfilling the requirements to the major all the way to the idea that it might not even be possible for me to finish the major--that's a big shift.

So I worried about my second test all weekend and tried to be reassured by my friends' well-wishing words. Then yesterday morning I took the test and did FREAKIN' AWESOME! The test wasn't the same; written passages were general, reading passages tested the most mainstream vocabulary, and I passed.

It will be slightly galling to be in the same class tomorrow with Allison, one of my friends who didn't go to China. But I clearly don't know everything they're going to learn, and it will help to be in a Chinese environment regularly.

One anecdote along with this: my friend Jenna's voicemail instructions ask you to sing her a song. I had talked with her a long time about taking this test, and after I took it, I wanted to let her know that I passed. I got a little song worked up. (I thought it was just a really short song but apparently it's only the last verse. The last line is normally "Amen.")

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
I passed-my-Chinese-test.

What was interesting is that since I took my test yesterday morning and didn't find out officially that I passed until this morning, I had this song on my mind for a whole day. And I realized that even if somehow I had failed the test, my singing this song to myself all day wouldn't be a waste, because it's what God deserves even when life is going horribly. And that's how Chinese and theology mix.

Eye Color, and Geckos

2008-09-15T18:44:00.000-07:00

Since returning from China last month, I've noticed myself paying attention to people's eye color a lot. "Wow," I find myself saying. "She has really nice green eyes." And then I'll talk to someone else and think about how blue their eyes are, or how Julie has really nice brown eyes. Even the people with uninteresting eye color (I've taken up saying that I have no eye color, so I would certainly fall into this category) get special examination from me these days.

I didn't use to be fascinated with people's eyes. But I think I have an explanation: people in America don't all have the same eye color. I never particularly noticed when I was in China that everyone's eyes were the kind of black-brown you have in mind when you're little and can't tell the difference between your mom's dark brown hair and black. But now I'm back in America and it's like people are eye candy. I mean, their eyes are candy.

I was thinking about this, or maybe I wasn't, as I drove to Bible study this evening. Then I saw there was a gecko on the hood of my car. This wasn't the first time a gecko's been all up on my hood. A few days ago I noticed one try to jump off but ran into the car again a few inches up the windshield. Then it jumped again and flew up and out of sight.

Well, I revved up as I got onto Archer and didn't see a happy end in sight for the little gecko along for the ride. "Don't jump, little buddy," I urged him.

At stoplights he roamed a little. He gradually worked his way up next to the windshield wipers, where he distracted me from the road so much that I had to totally disregard his life in order to preserve mine.

But for several minutes, he just looked into my eyes. I, of course, was too responsible to return anything but a look of surprise that he still had eyes that hadn't been run over, but it was a bonding moment. Particularly a bonding moment when I was driving at 45 and could see his reptilian flab whipping with the wind. But good ole' van der Waals forces kept his feet pasted to my window like a Jedi under Vader's deathgrip.

He should just be glad he didn't hitch a ride when I was driving to Orlando. I expect help paying for gas then. He lasted for the trip, though, and when I got out of my car before I went inside I made sure he was still there. He was, clinging now to my driver's side door. I thought it was a good moment for him and hoped I didn't decapitate his gecko head when I shut the door. I didn't, though.

The moral of this story is that if I notice your eye color, you're probably not crawling on my windshield when the car is moving.

A Series of Tubes

2008-09-13T15:03:00.000-07:00

(For help with the title's pun, see here and here.)

Studious people at college can easily get so wrapped up in the intellectual euphoria of class that they forget they have bodies. Freshman year around Thanksgiving I talked to this girl who, in a rare moment of insight, pointed out that in college we practically never have physical contact with each other. I had to admit that she was right. In class you don't hang on people. Eating out you don't ever touch people. Idly looking at all your friends' recently updated profiles on Facebook certainly doesn't involve real bodies. If you accidentally come into contact with someone walking, you apologize for getting in their way. If you meet someone knew, your reward is a handshake. But when you're focused on class or haven't made a lot of friends, I could easily imagine people going a whole week without touching someone. (Then the girl and I dated and broke up partially because I wasn't as touchy-feely as she thought I should be.)

The less bookish students are aware of this problem. That's why they go clubbing. That's why they hook up freely. That's why they get drunk. You don't forget people have feelings and needs when you need to prop up your friend who's totally wasted and get him to a couch because he can't control his body well enough to do it himself. Me being the intellectual type, I just imagine descriptive metaphors and painful situations instead of doing it myself.

But I have a solution: tubing down the Ichetucknee river. The Ichetucknee river (colloquially pronounced "Ichnetuckee") is about 45 minutes from campus and is a pretty inexpensive way to enjoy a Saturday in which Florida is not slaughtering another football team. I went with RUF, a Christian group that I've begun to get involved with, comprising about 40 people.

Tubing is fun for about 3 minutes. Then you need to find a way to make floating more fun. Guys tip the boats, girls shriek and complain. It's a great time. But what's most fun is trying to stand up on your tube. Once one person wobbles up for a few seconds, it becomes a challenge and everyone who's fun wants to try.

The thing about standing on your tube is that it's easier when you do it with others. You can get on your knees and get one foot up, and get the second up, and flail about wildly by yourself, but if you have a friend next to you doing it then when you start to fall one way, they can help you, and when they start to fall, you can brace them. All it takes is a little hand holding.

Andrew (who in the real world insists on "Smitty") and I did the brotherly duo raft. We linked together with Dan and showed RUF that mastering the inner tube is possible. Then we added people, got a square, eventually worked out a hexagon. Others were feebly trying but we absorbed their efforts and taught them how to do it right. If I hadn't been having so much fun, I think seeing a group of college students tottering on blown-up pieces of plastic and all collapsing into the water together would have looked ridiculous. But it was a totally acceptable way to get touch into life's equation.

At the end, once we had gotten about ten people all standing for a brief moment in a kinda circular shape, the challenge became getting as many people as possible onto one raft. Similar to this, but in the water:

And we used Andrew and my double tube for added stability and size. We managed four, and then tried to get five. I was in the middle straddling the two holes where people usually sit, and then people were crouched ready to stand on each side. There isn't much room for imbalance when there's so little room, and we never got it. But in the process the five of us were so close that we were practically piled on each other. And it was a great time.

So save the world, float the Ichnetuckee.

Fall Cleaning, Part 1 and 2

2008-09-11T15:40:00.000-07:00

This story has two parts. First, Dan and I decided to clean. Then, we decided to clean some more. Read further and you'll see what I mean.

Dan and I have a problem saying no to things. Over the course of the two years we've been roommates, we've acquired lots of stuff that we don't use.

Like pots:

Keep in mind, there are only two of us. This picture isn't a close-up because we wanted to focus on the counter full of pots, it's because that's how far you can back up in our kitchen.

So Dan and I toss things out with abandon (literally) into a to-Goodwill box or two. Exotic spices, years-old food coloring, insect repellant. "Have you ever used this?" I asked Dan about a pound of sea salt he was storing on the top shelf.

"No, but I will. Really."

"Good, because otherwise we should just throw it out now."

We moved things that we wanted to keep but wouldn't use (like a salt and pepper shaker set from Dan's deceased grandmother) to the private clutter of our room. For example, out of the twenty plus knives we had piled up at one point, only five made the cut. But Dan and I both couldn't part from our knife sets complete with the block of wood you stick the knives into.

Eventually we finished throwing things out and I left for the evening. While I was gone, I got a text. "You might want the bug spray after all..." it said ominously. What did that mean? Was there a colony of ants in an undusted corner? But then I got home and saw that Dan had taken the idea of use-it-or-you-lose-it seriously:

So Dan and I camped out in the tent two nights ago.

And so the first cleaning was finished, and part two begins. I'll start with the "after" picture so you don't worry that our house burned down. We're trying to look penitent but have way too much adrenaline from not being dead:

But then Dan and I were talking last night about how when you feel in a rush all the time, watching a flame is good for tranquility. Dan took a pan lid from the to-Goodwill pile, found the birthday candles we had thrown away, and we discovered the joy of fire. For several candles-worth.

Then we realized that all the olive oil we were donating to Goodwill would be a good addition. We were disappointed that no matter how we swished the various oils around, they didn't light on fire. "I thought oil was flammable," Dan mused to himself as we moved on to the lighter fluid I usually reserve for my juggling torches.

The lighter fluid gave a nice effect because it sat on the top and gave a small lake of fire:

The problem was that the lighter fluid diluted the mixture so much that the wax wouldn't congeal again. The solution, of course, was to transfer our concoction to a to-Goodwill pot and heat it up. All the excess would boil off, and we'd have a wax factory on our hands.

When it started smoking, I guessed that something was wrong. "Dan, we should turn the stove off. I don't know why it would smoke like that." We decided I was overreacting and I just moved to turn the heat down.

Then either I jostled the pot or the heat finally got to the solution, because it erupted in flames. When I say flames I don't mean baby coming-out-of-a-lid flames. These flames were at least a foot high and had smoke pouring through the house like they couldn't advertise our disaster fast enough.

This did not help our tranquility. I suggested suffocating the fire with a lid, but we rushed it and only covered half the fire. Dan took out the fire extinguisher.

"Dan, that's a bad idea. It's going to blow everything away!"

But in the heat of the moment, we canned my "use a lid" idea and Dan just opened fire with the fire extinguisher. Flaming oily wax splattered all over the walls that had just been repainted this summer, leaving half the mix still in the pan. I used the lid again, contained the fire, and brought the pan outside, where it suffocated in peace away from our house. And so we decided to do some fall cleaning, again:

The picture is foggy from the smoke. Don't play with matches, kids.

Assumptions

2008-09-10T20:37:00.001-07:00

I think intelligence lies in being able to change your assumptions. Assumptions are generalities, of course, so I'm aware that what I'm saying isn't true in every case. That's what going to college is good for. So in honor of the beginning of school, I have four assumptions I've been learning about. I'll start with the most controversial:

1) Assume that senior girls are taken. I'm up to an age where it's worth looking at a girl's left hand to determine her stage of life. This summer at least ten couples I know got engaged. And now every senior girl worth her salt wants to get married and is in a relationship desperately pursuing that. I know, Alice is a senior and she's single. But I strongly suspect she's not worth her salt, either. (There's my first case of changing somebody's name. I should have a career in espionage if blogging doesn't work out.)

This is a difficult assumption for me to work into, because in the Christian scene, girls are single by default. They're all too frosty for the uncertainty of relationships. But the cool ones are single, too, because Christian guys haven't had practice wooing girls.

So now there's a tendency to continue that thinking. But senior girls are the most likely ones to have a long-distance relationship with some guy who's graduated and is just waiting to propose. Long-distance relationship for freshman can practically be discarded. Unless they've braved a summer together in high school, I haven't known a couple to survive the end of the year. Senior girls' dating lives are much more opaque. The helpful "relationship status" on Facebook is too crude for their maturity, and that's a good reason to assume that seniors are taken.

2) Americans haven't been to Kazakhstan. I saw a kid the other day wearing a shirt with the border of Kazakhstan, the country's name, and some quote from Borat. It took me longer to process the fact that most people who have seen Borat don't know Kazakhstan is a real country than to think that this guy had probably gotten it as a souvenir. After all, I'm wearing my Naxi t-shirt today which features the last living pictographic language in the world, because I've been to a place with lots of Naxi people. I almost asked him when he went to Kazakhstan, but then I caught myself.

3) Chinese teachers who speak really good English don't have American values. Today in my horribly boring "Chinese culture" class when we weren't watching a movie about China which featured several places I've personally been to, we had to do an exercise in interpreting Confucian sayings. Every group was supposed to pick a proverb from the book that no one's actually read and explain it to the class.

One group's proverb was "The gentleman desires to be halting in speech but quick in action. "Their spokesperson summarized it well for modern-day kids: "You gotta walk the walk," he said. "Can't just talk the talk."

Our teacher listened to this and thought that the group was saying that talking was a deficit. "Well, that's not quite right. Girls talk a lot," he said. "Growing up, girls talk to their mothers more than boys do, right? But they can still know things sometimes."

I realized that he was trying to defend women's rights. To him as a Chinese man, women obviously talk a lot, but he was being magnimous by saying that this didn't necessarily disqualify women from being wise.

All the American girls in the class heard him and thought he was the one being sexist. "No," one girl said out loud when he rhetorically asked if little girls learn to talk to their mothers. Because as Americans, our idea of equality is that women should act just like men do, and our teacher's saying that girls talk more denies that.

4) Oil is flammable even if a match doesn't ignite it. But that's just a teaser for my next post...

Your Browsing Experience

2008-09-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Every blog should take into account its audience. For example, I recently learned that when you "import" a blog into Facebook, the only clue that the note you're reading isn't a random note is a small link at the bottom that says, "View original post." So I think I'm just going to have to include the word BLOG in my first several posts, and many links to my blog (s).

But there's a fundamentally different problem I have to deal with, and that's the "old geezer" and "geezer-to-be" schism. I'm realizing that normal blogs, which geezers-to-be feel are an extension of the self (remember Xanga?), are not as intuitive for old geezers.

I have some theories about this. "Old" is when you're old enough that you think you shouldn't have to learn any more, and for anyone who turned old before the Internet came around, there's limited progress that can be made. Not because once you turn 65 or 70 or 90 that your brain stops working, but because you think all this stuff that you didn't need before you shouldn't need now. Old geezers don't want progress.

I'm sure I'll be the same way eventually. I'll have just retired from Supreme Court-hood and will say to all the young whippersnappers around me. "Automatic altitude adjustment on my flying car? But there are so many options to it... Do I want 'Wind Optimization'? And 'Nature Preservation'? Or maybe just 'Fuel Efficiency.' I just want to fly! You know, back in my day, we didn't have to make all these choices. There was manual and automatic, sure, and then hybrid, but nothing complicated like this..."

But I should bring up some examples, because I'm pretty sure we geezers-to-be don't understand the depth of old geezers' inability to use technology.

My mom had a conversation with my sister that brought it to my attention after my first post. "'Can you believe it?' she joked with Melanie. 'Will actually expects people to listen to a song on Youtube and read his version of the lyrics. At the same time.'"

I had hoped that everyone would understand tabbed browsing, so in one tab you're waiting for the New York Times to load and in another tab you're cruising Facebook to talk to friends you're friends with. But I hadn't considered that using two tabs at once could overwhelm someone. If it's just a problem of unfamiliarity, then all I have to say is that if you click on a link while you're holding "Ctrl" then the page will open in a new tab. But if it's a problem with capacity, then I have no solution.

If all you want to manage is one thing at a time, your browsing experience is so much different than mine. I feel lonely if I only have one tab up. My homepage used to start with four websites (accomplished by using the "|" sign between addresses in Firefox's homepage options). I routinely IM several people at a time while writing on people's wall, scrolling through the news, and reading the latest on a few blogs. With a Wikipedia tab up for convenience if I need to look something up.

Or look at my little joke about links at the top of this post. The savvy reader would see the words "many links to my blog," see that there were many links, and would assume (correctly) that they all linked to my blog. That's a joke, see, because all those links are redundant. It's also funny because so many links look like advertising, but it's useless to advertise your own website on your website. And if the savvy readers weren't sure, they would move the mouse over the links, notice that in the bottom of the browser they all pointed to the same website, and would also get the joke. And even if they didn't do that, they would hold Ctrl and open each one in a new tab, and then see that the tabs were all the same page.

But the old geezer, being adventurous enough to trek beyond the safety of one page, would click on the first link, be directed to the same page, and then be confused why it didn't work. After a few attempts, they would frustratingly be defeated until they got to this paragraph and lamented being old.

And all I can think of right now is that when I was in China, I learned the word for "generation gap." But I never learned how to say "exacerbated by technology." Maybe I should pull up another tab and google the translation.

Here's the Kick Off

2008-09-07T21:25:00.000-07:00

Let's face it. I'm back from China and my mom and at least two other people have said that I should keep blogging. I did have a fantastically well-received blog (for a day at least), but I think it's more that blogging is just a hard habit to break. I still go through the day storing up anecdotes but don't have any release for them.

Nevertheless, there are some changes from my blog about being in China. The most notable from my side is that I will be able to actually visit my own blog. Something about America and freedom of expression. Other than that, though, is the fact that people in America speak English. And if I write about them, they can read it. So I have to be careful not to make knowing me a liability. (If I had a problem learning people's names before, I predict it's going to get worse, because now I'm going to be making up a lot of names.)

This blog, to be updated roughly every other day, is geared toward everyone. For convenience, I divide that into "old geezers" and "geezers-to-be." As a college student, I am a geezer-to-be, and if you haven't even heard of Numa Numa then you're an old geezer.

For us geezers-to-be, I will include pop culture references. But for the old geezers, I'll try to explain them. Did you catch the Relient K allusion? Not if you're not a real fan. (Alternate lyrics to Kick Off provided here:

Here's the kick off
Hope you're not sick of
Will's blogging way
Or all the posts he made
Cuz then you'll wanna click a different page!
(duhn duhn duhn dun, dun, boww)

I encourage you to sing along while listening to the YouTube'd version.)

Other housekeeping matters: I intend to import these blog entries as Facebook notes. When I do that, I won't know how many people read my blog because Facebook won't tell me how many people are just reading it on their site. But why have a smaller audience just so I can count the smallness? Comment to let me know you're there, because it makes me feel happy. And otherwise it's practically eavesdropping, and that's not polite. I'm willing to comment now, too. I don't know why I thought the narrator should be so haughty in my last blog.

I'll link to other people's blogs, and make it look less ugly. But not tonight. Right now I have some math proofs to do.

This is college life. Go Gators! And get excited, because Will has a blog.