Adventures in Leading (Part II)

... And not too long later, I'm really excited about this leading thing. I'm super lucky that a few really great follows actually want to help me learn and can give me really helpful feedback while I repeatedly epic fail at trying to lead them through things (thanks for being such awesome sports, guys! :]). So I'm slowly making progress -- there are at least a couple of things that I can lead pretty smoothly now. (Shock!) It's so satisfying to be able to successfully execute a move. :D

A couple random thoughts from my Adventures in Leading thus far:

In blues, since there's no basic step, there isn't really any sort of framework or structure to rely on to know where your follow should be, or which foot her weight is on. But trying to start a move irrespective of where your follow's weight is is a sure recipe for someone tripping over themselves (or their partner). So a good lead has to kind of follow the follow after initiating a move, keeping track of where her feet are, and going with her so *he* can match up with *her* before trying to initiate anything else. Trying to do a simple inside turn, I at first had to watch the girl's feet in order to time when to pull her back into closed position, but I figured that one should be able to just feel where her weight is without looking and be able to get the timing just by the feel... and sure enough, after trying it a few times without looking, I actually got the timing down, and it feels surprisingly smooth now! Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised. It's always easiest for me to follow with my eyes closed, presumably since there's much less sensory input to distract me from the most important thing in partner dancing: connection.

The other thing is that, after getting a lot of feedback over many attempts at executing various moves, it seems that, at least in terms of the physical aspects, there does seem to be a fair amount of symmetry in the way I and my follow experience a move. That is, it seems like if it feels to me like it went smoothly, my follow generally agrees that it felt smooth; and if I think something didn't feel quite right, my follow also generally agrees. This is really, really good to know -- knowing I can trust my own perception of things will help me a lot when dancing with follows who don't give me much feedback.

I have to wonder about leads who don't also know what it's like to follow though... After dancing with a rough lead, I can't help but wonder if it actually feels smooth and enjoyable to him, or if he thinks I must enjoy being jarred and tossed around. During one recent dance, I couldn't stop myself from visibly wincing (and uttering some kind of corresponding sound) when a guy did something that felt much more like a martial arts move than a dance move (my wrist was very unhappy as a result :|).

On a related note, I'm finally starting to be able to relate to a lot of things I get from beginner leads, like how challenging it is at first to string together various moves naturally, even once you've learned to do them well individually. One point of interest for me though, is about hand-squeezing. As I expressed here not too long ago, the poor-leading habit that I hate the most is squeezing a follow's hands. I totally got caught doing that exact thing the other day. (Well, I'm not sure if I was squeezing -- I don't *think* I was -- but my thumbs were down! Bad!!) But unlike the other beginner-lead challenges I've encountered firsthand so far, this one makes me have even less sympathy for leads who do this. I must tell all my follows to yell at me every time I do it. :|!

And speaking of dance injuries, I seem to have incurred my first one. I don't mean the flesh-wound kind, where someone elbows you in the face, or stomps on your foot in heels -- those don't bother me any longer than the immediate pain distracts me from dancing (i.e., not very long at all). But last weekend, through a combination of mild foolishness on my part and what happened to be awful timing, I almost broke my arm off at the elbow. It was too fast for me to really remember what happened, but I definitely felt something like the beginnings of a snap, and it hurt like hell well after that dance. It felt more or less fine by later that night (except when I fully extended my arm), but I figured I should get it checked out just in case... I didn't end up doing so during the week, but it wasn't really bothering me until this weekend... when I stupidly tried to lead something that involved rotating quickly and building up lots of momentum, then releasing the girl from closed position (so she kind of flies away from the pivot point) and stopping her with my (apparently not-so-intact) right arm. Bad, bad idea. >_< Add to that the aforementioned kung-fu lead I danced with later that night, and it looks like I have thoroughly messed up my elbow. Not sure what to do, given that not dancing isn't an option. :\

Adventures in Leading (Part I)

So about a week ago, I started actually trying to learn how to lead in blues. I ended up (unexpectedly) diving in face first, since the day after my first real attempt, I had to lead in a so-not-beginner progressive lesson, and the stuff we were doing throughout the class involved a crapload of elements which I had no idea how to lead (being that I couldn't really lead anything at all :P). I don't remember what it was like the first few months I started dancing, but since I can remember, dancing as a follow has involved basically no conscious thought on my part. So I never really pay much attention in lessons, since it's never particularly useful to do so. I just follow, and when something isn't working, I ask questions specific to the problems my partner and I are having. So in this class, in addition to not knowing how to lead anything that all the other leads already knew, I had to actually pay attention and take information into my brain for conscious retrieval. Epic. Fail. Being so unaccustomed to paying attention in dance class, I couldn't help but zone out every two seconds, which made remembering what the instructor was demonstrating impossible. Not that retaining it would've helped me much, since I didn't know how to lead any of the components anyway. Gah. But I tried (and tried, and tried), and it was impossibly hard, and by the end of the hour and a half my brain felt like it had short circuited and melted and was leaking out of my ears, and I wanted to collapse into a crumpled pile on the floor. Like, actually.

I think that's actually the most awful dance has ever made me feel (brain pain FTL!). In any case, I was really frustrated because the kind words of reassurance people were giving me (while I appreciated the sentiment) weren't helping anything. People seem to think that when I say I can't lead or am bad at leading, I mean I can't-and-won't-ever-be-able-to lead or lead well, in a boo-hoo, woe-is-me sort of way. That's not how I feel at all -- I just know that I currently don't know how to do anything, and I want to learn how to do stuff (properly), which requires a) being shown how to do stuff, and b) recognizing when I'm not doing it properly, so I can figure out how to fix it. This is why comments like "No, you're a good lead!" and "You'll be fine!" just frustrate and dishearten me more -- they're not constructive, don't actually help me get anywhere, and make me feel like I won't be able to get the kind of feedback I actually need in order to improve (i.e., hopeless :P).

But moving on... One observation I've made so far has to do with connection and counterbalance. As a salsa dancer, one of the biggest challenges for me as a follow in blues is connecting with my back to my lead's hand/arm. I've been told my closed position following is good (maybe from having done some tango back when I started dancing?), but that relies on connection through the front of the torso and through the legs. Once there's some space between me and my lead, we rely hugely on connection between his arm and my back, and that's something that's totally foreign to salsa -- being in almost constant opposition to one another, and trusting your partner to counterbalance you. (There's exactly one common move I can think of in salsa, called a Coca-Cola around here, that uses this same kind of connection. But even that doesn't require deliberate connection on the part of either lead or follow, since there's centripetal force there creating that connection whether you want it or not.)

This is the same thing that I'm having the most trouble with now that I'm trying to lead: I'm used to handling my own weight and keeping my own balance, and suddenly I have to handle not only my own weight, but also the weight of my follow -- and I have to do it almost all the time, because of the nature of the connection. I practiced leading a bunch in one night, and the next morning I woke up with my entire back and whole right side incredibly sore. (This despite forgetting to counterbalance my follow almost all the time, and almost toppling both of us over repeatedly as a result. :|) I made various semi-joking comments about having to work out if I want to be able to lead, but the fact that other blues leads I know who come from salsa had the same problem when they started in blues tells me that it isn't just that I'm a lame weakling -- the kind of connection in blues is indeed very different from salsa.

When just starting to learn how, trying to lead in a dance you already dance as a follow is like trying to write poetry in a language you've only just begun to learn.

Life, quantified

I just read this article about self-measurement. It's full of accounts of people who have undertaken self-measurement projects for various reasons, like trying to optimize their running performance, quit smoking, quit coffee, deal with sleep disorders, or improve productivity at work. I found the article quite thought-provoking in its own right, although all the descriptions of people hooking themselves up to sensors of various kinds made me think of this talk about how games will invade real live, as well as this TED Talk about harnessing the power of gamers, both of which I found quite interesting from the perspective of trying to shape the everyday behaviour of gamers (or would-be gamers... or maybe just anyone, really) by introducing into real life some of the same elements that drive them to happily spend hours training/leveling-up their characters, going after some kind of epic weapon or gear, or trying to beat a high score. I refer to gamers as if they're some kind of foreign group, but there's a very good reason I've deliberately avoided playing most video games for the last few years... in any case, my interest in the issue comes from a desire to more effectively shape my own behaviour.

I think I would do well to keep a detailed record of my activities, even just for some set period of time like a week or two. I can't even imagine how much time I don't realize I waste doing absolutely nothing of any productive value (entertainment/recreation counting as productive in some sense). I think seeing some hard numbers in front of me would shock some self-control into me. That's certainly the case when it comes to my spending habits, at least.

On a different note, the social aspects of self-measurement (when the collected information is broadcast) are also really interesting... In situations like trying to quit smoking, I could see how making your data available to friends might enable them to help keep you on track. But this part of the article gave me pause:

Jon Cousins is a 54-year-old software entrepreneur and former advertising executive who was given a diagnosis in 2007 of bipolar affective disorder. Cousins built a self-tracking system to help manage his feelings, which he called Moodscope; now used by about 1,000 others, Moodscope automatically sends e-mail with mood-tracking scores to a few select friends. “My life was changed radically,” Cousins told me recently in an e-mail message. “If I got the odd dip, my friends wanted to know why.” Sometimes, after he records a low score, a friend might simply e-mail: “?” Cousins replies, and that act alone makes him feel better.

As uncomfortable as I am with the idea of, say, Google Latitude, I think I'd really like to know when my friends are feeling down or especially happy, even if it isn't over something they'd consider worth going out of their way to talk to or tell someone about. At the same time, I'm not sure how I'd feel about sharing that kind of info if I were to track it myself... though I guess if the sharing bit were user-controlled, that would be less of an issue.

Today's lesson about going with the flow

Today we had the second annual meeting of Ontario iGEM teams. Last year's meeting was held at Waterloo since we were the ones organizing it, but with the aim of increasing iGEM's visibility within the microbiology community (which has a lot to offer iGEM in terms of faculty and graduate student support), we decided to hold this year's meeting at the 60th Conference of the Canadian Society of Microbiologists. Despite a number of hiccups and hitches in the organization process, the meeting ended up being fairly productive, and I was (somewhat unsettlingly) satisfied at the end of the day. Other musings regarding the meeting will most likely end up here at some point, but I think I learned one important lesson today about going with the flow:

Do not argue about going with the flow.

Going with the flow is something that will happen when it's necessary, whether you plan for it or not. No matter how much of a consensus a group might reach on following a given Super-Awesome Plan of Action, if the plan just doesn't seem to be working in practice, like it or not, the group will then have to devise another strategy — whether this means scaling back a project, redefining previously assigned roles and responsibilities, or any other changes that are appropriate for the given circumstances. But it seems like, in many cases, it's difficult to generate agreement to play things by ear, perhaps because such arguments are often mistaken for opposition to having a Plan A.

Of course you want to come up with the best plan you can for achieving your objectives, but, even when you've learned from firsthand experience that such plans aren't especially likely to pan out as hoped, trying to get people to agree to be ready to adapt if and when the situation calls for it is a waste of energy given that they won't have a choice in the matter when it comes down to it.

There's more I wanted to say on this, but I am losing (very badly) the battle to stay awake, so I leave it at that for now.

Something from nothing

For a while now, I've been meaning to write about my recent thoughts on my iGEM team, but (despite multiple reminders in the form of blog posts by other iGEM-ers) I kept getting distracted by other things. Somewhat ironically, a chat with a certain blues-ing gentleman about my lack of dance-related posts lead to discussion of torch-passing, which is exactly what's been on my mind regarding iGEM.

When I first got involved with iGEM in 2007, there wasn't really much of a team. It was our first year competing independently (rather than as a joint team with UofT, as in the two years before), and though there were a handful of interested students, there was essentially no structure or organization, let alone defined roles. At the start of the competition year, aside from a bit of money we had left over from the previous year's fundraising efforts, we also lacked resources (not to mention lab space).

That first year, three of us were doing almost everything, from fundraising to securing lab space, to designing the project and learning lab techniques, to working in the lab until ridiculous hours of the night and training other students in the lab skills we'd only just learned ourselves. A few other students were involved as well, but it was the three of us who were trying to build a team from pretty much nothing, holding everything together and driving it forward. (I remember how it was like Christmas, the day our first set of equipment and lab supplies came in: pipettes, glassware, gel rigs, agarose, media, petri plates... and a new prof in Biology was generous enough to let us use his then-empty lab, since he had no students at the time. Later we migrated up to the bacterial genetics lab that one of the three of us was working in that summer, which in turn led to that prof getting interested in iGEM and becoming one of our faculty advisors.)

At some point Andre likened our efforts to get the team going to trying to erect a tent from the inside: having to hold up the sides and establish the structure, until hopefully it gets stable enough that you can let go and get out of it without it falling down on you.

By spring 2008 the three of us had all graduated, but I was still in Waterloo doing research, and ended up holding the tent up myself. Without the other two equally committed members to rely on and to share the workload with, I gained a new perspective on developing the team. And being the last remaining member of that trio of insanity, the issue of how to build the team into one that would be sustainable long-term loomed huge in my mind: at that point there was no one else I could have handed things off to, and the situation wasn't helped by Waterloo's co-op program, in which students alternate work and study each term (nor the fact that the most knowledgeable/experienced students are generally the ones who are about to graduate). So the focus shifted onto recruitment, as well as training and integrating new members, with the hope that some of them would stick around and take on leadership roles themselves.

And it's a very tricky thing, finding that perfect combination: enough interest in the iGEM competition itself; enough technical background to be able to contribute immediately (or enough desire to learn the necessary background independently); enough time/energy to put into the team, on top of coursework or work hours; enough terms remaining in their degree that they'll be around to put the benefit of their iGEM experience back into the team; enough of a sense of the big picture that they recognize the need to groom others to eventually fill the vacuum they'll leave when they graduate. Anyone with some subset of these things can make a hugely valuable contribution to the team, but it's those few with just the right combination who will be the ones making the team successful in the long term.

Despite how jaded I quickly became about the vast majority of students who get involved solely to gain some lab experience or a line on their CV/resume -- into whom we'd pour substantial time and effort and resources, only for them to disappear come midterm season (perfectly understandable, but still disappointing and frustrating) -- there was always something about the beginning of each term that got me excited and filled me with optimism. So much promise and potential. Of course, then midterms would hit, people would disappear, and I'd feel like we were back where we started and that I'd been delusional in thinking that this would be the best term yet. But looking back, it was never delusion: each term was indeed better than the last, and, one by one, we were indeed gaining people who were in it for the long haul, taking the lead on design, lab, modeling, software and outreach.

Since I first became the last person holding up the tent, I've seen my role as doing whatever was necessary for the team to be as effective as possible. Early on, that meant things like training people in the lab, leading design meetings, and preparing funding proposals. As other members gained experience and took on more responsibility, my role adapted accordingly and became a more high-level team coordination/big-picture guidance sort of deal. Ultimately, I'll know I've been successful once I've made myself completely obsolete.

Last summer I even made run for it, seeing what would happen if I closed my eyes and my ears and left the tent... and most things actually continued to stand up pretty well. (... aside from fundraising... the financial situation gave me a bit of a heart attack when I came back in the fall... and member retention from that term was also quite dismal; both of these things mean the long-term view of the team needs strengthening).

Fast-forward to spring 2010. I've never been so optimistic about the team, and with good reason, it seems. Last week, for instance: I find myself sitting in a design/mathematical modeling meeting with Andre (who returned to Waterloo for grad school) beside me. To my right, the current modeling activities are being explained to the new members of the modeling group. To my left, at the far side of the room, the design team has split into two subgroups, each with a relatively new member explaining the current design to even newer members and guiding them in doing further research. This inexplicably warm, fuzzy feeling hits me. I lean over to Andre: "Hey, look... look around... look at what everyone's doing... and we're not doing *anything*...!"

So we're getting there. I'm really excited about the group we have around this term: two new co-ops who've quickly taken on leadership roles and seem genuinely committed to the team, plus a handful of returning members who are taking the lead on various aspects of the team's activities. A couple of these members have even been thinking longer-term, about the direction of the team, and how to keep it sustainable -- this in particular makes me super happy, since it's one of the hardest things to impart to those who don't really start thinking about it on their own. The one piece that's still kind of missing is fundraising, but if that's the only thing I have to worry about at the moment, that's still pretty awesome in my book.

Partly because this randomly just came to mind and partly because I can't think of a better way to wrap up this insanely long post, I leave you with a video from the 2007 iGEM awards ceremony. The finalists had given their presentations, the judges left to deliberate, teams started going up onto the stage to take photos while they waited, and the following spontaneously ensued:

Release me from your Kung-Fu Grip™.

There are already plenty of dance-floor etiquette guides and Top 10 "Do"s and "Don't"s lists out there, but having just been asked to contribute to another one has put me in a bit of a ranting mode, and I feel like posting this here.

I generally don't turn down dances unless I'm about to literally collapse from exhaustion, but there are a few things that make me not want to dance with a guy (even if it doesn't mean I'll refuse him as a result). Things like rhythm problems and a lot of leading-related issues can get frustrating sometimes, sure, but at the same time, the only way to improve on those things is to practice, which means dancing with as many people as you can. And I've certainly had plenty of fun dancing with complete beginners, so it's really not experience-related things that bother me.

The first two things are unpleasant, but not total deal-breakers. (And since my experience comes from dancing with guys, these are about guys, but they could just as easily apply to girls.)

Smelliness is something I really don't encounter very often, but when I do, I admit I try to avoid dancing with the person. I always feel guilty about it though, especially when I'd otherwise enjoy dances with said person. At the same time, I'm also one of those people who's really sensitive to perfume-y stuff (my biggest fear at a concert is ending up next to someone wearing perfume; I can barely breath, and it really does ruin the entire thing for me x_x), so dousing oneself in cologne is also not the answer. Either way, if I find myself trying to hold my breath (or awkwardly turn my head away) half the time we're dancing, I probably won't want to dance with the guy again any time soon.

We all get sweaty while dancing (if you're not sweaty, you're not dancing hard enough!), but guys who *always* end up with their shirts literally soaking wet should consider bringing as many changes of shirt as they need to make it through the night. I know guys who go through at least three in a night -- and the girls appreciate it! If that's not feasible for whatever reason, or if you simply don't want to, fine, but then don't draw the girl into tight closed position; I sweat enough myself, and don't need my clothes getting completely soaked in one dance, just from being held up against a guy's dripping-wet shirt. That said, even that is (more or less) forgivable... but the thing that really makes me not want to dance with a guy is being dripped on while dancing. Yes, dripped *on*. As in, "Hey, is there a leak in the ceiling?" If, by the end of a dance, shaking your head "no" would shower bystanders in your sweat, you need to invest in a towel and *use it* after each dance.

Now, both of these things have nothing to do with actual dancing, and I've danced with people who I would really like dancing with if not for those issues. So even if they'd make me not want to dance with a guy as much, I don't hold it against him and, in fact, may wish he would address the issue so I could dance with him more. This, however, does not apply my last point:

For me, the biggest no-no by far is hand-squeezing. Step on my feet, crash me into people, elbow me in the face -- whatever; I may not like it, and sure it may mean you need to work on control/attention or something (I know I sure do), but at least it's just an accident. As someone who plays guitar and therefore values her fingers, if a guy won't stop squeezing my hands (or at least make an obvious, significant effort) after I ask him to, I will not dance with him again, nor will I feel guilty about it. There's never any reason to close the thumbs down on a girl's fingers (especially when turning her!), let alone keep a death-grip on her hands the whole time. One could call this an experience-related issue, but unlike those other ways in which a guy can injure a girl, this one is completely within his control, regardless of what the girl or anyone else on the floor is doing. And unlike other aspects of rough leading, this one requires no feedback from your partner in order to fix it, so there's no excuse for doing it consistently. Honestly, if all you can do while concentrating on not crushing a girl's hands is the basic step and a right-hand turn, that's all you *should* be doing until you don't need to think about it anymore. I'll take a simple dance over injured fingers any day.

Unrequited dance (cont'd.)

So I pondered some time ago about the symmetry of partner dances and whether there can be a great disparity between how each partner perceives a dance in terms of enjoyment and (of more interest to me) connection/chemistry.

It seems that quite significant a disparity is possible. I find this unfortunate.

In the case where partner A experiences something in the dance that partner B doesn't, I have to wonder whether it could indeed be connection/chemistry at all that A feels, as opposed to enjoyment of another sort.

Not to suggest that I haven't been partner A (I certainly have, many times, at least with respect to general enjoyment), but there's something that bothers me about the idea of deriving enjoyment from a dance in the absence of chemistry with one's partner, especially if it's significantly asymmetrical. A very specific analogy comes to mind, but maybe I'll leave that for another time... In the meantime, I have more to ponder...

Lost memories

I just read this BBC article about how data on optical discs doesn't last nearly as long as one might think (or hope), even irrespective of brand name. A friend of mine (who I trust quite blindly when it comes to topics like this) had told me a long while ago that DVDs don't last especially long and that hard drives are much better for storing one's data. Partially because of this and partially because it's just way easier, basically all of my data (excluding the obscene amounts of anime I amassed from high school through second year) lives on a couple of hard drives and my computers themselves.

Lately I've been thinking about this data of mine, and I've had this nagging inclination to buy another hard drive or two – or even one of those cute little home servers they're selling these days. In any case, this particular article, which in my RSS feed had the title "Lost memories", made me (good, impressionable reader that I am) think about how many photos and videos and other records of various things that I've experienced I've collected over the years. And it kind of hit me, how incredibly sad I'd be if I lost them somehow.

It's kind of odd, considering its increasing ubiquity, how fragile data is now. How instantly huge amounts of it can be lost. I think about the photo albums my mom has from when my brother and I were younger, or even from when she herself was my age (and younger), and... well, an album is the kind of thing you can hold on to for your whole life. I once put a great deal of thought and time and care into putting together a photo scrapbook for a friend who moved away. As much as I'd poured into it at the time, and as much as I'd hoped they would really, really like it, I realize now just how much something like that would mean to me to receive myself. How much it would mean to me years later, to have memories and messages from friends with whom I'd spent some amazing times, preserved in a single book that I could one day show to my kids. (Not that they'd be the least bit interested.)

I don't know where I'm going with this. Now (in addition to buying more data storage) I feel like making some kind of album of my own, to keep in physical book form. But... at the same time, part of me feels kind of strange about photos and other mementos. I'm not sure to what extent I really feel this way, but I have this notion that the things that really count shouldn't require any kind of physical reminders; that the most important things are the ones that shape you as a person – that change the way you see the world and what you do in it. Those kinds of things you carry with you, memories or no memories.

That said, I admit I am a much more sentimental person than most people would probably expect, and ("should"s or "shouldn't"s aside) I can't help but hold on to the physical things that mean something to me.

Towards learning to play guitar

I have started learning chords. It is hard, since almost nothing I know relating to music (or dance, for that matter) lives in my explicit memory. Chords names, unfortunately, must. I'm also trying to learn my way around my instrument a little -- scales (so far only the major scale) and just playing around with random tunes by ear, and... well... actually trying to remember what note each string is (this information refuses to stay in my brain for some reason... I guess because I never use it :|).

Up until now, all I've done is basically trained my muscles to produce a handful of songs, generally using tabs as instructions. (Even the song that I managed to figure out by ear: I wrote each bit down in tab form as I figured it out, and then learned each section using my crappy tab-like notes.) This, to me, has very little relation to knowing how to play an instrument. I want to be able to play a new song given a set of chord names, and I want to be able to improvise a melody over some set of chords being played.

So these two endeavours, learning names for things and learning my way around my instrument, are my current strategy for trying to learn how to actually play. I think part of the reason I never worked at either of these things before is that there are no discrete tasks with immediate payoffs at the end, as is the case with trying to learn individual songs. But now I am determined! By the end of the summer, I want to have considerably improved on both fronts. I just wish there was some good way to quantify and track my progress. :|

miscellaneous thoughts in no particular order

I've been having nightmares lately. The kind where you wake up, and this awful feeling of residual fear or dread or anxiety stays with you well after you've gotten out of bed and begun to go about your day. I haven't had nightmares in many months — at least — and I don't remember ever having ones like this, that affect me long after I wake up. Part of me wonders why I've been having them all of a sudden, and part of me doesn't want to think about it.


Drag blues feels amazing. It reminds me of ballroom, and I miss ballroom. Specifically it reminds me of tango, and I think it's because of the nature of the connection. A lot of the lead/follow seems to rely not on the arms at all, but rather on connection through the legs and torso. I really like it... perhaps not surprisingly, considering that my arms are pretty much the bane of my dancing existence. (Sigh.) In any case, I'm dying to learn more blues. I think it's already changing my dancing in general. I've hardly been out dancing salsa lately, but recently I danced a really great bachata (with a ballroom instructor, incidentally), and it felt different from the last time I danced with him — certain things felt easier and more natural to follow, more effortless... and from the feel of those things, it was definitely a direct result of the drag blues workshops I did not long ago (taught by some amazing instructors from Denver).


I need to develop more discipline (i.e., an amount greater than zero). I know I have enough time to do a good number of the things I want to be doing these days without continually getting myself sick (I've long since lost count of the number of times I've been sick since last summer... it is definitely greater than eight), but I've barely been accomplishing anything, and it's really starting to bother me. I'm barely treading water, let alone getting anywhere. I seem to have completely lost the ability to be productive on a regular day. This is not sustainable. I fear the only solution is sheer will power.


Eu não vivo onde moro; eu não moro onde vivo. I feel like my life is in one place, and my home and school are in another. I don't think it's going to change any time soon. Part of me is scared by that thought; part of me wants to be fine with it. Fortunately(?), if I keep myself busy enough, I manage not to think about this or its implications and just enjoy what I have at the moment.

Boredom

I think I've long since forgotten what boredom feels like. I literally cannot remember the last time I had the feeling of "Man, there's nothing to do...", like I always used to whine to my parents about when I was little. It's something I simply can't relate to anymore. That's not to say that I don't lose interest in things. I definitely do, all the time. But for quite a while now, the sheer number of things that I want to do has greatly exceeded the number of things I actually have time to do... I suppose one could complain about this scenario ("Wah, I don't have nearly enough time to do the things I want!"), but when I think about how, a handful of years ago, I had so little inclination to do much of anything at all, despite my vague-but-varied interests... I'm really glad that these days I have genuine interest in so many things—the kind of interest I'm compelled to act on... that actually makes me want to *do* things.

It seems to me that boredom cannot be cured by anyone other than the bored person themselves. If I am bored, and I find someone else to entertain me for some time, won't I just be bored again as soon as they leave? (If the answer is no, what might it be that I will feel like doing at that later time, that I didn't feel like doing before?) I suppose I'm talking about chronic boredom, as opposed to, say, having forgotten the book you meant to bring on your 9-hour flight. I was a little surprised by the Wikipedia definition of boredom as "an emotional state experienced ... when individuals are uninterested in the opportunities surrounding them", which is actually quite an apt description of past-me: there were usually plenty of things I could think of to do, but I simply didn't feel like doing any of them. Perhaps some combination of affect- and attitude-related factors gave rise to this general disinterest in doing things... I don't know.

When there are severe constraints imposed on your activities, like when you're on the bus or waiting for a tardy friend to arrive at a meeting spot, then sure, it's a somewhat different story: that immediate situation isn't particularly rife with opportunities. But when I think about it, in general, it kind of blows my mind how many things a single person could take it upon themselves to just get up and do at any given moment.

The issue of how one goes from being generally bored to never being bored is a perplexing one for me. I don't know how it happened in my case... maybe partly finding things that I really cared about (or just greatly enjoyed) doing and was strongly compelled to spend time on, and partly being inspired by certain people to spend my time actually doing these things. That's not to say that I don't also spend a lot of time doing other things though, which I guess sort of relates to my second thought...

I've noticed that my wanting to do stuff, which is great and all, has actually been affecting my social life in an odd way: unless people want to do the same things I'm usually itching to do, I find I'm increasingly reluctant to make plans with people these days. Even people I really enjoy spending time (and actually want to spend more time) with, which is what makes this really unfortunate and kind of frustrating. I recently happened to grab coffee with a friend after something we'd met up to do wrapped up quite a bit early, and it was really nice. But at the same time, when planning ahead, I don't think I would've suggested getting coffee afterwards (even if I'd known our task wouldn't take long) because there are other things than sitting around drinking coffee (i.e., basically doing nothing) that are much higher on the list of Things I Want to Spend My Time Doing.

I guess what it comes down to is that the activity itself has become much more salient to me than the potential social interactions that would take place during it... which perhaps makes sense, since a planned activity, like hiking or playing a game with someone, or even drinking coffee, is relatively predictable and easy to imagine in concrete terms, whereas social interactions arise spontaneously depending on so many different factors, and it's hard to imagine beforehand what the experience of a social situation will be like. Which basically amounts to it being very difficult for a vague unknown to seem more appealing than a desirable known. So regardless of how often I would indeed be quite happy to sit around and do nothing but chat with people when the opportunity arises (and I definitely tend to get down when I don't do much of anything social for a while), I have a hard time planning such opportunities into my week. And since I'm logistically pretty far-removed from my social world, they don't really arise unless I plan them. I don't know what to do about this, or even if I want to do anything about this, but it seems like a problem.

Hey Science! What are you trying to prove?

There is a certain thing that comes up from time to time in my courses and elsewhere. It's one of those things that is always mentioned in passing, cropping up like ugly little weeds along the path of discussion: bothersome, but fleeting enough that on no individual occasion is it really warranted to interrupt the discussion at hand to address it.

In class this morning, however, I spent half an hour listening to a presentation in which the presenter informed us of what the authors of a paper had aimed to prove, described how they tried to prove it, summarized what their results ended up proving, and went on to discuss the potential implications of what had been proven.

And every time the student uttered that P-word, I cringed inside (or I hope it was only inside). I wanted to stop him and proclaim: "This is science, not math! No one is trying to prove anything!"

Science is about uncovering truths to the best of our capabilities, with the understanding that there is always more to be uncovered and our capabilities themselves may improve over time -- that what we accept as true today may well be replaced with a new truth tomorrow. Scientists seek to uncover truths by making educated guesses about the nature of the world as well as predictions about what would happen, under specified conditions, if their guesses are correct. If what happens under those conditions turns out to match their predictions well enough, we might accept their guess as the Best Guess So Far regarding the nature of that aspect of the world. If the match isn't good enough, we go "Hm, nice idea, but guess again!" Similarly, if someone's guess conflicts with an older, previously accepted guess, but the predictions following from it match reality more closely than those of the old one, we might say "Gee, looks like that old guess wasn't quite right after all."

Rinse and repeat, and hopefully our Best Guesses So Far get ever closer to accurately representing how things actually work, enabling us to manipulate the world in ever cooler ways using this growing understanding of it. (And to the extent that these guesses allow us to manipulate the world as we'd like to, that degree of accuracy is good enough for the time being.)

A mentality of "trying to prove" that your guess is correct conflicts with the very basis of science. It hampers proper, rigourous experimental design. It poisons critical, unbiased evaluation of data. It makes drawing grounded, realistic conclusions nearly impossible.

Sadly, the science publication industry itself seems to reward only those who most convincingly "prove" the shiniest things, in spite of the value that all well-tested guesses contribute to our collective understanding of how the world works. (So maybe I'm wrong; maybe people end up trying to prove things after all. Publish or perish, as they say.) This distortion of science, as the authors of that essay put it, certainly doesn't help to give students the right idea of what science is all about, let alone a clear sense of what may or may not constitute good science.

And so this morning I sat listening to a classroom of graduate students talking, not about how convincing the authors' evidence was, nor whether their conclusions seemed reasonable, but about what the authors had proven, followed by sharing other examples they could think of that agree with what was proved. And suddenly this seminar course seemed to differ from a typical undergraduate one by barely more than the fact that it's not a professor who stands at the front of the room, but a student.

This Is Your Brain on Music (Part I)

This is a book I bought years ago because of my interest in cognition, my love of music, and the fact that my curiosity about how we experience music and why was driving me crazy. For some reason (probably because I'd bought another half-dozen books at the same time), I started reading it then, but didn't get that far before I got distracted by shiny things and forgot about it.

Recently, in my theory development class, we've been talking about design and perception, and music (the way we perceive it, and our preferences relating to it) came up; it reminded me of this book. My music- and dance-related experiences over the last couple of years have made my fascination with this subject much greater than it was even when I bought the book, so I was eager to pick it up again and start reading it from the beginning. Here are a couple of passages from the introduction that resonated with me in a way they couldn't possibly have when I first read them years ago:

What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work. The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths become tomorrow's disproven hypotheses or forgotten objets d'art.

After I finished undergrad, during my final years of which I focused on molecular genetics and spent most of my non-classtime waking hours working on my school's team for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, I -- by no means deliberately -- gradually stepped back from the nitty gritty technical side of synthetic biology, and found myself spending more of my time focused on running and developing my team. Having receded from the land of the hardcore technical side of science, I came to realize that I am (would it be ironic to say "at heart"?) a scientist, in terms of the way I see and think about the world, the questions I'm given to asking, and the way I evaluate information on a day-to-day basis. Meanwhile, I'd become much more immersed in a world of art. Of music, and of dance, and of expression of whatever is alive inside us, trying to get out. And, feeling almost like two completely different people in each of them, I've all the while had a hard time reconciling these two worlds of Science and Art. I'm still not sure how I can do so in a practical sense (or whether I can), but reading that passage was strangely comforting; it made me feel more like a single person.

... I was going to include another excerpt here (actually, the one that I wanted to comment on in the first place), but I'll leave that for tomorrow.

Tough love

Often, when I've dug a really deep hole for myself, and I know I've screwed myself over to the point where I couldn't undo it if I tried, I'm more than a little ambivalent when things work out alright anyway. And, as happy and relieved as my immediate reaction might be, part of me is disappointed in -- maybe even a little resentful of -- the person who made an exception and cut me way more slack than I deserve, because they've robbed me of the hard lesson I should have learned from my own behaviour.

More on blues dancing... and (learning) dance of various sorts

I am currently super-hyped about the chance to blues dance again in the (very) near future, particularly after watching a bunch of great videos of blues dancing the other day.

This is the first example of blues dancing I ever saw, and I fell in love with it immediately.

The rest are videos I came across recently. The next couple videos are from the San Diego Fusion Exchange, so maybe they're not strictly blues (?)... but what I love about blues is that it totally doesn't matter. :]

Man, I love how this woman moves (same woman from the two videos above)...

Gah, 1:16 kills me! So awesome...

Love this one. This woman dances likes her limbs are weightless... beautiful. And the song... mm mm mm...

God, I love her lines at 1:28, and what they do afterwards at 1:34-ish. *_* Gorgeous dancing...

I really like these guys too; their style really appeals to me (and their choice of songs doesn't hurt :]):

Their style is pretty simple on the whole, but the overall feel is cool, and I love the little things they do with their feet (what the dude does at 1:25 *kills* me -- so awesome).

But now here's the interesting thing... Blues, this super free-form style, is making me want to learn technique like I've never wanted to before -- even moreso than when I was doing ballroom. In ballroom, it seems, technique is everything, and you really don't get the feel of the dance unless you're doing it properly. [I say this based solely on the eight-or-so months of ballroom I did, which was the first dancing I'd ever done, so I had nothing at all to compare to at that point. Maybe my impression would be different now... Not that I'm not still a Very Inexperienced Dancer, after only about 1.5 years total. Hehe.. So yeah: tablespoon of salt is warranted here, for sure. That is, don't be fooled into thinking that I know (or think I know) what I'm talking about at all. :P All of my dance-related ramblings are just my personal impressions/thoughts based on my own relatively meagre experience.]

So I was really into working on technique at that time. Once I stopped taking ballroom and was pretty much only dancing salsa socially, at first I really wanted to take salsa lessons to improve, but eventually (probably as my following improved over time, and I could at least squeak by dancing passably with most leads) that desire faded and I just wanted to have fun. Although... I suppose that was part of it, and the other part was that, when I hear salsa music, the way my body feels like moving is often at odds with how salsa styling seems to be commonly taught. (Or I just suck too much at consciously controlling my movements to find out, haha.) In any case, I didn't really feel like taking salsa lessons anymore (which was just as well, since I never did get around to taking any :|!), and since then I've been kind of just messing around on the dance floor, doing whatever the music is making me do (which can feel great, but, as I've written before, has actually become problematic).

But back to blues! So I learn about this whole "blues dancing" thing and fall in love with it instantly, since it's all about dancing the music and moving how you feel. Awesome! But seeing more examples of blues dancing, I see how much more can be expressed through it, and (unlike with salsa) I don't have anywhere close to the vocabulary of movement required to express the things I'm made to feel by the music I'd want to dance blues to. It's like being at a loss for words... like wanting to convey an idea to someone but not knowing how to put it, and watching these awesome videos is like reading something someone else has written that says exactly what you wanted to say, way better than you ever could have put it yourself. It makes me really want to improve my vocabulary and precision of movement, so I can say many more varied and nuanced things through dance.

... Too bad the reasons I never got around to taking salsa lessons when I wanted to still apply (and then some). :| Maybe in the spring I'll be able to squeeze in a lesson or workshop here and there...

Ideas Worth Spreading

One of the best websites on the internet (yes, the entire internet) is, in my opinion, TED.com. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), for those who aren't familiar, is an annual conference where some of the world's most extraordinary people -- scientists, artists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, innovators -- convene to share their ideas in concise 20-minute talks that range from thought-provoking to inspiring to mind-blowing. To read more about TED itself, you can go here, but I want to share some of my favourite talks that I've watched recently. Talk descriptions are taken straight from the TED site, and below each video I've included some comments of my own.

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

I'm extremely interested in cognition and how people process information, so in addition to the treatments his groups has been doing, his research and its implications are very exciting.

Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

I actually think the description for this one is somewhat misleading. The studies Ariely describes aren't really about why "we think it's OK", so much as under what circumstances we tend to cheat (and, based on those findings, he suggests explanations for this). However, given that the factors involved in those explanations aren't (in all likelihood) consciously considered by people who are deciding whether to cheat or not, his findings are quite interesting. If we're predictably irrational, we certainly aren't intuitively so.

[As an aside, I recently read the paper of his about what the authors term "coherent arbitrariness", how even when the value people ascribe to something is arbitrary (e.g., the amount of money they would have to be paid to be willing to endure the pain of the vice-grip on their finger, as he mentions in this TED talk), they still make adjustments in "coherent" (predictable) ways (i.e., demanding more money for longer duration of pain). He has also authored a neat paper on how buyers and sellers can value the same good quite differently. If you're interested in either paper, let me know and I can send them to you.]

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.

This talk actually made me shed tears. I cannot explain why. Maybe it has something to do with how strongly I feel about education and the role it ought to have in tapping into the specific strengths that everyone has -- getting people to realize their potential, especially in spite of what "conventional wisdom", such as academic curricula, would indicate should be expected of them.

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

This talk I actually watched years ago. As someone who is given to spending obscene amounts of time deliberating over important (and not-so-important) decisions, often to the point where my indecision ends up making my decision for me, I found this talk Most Excellent. Even aside from never really being able to know which choice will be "best", there's the reality that, even if we could always choose the "best" options, it wouldn't necessarily make much difference to how happy we end up being: by and large, humans make themselves (relatively) happy with the reality they are faced with.

Hm. There are several more talks that I really want to share, but I'll save those for another post.

Bottled feelings

I feel like I understand art a little better today. I've rambled on before about how the things (energies? passions?) that are alive inside a person can force themselves out in the form of art... music, movement... or other activities, like working hard for some kind of cause. In a couple of ways I get this a little more now than I did before...

Expression through dance is something I can relate to since I feel it all the time: when I hear the right music (which could even just be music in my head :P), there's this need to let this thing out of me, which can only be released through movement.

The visual art thing, on the other hand, I didn't really get. As intrinsically enjoyable as the act of drawing is for me, I'm rarely compelled to do it in the first place. But for perhaps the first time ever, I recently had a taste of that compulsion: I went out to a lake one evening with a bunch of friends. The moon was a huge, orange crescent hanging low in the black sky. As we stood around by the lake, looking at the stars, we realized the moon was getting lower on the horizon. Soon enough it had reached the lake itself, and I stood there, captivated, unable to look away as this orange crescent moon sank into the water like a ship on fire. Something about this nearly moved me to tears, and it felt like the ship was drawing the breath out of me and taking it with it as it sank. I couldn't bring myself to move until long after the last point of light had vanished on the horizon, and I desperately wished that I could capture what I'd just experienced... preserve it somehow, in the form of a painting.

Of course, I am in no way a painter, and it would be terrible to destroy that experience as it exists in my memory by seeing whatever awful rendering I might produce on paper, so I wouldn't even attempt it. Even my written description just now, which I tried to gloss over as much as possible (while still getting the gist of it across) in order to avoid this very thing, has kind of sullied my memory of the event. :| In any case, even if my inability to express myself through these means stops me from actually doing it, I've now at least had a glimpse of what it's like to want to express myself through visual art.

In this case, the desire to capture a moment made me want to create art: to take my experience of that event and turn it into a physical object so I could have it later, maybe share it with others. In the past, I've been driven by various emotions to write things -- sometimes poetry, sometimes other things -- and it has mostly been because of a need to take whatever I was feeling at the time and get it out of me. To reach in and grab hold of it and pull it out and get rid of it, so I could stop experiencing whatever feeling of unrest was roiling inside me. And aside from looking at what I've just pulled out only long enough to see that it is indeed the thing, in its entirety, that I wanted to get rid of, that's generally the end of it, and I don't deal with the thing any further.

But today, for some reason, I read some things I'd written a while back, during a time when I felt quite different than I do these days. Even though I remember a lot of things from that time, even some events in plenty of detail, I generally can't recall the specific feelings I had. Perhaps it's akin to the way you might remember the face of someone you once knew long ago; you might have a rough picture, but it's hazy and doesn't capture the details -- the features that make that person distinct from others with the same sort of look. Yet if you actually see the person, they're immediately recognizable, even alongside other, similar-looking people. In the same way, though I could no longer remember my feelings from these past times, as I read these things that I'd once written, everything I'd been experiencing at the time came crashing over me again. Nuances of emotion that I still wouldn't know how to begin describing in plain words. Somehow I didn't expect that reading these things could put those feelings back into me, even in spite of how irrelevant they are to the present. That is, given how things are now, it doesn't even make sense that I should be able to feel these things from these other times.

It's as if, in writing each of those things, I distilled that immediate experience out of me and bottled it like a drug... and all it takes to once again experience everything I'd managed to draw out of myself back then is to sip from that little bottle.

I suppose, then, that if another person has had experiences similar enough to that from which a given drug was distilled, they too can be affected by it; this is perhaps what makes art resonate with certain people but not others. This would certainly explain why until a few years ago I had very little appreciation for the arts: I hadn't even begun to live yet.

Unrequited dance

I often wonder about the symmetry of partner dance experiences. Like, to what extent can there be unrecognized disparity between how each person perceives a given dance? For instance, if a very skilled lead dances with a girl who's just beginning to learn, the girl might have a really fun dance while the guy might be pretty bored or even frustrated (and vice versa, in the case of an experienced girl and inexperienced guy). Or aside from differences in skill level... Say if two people have two pretty different styles... maybe person A might like person B's style and enjoy the dance a lot, while B might find A's style difficult to dance with. In this kind of scenario, I wonder whether A would necessarily feel from B their lack of enjoyment, and/or whether this would affect A's experience/enjoyment of the dance.

But beyond simply enjoyment (or lack thereof), what I'm really curious about is connection. Not physical lead/follow connection... maybe "chemistry" is a better word for what I'm thinking of? I'm not entirely sure of what people generally mean when they talk about chemistry between partners, but I think the thing I have in mind (which I've tried before to explain) is something more specific, if not altogether different. It's something like being completely in tune with the other person, really *feeling* them in a way that's not even physical... Not just feeling their movement, but feeling how they're feeling the music -- even feeling how they want to express the way they're feeling the music. For me, occasionally this happens with salsa, but I've never felt such an intense connection with my partner as I have while dancing blues. It's unbelievable, and I really don't know how to describe it other than... intense.

Whenever I'm trying to think of how to describe it, the following always comes to mind: in Dynasty Warriors, two players can perform a special attack together if they each have full special-attack meters and they're standing close enough to one another; under those conditions, you see this crackling electricity-type thing between them, indicating that you can perform the dual attack:

Despite my tendency to see many aspects of life in terms of video games, I find it more than a little weird likening blues dancing to Dynasty Warriors... but it's such an apt depiction of how the connection I'm talking about feels! When it's strong, it is like this electricity... this direct link between each person's experience of the music. (I guess in this sense the analogy can be extended, since I can't imagine that this kind of connection could occur unless both people's individual music-experience-intensity meters are at least close to maxed. :P)

Anyway... Revelations of my gamer-nerdiness aside, I'm so curious as to whether one person can feel as if they have this kind of intense connection with their partner, while at the same time the other person is just dancing normally, without feeling anything out of the ordinary. Or can it indeed only happen when two people are each feeling the way the other is experiencing the music... when this magical kind of synchrony happens... when they're not just dancing concurrently -- or even "with" each other -- but dancing together through the music?

Sorry if I spray you.

I am faced with a bit of a meta-problem. I said before that I want to fix my broken following... or my conscious self does, anyway. My dancing self, I have since discovered... maybe not so much.

A couple weeks after I wrote about this growing following problem of mine, I got to hear (by proxy) what the director of one of the salsa dance companies around here thinks of my dancing, which pretty much exactly confirmed my suspicions (which in turn made me really happy, to know that my perception of things is fairly reflective of what at least one super-experienced lead feels from his end). Specifically, he said that I need to learn to channel my energy and that sometimes my following is disconnected, but, because I have good reflexes, I get away with it (all three of these things are exactly things that I'd been thinking myself). So this was further motivation to work on my following. But I think this is going to be a lot harder than I'd expected, and not for the reasons I'd have thought.

Tonight I had probably the most fun dancing that I've *ever* had in one night (that I can recall, anyway). Toward the beginning of the night, I was dancing with a friend of mine when he noticed my broken-ass following and tried to help me fix it. As soon as he held his hands up, palms-out and fingers splayed, and told me to place my fingertips on his, I was like "Yes! This is going to be such awesome following practice!" And it was -- he not only gave me some general feedback about specifically how my dancing insanity makes it hard for a guy to lead, but helped me practice following more responsively -- more connectedly. It was really great, and I definitely want to do more practice following like that, until it's basically second nature. But I realized, a handful of dances after I danced with him, that I'd completely forgotten about what we'd been working on and was dancing like I normally do (maybe a bit more exuberantly than usual, since I was insanely excited to be dancing after what seemed like forever since the last time...), and I was having a ridiculously fun time. And, later in the night, he asked me if I'd changed my style -- said that at some point he saw me dancing with this other dude, and it looked completely different -- really smooth, or something (as opposed to impossible-to-control-wild-creature-like). But I hadn't been doing anything other than what I normally do, and I told him something to the effect that it depends on the dude. I realized, though, specifically what it is.

I don't remember what it was like when I started, but these days I dance because I can't help it. Like, literally because I cannot contain myself. It's like... It's like I'm like a faucet, and when the music starts playing, the water starts running through the pipes. If I'm not dancing, the pressure builds up and I want to explode. If I'm dancing with someone, the way they dance and lead me sets how open the tap is. If I'm feeling particularly exuberant (or even just if the song is really good), that water is running like mad, and it has to go somewhere; if what they're doing with me allows me to express what has built up inside me, that tap is wide open and the water can flow freely, in a predictable way (i.e., straight out the tap). Sometimes how someone will lead me is very different from what my natural inclination would be in terms of moving with the music, but that movement ends up still being hugely effective means of expression for me -- still provides that same release (or sometimes even more), even though they've turned on a different tap altogether and channeled the water out a different way. On the other hand, if what they're doing with me doesn't open the tap enough, that pressure is still there, and the water starts bursting the pipes and spraying all over the place. *I* feel better, but water ends up going way more places than they expected when they opened the tap; sometimes it ends up in harmless places (if my insanity happens to not interfere or conflict with what they're trying to do as a lead), but other times it sprays all over them, and it's probably not much fun to dance all wet. :|

Here I need to clarify that it isn't in any way a matter of good versus bad leading/dancing, or anything like that -- it just comes down to compatibility in the ways we're each experiencing the music, which of course differs hugely from person to person.

But now I'm not sure what to do. Part of me (the thinking part) wants to improve as a follow, but part of me (the dancing part) just wants to enjoy dancing. There are enough leads who seem to be okay with my tendencies (and who work those taps in just the right way for me) that I can have Most Awesome Salsa Nights like the one I just had, despite my broken following. But at the same time, there are probably plenty of other leads out there who I'd have an amazing time dancing with as well, but whom I'm disinclined to ask in the first place because I don't want to spray water all over them... So I'm definitely limiting myself if I don't fix my following (or at least get over the guilty feeling, hehe).

I guess the best thing to do is just dance how I feel with people I can do that with freely (without spraying), and with others, take the opportunity to channel that extra pressure into concentrating on practicing my following.

Morning's here... The morning's here! Sunshine is here...

I love mornings. :D To observe my behaviour, you'd never conclude such a thing. For instance, my last couple weeks have gone more or less like so:

Sunday: wake at 3 pm

Monday: sleep at 7 am; wake at 2 pm

Tuesday: sleep at 11 am; wake at 5 pm

Wednesday: sleep at 4 pm; wake at 6 pm

Thursday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 3 pm

Friday: sleep at 3 am; wake at 12 pm

Saturday: sleep at 7 am; wake at 3 pm

Sunday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 3 pm

Monday: sleep at 5 am; wake at 7 am; sleep at 5 pm; wake at 7 pm

Tuesday: sleep at 8 am; wake at 9 am; sleep at 6 pm; wake at 8 pm

Wednesday: sleep at 5 am; wake at 5:10 am; sleep at 9 pm (!!)

Thursday: wake at 6 am (!!)

Friday: sleep at 1 am; wake at 8 am

I don't quite understand why I always tend to stay up forever into the night, eventually giving in to exhaustion and sleeping sometime in the morning... I guess there's something about the quiet, when everyone else is asleep, that I like, but I most of the time I don't get much (or anything) done when I'm awake really late anyway. Sometimes there's something specific I'm doing such that I stay up forever (e.g., playing guitar), but other times time just somehow elapses, and suddenly it's 6 am, and I wouldn't even be able to describe what I was doing the whole time if you asked me.

I think I need to get into the habit of sticking to a behavioural curfew. Something like "no computer after 10 pm". I really like early mornings, when it's just getting light out (or even before it starts to get light). They're so much better than evenings. They feel so much happier...

I watched a TED Talk yesterday, about lifestyles that are associated with longevity, and (in addition to making me think about what a ridiculously high proportion of the time my body must be under stress -- due to my sleeping habits alone) the speaker talks about the Japanese concept of ikigai, which he, perhaps rather inaccurately, translates as "the reason for which you wake up in the morning"... Now, maybe what he really meant by this description was something closer to a raison d'être, or broader sense of purpose in life (which surely would be a great thing), but even taking it literally: for me it makes such a huge difference simply to have something specific that I want to do when I wake up each day. It's such a great feeling to wake up and to not be able to stay in bed because there are things that you can't wait to do right away. Which is another reason to set a curfew for myself, even (or especially) when there are things I really want to do right that moment, at night.

It's odd... I saw this personality quiz recently (a Which Typeface Are You? quiz, hehe) in which the following question was asked "Are you relaxed -- do you take any chocolate from the box, whether it's orange cream or hazelnut crunch? Or are you disciplined -- do you first suffer the orange cream so you can later enjoy the hazelnut crunch?" I would never think of myself as disciplined (like, at *all*), but I always do the latter. I always eat things I don't like first, saving the best things for last. If this is indeed some kind of manifestation of discipline, maybe there's hope for me yet -- maybe I can make a habit of not only to holding off on enjoyable activities until morning (so I can sleep and wake early :D), but maybe even first doing tasks I don't want to do, getting them over with right away so I can enjoy other things fully afterwards. Wouldn't that be something...

Why trying is good

Holy frig. Like, holy frig. So last week, I started trying to learn a song. I am lame and don't know chords (other than, like, the five-to-ten most generic ones), and aside from the mainstream, strummy sort of songs you play on an acoustic (which tend to consist of maybe ten generic chords total), the handful of other songs I've ever learned were all from tabs. Unfortunately, tabs are virtually impossible to find for most Brazilian music, and I can never make sense of any chords I can find. :| So that left learning this song by ear (and by the handful of fingerings you can see in the video, hehe). Which seemed like it'd be... really, really freaking hard... when I listened to it, but I really, really wanted to learn it, so I tried. And after working at it a little bit more each day since this past Sunday, today I finally finished! :D!

Some parts aren't quite right, and I still can't play it very well, but man! The first time I played it through from start to finish, after I reached the last note I could not stop grinning. I can't believe I actually did it! I listen to the original song, and I'm like, "Whaaaat, I learned that *by ear*?? Whaaaaaaat??" I'm so happy!! Seriously, forget grades or awards or scholarships -- I don't think I've *ever* felt this kind of sense of accomplishment. I feel like a little kid who just made their first-ever Play-Doh man. :D (One arm is falling off.)

Thinking back, there have been a couple of other times I set about learning something that I thought I was crazy to try, given my pitiful skill level (they include the third song I ever learned, and this one). But I did learn them (yay tabs!), and, bit by bit, they were much less impossible than they seemed at first. And then this! So my Important Lesson of the Day is: trying to do things you think you're crazy for attempting is The Best! :D Either you keep trying until you eventually succeed (and you get to be super happy about it!), or you learn a whole bunch through your effortful attempts and at least you know tried your best. :]

So yay! Lack of tabs can't stop me now! :D! There are so many songs I want to learn now... Although, man, it's *insanely* hard to pick out the notes for chords when all of the strings are sounded at once. D: But... I guess it'll get easier as I gain familiarity with the different chords.

Now to apply my Important Lesson to life in general... :o! I want more of this awesome feeling!

August 16, 2009

On social media I once considered dumb

For a long time, I was one of those people who shocked others when I revealed that I didn't use Facebook. I really didn't see the point of it, and I thought it was dumb, how much time people spent on it. Eventually, years after the first of my friends to get it, I reluctantly and begrudgingly signed up. And then I proceeded to almost never, ever use it, except to view the occasional photos or event info that existed nowhere else.

More recently, however, not only do I find myself using it continually (and being one of the shocked when I now meet people who don't use it), but my hackles tend to go up when people pooh-pooh at it, and I even find myself defending it now and then.

It made me consider exactly what has changed since once upon a time when I never used it, and it seems to boil down to two main things:

First, the world has become a smaller place for me. Part of this is because of people graduating and moving away, and part of this is because I've met people abroad... but much moreso now than ever before, the people I know and really want to keep up with are all over the place; very few of my friends even live in the same city as me. We all have our own separate lives, and we're busy with hugely varied schedules, so it's nice to have quick updates on at least the major highlights (and often a lot of minor ones) even when there's nothing specific we'd be inclined to, say, email one another about.

Second is that one of the main things I do whenever I have a big enough chunk of free time is dance. This, of course, requires somewhere to go dancing and people to dance with, so being able to keep up with goings-on in the dance scenes relevant to me is huge. There are lots of different events and socials and workshops organized by different people and dance schools, and it's hugely convenient to not only know what's going on when I happen to be going to Toronto (or, perhaps more importantly, have something to plan around so I can go for the stuff I'm interested in), but also have a rough idea of who's going to be at what. Maybe this wouldn't be as big a deal if I were out dancing several times a week (as was the case during my Summer of Freedom) and could keep up by word of mouth, but alas... time is far more scarce these days... and even in this scenario, having events listed all in one place is super handy. The Events feature is also of great utility when trying to wrangle my various scattered amigos into the occasional get-together.

There are other reasons I use Facebook these days, but those are the most important ones, and the ones which perhaps most rationally justify my reliance on a form of social media that part of me still hates.

UPDATE: I like how I happened to post this just before Facebook decided to revamp the homepage layout to something that makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.

Epic. Fail.

The things that live inside us

I was cleaning off an old hard drive from a desktop I used years ago, and I came across a whole bunch of files I thought I'd lost. Among these were some various art-ish things, which, according to the file info, are from about ten years ago (it still blows my mind when I recall something that falls into my "years ago" mental category, and it turns out that it was a *decade* ago o_o!). Nostalgia impels me to share some of them here. (Bem, na verdade, eu omito os desenhos pro quais eu estou a mais nostálgica, rsrs... mas em todo caso...)

These ones are scans of some things I did in my grade 9 art class:

I think we had to paint these using fake flowers as a reference, hehe.

I think this was based on a photo from National Geographic.

I don't remember working on this one at all, but I must have used a photo for reference here as well.

This one my brother drew (bonus points if you recognize the character!), and I scanned his drawing for my first-ever attempt at colouring something on the computer... using a mouse. :| I'm pretty sure it took me forever, and I think in the end the only part I was happy with was the right shoulder. Haha..

Some random little images:

The bottom ones were probably playing around with my tablet, once I got one.

This may be the only piece of fan art I ever produced. It was for a webcomic that I'm sure has long since ceased to exist.

After some point, I think I just sketched random crap now and then:

I think I pretty much didn't draw at all after around this time. It's kind of strange, because I definitely enjoyed doing it. But... it's weird: thinking back, even though I recall liking doing stuff like this, I can't imagine the feeling of actually *wanting* to do it. You know, the sort of state you're in when you're thinking something like "Ooh, I know! I'm going to do X!", just before you actually go and do it. Being compelled to do something. It's something I used to struggle with, actually -- rarely (if ever) having that feeling of wanting to do specific things, in an immediate sense (as opposed to hypothetically). That's not to say that there weren't lots of things I enjoyed once I was doing them... but I think my tendency was to sort of idly drift into doing things, rather than actively seeking out the activity. Or some external stimulus would make me suddenly want to do something, instead of the inclination spontaneously coming from me.

I guess this is the reason why, for a long time, the only things I really did for fun either were passive (e.g., reading, watching anime/tv/movies, listening to music) or inherently prompted further continuous action (e.g., video games). Perhaps one exception to this was designing and making graphics/layouts for sites. Inexplicably, I used to really like making layouts. (Sadly, I couldn't find any of them on that old hard drive... I guess they're gone forever. :( ) Maybe it had something to do with the combination of aesthetics and functionality -- that the thought of using them afterwards (and actually getting to *see*, on a regular basis, the nice-looking thing I made, unlike with most art I might have produced) made me want to do it. But yeah, it really used to bother me, this general lack of internal desire or motivation to do things I enjoyed.

I think that, by and large, I'm only really compelled do things that make me feel something. Looking at and using layouts I'd made kind-of-sort-of-almost falls into that category (probably due to the aesthetic aspects), but loosely. Better, more recent examples would be playing guitar (and singing), or horseback riding (a hugely physical kind of "feeling" here -- I guess you could call it exhilaration), or dancing. Both playing music and dancing are able to stir up all kinds of things in me, and those things can vary greatly depending on the type of music or dancing. (I won't even begin to try to describe the incredible array of things dance is capable of evoking in me... it adds a whole other dimension to the already vast spectrum of what music alone can do.) So on the one hand, they can elicit strong feelings from me. But on the other hand, if I'm already feeling something, they also provide a means of getting it out of me.

Hm, then I guess writing belongs on my list as well. I thought of it in the context of expression of emotion, but in truth I suppose the writing example means that the whole making/letting-me-feel-stuff thing goes beyond emotions. For instance, if I have some kind of complex idea(s) that I want to communicate (or even just sort out for myself), not only is writing immensely helpful in shaping it into something coherent that effectively conveys the idea, but it's also incredibly satisfying to reach the point in composing a piece of writing where everything fits. The various ideas are all there, expressed clearly and concisely with natural progression and flow, and everything is tied together nicely into something that says just what you want it to say. It's this wonderful sort of mental release, to finally be able to take this mysterious, complex thing that was alive in your head, and to put it out there into the world in a faithful representation of what it was inside of you. [In a way, the process of constructing that understandable representation is satisfying in the same way formulating proofs is (or was), at least for me; the solution, or some part of it, just comes to you in a flash, and at first you don't yet know what it is -- it's there in your head, and you can see it, and you know (or think) that it's the thing you were looking for, but it takes some time to examine it, to tease it apart until you recognize in its amorphous form familiar subcomponents, and finally how they all fit together. And there's this huge satisfaction that comes from taking those subcomponents, putting them together, on paper, in the way you observed them to relate in your mind, and seeing that, yes!, everything fits, and you've got exactly the thing that initially came to you in that flash.]

I suppose, in general then, it's all about achieving that release that comes from effective expression: from getting whatever is alive inside of you out into the world. Whether it's heartbreak coming out as song, ideas as an essay, pent-up energy as a sprint down the hall, or anger as a throat-rending scream, we each pick the most effective means we have for getting things out of us. In one of my classes a few weeks ago, the prof raised the question of "what is passion?", and I think that it may be these live things inside us, trying to burst their way out.

On the other side of the coin, I guess this is really what allows us to connect with other people as well. To see, there in front of you, produced by another person, a manifestation of the very thing that's alive within you -- to read it in their words, to feel it in the movement of their body; how can you not feel closer to a person, knowing the same thing lives inside you both? It's amazing how the way a person expresses themselves can excite things in you, even if neither of you knew it was there, and even to the point where what was once sleeping within you finally resounds so strongly that you're moved to give voice to it as well. And the positive feedback that can happen: given how satisfying it is to express these live things, it's no wonder we like to surround ourselves with people who share the same passions. They keep them alive in us and make them stronger.

As I said, I used to feel empty in this sense... like I didn't have any of these live things of my own, moving me to do things. Even though other people could transiently excite certain things in me (and a myriad of things at that, with how diverse my interests are), it would never last long beyond the direct influences of those other people, and, left to my own devices, I'd invariably go back to not feeling like doing anything. I'm really glad that in the last few years various people helped to awaken different things in me, and that these things grew strong enough that they've stayed alive in me even without these people around anymore.

So, as far as art goes... I think if I were to be an artist, I'd be an artist of emotion. Even though I enjoy drawing once I'm doing it, I'm not compelled to do it under everyday circumstances. I guess the act itself, though enjoyable, isn't enough so that it alone would move me to do it, and I don't get all that much out of looking at the final product myself (maybe I'd want to do it for a gift or something...). And since my skill isn't great enough to faithfully produce the things that come to mind when I'm compelled to give voice to my emotions, these days I instead turn to the languages in which I have somewhat more fluency, like writing, music and dance.