Monday, May 19, 2008: Crashing Relay for Life

My summer project is to be more spontaneous. (If you need proof that it's necessary, note how I called it a project. Project implies deliberate, after all.) So after I got back from the gym at 9 PM and heard music from the baseball field, I went and saw what was going on.

It turns out this was Relay for Life. I know that if something's free, and open to the public, and attended by half the town, you're not really crashing it. But going in with that mentality made it so much more entertaining. (At least until I ran into two people I knew.)

It didn't help being incognito when I set a fire. It was an accident. The place was lined with candles inside paper bags. You should already see the obvious problem here. Anyway, I was taking pictures and leaning against the fence. I noticed my feet felt warm. Then, too warm. I jumped back; sure enough, one of the paper bags was on fire. I stopped and stared at a second until a gaggle of children started to throw sand on it. I was uneasy about this - that's someone's MEMORY you're tossing sand at! - but then I realized that the symbolic implications here were just altogether bad and I should leave it unanalyzed, as much as it pains me to do. Once the fire was out I quickly left the area.

This next vignette, or at least a reference inside it, has the potential to be soul-crushing. It's lose-lose, in a way. Either you've heard of the song in question, in which case your soul already withered a little bit, or you haven't heard of it, in which case you are fantastically lucky and envied by me. In order for this to make any sense, I have to name the song. So please, please, anyone who's reading this, treat this not as a wreck that you have to see for yourself, but more like a flowchart. I'll even set it up that way for you.

Performing at the event was one of those event bands. You know the type. They play at weddings. They play at events sponsored by country clubs. They only play covers, carefully chosen to appeal to the middle-aged, not to corrupt their children, and to have permeated adolescents' and young adults' psyches sufficiently during childhood to be inoffensive. Think adult contemporary.

Well, it seems society, at least Southern society, has "progressed" to the point where that second tenet is withering. I worked in an office. I've listened to enough adult contemporary to know that there are a select few Top 40 songs that are inoffensive enough to fit in with Celine Dion and Billy Joel. But anyway. A few years ago, a certain country artist came out with a song called, and I cringe as I type, "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk." Flowchart starts now. Have you heard it?

Yes - I'm sorry. It will shortly get worse.
No - Describing it would require me to call it up in my mind, which is something I'd prefer not to do tonight. Here's a rough barometer: It's a country song. Figure out what you're imagining it to sound like. Multiply that by 5. Yeah.

As you can probably tell by now, the song's sole purpose is to glorify a particular woman's buttocks. I could argue about objectification, but that's not the problem. The problem: this particular band had the bright idea to cast this as a family number. By that, I meant they called a bunch of children on stage for a 'dance-off,' to these lyrics. By children, I mean children as young as kindergarten, or early elementary school.

There are certain things which are just Wrong. That's just wrong. I don't know which is more depressing: that someone came up with the idea in the first place, that the children involved were A-OK with it, or that the parents of the children involved were OK with it. Times like this are when I wish I had the clout to commission an enormous helicopter with megaphones, to blare out music over the field.

Anyway. That particular fiasco over, things continued as normal. By this point it was about 9:30 and I decided to wander out into the park proper. I've always thought that in a way, the most interesting parts of events, especially outdoor events, are the ones not frequented. This sentiment is superficially ingrained into American consciousness through Robert Frost and others, but not many people actually believe it, at least not in an actionable way. So if you leave behind the crowds and the booths selling trinkets and the funnel-cake stands, you are left with a beautiful night, in a serviceable park. It's almost pastoral. It's also impossible to describe. Such things defy description. Perhaps if I thought about it I could describe it; certainly, if I enjoy writing, that should be fun. I might try it. But not now.

May 10, 2008: A short entry

I've been neglecting my blog. No, wait: I've been cheating on my blog. With Twitter. It's just easier to make snarky little Twitter comments than to write a full, reflective, blog entry. I know this makes me a churned-out product of Internet culture, as well as American culture who has to have everything INSTANT. I like it, though, and it means I'm sharing.

~*~*~

And while I'm detailing new obsessions, the Snowclone Database is about as far up my alley as one can get without hitting the next street. (I tried so hard to coin an original phrase for that. It's difficult. If it wasn't difficult we wouldn't need a Snowclone Database.)

None of that made any sense if you don't know what a "snowclone" is. It's not a tasty fairground treat. It's a derivation of any phrase, such as, say, "a few X short of a Y." This sort of thing fascinates me.

~*~*~

I've also been rearranging this a bit. Notable: a section for my other presences online. Some of them, at least. Also notable: tags.

May 7, 2008: Nostalgia time: Hugo's House of Horrors and Commander Keen 4

Nostalgia is big. The 90s are becoming as much of a commodity as The 80s. I'm complicit in this. I don't know if nostalgia is an innate phenomenon, or a marketed urge, but I partake in it willingly. It surfaces all the time. This evening I suddenly thought that all I wanted to do was go roller skating. (Hey! Now that I'm not a kid anymore, I *can*! Any time I want! I should also go ice skating this winter. I miss that too.)

My 90s were different than some others' 90s, though. I've co-opted some stuff I wasn't around for, like alternative rock, but I have a whole slew of other interests that don't require co-opting. One of the largest: PC games. I don't identify as a gamer, although that might change once I re-acquire some consoles. I did play quite a few older games, though. These are treasure troves of nostalgia, and now I shall wallow.

Remember when games came on floppy disks? (I barely remember when games came on *literal* floppy disks, but I'm not going back that far.) I had one particular set with various games, but there were two that stood out.

~*~*~

First up is Hugo's House of Horrors, a parser-based adventure game. I credit my ongoing interest in interactive fiction to this game. Plot: You're some guy named Hugo. Your girlfriend Penelope took a babysitting job at a supposedly haunted house. Bad Stuff apparently happened; your job is to investigate, because you are a commendably devoted partner. Spoilers now follow.

I also never beat this game. I played it when I was a child and did not know what walkthroughs, FAQs, spoilers, or such were. There's a certain purity in that method which I wish I could get back. I actually solved puzzles on my own, without consulting myriad hints. Hell, I was proud when I smashed the pumpkin to find the key to the actual House of Horrors. I think I also figured out the whole Igor bit, and got into the dinner party or whatnot. I got into the bathroom. I met the dog. But I never figured out how to pacify the dog. In retrospect that wasn't even a difficult puzzle, and I should have gotten it. Oh well. I was just a kid.

The dog scared the crap out of me. The dinner party REALLY scared the crap out of me, especially the "chop" bit (hint: I interpreted it as a verb, not a noun!) Ah, the feeling of youth.

~*~*~

And then there's Commander Keen. Commander Keen 4, that is. "Secret of the Oracle." In movies and often TV, by the time a franchise reaches number 4, it has gone downhill. Games are different. I've played some of the others (by 'some', I mean the ones freely available, which are 1 and the interim, Keen Dreams.) Maybe it's just that the nostalgia factor is missing, but 4 outshines them all.

(to be edited)

I'd be remiss not to mention the music. My interest in video game music is about as extensive as my interest in games, which is to say, not very except in small, potent bursts. This is one of said bursts.

Now then. The music for Keen was composed by Bobby Prince. According to his website, he got the job by responding to a post on the Prodigy music boards, a triumph of coincidence that's as good a story as Mandalay forming from an ad in Melody Maker.

You can listen to it on the YouTube, but from there, you're on your own. (It may or may not be available somewhere if you look hard enough.) Long story short: this is damn good stuff. It's memorable. It's catchy. If I still had a radio show there's absolutely no reason why I wouldn't put it into rotation. (I'm considering talking to some folks, so maybe I will. Have a radio show, that is.) And then there's a track called "Eat Your Vegetables." Why the title? There's a rather amusing backstory.

Photo project

I'm only about over a week late.

http://picasaweb.google.com/sarahcryst/April20thPhotoProject/photo#5195252406778166594

Wednesday, April 30, 2008: My interests according to Askville

Amazon has a service called Askville, which is kind of like Yahoo! Answers, possibly with extra bells and whistles. Anyway. I answer questions not exactly at random, but not exactly by choice; the best description is "stuff I already know or can find via clever Google search, out of the pile that nobody else wants to answer."

Now, other people answer questions too. For every answer you submit that's the best of the lot, you earn points in a category. The categories aren't systematic. The best description here: "whatever the asker felt like tagging the question with, whether or not he/she understands what tags are for." The better the answer, the more points. Now, there's a lot of vagueness here, so you'd expect that Askville points would do a pretty lousy job of determining my interests.

Turns out it does a pretty great job:

music (140 points)
computers (130 points)
books (126 points)
entertainment (113 points)

From here on out things fall apart:

trivia (82 points)
electronics (73 points)
food (71 points)
health (65 points)
shopping (64 points)
beauty (60 points)

And then the categories spiral off into irrelevancy and over-specificity. The top 4 are spot-on, though, and in roughly the correct order. I'm impressed.

~*~*~

Last night, during an innocent conversation on AIM, I unwittingly unleashed something truly evil onto the world. The proper thing to do in such a case? Why, tell everyone else how to unleash it too!

Tools You'll Need:

- An mp3 file, preferably of a song which is happy and uplifting. I like Disney songs for this.
- Audacity. It's free.
- Basic musical theory (optional; it's probably more surprising if you don't have it)

Steps:

- Open the mp3 file in Audacity, twice.
- In the second file, select the entire track, go to Change Pitch, and take it up 6 semitones. If you know basic musical theory, you already see where I'm going. If you don't, just experiment until the dialog box tells you you're at 6 semitones.
- Wait. (This takes a while, and takes longer the longer your track is.)
- Select the whole thing, and copy. CTRL-C, menu, however.
- Go to the first file (the one you didn't change) and select New Stereo Track.
- Go to the beginning of the new track that just appeared, and paste.
- Play.
- CRINGE.

Testimonial: "When it got to the bridge, I lost the will to live."

This, my friends, is the power of the tritone, the interval also known as the Devil in Music. Western society associates this thing with dissonance, and with evil. Personally? I think they have a point here.

April 16, 2008: And dream of...singing?

I keep a dream journal of sorts. I say "of sorts" because the phrase 'dream journal' implies two things:

(yes, I realized I used double and single quotes in the same sentence. Who needs continuity? Anyway. Two things:)

- That it will be a physical entity. I used to use paper for such things until I realized that people could, and did, read them. My handwriting is pretty bad, but not bad enough to avert some uncomfortable moments. I now use WordPad. This is more secure since my laptop is password-protected. I suppose if I wanted even more security I could password-protect the individual documents, but so far I have not dreamt about my social security number, credit card information, or anything of that ilk. Besides, I change names if I feel like I wouldn't want them to be public. I find it a bit sad that I censor my personal dream journal, but I'm paranoid. At times I've gone back and changed names I forgot about or didn't think about changing.

- That it is updated frequently. At first this was the goal. Not as much anymore. In a little over one year, I have documented 32 dreams. Fractionally, that is rather sad if you consider the number of days per year. (It gets marginally worse if you consider leap year. My 'year' started last April, so I had to.)

32 dreams, however, is barely enough for a statistical sample, so I can start to suss out some patterns. Here are some of them.

First of all, I dream about singing more than most people, well, dream. 13 out of 32 dreams involved singing of some sort, whether I was the singer or not (and I usually was). I wonder if I'll start dreaming about reading and books if I become a music major.

I dream about driving quite a bit, although nowhere near as much as singing (I think the count was about 7/32). These dreams aren't as fun. Two of the dreams involved my careening out of control on the road and ending up prone in oncoming traffic. One dream involved driving off a cliff - with my grandmother in the car. Then there are the dreams loosely based on things that really happened. One dream (I just mistyped "car" there) involved the car breaking down - which has happened. What didn't happen was bits of paper flying out of the engine, which in my dream looked like a torn metal box. One dream involved my getting lost on the way to Winston-Salem. This was in December. Two months later I actually DID get lost on the way to Winston-Salem, although not in the same way as the dream. I must have subconsciously picked up on how much of a clusterfuck the town is when I visited there.

According to dream analysis, at least the versions people tell me, if you're the one driving in your dream, then you feel like you're in control of your life. If I trust them, I feel that I am actively botching my life. I don't think I like this interpretation. It makes me a lot more comfortable dismissing the stuff as pseudoscience.

It's interesting to hear about others' dream patterns. I don't know if she still does this, but whenever my sister dreams about a family member, that family member ends up dying in the dream. (Again, something where I really don't want to think of implications.) It's interesting in the "insanely jealous" way to hear about people who manage to lucid dreams, or have abstract, symbolic dreams. My dreams aren't very symbolic. They are quite boring. One of my entries starts out: "I attend a board meeting."

I'd be remiss in ending this train of thought without providing tidbits from said journal, so have at it:

- "I bike around a bit and then I decide to audition/apply for the Queen of Britain's biking team." In my subconscious, Britain is equivalent to England (which it isn't. I know it isn't. My subconscious doesn't.) Also, it has a biking team. Also, I can make said biking team, which I go on to do in the dream.

- My subconscious teaches me that the reason water in a fishtank tastes bad is that it is 2/3 water and 1/3 "self-regulating cooling fluid".

- "This time I got it, but when I pierced the fish's side my own foot bled and started to hurt." ...voodoo-doll stigmata?

- I had one actor's nightmare that I remembered, on August 6, 2007.

- "Rehearsals were Wednesdays at 4; I ponder how I'll reschedule my volunteer work and think maybe two or three afternoons for one hour would work." Why do I do tedious crap like rescheduling stuff in my dreams, too?

April 4, 2008: Can she manage two blog posts in two days?

Why yes, yes she can.

Since I last posted, ScribbleWiki's site interface has exponentially improved. I was a bit too gushing in that last entry. I neglected to mention the fact that ScribbleWiki, the site itself, has - well, had - a horrid interface. (Not the MediaWiki part. The site itself.) Before, there wasn't really a login feature. Ostensibly there was one, but I could never get it to work. Perhaps there was an amazing site beyond the dialog box, like Narnia in the wardrobe, but I couldn't ever get to it, so it was as good as not existing.

Now, there is a quite lovely site with a FAQ and distinct login area. Just one problem, though: I forgot the details I used. This is a problem. I have far too many different email addresses I use for various sites, and too many convoluted passwords. This is called password security, but it should be called pain-in-the-assword security. I'll trust their site design is good all the way through.

~*~*~

Tomorrow I am attending a conference with the English department here. My role is to sit in the audience and ask questions about papers (or, as my mother informs me, to be a plant.) I had mulled over the idea of submitting one but people don't really know how extensive my Christina Rossetti obsession is. Let me explain.

My tastes in music and literature are similar, but not quite the same. I don't like modern classical music and I suspect I never will. It isn't for lack of trying; I've attended several concerts with the UNC new-music programs. Each time, I leave bewildered and basically unchanged by the experience, unless you count a higher degree of confusion. It's all right when you're listening to it, but I couldn't imagine myself wanting to repeat the experience. At the last concert I attended, I left after intermission and went outside to walk to Franklin Street. The night was clear, it was cool, and I listened to Tanya Donelly's gorgeous Beautysleep. I felt more transcendence in the short walk than I had in the entire first half of the concert.

This is why I'm not a music major, although you'd never know it from my posts here. I do like older classical music, to varying degrees. (Baroque was never my favorite. Of course, this means it has to be what they have me singing. I think part of it is culture shock after five years of singing musical theater.)

Literature is different. I quite like modern literature, and modern poetry especially. (I don't have as much to go on for novels, since I don't read as many as I could. Ten years ago that would be unimaginable coming from me; I was the girl who read almost every book in the school library. It was a private school, but still.)

I do still appreciate children's literature, in a combination of nostalgia and desire for childlikeness, and I also like older literature a great deal. My favorite "older" author (which is as silly of a classification as the lump-sum "classical music", but bear with me) is, of course, Christina Rossetti.

I've been drawn to her poetry and her life for about five years. Her poetry is simply beautiful, but her life is more interesting even, I think. She is what I might have been had I lived at the time. (She even looks a bit like me.) I've read several biographies - last year the Battiscombe biography, and a few weeks ago, the Kathleen Jones one from 1991. I really want to read the Lona Mosk Packer biography even if every other biographer maligns it for her assertion that Christina had a secret affair with William Bell Scott. Lack of evidence aside, it makes a truly good story. That's why I'm not a history major, or a biographer.) I am as engrossed in them as in any novel. Sometimes I even lapse into mannerisms normally reserved for movies - "No! Don't leave Charles Cayley! You love him!" I'm certainly invested in the reading.

On my list of things I want to do while I live is somehow read her letters. I know they're available, at least to biographers. It'd satisfy both my thirst for information and my wish to really know Christina. The wish isn't unique to her - I have other historical figures I do the same for, notably Claire Clairmont - but she's foremost among them. I'm not sure what she would think about that. Certainly she wasn't self-effacing. I know this is silly, but I feel the need to reassure her that it's out of respect - for her life, her poetry - my God, for her poetry - and for her person.