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November 24, 2002
Car Vs. Computer
I've been ambivalent about cars since the day in middle school when our crunchy-granola computer teacher, Mr. Hatridge, told us about a cross-country bike trip he took. The environmental drawbacks of car culture were more than apparent growing up in the LA area. (Dad tells a story about the year he lived in Southern California: he never knew there were mountains north of Los Angeles, because not once during that year was the air clear enough to see them. Marine layer. yes, it's all "marine layer.")
The car really doesn't feel like it's mine yet. Its upholstery is fresh-looking; the paint is unmarred. It accelerates smoothly, with an unalarming noise, and doesn't pull to one side or another. Not only does it not feel like it's mine, it feels like it doesn't belong in the family. Like a squeaky-clean brother-in-law about whom everyone is skeptical. Though my family has frequently had nice cars, we've rarely had new cars. Dad has the faded, delicate upholstery of the old Packard or Triumph replaced, and then it's never long before he sells it off. A man who came to buy a '39 Chevy hot rod off my dad at one point asked my sisters and me if we'd miss it. We shrugged. I imagine Gypsy girls felt the same way about their fathers' horses.
I'm dealing with a novelty curve that's totally foreign to me. I am waiting for the day when the daily functions of the car are as familiar to me as they are to my dad. Early in my training in the Orange Bomb (a 1972 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser painted screaming orange with a white racing stripe -- has moon roof! seats eight!) Dad called my attention to a barely-perceptible ringing noise that sounded when the car was moving. We're going to go home and diagnose it, he said. He helped me narrow it down to something wheel-related by the fact that it was a continuous ring... then to the drive shaft... which it turned out was scraping against a misplaced muffler. A thin shaved-silver ring showed where the damage was being done. This is what familiarity means: not just knowing how to fix the problem, but knowing and caring about the noises the beast makes in routine operation well enough to notice a minute change in the first place.
You know how it is with a computer. A new computer takes very little time to break in. I stick an anime graphic on the desktop, set up the menus to display the way I like, configure my text editors and browsers and the thing is mine within a week, purring and clicking to me in ways I quickly come to understand: the timing of loading a Flash animation vs. a site that's down vs. a system crash -- that kind of thing.
Will the car ever be that familiar? It feels like a big metal husk. I'm moving when it moves, and it stops and turns in correspondence with my reflexes, but it's not like my computer. My thoughts stay in my computer; their contours build up there, like plasticene I have shaped, and they're there when I come back to them. My computer knows verse and refrain; I think of a question about, say, the vertebral peculiarities of Arabian horses, which I used to know, and know some part of me knows, but my computer knows it better... and the computer sings back the answer. A car like a computer would know how to do some sort of nonlinear dance. It would be awkward, but it would be less like driving and more like dancing, or maybe swimming or flying.
Anyway I am re-developing a kind of consciousness outside my physical person which I used to experience in the early days of having a boyfriend: a feeling that I could sense the surroundings of something important to me which was out of my own sight or earshot, though not well enough to communicate with or protect it. (I just hope I remember to move it on the days when the street-sweeper comes.) Is it going to be like this when I have kids? I want to go check up on that car every five minutes.
A driveway is not something I've ever wanted before, but now I do. It's a slippery goddamn slope, you know? You want health insurance, so you want work, so you need a car, so you have to have a driveway, a carport... which means a house, which means a mortgage, which means regular work, no stopping to write a book. What was that Chief Seattle said about our posessions owning us? Right, right.
coda Yeah, mhmm. wrote that a few weeks ago, and was waiting to post it until I had pictures. enough of this airy fairy bullshit. I suppose any $200 bout with parking tickets will make the novelty wear off real fast...
here's another shot:
Posted by me at 9:38 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
November 19, 2002
Linguistic Causes Of Dyscalculia?
Graduate school applications periodically ask you to enter medium-length strings of numbers which code for one horrible bureaucratic thing or another, so I was entering the code for Stanford University -- 101764 -- when I had some of the usual trouble transposing numbers, and had to correct myself. I could very clearly see that the last three digits ran 7-6-4, but I entered it as 6-7-4 twice before I got it right.
I was vaguely aware that I had been saying them wrong to myself in my head. Had I simply allowed my visual understanding of and response to the symbols to take over, I could probably have typed in the numbers correctly. Suddenly it struck me that the problem might be that my language center had taken over, and maybe I was performing a linguistic correction in my head.
Why? "Six-seven-four" sounds better than "seven-six-four." Try it -- the sound you get when saying the former is "sickseven," which is easier to say than "sevensix."
Cobbling together some half-baked ideas from Steve Weisler and Neil Stillings's ever-popular, fan-fucking-tastic introduction to linguistics class, here's my reasoning: Not all English words pluralized by adding an S are spoken as if there is an S at the end. Words that end in voiced consonants are pronounced as if there is a Z (I don't remember what the teeth are called -- would that be a voiced dental fricative?) at the end: "Liam's dogs eat cans" would be pronounced "Liam'z dogz eat canz," not "Liam'ss dogss eat canss." "Seven," like "can," ends in an N (a voiced velar glide?), so speakers of English might be expected to correct themselves when faced with an S following "seven."
Could my overdeveloped language skills really be making that drastic a jump -- actually rearranging word order -- to correct a minor incidence of dissonance? Were the same skills that raised my verbal SAT scores also dragging down my math scores?
OK, so now that I've worked around to this part of the argument I find my half-remembered theories and misused jargon aren't really supporting my point, which is seeming increasingly rickety. Perhaps the claim shouldn't rest on ideas about pluralization; maybe there's other linguistic theories about word order and euphony that could be called into play. It just seemed to explain my problem with transposing numbers better than a simple diagnosis of dyscalculia; I've never actually seen the numbers out of order, just read them out of order.
Any thoughts?
Confidential to hahaha and Sammy: here's your picture:
d00d u had betr r33d up... or mayB $tart w/a dictionareee... bcuz Strunk 0wnz j00r 3l33t a$$ez yo...
Posted by me at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 13, 2002
I Know What You Did Last Halloween, Or At Least I Have A Vague Kind Of Sense Of What You Were Up To
The slightly creepy thing about having friends on Petridish is that pictures of you which you barely knew existed, like this one of me, Fuzrock, Dante, and Scott from last Halloween, show up sometimes. Here are more from that set, and there's also some from this Halloween, including some great shots of Jacob doing his luchador thing. You get a feeling for the Software Pirate concept and for just how homemade my costume was, but alas I'm not seeing any shots of Fuzzy-as-pirate, of Ben as Pontius Pirate, or Katya as a pilot. Goddamn I miss those kids. Kalamazoo and Chicago are richer for having them.
Posted by me at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
November 8, 2002
Like, totally.
Ever think Yours Truly is denying her roots and filtering out all that authentic Valley Girl flavor when writing the DSWJ? Well, now you can shove this prose (or any other site's) right back through the social-climbing, code-switching filter it's been squeezed through by using this Val-speak translator. The piece about Janeane Garofalo is particularly funny that way. Too bad the site can't handle XML includes. I want to note that it's interesting that Valley Girlism is now being considered an 80's phenomenon. Like, hello?! Has anyone been to New Jersey lately? Totally.
Posted by me at 3:09 PM | Comments (1)
November 4, 2002
That's the letter F and the letter U...
"Oh yeah, you know what?" Bert retorts. "Today?s show has been brought to you by the letters 'F' and 'U'! At least Bernice was real! I mean, I wasn't the one shoving a rubber duck up my ass!"
Found that on an old Columbia U satire rag website. (Sorry, guys, but I have to say they do much better than the Omen.) I was poking around gay-Muppet controversy sites as I'm thinking about ways to expand a pitch about an old feminist song on the show... anyone remember all the female muppets singing "there's nothing we women can't be?" If anyone has any memories of that particular sketch please email me, I'd love to have people's reflections on whether or not messages like that affected their take on gender roles.
Posted by me at 6:06 PM | Comments (0)
Jacob Wins!
Jacob has won the October round of the Dark Horse Comics Strip Search! Now he goes on to compete against the winners for the year. It already looks like there's some stiff competition -- I really like the first entry for this month, titled Tangerine. Yeah, I'm a sucker for plotlines about Brooklyn ghetto ninjas and organic produce, what can I say. Keep watching the Dark Horse site for further developments.
Posted by me at 12:51 PM | Comments (1)
November 3, 2002
Phone trouble?
Has anyone out there been having trouble with my phone over the last three days or so? I've been expecting to hear from people and haven't, and my land line has been doing this weird thing where it half-rings and then I get a dial tone and the person calling apparently gets a broken-phone busy signal. My cel phone is also underpaid at the moment and so service may be off. Can someone verify? Thanks.
Posted by me at 2:06 PM | Comments (0)
November 2, 2002
Last Chance -- Vote Jacob!
Old buddy Jacob Chabot, of Rick and Saurus, The Beetle, and Surly Boy fame (who also drew the new sausage graphic) has entered a Dark Horse Comics contest where four rising-star artists go head-to-head each month, competing for an eventual end-of-the-year prize and possible anthologization. Voting for Jacob and his competitors will continue until the end of October. Stop through and cast your vote! If you have time, check out the contenders and then decide Jacob's the best and vote for him; if you don't, just support your local artist and vote for him anyway. Oh, and if you want more new stuff, check out the latest installation of the Beetle vs. the Speak and Spell from Hell.
Posted by me at 6:27 PM | Comments (0)
Electronica Primer
Can anyone find me a better primer on genres of electronic music than this one? I've never gotten a good explanation, mostly because writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Also desirable would be a reason why anyone would be so anal as to divide genres based on BPM and the use of hi-hats, but mostly I'd like to be able to identify and explore the kinds of music I like. (ahaha. irony. Boards of Canada is a favorite.) Extra points if you can define "mowaxy."
Posted by me at 6:01 PM | Comments (0)