Adventures in America

To my loyal readers:  I apologize for no post yesterday.  Apparently we stole all the free wireless in the neighborhood and now there is none left.  This would be a serious problem, perhaps even to the point of allocation of funds, were it not for my next piece of news:  I am leaving!  Without my computer!  You see, for the past four years I have been a member of a division I drum and bugle corps, a youth organization that spends the entire summer touring the country and performing field shows for myriad band kids and VFW members.  I had not intended my involvement in the activity to play a large role in my blog; it’s a niche activity and not a big part of my daily life any more.  Until last night, that is…  I got a call from My Team asking me to join as a staff member.  At first, I was terrified; I had been hyping having a summer free to fuck around over the past month, and this committment means I will not be free until August 20th or so, including the backpacking trip I am going on in August (I was smart enough to plan that around Finals anyway, since I figured I would go regardless).  On the other hand, I was dying to get this job back in December when I applied.  My Team is going through a big transitional period and I could really have a big impact on the direction they take.  The fact is, I really care about these guys, and to turn down this opportunity would be something I would regret.  After briefly considering the layer of sweat I would be sleeping in all summer at home without AC, I gladly accepted.  On Saturday I will be hopping on a plane to City, State, and beginning a madcap summer of adventures all across America.

What does this mean for you, dear reader (I know you’re out there)?  Well, for one, I will not be posting as much.  Nearly as much… once a week if I’m lucky.  On the other hand, life on tour is jam-packed full of intense relationships, unexpected happenings, and mind-blowing explosions.  Ok, no explosions.  Hopefully.   I suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t have to check back into a mostly dormant website all summer just to get my tales of adventure.  However, I promise, here and now, to relate every bus-seat or gym-floor hookup in excruciating detail!  If that won’t get you coming back, then I don’t know what will.

Adventures in Mathematics

(Boring Alert)

In some small way, I am a mathematician; I have a bachelors degree in mathematics from an old university with an impressively short name, and I am currently employed to impart knowledge and joy in the art of mathematics to young people. In other ways, I am not. Despite accumulating as many math credits as I could in college (sixteen, or forty-eight, depending on your system), I primarily took these classes because they were easy for me and I could coast through most of the semester with a minimum in effort. I have not at any point pursued math as a hobby or passion, despite the great joy an original or elusive solution brings me. In fact, math has long been the only academic pursuit that gives me any joy whatsoever, to the degree that even at four in the morning we would dance around with genuine glee after devising a hermetic proof. Laziness, not lack of interest or ability, is the only reason I do not consider myself a mathematician. My interest in applying to graduate school last fall withered as I realized that I needed to be ready to give myself fully over to academics, when in fact I just wanted to get away from it.

Now, after another year of successfully escaping work without serious repurcussions, I am feeling a desire to change. If I am going to be admitted to and successful in a serious math program next winter (this is the current plan, although a third year of teaching is not out of the question), then I need to prove to myself and others I can sustain an interest and work ethic for mathematics. To that end, I went to office depot with the goal of buying a journal and the most expensive pencil I could find. Successful, and so armed, I now begin the task of working through my college textbooks, with the intention of completing every excercise along the way. Last night I got started, filled ten pages with reassuringly natural and rigorous proof, and took delight. I really hope I can finish this project; in some sense I feel my soul depends on it. Here is the plan

June/July: Serge Lang, Undergraduate Analysis

August/September: Michael Artin, Algebra

October: Revisit and improve my senior seminar on p-adics and adelic analysis, to help get a better recommendation from my senior advisor (I got an A the first time around, but the work was pretty shoddy).

November: Sheldon Ross, A First Course in Probability. This should be pretty easy, but I think this is the direction I want to go in my research, my favorite classes were discrete math, advanced probability, stochastic processess and algorithms. I have no doubt that there is extremely productive (and probably profitable) work I could do in this area.

Around this time I should know whether or not I want to apply to graduate school and I should be in touch with some professors from college, so its hard to say where I will go from there. Hopefully I will be revisiting this post in four months with a sense of accomplishment, and not regret.

Knocked Up: Don’t Forget Your Condom!

Here is my review of Knocked Up: Totally Fucking Hilarious. However, some bizarre stuff. Here I am, literally playing the role of slacker boyfriend who deflects questions of responsibility and commitment with disarming wit (this was another date with SB). Put 50 pounds, a mop of jew-hair and much, much better written jokes on me, and I am Seth Rogen in this movie. So you think that I’d be sympathetic to his character in this movie. For the most part I was, but for the middle “conflict” part of the movie he was a huge asshole, reacting to one slight from his gf with an unending stream of resentment, neglect and scorn, culminating in him telling her off, calling her a huge psycho bitch and walking off giving her the finger. He feels bad about this later, makes a piss poor attempt at reconsiling, and strangely goes all stalker-ish by building a cute little home for this family that he just told to fuck off. That was just weird. Of course everything works out in the end but he seemed wayyy too on edge for the lovable pot-head teddy bear that he was supposed to be playing. Anyway, still hilarious, but I am a sucker for a good love story as well as a good comedy and this one didn’t quite feel right at the end.

My title to this post does not actually refer to the movie. Let this be a lesson to you: if you are taking your girl out to see a movie called “knocked up”, she’s probably not going to let you put it in her without a sandwich bag.

More on Smoosh

I made a delightfully drunk and delirious post about my new favorite band after the show Saturday, and I just wanted to reiterate:

This girl, Chloe, plays the drums with strength, precision, originality, and joy. I was entertained out of my mind watching this girl play and interact with her sister. I’ve been involved with serious drummers in all sorts of contexts and she’s definitely not “good for a girl” or “good for her age”, but one of the most badass rock drummers I’ve ever watched (Granted, perhaps not the subtlest. But that just makes it so much cooler!). Maybe the preteen girl thing clouded my judgement a little but I think this girl will be making some serious noise five years from now (when she’s 18!). Her sister is great too, but should seriously consider expanding her musical vocabulary… apparently she’s self-taught on keyboard and has no desire to learn to read music. What they’re doing now is great but if they want to become a serious musical force (for which they clearly have the talent) she needs to expand her songcraft a bit.

She has genuine rockstar pipes too… her vocals sailed over the top of their muscular playing ala Neko Case from New Pornographers and in generally their sound was fantastically balanced and full. Regardless of what these girls do in the future they are obviously having a blast performing their music right now. I checked out some videos online and they have definitely gotten stronger and tighter over the past year.  Hopefully their parents are taking good care of them!

In the future, I will

get more than five hours of sleep at a time

add narrative structure to my blog entries

actually practice my horns, instead of just noodling around

develop work ethic

stay in touch

Thug culture pt. 2

This is a great article that elaborates on what I was trying to say about thug culture in my article on racism. Here’s my favorite part:

Sociologists have a term for this pathological facet of black life. It’s called “cool-pose culture.” Whatever the nomenclature, “cool pose” or keeping it real or something else entirely, this peculiar aspect of the contemporary black experience — the inverted-pyramid hierarchy of values stemming from the glorification of lower-class reality in the hip-hop era — has quietly taken the place of white racism as the most formidable obstacle to success and equality in the black middle classes.

I teach at a <certain type of> school, and this phenomenon is in full force in our lower grades at school. A small portion of the school is on a grant program to bring students from poorer backgrounds into the school. As far as I can tell, the other students do not discriminate on these lines; a poor European student is among the most popular in his grade and I honestly have no idea which black students come from disadvantaged backgrounds and which have lawyers for parents. In addition, our black students in our graduating class this year, were, almost without exception, some of the finest examples of citzenship, leadership, and work ethic, and enjoyed the popularity in a mostly white school that their personalities deserved. Then there is the freshman class. Perhaps these kids are just waiting to grow up, but the thug subculture that arose among the black students in our ninth grade class is absolutely destroying this kids. One of my brightest students at the beginning of the year is black, and I told him without hesitation (after he began struggling) that if he straightened up his act he could go to a school like Harvard, not as a judgement of what represented success, just to give him an idea of how highly I held his abilities. Unfortunately, he, along with two other black students in my class and several others in the grade, devolved into a subculture that isolated them from other students and is characterized by surliness, rudeness, and violence, and has already lead to problems with drugs and theft that we rarely encounter at school. When I spoke with one student’s parents about his behavior, they seemed astonished and dispirited, as they viewed their son as a potential leader in the school community (they themselves were well spoken, well balanced, and more stable than most of the other parents I’ve interacted with throughout the year). For this young man to be making an effort to throw away all his parents have worked for to get where they are is really discouraging. I can only blame this class-backwards system of values on the successful thug hip-hop artists, glorifying the violent cultures from which they emerged, and flaunting their money as a way to sit atop the heap of this cultures, feeding off legions of destitute drug users, rather than escape that culture, or better yet, work towards eliminating it.

Smooshed

Roommate drug me out to the Black Cat tonight; I was ready to settle in for a night of cracking a new book (Yiddish Policeman’s Union), but I agreed to go out for some adventure. What adventure it was! The second act was two teen girls, Smoosh. OH MY FUCKING GOD THEY WERE INCREDIBLE. Some of the most seriously badass drumming I’ve ever seen live and the girl is 13 years old. I was utterly transfixed. The other girl played keyboard and sang and had serious pipes. Man, the drummer though; she beat the hell out of those drums; so fucking awesome. I got autographs, a picture, and bought a CD and t-shirt.

hehehe, I’m still giddy. SHOOSH! WOO!

Saxophone Song for Myself

I bite the cold metal of the mouthpiece, feel the dry reed on my toungue.

First rush of air, uneven fingers, abrasive sounds, but a melody is young.

Here, doo dah, blee roo, I’m finding the style

melody forms, then falters. Now I smile

’cause the room fills, the room sings, to my tune, my thing.

I found a fresh key, a fresh line, a fresh way and it sings,

Diving, then soaring, vulnerable then strong,

It finds the right line, the next one in this song.

See, the band is just me, and I’m my only fan, oh,

this is the premiere, the first and final show.

For this song, this living, breathing thing, its out past me;

just my fingers and ears and breath and heart, else it’s free.

No one to grab it on paper, or any such thing;

Today, only for me does my saxophone sing.

Existential Crisis Resolved (postponed)

I just have to remember that this is the reason I started writing things down. I know I cannot capture myself in words, forge a paragraph imbued with the essence of my being. The goal of this journey is gain that ability; for these updates to gradually reveal more and more of my true self. To be sure, the person I have represented falls short of my own expectations for myself; he is intelligent but ignorant, claiming a joy in life but exhibiting a single minded drudgery, and worst of all presuming a knowledge of the ways of a world that I am only beginning to explore. Rereading my posts is annoying at best; but I have come to realize that it is not the music of my head that is poor, but the transcription.

You see, at school we’ve been involved in end-of-year ceremonies this week, and I have had the opportunity to reflect on my first year teaching and my first year as a self-reponsible adult. To be sure I have failed in many respects; I was lazy and my fuse was too short at times. However, I was overwhelmed with the real appreciation from my students this week; young men I have taken the time and care to understand as well as I could, and to reveal to them as much of myself as I could. Through their response to me over the past year, I can see that I am becoming the person I want to be, and that I have something to offer the world beyond my talents.

So I hope you continue to join me in my adventures, exploring both the great world and the unexpressed nature of my own being.

trying to be honest, drunk

I wrote an e-mail to a DC blogger to check out my blog.  I thought hers was cute; part of starting this blog was to make friends in DC so I told her to check mine out.  Then, I hate mine so far.  It’s not that the things I’ve been writing haven’t been honest, they have.  Yet a huge part of me, most of me, is missing.  I haven’t found my voice yet.  This is why I started it, I should have expected it; I knew I can’t yet get me across in writing.  I’m not the person, only the person, you’ve read in entries so far.  When I’m sober, I’ll fix it.  Love you, DC.