Thrum.

(I got this entry off to an illustrious start by almost posting it on my other blog, the one I keep to track my independent design project’s progress. Clever! I’m sure my professors would love to read about what I’m really like, but I’m on a mission to prevent that from happening. They currently think I’m competent for some reason…)

Do you hear that sound?

That strange, low-level noise, the one that’s like a sonic iceberg, only its highest ten percent or so audible to the human ear? The rest of it lingers in a more tactile place, spreading over your skin like fire-warmed honey before working its way inward to nestle among your organs. It’s sweet and rich, and secrets are suspended in its depths, like half-forgotten notes preserved in musical amber; as it progresses, nuances bubble to the surface and erupt into the air, sharp and fervent.

It sounds an awful lot like a girl playing the opening bars of Seven Nation Army ten thousand times over, swearing whenever her fingers slide across the sharp edge of the fretboard too quickly, and it feels an awful lot like the makings of musical satisfaction.

Mmmm, hmmm. Bought me a four-string, I did; his name is Thrum. I’m determined to make good use of it. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this recently, but I get synesthesia from certain types of music; I can feel it on my skin and sometimes inside my mouth, expressed as texture and temperature. I realized recently that it’s brought on by the bass in a song, so what better instrument could there be for me to play? It was obvious as soon as I sat down with the thing – my skill level’s currently one step above “dying goat spasming on the strings,” but I could feel every note I was playing, both immediately (as the vibrations ran through the strap and into my back) and via whatever weird mechanism my brain uses in such situations. Every good run through a scale made my heart beat faster and my muscles shift of their own volition, and every missed note tasted like dirty metal. It’s excellent feedback, in any case, not unlike Bart Simpson learning not to steal cupcakes by constantly receiving electric shocks…

Bryan’s half-owner of this little number, because he’s also interested in bass, and I figured we could keep each other motivated. I’m trying to feel competitive rather than dispirited by his disgusting amount of talent and training. It’s important not to compare oneself unfavourably to someone who’s been receiving musical training since he was five, but it’s still totally unfair that he can pick up the first string instrument he’s ever played and start merrily plucking tunes within seconds. *Bryan sits on the couch, frowning in concentration, then launches into song while he plays* “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin, keep them doggies rollin’…” “Hey, can you figure out how to play Seven Nation Army? I want to work on that.” *dum, dum-DUM dum dum DUMMMM DUMMM…* “Dammit, that was just too easy for you.”

I want to start a band one of these days. Right now, it’s looking like all of the members may be engineers and computer science people, so I proposed that we call ourselves “The Bass Case” and reference recursion in all of our songs. It’s a testament to the nerdiness of my companions that they all laughed. :p

It’s so easy for me to get burned out while doing this degree, and I’ve been too bound up in Python and MATLAB and Java to write the ten thousand stories burning holes in my brain. *spasms on the strings* Hopefully music will fill the gap until I have the time to organize my words the way I’d like them, and hey, everybody knows that a good bass riff is key to porn music!

Because the good relationships are the ones that keep the MENTAL DOCTORS in business.

We were wandering around Canadian Tire, locating home-improvement necessities and letting the puns fly fast and free from our grinning lips. While on the hunt for a humidifier, we asked an older Eastern European employee for assistance; she turned to another employee, declared, “Stop telling story! Now I help boy and girl!” and took us on a madcap tour of the water-vapourisation options available to us. A woman broke in to ask her a question; after receiving the answer, she walked off without offering thanks or further comment. Our helper remarked, apropos of nothing, “No wonder your country has so many mental doctors!” After she turned her back, Bryan and I exchanged a series of complex expressions representing the following conversation:
“WHAT IS GOING ON?”
“I DON’T KNOW, BUT IT’S AWESOME.”
“MENTAL DOCTORS!”

Somewhat later, we were staring at a huge, apparently randomly-arrayed wall of nails; Bryan was searching for 1-1/4″ finishing nails, but not the kind that have a bright finish, because those are just too flashy for his humble abode. We both grumbled and cursed at the fact that the boxes appeared to be placed wherever they fit, forcing us to look at every single one, and as a man in a blue work shirt walked by, Bryan stopped him.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Well, I don’t work here-”
“-oh, sorry-”
“-but ask anyway, and I’ll see if I can help.”
“Well, can you tell me why this wall is SO BADLY ORGANIZED?”
“…ah. Well, no, I can’t.”
The man then fell silent, paused a moment, and turned 180 degrees to face the other side of the aisle. I was glad Bryan had asked, because hey, that’s how you learn things!

We were both feeling a bit under the weather – due to an early-morning airplane ticket acquisition adventure, I was running on no sleep, and he’d managed to develop a case of back pain nasty enough to cause him to splay himself out on the floor like a 6′4″ toddler having an unusually peaceful tantrum – so by the time we’d obtained the humidifier and nails, tested every back massager available, hung informational signs on our persons, fought each other using foam insulation and spatulas, and made insightful comments such as “I love that we have such a multi-fauceted relationship” (this remark was made in the bathroom-fixture aisle, of course), I was ready to venture homeward.

Bryan, however, wanted to look at toaster ovens, so we ambled around the eastern half of the store in search of them. We failed to find what we were looking for in that area, so I started singing a happy little tune – “Doo do do dee dee de de doo…” – and invited Bryan to follow me as I walked confidently through other sections, working my way toward the store’s entrance. He followed for a while and then, with a slightly suspicious tone in his voice, he asked, “Wait, are you leading me to toaster ovens, or out of the store?” “Doo doo dee dee dooooo…!” I tried to sound nonchalant, but I knew I was busted. And I was so close to success, too. He reached for my hand, and we did a little dance before actually managing to find the ovens.

Giggling ensued. Giggling always ensues.

Crises, part I.

It happened the way it always did at parties, within seconds of her arrival: a man caught her eye from across the room. That is not to say that he possessed some notable attribute that caused her to focus on him; he was of some appropriately masculine height but he wasn’t tall, and he had a face, but it wasn’t striking. Instead, his projected interest reached across the intervening space and called her to him, exerting a gravitational pull that acted directly on her body. He examined her from head to toe, and she felt herself respond: weakly at first, but with steadily more determination as a sly grin spread across his face.

“C’mere.” He mouthed the words – well, the word and a half – with an exaggerated leer and a wave. What a ridiculous man he was, bobbing his head like a half-plucked emu.

She couldn’t have refused if she’d wanted to.

Must. Write. More.

Sometimes my mind is so full of ideas and potential projects that it comes to a complete stop, paralysing me with indecision because I have no idea what to work on first. In fact, ’sometimes’ probably isn’t a strong enough word. I’ve spent the last year or two wending into and out of that state, completing stories and other creative ventures here and there, but leaving far more crying out to be made whole… or mercy-killed. (“Father, give me legs!”)

Some of this is no doubt due to the fact that academic assignments are keeping me busy, and social engagements fill most of the gaps – I don’t want to turn people down more often than I have to, but seven evenings per week really isn’t many. I’m starting to see why so many people roam in packs; I prefer to engage with others on a one-on-one basis, but when you see all of your friends at once, you get to interact with them more efficiently and more often. (Also, it makes hunting water buffalo a much simpler task. As sharp as my fangs may be, my smaller social circle requires me to stick to hares, birds, and maybe the occasional crippled okapi.) Chums are important, and I’ve been trying to prioritize them more, since I have a tendency to suck in that regard. My classwork is also particularly interesting this semester: doing independent work on PyGraphics (here, if you have Subversion and want to poke at the existing source), designing teaching software for the Toronto District School Board, and working on a computer vision project for an assisted living client. They’re all great projects, ones which will excite and challenge me and pad my portfolio. But I can still do more, can’t I?

There’s so much art I want to create, but I find myself feeling stymied for a variety of reasons. When it comes to the most interesting of the pieces, the problem is fear; anything that makes a strong enough statement is inherently risky, and I don’t know what kind of reputation I want to build for myself before I enter the professional world. Sure, being ballsy and intelligent is a selling feature – but where’s the limit, and does my gender change the threshold? I don’t want to go into too much detail, but a performance piece I came up with recently would involve culture jamming and a major political statement. It involves burquas, sexual expression, and wearable technology. It’s well within my means to make it happen, and I think it would make a mark on the city, but it’d be at the risk of my personal safety and my future employment. My friend Matt and I have also been (slooooowly) designing an online game which employs all sorts of blasphemous and otherwise offensive material, and as my mother said when I described parts of it to her, “I’m very glad to live in a world where people can express those ideas, but I’d be afraid to do so myself.” The threat means the subject is important, but it’d likely be better for me to stick to writing and leave the grander projects alone. That’s not where my brain has been taking me recently, though.

So instead of working on any of the ten or so really good concepts I have queued up, I sit at my computer and watch TV shows like a slob. Over Christmas break, I hand-sewed a hat, read four books, and wrote three-quarters of a short story, and that’s as much as I’ve managed recently. I wish I knew how to get over that…

It’s a beautiful day in the neighbourhood…

My parents wanted to get outside this afternoon, and my flesh had begun to knit itself into the fibres of the couch, so I was happy to oblige. We went down to the Irving Nature Park, where the weather was impossibly balmy and the 100 km/h winds tussled our hair in the manner of a loving uncle who has no sense of his own strength.

I don’t know why anybody bothers to go to California, because the Atlantic coast has beaches that promise relaxation and comfort. And you don’t even need sunscreen!

The annual “Oh man, I am so inanimate!” post.

This has been one of the most asocial Christmas vacations I’ve ever let myself wallow around in. Aside from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I’ve just been sitting around the house, reading, chatting with Mom, and working on little projects. Oh god, so lazy! Ever-so-slightly rounded objects placed on surfaces which are not precisely level are faster-moving than I am right now. It is entirely possible that my atoms have just given up and are hanging sluggishly in space; is it possible that as the value of sloth approaches infinity, it begins to approximate absolute zero?

I was dangerously close to burnout when I got on the plane, so I’m going to label the last seven days “human storage for necessary restoration.” I don’t know if it’s because I’m not the hardest-working of people, because this schoolwork is beyond my comfort zone, because I took too many difficult courses at once, or because of some blend of those factors, but the whole situation cranked my anxiety into high gear. On the plus side, time and practice have helped me become self-aware enough to realize that I’m getting ill and to take my medicine for a while. I’m also smart enough to realize that it’s worth my financial while to take an extra semester to graduate, so I’m going to drop down to four courses per semester from now until graduation.

What does it say about UoT’s comp sci program that I was the only person I knew who was taking a full course load? I looked up the stats, and apparently the average time to completion here is five years. There’s something a bit ridiculous about the way the courses are administered; they almost all need to be bell curved to provide any sort of reasonable average, so you can bomb your way through the semester and still get a decent mark in the end. My statistics midterm had an unadjusted class average of about 30%. 30%! The prof ended up adding 26 points to everyone’s mark, but that wasn’t terribly reassuring. Sure, I went from a 45% to a 71%, but I still walked out of the lecture hall knowing that I’d only completed half of the questions. How do you know what you’re really learning when the tests are such inadequate measures of student achievement?

This university prides itself on being very challenging, and it has a good reputation as a result of that – but there’s something distressing about never knowing how anything is going to turn out. You can study all semester and complete every assignment, and the exams will still contain questions of a type you’ve never seen before. You’re not expected to be able to complete them correctly – the focus is on lateral thinking, applying current knowledge to new issues, and seeing whether or not you buckle under extreme pressure. It’s not how I’d choose to complete a degree, though.

Anyhow, things are looking up now! I’m currently embroiled in a Top Secret Project of Ultimate Ridiculosity, which will be revealed once I get back to Toronto, and am learning Python in the evenings. I was selected to work on an independent design project next semester, which is awesome; it involves updating and reworking the first-year comp sci Python media package, and it’ll be an excellent excuse to master the language and hack at things on my own schedule. I also get to take a class on computer vision, which will let small student groups develop and implement algorithms to solve problems like determining whether people are using sinks and stairs effectively. As much as I may complain about the way its course structure torments students, UoT is amazing because of its resources. The vision course is affiliated with one of the major downtown hospitals, and we’ll get to gather data which actually helps disabled patients. That makes the suffering worthwhile! Also, if I have a breakdown and end up in said hospital, perhaps I’ll have assisted myself somehow. :p

This is the most journal-y journal entry I’ve written in a while. What’s with that?

8:45 AM: Rolling over to turn off the alarm clock, I reach just slightly too far and fall directly into the half-foot gap between my bed and the wall. Good morning!
11:30 AM: Walking out of operating systems exam wearing a big grin, knowing I nailed it. Considered high-fiving Osama on the way out, but that’s probably frowned upon, even if my performance could technically be described as “totally radical.”
12-1:45 PM: Desperately learning linear algebra, digging through past exams and mumbling things like “Gram-Schmidt process is u2 minus u2 v1 over v1 v1 times v1…” while waving my hands in the air to depict vectors and matrices, much to the dismay of the people trying to study near me. They do not appear to appreciate my visual representations of numerical concepts.
2 PM: Whispering a ridiculous prayer to Coyote (because Coyote doesn’t listen to any other kind) and thinking about the price of unpleasant university courses vs. the cost of septic tanks. We spend a shocking amount of money on maintaining our lives and doing necessary but boring things – but the really weird part is that that’s shocking. Society teaches that cash is for acquisition of new consumer goods, but that’s mostly not the case; money is just a conduit to transformation, after all. Anyway, math courses are expensive and irritating.
4:30 PM: Walking out of linear algebra exam, wearing a grin big enough to terrify bystanders. Thank you, Gram-Schmidt process!
5 PM: Cycling south and swearing feverishly, because that’s the only heat-related word that’s even remotely applicable. The -20 C windchill turns cycling into an extreme sport. Luckily, my parka gives me a visual field of about 45 degrees, which distracts me from the way my fingers have frozen and started to shatter.
5:15-8:30 PM: Eating Thai food with Bryan, sharing ideas (“twatwrinkle” caused a solid five minutes of laughter, not to mention the Gerontobear montage), drawing diagrams of Saint John’s six-way intersections, and contemplating our current projects. Some projects do, in fact, involve current.
10-11:30 PM: Reading in the bathtub. The cat approves, giving two wet forepaws up.
12 AM: Surreptitiously playing DDR, attempting to hop very, very quietly so as not to tip everyone off as to what a terrible neighbour I am.
1-1:45 AM: Preparing resume, transcript, and cover letter, then applying for a summer internship at Google. Realizing that damn, I look really good on paper. Why do I feel like such a fraud most of the time? Imposter syndrome is such a pain.
2 AM: Wondering why the hell I decided to apply to Google on a whim at 2 AM. Who applies to Google on a whim at 2 AM?! Also, why did I make so many jokes in my cover letter? This must be my way of repaying Coyote for helping me out on that linear algebra final…

“When the seizure occurs during sleep, the person will often become semi-conscious and act out a dream while engaging with the environment as normal, and objects and people usually appear normal or only slightly distorted, being able to communicate with them on an otherwise normal level. However, since the person is acting in a dream-like state, they will assimilate any hallucinations or delusions into their communication, often speaking to a hallucinatory person or speaking of events or thoughts normally pertaining to a dream or other hallucination.” (from Wikipedia’s simple partial seizure entry)

As most of you know, I’ve had strange events occur during sleep for at least the last ten years, probably much longer. I have a tendency to feel like I’m awake and react accordingly, but I’m hallucinating and interacting with concepts that I’d easily recognize as irrational if I were actually fully conscious. This usually happens within half an hour of my falling asleep, although it does sometimes occur later in the night; I’ve always assumed this meant it’s tied to the REM part of my sleep cycle. The results are weird and often hilarious; here are some examples.

Most recently, I vaulted about three feet straight up in an attempt to escape my bed, which, I firmly believed, was about to fold in half to devour me like some sort of down-filled venus flytrap. (There’s a metaphor for insomnia if ever there were one.) The examples in my old entry are cute, but most of the time, I wake up thinking that there are insects in my bed or that someone is trying to do me harm, and have to flee in a panic. I generally make it to the light switch by my bedroom door before my brain snaps on and I start to wonder, “Wait, does this make sense? ARE there such things are sentient, five-foot-tall cockroaches? CAN some faceless entity encase my entire bed in Saran Wrap without having keys to my apartment?” It takes about five more minutes, and then I feel secure enough in reality to go back to sleep.

No explanation for these events has ever really satisfied me. I usually just tell people that it’s some sort of extended somnambulism – I was well-known for ambling happily around my parents’ house as a child, mumbling nonsense until I was returned to bed – or that it’s probably related to night terrors. But I know that sleepwalkers aren’t actually conscious, so they don’t behave rationally and generally don’t remember anything, and night terrors cause similar effects. I keep meaning to go to a sleep clinic, but doing that is time-consuming and annoying, and the waking dreams don’t occur often enough to be a real problem. They’re just a five-minute distraction a couple of times per month.

But what if they’re actually simple partial seizures, occurring while I’m asleep? It’s apparently not a significant issue, since whatever it is has been happening for ages and I’ve experienced no adverse effects, but it’s very strange to think that it might be some sort of very specific epilepsy. Epilepsy is also positively correlated with anxiety disorders, migraine, ADHD, and infertility, and I have at least two of those. (I’ve been wondering about my fertility for a while now, for various reasons, but I’ve been diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder, and I get migraine-like headaches at least once a month.) Brain? Hello? Brain? What are you doing in there?! Hop to it, American researchers working on subdermal LED implants; I want my idiot lights already!

Well, that’s just unnecessarily nerdy, little girl.

(To the tune of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. Jessica sent me a reimagining of DM’s Master and Servant, and this was my reply…)

Calculation’s
Like meditation,
Finding eternity
Inside an integral.

Anticipation
Of derivation -
Oh, how can you not
Love mathematics, girl?

All you’ve ever counted,
All you’ve ever added,
Sum more than their parts:
Numbers are nature’s own calculator,
They stretch out uncountably far…

Scribbling in sand
With thoughtful hands,
Hippasus was convinced:
Two’s irrational.

By contradiction
Showed fraction was fiction
And shared a complex truth.
This proof’s non-trivial.

The distance we’ve measured,
The music we’ve treasured,
Are gifts of this art:
Numbers are nature’s own calculator,
They stretch out uncountably far…

Double d-light, double d-jection.

It has been brought to my attention that I have developed a reputation at UoT for being somewhat prickly. This isn’t a matter of friendliness, as far as I know; I like and am liked by almost everyone I’ve met, and never lack for conversation, high fives, work-related advice, and table tennis when I’m lurking around Bahen. I’ve actually never had an academic situation this gregarious and open, and the only thing keeping me from forming closer bonds to more people is the fact that they’re all so much younger than I am. It’s hard to imagine myself going to pub nights and getting drunk with 20-year-olds, no matter how like-minded they may be. During the day, though, I slide through the department like I belong there, which is nice.

I’m still known as the reticent girl, though. When I say this, I don’t mean I’m a girl who is reticent about interacting, because I’ve never been less shy than I am now; rather, I’m a person who is reticent about being a girl. It’s become steadily more apparent that there are complex gender issues at play here, in the professional world in general and in the computer science department in particular, and I don’t know how evenly the blame should be shared. Maybe it’s mostly my own problem, and I’m extrapolating too much from what I see and read. Maybe I’m an innocent bystander who’s being oppressed by her chromosomes. I suspect we’re all taking turns creating this situation, even if most people aren’t actively aware of it. As my own awareness grows, I have to figure out how to react and respond – and as far as that’s concerned, I’m not where I want to be just yet.

Last week, I had to explain to a good friend that the reason I constantly rebuff compliments from him and our peers is because they’re almost always focused on my looks, not my contents. If you tell me I’m a good coder or that a story I wrote held your interest, I’ll thank you; if you tell me I’m pretty and/or hot and/or that I have great breasts, my specific wording will vary based on my mood, but it will be some reasonably polite way of saying, ‘Fuck off.’ The thing is, it’s not that I don’t like compliments of that type – I like them a lot, in fact. I don’t need validation from men, but it’s always pleasant to receive positive reinforcement. That said, I don’t want to hear them from people I consider colleagues, unless we know each other well enough that I can assume they’re not determining my value based on my looks. Even then, it’s only acceptable when I also know that those people aren’t secretly planning to bone me someday. (Yes, men, I know that ‘all men secretly want to bone all of the women they find attractive.’ Most women feel the same way. That’s natural, and not a problem! But there’s a difference between wanting to have sex and plotting away, feigning friendship and human interest when all you’re actually seeing is a potential lay.) Basically, as I explained, I want to be friends with the nerdy elite with whom I identify so strongly, and I feel like doing that requires that I avoid admitting to being a sexual creature.

So I don’t wear my short dresses and big boots to class. I keep my clothing simple and largely unflattering, and I don’t go to town with my make-up and jewellery. I’m friendly and helpful and occasionally filthy-minded – I can sass any of the young men of my acquaintance into the ground when the situation demands it, and most of them don’t try to compete with my smart mouth – but as asexual as I can manage. I don’t participate in the guys’ conversations about sex, and bow out rather than getting irate when they casually debase women. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t really work. Even if it did, it’s untenable.

I don’t feel particularly good about myself when I traipse around in t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, but that’s the most minor of issues. A bigger concern is that I seem to believe that in order to be taken seriously, I have to shelve my gender and become some sort of giant brain floating in depersonalized space. And even worse than that? I think I might be right. I can’t tell you how many of my classmates have expressed surprise when I turned out to be a strong coder who can debug their projects when they can’t; I’ve watched, and they don’t behave that way toward each other. I also frequently hear about how much I’m not a girl, and this thought is always expressed in respectful tones. What is so weird or wrong with being a girl in computer science that I feel I have to escape it, and why is it that when I succeed, people are impressed?

I’m afraid that I’ll never really feel like part of the team in CS, in class or in the professional world. I’m ever-so-slowly dealing with the imposter syndrome – it’s a condition that affects a lot of women in technical fields; they believe they’re not as talented as the men around them because of differences in the way men and women express themselves, and live in fear that their uselessness will eventually be discovered – but I don’t know what to do about my pheremones. I’ve traditionally compensated for perceived gender inequalities by being a flirt, playing up the Jenny McCarthy effect: if you’re one of the boys and like wearing low-cut shirts, men will want to keep you around. I’m still happy to do this to some extent – because, let’s be honest, it’s fun, and we should enjoy our bodies while we’re young and they’re looking their best – but it doesn’t and mustn’t carry over to my burgeoning career. Even if a woman could command actual professional respect that way – and I don’t think it’s possible – it’s a temporary skill. 40-year-old women really can’t do that, nor should they have to in order to find their place in a tech company. If I capitalize on my looks instead of developing my personality and demeanour, it’s going to cost me in the end, likely sooner rather than later.

I want to build a reputation for being creative, intelligent, and cool, not for being slutty or frigid or too much of a feminist. Men jostle for position in the corporate and social hierarchies, but I feel like if I try to do the same, I’ll be branded with a label that none of my male counterparts will. That pisses me off, and I haven’t really figured out how to deal with it yet. And I still kind of wish I were a guy, at least until I remember that dammit, I have great breasts.