January, 2009:

I got tagged by Kimli to do this internet meme some weeks ago, and while normally I avoid memes she bought me a really nice watch for Christmas and I keep getting compliments on it so I’d feel really guilty if I denied Kimli this, a silly list of information about me.

The meme itself seemed far too open and vague, so I decided to narrow it down to just trivia about my hair. Still there? It sounds shallow, but I think about my hair a lot. Not as much as I do music, or friends, or my career, or even my cat, but still, probably more than it’s due. Some of you will remember that I usually post a blog entry when I get a new haircut, so this isn’t a completely surprise I’m sure. And now you get to read my thoughts about my hair, all organized into a list.

I can feel the excitement from here.

1. I’m pretty sure my hair is the same colour now as it was when I was a kid (light brown). If it’s darker, it’s not by much. Mind you, I just mean naturally; I pay for highlights.
2. I like that highlights cover up any grey hairs I’m getting. There’s this one grey hair I see at my part that I’ll be happy to kill in a couple weeks.
3. My hair was wavy when I was a child, curly as hell when I was a teenager, and is back to wavy in my adulthood. It might’ve been better the other way around.
4. Because of a few weird encounters in my teen years I worry that having short hair makes me look masculine. That’s one reason I’ve kept it long for the last couple years.
5. Because of a few weird encounters in my adulthood I worry that having short hair will keep me from getting laid. Which doesn’t make sense, since I got way more action 4 years ago (with a pixie-cut) than nowadays, but the idea lingers. Tanya said the same thing last night (about long hair == more male attention).
6. That said, I think I look best with a chin-length bob haircut, but I’m somewhat unwilling to chop off half my hair to do it.
7. A former workmate (also named Tanya) thinks that if I got my hair cut super-short again, I’ll go back to looking 19, because she thought I was 19 when she first met me 4 years ago. At 31 I think that’s a bit far-fetched.
8. I find my long hair very annoying during sex. It gets in the way, it gets messy and sweaty, sometimes the guy leans on it, and it tangles up way too much.
9. I find it a weird coincidence that my hair matches the orange in my cat’s fur. Like it was fate or something; it’s not like my stylist has ever seen my cat.
10. I complain about my cat’s shedding but I think I’m worse.
11. I end up eating my hair by accident now and again. It gets in the way. I know I eat my cat’s hairs once in a while too, but they’re shorter and easier to swallow.
12. My hair is entirely unmanageable if I don’t use conditioner. And combined shampoo/conditioner doesn’t count as conditioner.
13. It bothers me that my stylist won’t give me bangs even though I know they’d look dumb on me.
14. I wish I were the sort of chick who could get away with really bright hair (like that chick Kari on MythBusters) but I don’t have the balls nor the complexion for it.
15. I rarely use my hair dryer. Only before a special event when I shower right before it.
16. I rarely use hairspray or gel or mousse or anything, even though I have all of these products.
17. I don’t brush my hair, but use wide-toothed combs. This is from when I was a teenager and brushing created afro-frizz.
18. My mom has female-pattern baldness, and every time a bunch of my hair falls out I worry that it’s genetics saying hello.
19. However, I have tons of hair. Or hairs. Many, many follicles. So far, so good.
20. In Grade 10 Science class we had to use microscopes to look at our hair. As one of two white people in class and having curly hair, I was asked by my mainly-Chinese classmates for my hairs. Within minutes, there were gasps and shrieks, as my hair was about 3 times as thick as everyone else’s. That was probably the most attention I got in all of high school.
21. It took at least a year to find the right balance with highlights: brighter, but not lighter than my natural hair. The bonus is that my roots aren’t that noticeable and 4 months after getting the colour (such as now) some people still think this is my natural colour (if I don’t tell them).
22. I feel like blonde looks weird on me but darker hair makes me look sickly.
23. I normally wear my hair down, and pretty much always have. Maybe a barrette to get hair off my face, but that’s it.
24. I have really no concept about how to “do” my hair, put it up, or braid it, or anything like that. I know how to braid, and I have all the necessary accessories, but my perfectionist nature realizes that I can’t do things 100% symmetrically so I give up very quickly. I also feel silly in an up-do or fancy hair. Like I’m playing dress-up.
25. I have a badly-organized Flickr set of haircut photos from the past 4+ years. I consult it when making hair decisions.

That’s it. No tagging of anyone else, because everyone else has done this meme already.

I’ve been wasting away from the bubonic plague all week, but today I had just enough energy to run some errands. Working from home, I’ve been using up all my various office supplies, much of which was left over from university (nearly 5 years ago), so new purchases were in order:

1. pens
2. notepads
3. desk lamp
4. extension cords
5. pajama pants

There are benefits to this lifestyle, “pants optional” being one of them.

Here’s something you might not have known:

Barack Obama is left-handed.

Maybe 10% of the population is a lefty. I wonder what the percentage would be if there weren’t people around who were forced to switch to their right hand (like Mom). Maybe life would’ve been easier for people like me (another lefty) if there were more of us and therefore more lefty scissors around. I really suffered in elementary school, thanks to the scissor situation.

I could go on about my chronic issues with smudging ink, but I can tell you don’t care. Good thing keyboards are ambidextrous, or I’d still be finishing high school. In prison.

Here’s the other left-handedness fact worth mentioning:

When Obama is inaugurated tomorrow, he’ll be the 5th of the last 7 US presidents to be left-handed.

Along with Clinton, the first Bush, Reagan, and Ford.

Creepy. I’m sure creeped out. Aren’t you?

McCain is a lefty too, so Americans were going to get another left-handed president, regardless. Sounds like a conspiracy to me (a leftist conspiracy?).

I wonder why this is. I wonder if it’s coincidence or if there’s something about being a southpaw which makes you a popular politician. Or a good one (fingers crossed). Do lefties have intrinsic talents or traits which are an advantage over their average-handed counterparts?

Lefties live 7 fewer years on average than right-handed people. Which would be reason enough to not elect McCain: he’s practically on borrowed time as it is. But I’m not sure how a shorter lifespan is a benefit to politics, unless you suck at it.

Maybe having to adapt to a right-handed world gives you problem-solving and thinking-outside-the-box skills, though I’m not sure I got anything out of my childhood strife. I just avoid using pens with smearing ink or binders, and I use a right-handed computer mouse in my left hand. And right-handed desks at school. Innovative, that’s me. That’s leadership potential for you.

This might be entirely meaningless, and it certainly doesn’t matter, except to lefties such as myself who kind of like it that there’s one of us in the biggest job in politics. Beyond that, meh. It’s a pretty boring topic.

I found this via Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise blog: a Youtube video the New York Philharmonic playing the finale to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, Leonard Bernstein conducting, but with recitations of some of the Youtube comments heard over the sound of the music.

I hadn’t heard of the Youtube Commentary Project before, but it’s just too meta for me. Also, most Youtube comments are really dumb (case in point, the title of this blog post).

If you know the history of the piece, it’s sort of interesting to hear people talk about it (not all of the comments are dumb: somewhere in the first few minutes is someone talking about how Shostakovich “fucked like a jackhammer”, which is certainly topical). After reading the Wikipedia entry on the symphony, I’m thinking I’ve had too many beers between music school and now to remember the facts right, but then again Shostakovich has only rarely come up in conversation in the past decade.

The general and potentially incorrect story as I know it is that back in the 1930s Stalin decided he hated Shostakovich and said his music was anti-socialist (or anti-Stalinist), possibly because it wasn’t a short ditty you could tap your feet to. From what I’ve heard, Stalin was one of those guys you didn’t want not liking you, and Shostakovich was in fear for his life. Hard not to be when your friends keep disappearing.

Supposedly Shostakovich had gone to some government official on a Friday and was told to come back on Monday, with the assumption that this was his last weekend on Earth so he might want to wear fresh underwear. So Shostakovich spent the weekend setting his affairs, saying goodbye to people, and whatever else one does in such a situation. Then he comes back to the official’s office on Monday, to discover that the official himself had been “removed”. According to the Wikipedia page I might be talking about this guy, but I don’t know. It’s both fascinating and terrifying, how close he was to death.

Shostakovich then went on to compose this symphony, in an attempt to keep himself alive just a little longer by making government-approved music. Or not; the jury’s still out on whether he was specifically trying to woo Stalin with this, and he’s dead now so we can’t ask him. I never studied Shostakovich enough to say what changes he made between his earlier works and this one, either, but he changed something, and it worked. It was a success, and Stalin liked it and declared Shostakovich worthy of not being shot, so all was good.

This finale is interesting because the assumption nowadays is that it’s meant to be a parody of a triumphant march, and that the beats feel forced in the same way as people in the day were forced into slavery and brainwashed against their will. Scholars think this was Shostakovich giving Stalin the middle finger salute while his back was turned, but again, who knows? It could be wishful thinking, but it does make for a good story.

When I first heard this piece and was told about it (in 20th century music history class), I thought that it did have an uneasy, frenetic feel to it, so the story and the theory behind it seemed plausible enough. It’s harder to tell in this video, though, what with all the talking about how funny Bernstein moves around, and how the flautist is a dead ringer for Michael Caine. Some of the commenters mention that Bernstein takes it faster than is usual and that it comes out sounding far more authentic than Shostakovich intended, but again, I can’t really give an opinion on that; it doesn’t sound any faster to me. And there’s such a fine line between parody and cacophony in music, and maybe we just don’t have the subtlety to hear Bernstein’s version of Stalin’s Terror.

Here’s the original video, in case you’re interested in hearing it without all the annoying chatter:

I feel very fortunate that I have been able to find a couple contract jobs in the last few months that have kept the cat fed and me off the streets. Especially since I didn’t go looking for either of them, which is how I like to find work, and everything else really. However, one contract is finished and the other may only last two weeks longer, and I may soon find myself hunkered in a doorway on Seymour downtown, sleeping in a cardboard box with only my cat and Tivo for warmth.

So I have been looking at the job ads, not that I ever stopped looking, though it’s often depressing to do so. Full-time work seems at least to be more secure, though I don’t think I should say that since I was laid off 4 months ago. I don’t really like the uncertainty of contracting, because if I don’t know how to look for contract work, how long can I just run on the luck of friends’ recommendations? I may run out of friends.

Now, as for the job ads being depressing, one aspect is that I’m very rarely seeing anything for a specifically MySQL DBA in Vancouver. Maybe once every 2 months. I was up for one and then the company changed their minds when the economy went bad. Oh well, it would’ve been a long and dull commute to their Burnaby offices anyways.

But what’s really, really depressing is what I’m seeing here and there in the job ads themselves (for developer and DBA positions):

PHP/MySQL Web Developer: $15/hour contract
Consumer Database Administrator: Salary $30,000.​00 – 48,000.​00/​year

To which I say: are you fucking kidding me?

I’m not even sure $15/hour is industry standard for coop (intern) students. I was certainly making more than that my first year out of computer science, and they want people with experience for that price? What sort of quality of IT worker are you expecting to get for that?

I had some interesting discussions last month with my parents (all four of them) about the fact that I was seeing job ads for pretty low wages, though I was talking about offerings of $40K at the time. 3 out of 4 of them suggested that I apply to these jobs just so I could “get by” until a better job came along. Granted, that advice has some merit, except for the principle of it:

There shouldn’t be a 50% off IT worker sale.

I shouldn’t apply to these jobs because I don’t want to encourage companies for offering that much and thinking they can get quality work for that. It’s just wrong. If I can afford to hold out for something not insulting, then that’s what I’m going to do, for myself as much as for the sake of the industry.

I’ve never been looking for work for this long before, so I’m not sure if these ads are just random anomalies from naive managers, or whether they’re a result of people wanting to take advantage of the bad economy. A friend of mine who does office admin work has mentioned seeing drops in offered wages as well (“$9/hour, must have BA from accredited university”).

Is anyone seeing similar ads, or can give me a perspective of what ads were like prior to this recession? And what do you think of my decision to avoid applying to such ads?

Anyone who’s come to me in the last half year or so and asked me to recommend a band, regardless of what music they listen to I always mention Frightened Rabbit (MySpace). I start talking about how their latest album The Midnight Organ Fight is the best album I’ve heard in years, and how I can’t stop listening to it, and like omg go check out the album now already!!!11 And maybe I started to sound crazy because nobody would take my advice and then months later they’d tell me about Frightened Rabbit and say, oh, you mentioned them before didn’t you? I hope these same people realize now that obviously I have awesome taste and they should listen to me from now on and take notes. Grr.

I discovered this band back in 2006: before their album was released in North America I got a leaked copy of the UK release of Sing the Greys. I really liked their sound and was interested in hearing more, but there wasn’t all that much more to the album for me than a sense of potential. Plus they didn’t come to Vancouver on their NAm tour, so I sort of forgot about them.

This past spring I heard their new album was coming out, and I was strangely excited about this, as if I somehow knew, the way you know a good melon. I got an advanced copy of their new album because I have neither patience nor morals, and then spent a whole weekend doing nothing but listening to them. And then spent the next 9 months doing nothing but listening to them. Really, most of musical purchases since April have been entirely pointless.

In the 1820s there was a French composer named Hector Berlioz who fell in love with an English actress named Harriet Smithson, known for her role as Ophelia in Hamlet. He sent her many love letters, but she did not respond, and dejected and in despair, he goes off on an opium binge and composes the Symphonie Fantastique. A few years later Harriet discovers that she was its muse and goes off and marries the guy, because who wouldn’t? It’s a great story up until they get divorced 9 years later.

Anyways, heartbreak seems to be the bomb of musical inspiration, and Midnight Organ Fight is a song cycle about the lead singer’s recent breakup. It’s there in the lyrics and in his voice, and if you can’t relate then you have no feeling.

“Keep Yourself Warm” has to be the best song I’ve ever heard to describe casual sex; specifically sleeping with someone you met at a bar to try to numb yourself from the pain. People sing along to this at Frightened Rabbit’s concerts, because there’s something universal about making mistakes like this when you’re emotionally hurt.

You won’t find love in a, won’t find love in a hole,
It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm

My favourite song from the album is “Good Arms vs. Bad Arms”, which is about your ex coming to drop off your stuff and you dealing with your feelings towards them. The chorus goes,

Leave the rest at arm’s length,
Keep your naked flesh under your favourite dress

which is all you need to know. I find this song, like the others, quite poetic in its metaphor and word play (“Good arms, versus bad arms, will win hands down”/”I am armed to the teeth and I’m heavy set”).

According to my Last.fm profile I’ve listened to this song more than any other this year, yet I still can’t get enough of it. Though I always was a sucker for 6/8 time.

Don’t mistake me; the album isn’t all dark and sad. After the despair comes hope, and the mindset that “while I’m alive, I’ll make tiny changes to Earth”.

I saw the band perform at the Media Club a few months ago, and I am kicking myself that I didn’t go up to Scott Hutchison after their set and tell him how much this album meant to me and that it was my favourite in years if not this decade. But I thought I’d seem really sappy and dumb so I didn’t. Hopefully some of you will listen to the songs and get a sense of what I’m talking about.