Wonderfully creepy, my lord

Lots more Game of Thrones-related stuff has been announced in the past few days, but the highlight of what's been posted lately is this featurette of Petyr Baelish, also known as "Littlefinger," one of the courtiers in King's Landing. The master of treasury, Littlefinger is about as shrewd as they come, and he also harbors a long-smoldering obsession with Catelyn Tully Stark, the wife of Eddard Stark, who thinks of Littlefinger only as a little brother. In Catelyn's absence he sort of gloms onto her children, especially the older Stark daughter, Sansa, in his shrewd, awkward, and creepy way.

Littlefinger (Aiden Gillen) and Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) turning on the creepy factor. Screenshot courtesy of Westeros.org

Littlefinger is definitely a love-to-hate type of character with a bizarre and slightly pathetic history, and that screenshot really captures the awkwardness and creepiness he seems to bring to just about every interaction he has with anyone, particularly anyone connected to his infatuation with Catelyn, doomed from the start due to his position as a relatively lowly lord and Catelyn's position as both a Tully (first lords of the Riverlands) and a Stark (the wardens of the north).

Vacation blahblahblah

Not dead, just on spring break. Which is of course delightfully un-full of things to do but which thus makes blogging about things less necessary. Blogging is often a procrastination tool for me, a way to settle my mind before moving onto something else, but there's nothing really to settle here or procrastinate doing. Except sleeping. Which I'm doing, for some reason.

I have A Game of Thrones back from my housemate, so I've been re-reading that. There are a lot of sneaky little details I missed the first time through--unsurprising, in a way, considering how quickly I usually read things. It just takes such a long time with ASoIaF since every book is at least 800 pages in mass-market paperback form, and at school I only read before going to sleep, which only allows for a chapter or maybe two a night (the chapters get really long as the series goes on, it seems). 20 pages or so a night, 50 if I really chug on through (but then I usually have trouble going to sleep afterward, so yeah). That means it would take 2-3 weeks a book to re-read at that pace.

I also have been reading Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter over the past week or so. It was pretty good. Totally, totally different from what I've been reading the past few months (fairly generic modern realistic fiction as opposed to epic fantasy and then trashy fantasy), but that's probably a good thing. Oh yeah, and all that reading I do for class, which for some reason I never really think about when I get to thinking about books I've read. Next quarter I'll have fiction to read for class; I don't think I've had that since last spring quarter, when I took a class on Shakespeare. Kind of looking forward to being able to write English-y style papers in addition to obnoxious sosc papers next quarter.

Being home is extremely, extremely boring in the sense that, well, there's not much to do. Almost none of my high school friends are also on break, so it's mostly just me and my family rattling around small-town New England, fiercely missing friends from school. It's also so transient--just over a week, just 10 days, three of which are now done--that it's hard to really bother settling into any sort of routine. I'm not sure where my suitcase is (I assume my mother took it and hid it from me), but my clothes are all in a laundry basket. No real point in putting them away, it seems, when a week from right now they'll be packed up and ready to read back to the central time zone.

Some more interesting stuff should be happening starting tomorrow, which I guess is good. Lazing around driving my mother crazy and being driven crazy by her is only entertaining up to a certain point, after all. :)

A morning filled with 400 billion suns

Auto-tuning is very popular in music nowadays, but it rarely adds anything to the music itself. Usually it just serves to make an otherwise terrible singer bearable to hear. On YouTube, however, there is an entertaining (and strangely beautiful) project called Symphony of Science that takes many famous popular scientists and creates auto-tuned songs that are really quite lovely, as well as bizarrely inspiring.

First up is "A Glorious Dawn," a remix of some Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, taken mostly from clips of Cosmos and set to that strangely resonating piano/synthesizer background. "The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature..."



The other one that my friends and I at U of C have really enjoyed over the past month or so is "We Are All Connected," which is faster-paced and includes some drumming in the style of featured scientist Richard Feynman. This one has a wider selection of scientists, including Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Feynman, and even Bill Nye (yes, the science guy, a legitimate scientist in his own right). "The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it but the way those atoms are put together. The cosmos is also within us; we're made of star stuff..."



"We've traveled this way before, and there is much to be learned."

A waltz for Bill

I was introduced to Bill Evans sometime during my sophomore year of high school or so, first as the extremely famous (although then a relative nobody) pianist on the majority of Kind of Blue and then as a separate entity from Miles Davis. From the KoB recordings, he is probably best showcased on "Blue in Green" (allegedly his own composition that Miles later claimed credit for, as he was wont to do throughout his career), which I thought was just the loveliest song that could ever be.



It's hard to separate jazz artists from the groups they perform in; different combinations of people seem to produce different ideas and sounds from the same artist. "Waltz for Debby" is an early and extremely famous Evans piece that predates his time with Miles but has the same sort of bizarrely clear, drifting, aching sound, like water, a tone I always associate with Evans despite the fact that it changed somewhat in his later life (he died of drug complications in 1980). I'm not sure where and when this particular recording is from, but I would guess sometimes either late 1950s or 1960s, after his fame had risen considerably. Anyone who has ever played the piano with any degree of seriousness at all understands exactly how difficult this sort of melodic fluency is to obtain.

Please ask, please tell

Today, as most anyone with a TV or an internet connection knows, the US Senate voted 65-31 to finally repeal the infamous Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) legislation that prohibits servicemembers from being openly gay in the military, even as it (allegedly) protects them from being ferreted out and harassed by supervisors, etc. Supervisors don't ask about your latent homosexuality, you don't tell them, and everything jerks along in some semblance of normalcy. Of course, the simple fact that no one asks heterosexuals to keep their love-life on the down-low in the military, to hide their wives or girlfriends or boyfriends or husbands, makes this type of legislation at least moderately hypocritical, something that people remark often upon. What doesn't seem to get quite as much attention at times is the underlying attitude that so much of this legislation assumes, that gay or lesbian servicemembers need to be protected by denying who they are.

Bullying and harassment of homosexuals is as old as anything, as old as sexual harassment of all sorts and as old as ridiculously outdated race-related prejudice. It absolutely needs to be smacked down, whenever it appears, wherever it appears. The idea that having homosexuals hide who they really are to protect themselves, however, smacks of patronization. I'm willing to bet that many servicemembers know of several comrades who are more than likely gay, lesbian, and so much more, just as supervisors and military brass know. Bullying and harassment don't end by agreeing to pretend that there's "nothing to see here," by ignoring the qualities of those who are being harassed. Harassment ends when people realize that those whom they are harassing are human beings, just as they are; harassment ends with exposure, with people saying, "Yes, I'm gay" and letting others see just how "normal" (whatever that may mean) they are, letting others see that they're not monsters. To try to give non-heterosexuals some semblance of protection by asking them to pretend that they aren't gay, aren't lesbian, aren't bisexual is useless and counterproductive, not to mention extremely demeaning and insulting.

Repealing DADT is about letting servicemembers serve openly, without having to pretend that they're things and people that they aren't, yes, but in some way it's also about continuing to open dialogues and cultures. It's about opening up simple conversations about lives, simple encounters, that cannot exist when you try to pretend that everything's hunky-dory, that everything would be okay if people who deviate from the majority simply live their lives quietly and suppress those parts of them that are "deviant." It's about not merely tolerating homosexuality, turning a blind eye to it, "winking" at it, but celebrating it openly as the perfectly wonderful and beautiful thing it can be, the same way that heterosexual love can be perfectly wonderful and beautiful. The difference between tolerance and celebration can seem pretty semantic, but the joy and open-hearts-open-arms of celebration--the wild ride of shared life and shared humanity that it embraces--can make all the difference.

There are a lot of things still wrong with the way America, and the world in general, deals with homosexuality, with bisexuality, with, in short, anything different from straight-up monogamous (or serially monogamous) heterosexuality. There are a lot of things still wrong with the way we use, or attempt to use, our military to deal with the rest of the world, with the way that the military deals with minorities, with women, and, yes, with non-straights. For instance, the latest I've seen/read/heard about the DADT repeal that's been swept under the rug is the fact that the bill still explicitly bans these newly open gay soldiers from being able to extend military benefits to their domestic partners or potential legal spouses (for those who live in states where same-sex marriage has been legalized). DADT repeal also does absolutely nothing to address transgenderism, to whatever extent it exists in the military--and it probably exists to a much greater degree than people might be willing to admit, since transgender individuals are generally even less socially acceptable than homosexuals. They bend the common notions of gender even more--what do you call a male-to-female transgender who is sexually attracted to women? Straight male? Lesbian? What pronouns do you use and when and how? (When it's hard to label something, people tend to get a bit antsy.) The idea that gender and biological sex is a stew of hormones, chemicals, and social conditioning, among many other things, that don't always align in the same way doesn't fit well with the ages-old conception of "male" and "female."

That's another topic, for another day. For now DADT repeal is on its way to becoming reality; there's still Obama's signature, then certification and implementation by the Pentagon, which could take who-knows-how-long. This is a positive thing, however, a step in the right direction. These steps do not end with the military. They do not end with the end of harassment. They do not end with the legalization of same-sex marriage. They probably will never fully end. But everything that leads, even incrementally, to celebrating, openly rejoicing in, the wonderful myriad of forms that humanity can assume is something to be happy for--and a kick in the pants, a reminder to never stop loving, celebrating, and fighting for us all.

Thai expeditions

My hometown isn't the most diverse place in the world, but we do Asian-style foods okay; there are quite a few Chinese places (Americanized Chinese, but still) and two or three Thai places in town, and if we venture into the city, there's some Indian and a Brazilian steakhouse and whatever. Compared to Chicago, this is all laughable, but no one comes to New England looking for exotic food, unless someone considers seafood exotic.

Hyde Park is an extremely gentrified neighborhood for Chicago, but 55th Street is semi-famous for its three Thai restaurants (Siam, Thai 55, and Snail), and restaurants of other persuasions besides. 57th Street also has a pretty good Americanized noodle place called Noodles Etc, where a sort of pan-Asian (mostly Thai and Japanese) cuisine exists for dirt-cheap (aka student-friendly) prices. All this is to say that campus does not lack noodles of all sorts, in particular Thai food, and Chinatown (where the legitimate Chinese food resides) is only a 15- or 20-minute Red Line ride away. The dining halls are not open on Saturday nights, leaving us to the mercy of local restaurants and the like, and so U of C students tend to spend more time eating vaguely Asian food than eating any other type of cuisine, when it comes to going out for dinner.

Nonetheless my friend and I decided to hit up a local Thai place today, mostly because I found myself craving something noodle-y and peanut-y after having refrained from Thai food for the past several weeks. I had pad see ew (apologies for the bad transliteration; I've seen it Romanized in many different ways), which is similar to the ever-popular pad thai, only with much thicker noodles that are, in my opinion, probably better than pad thai noodles. I tend not to be very adventurous with cuisine (for several years I only ever ordered pad thai in Thai restaurants, and this isn't exactly anything far removed from that), but living in Chicago does seem to make people more embarrassed of culinary boredom and predictableness, so over the past year and a half I've been trying different things out, even if one of the listed ingredients makes me squirm. I've had "real" Chinese food, both dim sum and otherwise, Greek food, Indian/Pakistanti a few times, plenty of Thai, real Mexican food, and much more.

After lunch we found ourselves dealing with the usual small-town boredom that settles in when you live in a place where the only establishments under-21-year-olds are welcome to are restaurants and stores. Having dealt with the restaurant portion of that, we wandered around the Dollar Store for a while, ostensibly trying to find something tacky my friend's mom had requested for Christmas but in reality only finding cheap party supplies and state-themed shot glasses. (If you've ever wondered how long people can spend in a Dollar Store, today showed that it can be at least 45 minutes.) After that it was more small-town boredom at the library, a favorite after-school hangout for many middle schoolers and early high schoolers, much to the librarians' annoyance. When you live in white suburbia, you tend to spend a lot of time wandering around in stores, libraries, parks, and parking lots, even, just talking and joking around, wasting time, trying to enjoy other people's company.

At the risk of being redundant, boring, and awkward, we ended off the day by swinging by the high school as the students were dismissed. This at least was somewhat productive; we had an amusing conversation for 15 or 20 minutes with a senior (I still think of him as a sophomore) in the frigid high school parking lot, and by the time we went inside most anybody of interest had already left, fleeing hard and fast for the weekend. I can't say I blame them. A lot of days on break here in suburbia feel kind of like the weekend, but most other people have real life to attend to, still.

At school on a Friday night, I'd be going to dinner before the dining hall closed (at 7pm central, of course) and then hanging out in the lounge playing video games or watching trash TV or sometimes watching other people play deeply involving board games, like Settlers of Catan. If the homework load is low, people will try to figure out who is throwing a party, where, and who wants to go to it. The night would probably inevitably end in someone's room, watching YouTube videos and shooting the breeze until the middle of the night. Here nights are spent alternating the internet (YouTube videos, music, blogs, Facebook, IMing, Twitter, etc) and occasional TV shows with books, with lots of texting throughout. Occasionally there will be a dinner out with either family or friends, and at this time of year the party parade starts up (in another few days). Seeing friends is just harder, since at school your friends are all within spitting distance, for the most part, whereas here you have to drive for at least ten minutes to see anyone else.

Waltzing flowers

Such a great song, even if sometimes over-heard at this time of year. Always makes me want to learn to ballroom dance or something. Last year, in a fit of just-finished-a-paper-joy, I ran up and down my hallway once pretending to sashay to this song. I consider it a mark of U of C's relative weirdness that I got no odd looks for that stunt.

The home wavelength

My newsfeed on Facebook has become cluttered with a few common themes: "FINALLY DONE FINALS YAY!" (from friends at other schools), "Where are my grades?" or, alternately, "This quarter sucked" (from, of course, fellow Chicagoans), and then the curiously amusing "XYZ college class of 2015!" from current seniors at my old high school who have heard back from early action or early decision schools. Thanks to Facebook and another day of gossip at said high school today, I now know where several people are going, where one kid has been deferred, and where many of the rest are applying, to put their fates in the hands of the regular decision application pool.

Never mind the fact that "class of 2015" makes me feel extremely old, in a way that "class of 2014" (only one year off my own graduation year of 2013) couldn't quite manage. Why two years instead of one hits home isn't really clear, but I haven't thought about anything occurring in 2015, two full years after my own college graduation. I'm beginning to think, half in jest and half seriously, that I may be living in a cardboard box in 2015, but it's still far enough removed from the present that such an idea is more amusing than it is frightening. It's similar to how it's hard for those of us under the age of 22 or 23 to take any economic news seriously; we kind of delude ourselves that by the time we are facing the job market, things will have to be better, or maybe we'll just run away to Europe or Australia or something. Never mind, of course, the fact that you can hardly just run away to another country (immigration laws are strict everywhere, unless you marry a national of that country) or that other countries are in equally bad shape.

Thinking about how these kids who, last I knew, were awkward sophomores just emerging out of the pit of moodiness that is early adolescence are now applying, and in some cases even committing, to colleges is bizarre. When I last was home in September, they were still all mostly confused, annoyed, and not looking forward to the college application process at all, and now a few of them are already done. At this time two years ago, in December 2008, I myself was already done, really, sitting on a gorgeous early action acceptance letter from the University of Chicago and awaiting the financial aid decision that would seal the deal. It was so exciting. It wasn't until maybe March or April, as other people sealed their own college deals, that I realized just how much the past thirteen years of my life had been scripted by the rhythms of the public school system and how weird it would be to find an entirely new rhythm to serve me for the next four years. What do you do when you don't have school to dictate what you'll do with your waking hours? College's dictations are different than those of high school, but there is still the obligation of classes and homework and papers and exams.

Being home and lounging around with a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds takes me back a bit to that old, high school rhythm, without really immersing me in it. Last year at this time it was almost literally breathtaking to return and remember life as it had been, barely six months previously. My heart would race when I approached the high school, both as a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome thing (just remembering every bad test, every absolutely menial and joyless day) and as a strange kind of confused and resistant joy to being back home, in those hallways my feet still could traverse automatically.

Today and yesterday there was no emotion, positive or negative, no real awkwardness or fear of being called out for walking the halls I left behind in June 2009. Last year there was the fear of somehow falling back into high school, the fear of finding something there that would make me entirely unwilling to return to Chicago--the fear, in short, of remembering positive things about that experience we all vilified so heavily throughout. Being happy in Chicago was natural, but it depended in part on being able to vilify high school, my home town, everything that had come before. When the bloom came off the rose in February and the happy memories of time before June 2009 came swirling in, that defiant happiness of autumn quarter last year had to change and figure out how to incorporate all that had been happy in 8th grade, in 11th grade, in 12th grade, in Latin classes and with friends at lunch and after school. I had to finally put to rest the teenager, rebelling in part because actually enjoying anything or anyone was threatening to her oh-so-tenuous sense of independent self, and find the adult who finally understands that agreeing with other people and enjoying their company doesn't mean that she's lost herself in them.

The home wavelength even now feels at times like it's threatening to overwhelm me again, threatening to nullify all the things and people I've done and seen and met in the past year and a half since I left my parents' immediate control. Whenever that starts up again, however, I remind myself that my sophomores are now becoming members of the college class of 2015 at institutions all over the place, that my freshmen are starting college tours of their own, that a few of my favorite teachers from high school have left for greener pastures--in short, that everything changes, that clinging to life as it was is utterly pointless but so too is vilifying all that went before. My seniors, they are now, are different people from who they were when they were sophomores, just as my juniors are so different from their freshmen selves, just as my Latin teacher's smile is more worn and complicated than it was on the last day of my senior year. I loved them as they were and, if I really care about their lives and my own, as I want to, as I want to feel that depth of involvement and emotion, I love them as they are and as who they will be.