Friday nights in March

Another Friday night tending bar at Bruka Theatre. Another fun evening of pouring drinks and flirting and smiling. I love that I get to step out of office mode for a while and forget that I just spent a week with financial statements, forms and spreadsheets.

The theatre atmosphere is so different. I’m not just talking about the obvious party feeling and the dramatic conversations (in all senses of the word). I am talking about the group effort in putting together an artistic creation. The camaraderie and the sense that something beautiful is being created.

Life outside of work and theatre is getting full. We have to clean up and move out of the house we’ve been in for a little over three years. I do think it’s a good thing in the long run. But the work! Time to enlist the kids…

My creative life is confined to working on jewelry in between loads of laundry and writing haiku between cups of tea. I want to do more, but life, as always, intervenes.

My mood is lighter these days and I’m not sure why. St. John’s Wort and my fabulous friends seem to help. But finances continue to be tight. Having to get another car and moving and teenage boys seem to suck my bank account dry on a daily basis.

Ah… responsibility. I don’t want to be a grown-up some days.

Okay. Enough whining.

The weather has been cold and grey-ish. The thermometer says it’s in the 50s, but the wind on my face says it’s a lot colder. I find it comforting for reasons I can’t explain. Winter isn’t over. Spring keeps threatening to be.

Conversations seem to lean towards the wistful. Friends ask how you are and really seem to want to know. I am staying up later and wishing, most mornings, that I didn’t.

I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s lovely novel Norwegian Wood
and feeling its wistful spin on youth and sanity. The perfect novel for this March state of mind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On another note: The coolest machine ever! I want one! Totally useless yet philosophically jam-packed.

Yeah, Right

Seems sarcasm is an evolutionary survival skill... hmmm...

Happy Birthday, Will

In honor of Shakespeare's birthday (he's 444 this year... not 544... I mis-typed his age last year), I am posting a sonnet (Shakespearean, of course) I wrote in a fit of mathematical ecstasy.

I will go read Hamlet... or watch the movie. Please celebrate in your own customary way.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Science of Patterns


The order of the colors, prism bent;
The fractions in a chambered snail’s shell;
Statistics buried, called coincidence;
The chemical recall of asphodel.

So water congregates to build a cloud
and droplets marry heavy, forming rain;
With Spanish moss’s chaos-patterned shroud
To respirations measured fill and drain.

Honeycombs, whose architects are bees;
The icy veins in alabaster’s skin;
The march of leaves up eucalyptus trees;
The oscillating song of violin.

An ocean wave will roll in, uninvolved
In differential equations it has solved.



30 Oct 2003

More fun with forms

Electronic signatures produced by collisions of protons and antiprotons in the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab provided evidence that the elusive subatomic particle known as top quark has been found. (Image courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)


The terzanelle is yet another form I like to play with. It's similar to the villanelle in that it uses repeated lines, but this one takes the middle line of the stanza and it gets used as the last line of the next stanza, so the rhyme scheme changes each time. And the final line should be the last line of the first stanza.

It's like putting a puzzle together... the hard part is making sure it makes sense. And this one just barely does.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~­
­Subatomic Terzanelle


In orbit, strewn with waiting, patient protons,
With you beneath – unaware my anxious hover.
Beaming light, my kisses touched like photons,

And quantum flux in wavelengths of a lover,
Are positively charged in spectrum’s hope.
Beneath my hungry stare and anxious hover,

Add neutrons, and my heart’s your isotope.
Creating radiation, banish dark –
So positively charged in spectrum’s hope –

Infecting every flavor of each quark,
Until they shake in subatomic lust,
And create that radiation – banished dark.

Adding electrons to your nuclear husk
Can ionize your will to spark a fusion.
They’ll vibrate you in subatomic lust

Swirling in subnuclear confusion.
In orbit, strewn with hope and patient protons,
Ionize your will to spark that fusion –
Lightly, as my kisses, touched by photons.


15 May 2003

Useless research

I've stumbled across some odd, useless and obvious "studies" done in the name of serious science, but I've finally found one that is obvious as well as apt!

Now I know my profession has a less-than-exciting reputation, but I have never felt the need to justify it. Heck, I can easily get a job almost anywhere. But it's funny how so many accountants get defensive about the work they do.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales provided a robust defence of its members.

A spokesman said: "The area of tax accountancy is anything but dull. Our members get to work in all sectors of the economy, including small businesses and the media and entertainment industries.

"Many of our members lead varied and interesting lives, taking part in activities such as trekking around the Alps for charity and being involved in local community projects, such as working in deprived areas. "

Some of them can even write...

May the force be with all of us

An interesting piece in today's NY Times by Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, etc.) states about Star Wars:

"Twenty-eight years later, the vast corpus of "Star Wars" movies, novels, games and merchandise still has much to say about geeks - and also about a society that loves them, hates them and depends upon them."

Now, it's no secret that I am attracted to geeks and to the geek side of non-geeks.

"To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal - and to have a good time doing it."

Stephenson makes a good analogy between the geeks of our society and the fading Jedi knights:

"Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out. "

Go hug a geek this weekend. Or, better yet, explore your geek side.

Science and Art

This afternoon I got to listen to an NPR interview with Alan Lightman. He wrote a book I read a couple of years ago called Einstein's Dreams. It is a beautiful novel full of astounding insights and imagery and melds physics with poetry in a breath-taking walk through a point in time in Einstein's life. (Aside: SIPs include "giant clock"and the Flesch-Kincaid index is 7.3)

The interview was about Lightman's new book, A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit, which is a series of essays about science and art. I, of course, ran down to my local independent bookstore (Sundance Books!), and immediately picked up a copy of the book.

I am only 20 pages into the book and I am enchanted. This man can write! He discusses things such as the importance of metaphors in science, words, and meditations on our wired world. I can't wait to get back to reading.



On a side note, I hate to agree with Orson Scott Card on this... but enough is enough.