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But wait, there’s more. I feel like writing tonight.

I have a neuroscience exam tomorrow, and a religion quiz, and a math quiz. Ugh. I’m not prepared for math, I never am. But I always get a 100 on the quiz. I feel bad, because it’s giving me a false sense of achievement and I’ll get owned on the final. I really hate classes. I love learning new things, and I love (most of) the content of the classes, but I hate all the administration and tests and notes and stuff. I hate the competitive atmosphere most of all… it’s hard to know it until you take a biology or compsci class. I wish we could just go learn and enjoy it. Every class should be an open colloquium.

My class schedule for next semester is a beautiful work of art. I only have about four hours of class a day, except for Thursdays, which are marathons. But it’s way better than this semester.

What’s a bunch of smart people, bound together by a self-reinforcing delusion of legitimacy and importance? KSCR. Just a thought.

Everytime I’m there, someone asks me to do something for them or help them out with something. Lately I’ve just started saying no, because I simply don’t have time for new projects. I’ve got things balanced pretty well now, don’t need to be screwing with that. So somebody tries to add a few kilos to my triple-beam life, and I tell them no, and they think I’m an asshole or that I’m playing favorites or something. I think that nobody understands the actual amount of hard work that goes into all the things I do at the station. I guess that’s a self-centered thing to say. Maybe I should interpret it as a compliment that I make the things I do look easy.

I’m not really sure why I still work at KSCR.

Well, I guess I know why, now that I think about it. Huh. #

So tonight I saw Evelyn Glennie at Oxy. It was incredible. Traffic sucked on the way there, as usual, but XM has this magic effect of making traffic stress disappear. You almost want there to be traffic, so you can listen for a few more minutes.

Anyway, she played Michi, which is certainly one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. She performed it mostly the same as the recording she did, except that on almost all the melodic stuff in the right hand she was kind of doing a one-handed single-stroke roll. She basically made every note a double stop with mallets 3+4, but then controlled the rebound so each mallet hit four times instead of once, which gave the melody this fractured, frantic effect. It was amazing. At one point she was playing harmony with mallets 1-3 and doing the quadruple-bounce crap with mallet 4, completely independent of mallet 3. Ridiculous. I was just shaking my head in resignation through most of it. And she was doing that for, say, 15 minutes. Who needs reverb when you can do it yourself, eh?

The song is about loneliness, depression, and frustration. I guess that’s one of the reasons I like it so much. I find that performing it is ultimately uplifting, and I think it is for her too. When she came to the bridge of her improvisation after the main original section, where the really fast stuff breaks into the big, fat harmony, it was beautiful. I got chills, for about 30 seconds straight, which was weird. I kept thinking, what is it about a stupid V-I progression that’s so pleasurable to a human, and makes your CNS malfunction to the point that your spine tingles and you choke back tears?

That’s what I was doing, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but essentially the entire USC percussion department was sitting behind me, and they all noticed that I was losing it. I arrived just as the lights went down, so I didn’t see them until after Michi. I was kind of embarrassed during the intermission, heh.

Anyway, it was great. This month I’m seeing Jimmy Eat World, Broken Social Scene, Death Cab, and LTJ. Pretty cool. #

Today my EE discussion was cancelled, so I went to see all my advisors. It was awesome. Essentially, I have permission to take any grad-level course I want. (!!!) This erases the major roadblock towards graduating on time. I’ll probably even be able to finish the percussion minor.

Some CS courses that strike my fancy:

CS 541 Artificial Intelligence Planning
CS 542 Neural Computation with Artificial Neural Networks
CS 544 Natural Language Processing
CS 561 Artificial Intelligence
CS 564 Brain Theory and Artificial Intelligence
CS 566 Neural Network Self-Organization
CS 567 Machine Learning
CS 569 Integrated Intelligent Systems
CS 574 Computer Vision

There’s also a lot of cool courses in the neuroscience, biology, philosophy, and linguistics departments.

In the spring I’m going to take 460 (Intro to AI) and 499 (Exotic Computing). So, I need to pick two more from the above list to count for my technical electives and my neuroscience CMS category. #

I’m really tired, but I can’t sleep. I got like 3 hours last night. I went to bed at 12:30, but I didn’t fall asleep until about 4:15. In my neuroscience class today we learned about sleep. The leading cause of insomnia is constant stress.

I probably would’ve fallen asleep in my neuroscience class were it not for the lecture topic. Would’ve been just a little too ironic.

I tried to sleep just now. But my neighbor’s band has been practicing with all the doors and windows open since 2pm. It is now 9:15. At least when I practice, I have the courtesy to close my doors and windows — most of my neighbors don’t even know I have a drumset. I tried closing my windows, but it’s damn hot here and we don’t have AC. I guess they’re hot too. They keep playing Radiohead covers, which was novel at first, but now is annoying.

I just tried to buy Jimmy Eat World tickets. They went on sale 5 hours ago. Sold out. Angry. Maybe some will show up on ebay. The Tempe show is not yet sold out. I would do it in a heartbeat, but I don’t have anyone to go with me. Nobody likes them. 7 hours each way is a little hardcore by yourself. #

Percussionist Evelyn Glennie to Perform at Occidental College Wednesday, Oct. 29

And, reliable sources inform me, she will perform Michi… there are… no words… #

We keep getting screwed. Over and over again. Was it always like this?

Schwarzenegger? GOP conspiracy to ensure control of a pivotal state a year before the presidential election. I am absolutely serious. You think the governorship isn’t that important in deciding the presidency? Ask the nice voters in Florida. Davis certainly made some mistakes, but unless you can prove he committed a crime, this was unfounded. You elected him in 1998, and then you elected him again in 2002, and he was the same politician then that he is now. Women, did you not read about how Arnold treats women? The majority of you voted for him, so I guess not. Arnold, who promised to discuss the allegations after the campaign, shrugged off a reporter’s question on the subject as “old news” as he left his most recent press conference. Maybe you didn’t find out about Schwarzenegger’s meeting with Ken Lay at the height of the energy crisis? I’m sure they were playing bridge, considering Enron’s colorful history of buying political favor.

Iraq? Oil. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The most destructive substance found in Iraq was a small vial of botulinum toxin. It’s dangerous stuff, but you may know it by another name. Meanwhile, Halliburton is cleaning up in Iraq to the tune of $1.4 billion. You remember the guy who used to head up Halliburton, right?

Stop being so gullible. #

Some very cool things have happened lately:

• I wrote an introductory paper on neuroscience last semester entitled Building Blocks of Thought: Exploring and Engineering the Neuron. Illumin, USC’s student academic engineering journal, is going to publish it in the next issue.
• I have seeded Mandala at 1.0, and generated a source release, which you can download (read: see what I’ve been doing since May). 3968 lines of code! Not much for some MFC project, but considering I wrote every line by hand, it’s pretty huge.
• Installed Red Hat 9 on a separate partition a few weeks ago. It rocks. The main obstacle keeping me from completely nuking Windows is application support… I really need dreamweaver, fireworks, photoshop, cooledit (audition), timbuktu, etc. GIMP isn’t half-bad, though.
• I’ve been writing a marimba solo for a few weeks now, and I really like it. Can’t get the melody out of my head. I’m going to try to write it all down on paper… It’s harder than I thought, because modern marimba music is so different from many instruments in that you can’t reliably use a grand staff for any length of time, and there are usually no key signatures. A lot of pieces don’t even have time signatures, which is kind of where I’m heading with this one.
• If you’re not already subscribed to the KSCR weekly updates list, you should do so immediately! #

Well, guess I should drop all my classes.

#

I need one of these immediately. #