the rest of the week went quite well, even considering all the work i had to do (on an EE or CS scale, this isn’t much, but for me it is) in greek, philosophy, spanish, etc…
so let’s get the dumb obligatory i’m-in-college school news out of the way: i did my first modal logic problem set, and it was a much different experience than predicate logic…lots more little drawings and figures, which i tend to like better. class on thursday taxed me seriously, though–we’re talking about the complexity of a given task in the modal language, measured in P, NP, PSPACE, NPSPACE, EXP, etc… it’s all very weird and i think the next homework might kick my butt unless i do the whole take it by the horns and jump on it and hit its butt thing again.
what else have i done in the past few days? wednesday was crusade, then i studied at the copo until late, and cv was there a while. thursday i worked and went climbing and started on my paper, “the enaselvai language”. see, today i went to a “conference” (in quotes) for people who make constructed languages (conlangs). i thought on thursday, if i’m going to go to this conference, i’d better have something written down about enaselvai, or it won’t be very interesting and we might just sit around wondering what to talk about. so i spent a lot of time thursday writing the history of the language, and even some preliminary grammar.
friday i spent a lot of time on it…much more than i meant to. only half-way through the project did i realize what a daunting task it actually was to set down all the grammatical / syntactical / phonological / morphological features of even an extremely basic, invented language. but, i’d already started it, and i didn’t want to not finish it by saturday, so i stayed up until 3am working on it. i took a break for a few hours to go watch life is beautiful at the history corner with a bunch of cornerstone people. i hadn’t ever seen the movie before, and i thought it was great! intelligent writing, humorous yet sympathetic, pretty yet not shallow, and saddening and thought-provoking. i usually don’t like movies in its general genre, but i was very happy that i saw it!
today is/was saturday. i woke up at 10 and printed out a few copies of my paper to take to the conference, and then i hopped on my bike to catch the 11:30 caltrain to san francisco.
may i just say that the trains sucked today. i rode like the fashion police was after me (my trendy nalgene bottle dangling from my backpack only barely keeping them from devouring me), because i thought i was going to be late. i pulled into the station just in time, and waited….and waited…and waited. the freaking train was half an hour late. these kinds of delays are not good, because i had to switch to two completely different train systems to get to berkeley, and i was supposed to be there at 1:30.
my original plan was to leave palo alto caltrain at 11:30, putting me into sf at 12:30. i figured 30 minutes to take the MUNI to the BART at embarcadero, and then another 30 from there to berkeley. that made it right at 1:30, not to mention however long it took me to walk after that.
the caltrain being late put me into sf at 1:10. i got on a MUNI right away, but in the course of our journey we stopped and our driver had lunch (he said we were ‘early’). maybe he was early but i sure wasn’t. i didn’t even get on a train to berkeley until after 1:30. the short of it is that i was an hour and a half late. stupid trains.
it turned out there were only two other people there–the guy hosting it and his friend (who, oddly enough, i had met on the internet in junior high / early high school, and not talked to since then. and here he shows up in person). so we walked to an outdoors cafe and sat and baked in the sun and talked about invented languages. the guys were pretty cool–not nearly as dorky as i thought they would be, and both big radiohead fans. we went through enaselvai, and they seemed impressed by the presentation, if not the language itself. they’re both linguistics majors, so i learned a lot of new terminology and concepts. lastly, we went to a classroom and used the chalkboard to make up a new language together. we made up a phonology, case system (involving a new invention of mine–the “attitude” system), verb tenses, etc… it was a VOS ergative-absolutive language, and it was the weirdest thing any of us had ever created. but it was fun.
i left berkeley at 6:30, and due to more train stupidity, arrived back at stanford at 9:30. more out of habit than hope, i went to the mailbox to check for control, the new pedro the lion album that i have been looking for in the mail [extremely impatiently] for a week now. you have to understand, there is absolutely nothing like a new pedro album. i don’t think i’ve ever looked forward to an album this much, period. so i let out a whoop of joy and utter delight when i saw, crammed unassumingly in my mailbox, a manilla package from jadetree.com.
i held it over my head and said the incantation: “GENTLEMEN, I HAVE ACHIEVED CONTROL. YOU MAY PROCEED WITH THE PLAN.” well, not really, but i thought about saying it.
back in the room dan and i invited serena and shannon over again and we hung out for a while and watched a bit of monty python. then the girls left so we shut off the movie and dan and i had a control listening party (dan bought the cd too). i layed on the floor and let the album soak in, playing it nonstop from beginning to end. it’s amazing. you can’t hold pedro back–he just goes to the edge (and sometimes over it in terms of what is socially acceptable…but i love it because it’s done so well).
now i need to sleep so i can go to church tomorrow, and then down to santa cruz for some beach time. somewhere i’ll have to fit in some homework.
virtual disc on spin: ok computer | radiohead
