The Garden State Foghorn

Church attendance; kids and religion

2009-12-25T07:00:46Z

Early this morning, my mother came into my room and woke me up to run errands. I had to be up anyway, since I still had to buy some gifts for people before Christmas, and I just moved back home the day before. Everything was normal. Then my mother asked me what I wanted to do about Mass later that day--that is, if I wanted to go, because she wasn't sure how I currently feel about it. I managed to avoid the second part of her question by saying that I had been expecting that we would go, and that we had always gone in the past. I honestly was fine with going for tradition's sake, even though that's not a great reason to do something.

We did go to Mass, as we have every year that we've lived in our town, and came home and had dinner. After Mass, I was sitting at the kitchen table eating crackers and hummus while my mother was watching television. She brought something up, and somehow the conversation turned to the Mass. She asked me if I felt awkward to be in church during the Mass, and whether or not I was still "into the Catholic thing." I didn't feel awkward at all during the Mass; I don't know why I ever would have. Unfortunately, I caved in to the second question and lied, saying that I go to Mass occasionally. (I went to one or two Masses last year at a Catholic church near Rutgers but haven't gone since last spring.) She then followed that up by asking if the church I go to is Catholic.

In the morning, and up to and through the Mass, I was actually very impressed that my parents were trying to accommodate any changes in beliefs that I might have had. The second round of questions, though, was just really awkward. I hate discussing religion with my family as much as I hate discussing politics with them, because there is no room for a change of opinion. My family, particularly my extended family, which includes a Catholic priest, is far too Catholic to accept anything that isn't in the Latin Rite. I wonder if they'll ever know that I'm an atheist, because right now I'm in the closet about it. There seems to be more of a stigma associated with being an atheist even than being gay; I'm more afraid of my family's reaction to the former than the latter.

At some point, they'll know, probably around the time I have kids and they start to wonder when the baptism will be. Right now, I'm not planning on raising my kids in any religion specifically. When they are old enough, and they've probably heard things about God and religion, I'll explain religion to them. I'll explain my beliefs and the reasons for them to my kids, but I want to emphasize that it's up to each person to find his own answers and that I'll accept any religion that they might think is right. These are general ideas, and I might change them or throw them out completely, but I have thought this way for a while. That's how it will be in my family.

Until that time, I have to deal with my own, along with my very Catholic friends. I suppose I'm partly at fault here for living a lie, but, at the moment, I feel I don't have much of a choice. I just hope that, when these things reveal themselves, there aren't serious ramifications. There shouldn't be. I have to care about people's reactions to a certain extent, but after that extent, I should not care, because I am living my own life.

This matter isn't the only one you'll see my in my journal in the next few days, but I feel I had to get this into words before I lost my thoughts.

Merry Christmas.

Конец конца жизни бабушки (Grandma: Part II)

2009-10-30T06:10:54Z

My grandmother's wake was held at a funeral home in Caldwell, her last town of residence. My parents and I headed down there last Monday afternoon for a four-hour open-coffin wake. For the first thirty minutes or so, when the only people there were my family and my father's sister, I was pretty emotional, but I didn't let myself go at any point. None of us did, and we couldn't, especially if my father didn't. It was, nonetheless, very difficult to look at the corpse of someone whom I had meant to see only hours after she ended up dying, and whom I hadn't seen since August, but she did look beautiful, embalmed and wearing the dress she wore to my parents' wedding. Her apparent calmness provided a strange, mild relaxation. Over the course of the wake, many members of my extended family stopped by, as did a few of my mother's co-workers. They really helped to lighten my mood (as much as such a thing could be accomplished at a wake). Unfortunately, the most difficult part was yet to come, and I left the funeral home on Monday night trying not to think about the funeral the following morning.

My parents and I returned to Caldwell the next morning to pay our very last respects before the body was brought to St. Aloysius, down the street from the parlor, for the funeral. When the final moments came, my father knelt down and said a prayer; then he grasped my grandmother's arm for a second before finally pulling away for good. I knelt and said a prayer and touched her arm as well, since I hadn't embraced her in two months. Her body was as cold as ice. Then I turned away and left the room.

The procession consisted of the hearse, my immediate family, and an aunt and uncle on my mother's side. We drove through the rain the few blocks to the church, and the service was set up. We then waited for my uncle to arrive, since he was going to preside. At around 10:30, the Mass started with organ music, and everyone in the procession plus a few additional family members on both sides filed into the church behind the coffin. The Mass proceeded normally--again, I didn't let go, but I don't think my lower lip has ever trembled more than it did for the first ten minutes. I found that, after the initial shock, as long as I didn't look at the coffin to my right, then I wouldn't become emotional, and I observed that rule well enough. At the end of the service, everyone filed out again to "take Nina to her final place of rest."

We didn't leave right away, though, because the funeral home guys had to get Grandma back into the hearse, and it was raining pretty heavily outside. Everyone waited and talked fairly freely just inside the door. I waited but didn't talk, partly because I'm not one to talk anyway, and partly because I had just been exposed to another round of heavy organ music. Then I saw my father's sister.

At that point, I started thinking about her and her relationship with her mother. The two were not close after a certain point because the former essentially blamed all of her problems in life on her mother; she often called my grandmother to scream at her for this reason. There was nothing there after a while, and I can't imagine how my grandmother must have felt to have to endure her daughter's rants. I couldn't stand the woman at the wake, since she kept talking about herself and would not shut her mouth, and I would stand her even less later on. In the church that morning, I came to despise her for what she did, and I still do. My grandmother did her best; I know she did. I don't know why my father got over her mistakes but not my "aunt." She couldn't try to change even after my uncle died five years ago? To hate is to say something very strongly negative about a person, but I do feel a certain hatred for my father's sister.

The next stop was the cemetery where my grandfather was buried. One by one, the cars entered a line, hearse at the front, and set off for East Hanover. We arrived at the memorial park in the pouring rain, so we were given large umbrellas to hold during a final few words said by my uncle. The silver coffin was covered in flowers and set above a pit in the ground next to that held by my grandfather, who died before I was born. When the final words were said, everybody slowly left.

We then headed to a local Italian restaurant and had a very nice lunch. I had a few laughs, and I was glad to be with family after the day's events. Later in the afternoon, when all was said and done, and my parents and I had changed out of our funeral clothes, we went back to Rutgers, where I got dropped off to pick up with Wednesday classes. In five days, it was all over.

My father handled this whole thing so unbelievably well from beginning to end. He has always been a strong person, like his mother, but he really proved it that weekend. He has lost a lot with his family now, so much so that he really is more or less the only family member remaining. Both of his parents are now dead; his brother died five years ago; and his sister is estranged, as much as he obviously still wants to include her. If a person were to ask me now what relatives I have on my father's side, my answer would be "none." In addition to the obvious trials of losing a family member per se, my father has lost the last piece of his past tying him to Caldwell, where he grew up after moving from Swampscott, Massachusetts in the late '50s. There won't be any more weekend trips, or Christmas visits, or passes by old landmarks of my father's past, like the Washington School. It will be a big change for my father to wake up on a Saturday morning, or any other morning, and not think about my grandmother or her former needs.

The last two sentences of the previous paragraph apply to me as well. Of course, it's much more significant for my father, but this event marks a shift in my life too. Especially since about eighth or ninth grade, but before then as well, visiting my grandmother to do her shopping was one of the principal ways in which my father and I bonded. We would go down on certain Saturdays, have lunch somewhere, and complete the tasks my grandmother needed done. In the process, I felt like my father and I connected. On the drives to and from, we talked. Over lunch, we talked. We could talk about things that were a little taboo around my mother. Well, I woke up one morning to a message saying that that period of my life is now over. I won't be going to Caldwell for a weekend visit, for shopping, for lunch, for bread. I won't see her My father can't point out the various things around the town that he knows. We'll find other things, and we already have other things, but this will still be a major adjustment, one that depresses me.

So, now that my grandmother is gone, it's up to me and my father especially to remember her. She'll remain alive as long as she's remembered. What will I remember about her? Well, I won't forget the sound of her voice, of course. Beyond that, there were her career as a hairdresser; her love of piano music, such as "As Time Goes By," which she could play, and anything I played for her over the years; her love of flowers; her photo albums; her unbelievable sweet tooth and her insatiable appetite for Mallomars; how she thought that my meeting Alex Trebek at the National Geographic Bee six years ago was the coolest thing in the world; and her generosity with money, even when she did not have much. These things add together to paint a picture of a woman who, in the words of both my mother and my uncle the priest, was "simple." This word is perfect for describing her life. She was born and raised near Scranton, became a hairdresser, married another hairdresser, had three kids, and seemed to live a happy life in houses and apartments in a nice North Jersey town. All the way up to the last few weeks, she seemed happy, despite setbacks like the loss of her son. She was a happy woman.

In searching through my grandmother's drawers, my father and I found some very interesting photos and documents, most of which we will save. Among the cooler pieces we found are some letter-size wedding photos of Grandma and Grandpa taken in 1945. My father put the simplest one on display at the wake, but I made sure to get another one into the scanner before I returned to Rutgers. Evidently they were known for their dancing, so here's to Grandma Nina (1922-2009) and Grandpa Romeo (1902-1987):

First entry of the new school year

2009-10-24T16:30:30Z

Since the beginning of sophomore year, I have been wanting to compose an interesting entry to bring public entries back in this journal. All the way up until very early this morning, I had a few ideas in mind. I was hoping to write the entry late this morning or early this afternoon. My plans were forcibly changed by my parents last night.

I called home in the evening to talk to my father, whom I haven't seen in a couple weeks now, and was told by my mother that my parents wanted me home this weekend because my father's mother was not in good shape. She was diagnosed with a second recurrence of lymphoma in her lower back, I believe, earlier this month. At the beginning of the week, she ended up in the hospital after some side effects of chemotherapy set in; she wasn't eating or keeping herself hydrated properly anyway, so something had to be done. To my limited knowledge she took a turn for the worse at the end of the week but was still OK, stabilized in the hospital. In any event, I was set to visit her this afternoon, probably around two o'clock or so; I must admit that I was initially angry at the inconvenience of going home for the weekend, but not at having to visit my grandmother. I haven't seen her since the last weekend in August anyway, so I figured a visit was a must. I was told to be ready to go at eleven this morning.

I turned over in bed at five minutes of nine and checked my cell phone to see if my mother had left a message asking me to be ready before eleven. I saw that I had a voicemail from my father; when I listened to it, it was terse, asking me to call him as soon as I got it. I already knew what must have happened. My grandmother passed away overnight.

This is the closest death I have ever experienced, so I'm not really sure how to react. On the phone this morning, I almost let myself go a couple times, but I ended up holding myself together. Since then, I haven't really had any urges like those, even though I've been depressed all morning. I'm sure I'll let everything out in a few days.

I can't believe she died probably twelve hours before I was going to see her. It's not fate, it's just bad luck. This caught me off-guard, for the most part; evidently my parents also were not expecting this, at least not so soon. I feel terrible that the last time I saw her was in August, and that the last time I spoke with her on the phone was two weeks ago, when she spoke in slurs and sounded extremely tired and unhappy on the phone. I think I told her I'd see her soon at the end of that call.

She was eighty-seven, and there was concern that her cancer had metastasized, so maybe it's better that she went in her sleep overnight, but I'm surprised that she died only because I thought she was going to live for quite a bit longer. All the way up until my last visit in August, I thought she could run circles around my mother's mother, and that she would easily make it to ninety, possibly ninety-five, and maybe even one hundred. My mother's mother, who is currently either eighty-six or eighty-seven (because I don't know her birth year for sure), was, I thought, sure to go before my father's mother. I am very shaken by how suddenly the tables turned.

The wake will probably be on Monday, the funeral on Tuesday. I'm going home tonight, probably to return on Tuesday night to be back in time for a very busy Wednesday.

I hope I react more strongly later on than I did today, but I should be careful what I wish for. In any case, I am going to miss her and her unique humor, her energy, her generosity, her ever-pleasant mood, and her general warmth and love.

Another photo

2009-05-26T20:38:49Z

I am so glad that Lewis Cass lost the Election of 1848. He just looks like he would have been a terrible president, not least because he would have favored the expansion of slavery into the territories.

Almost at the end of the line

2009-05-11T05:20:41Z

I have completed three of my five exams; only chemistry and physics remain. Yes, only chemistry and physics. Though those two subjects are pretty difficult and require a lot of work and study, I think that the exams for these classes will be much easier than my calculus exam was on Friday evening. I can go for my grade on that exam tomorrow, but I wonder if I should.

Three days from now, I will more than likely be lying on the couch in the family room at home, sleeping while some show plays on the television across the room. I long for the lack of worry. I have had enough of this semester, and this whole year. I did not dislike it, but I want it to end.

My roommate just left to go to New York with friends to watch the sun rise. I would have liked to do that this year, and I promised myself that I would spend the entire night in the city once or twice, but I just never did. There is always next year, and I will do it at least once next year.

Edited to add, 11 May 2009, 1:27 AM: It looks like my roommate and his friends who had planned to go to New York tonight have missed all the trains in that direction. Maybe they can get a ride. Maybe they were always planning on getting a ride, and it was wrong of me to assume that they were taking the train. Anyway, I hope he goes. A New York sunrise would be pretty nice to see.

Only days remain until the end of my first year at college

2009-05-07T21:14:10Z

It has not yet really hit me that, in less than a week, I will be home. I won't have to deal with the spring semester or my roommate anymore. At the moment, I feel like I'm going to be here for months more. Maybe I will feel differently after my calculus exam tomorrow evening. I am extremely worried about it; at this point, though, I just want it to be over. I have my first exam of exam week tonight--chem lab, which I don't think will be too difficult--after which I will be able to relax for a very little while before I have to do more work with Green's Theorem and the Divergence Theorem and Stokes' Theorem.

I could really use a couple weeks of nothing.

Canadienne

2009-04-25T20:33:12Z

Over the past few weeks, I have fallen in love with the album Jagged Little Pill. There is a song for every mood, but, overall, the lyrics and music combine to produce slight, masked melancholy; every song is sung with very genuine emotion. I love it. I love every single song on the album now.

Nobody is around this weekend, so I'm pretty lonely. At least I'm going down the shore again tomorrow with my parents to scope out beach houses for the summer. I never need an excuse to go down that way; I will just get up and go. It should be a nice day. This evening, I would like to go see a play at a theater on campus, but my feeling is that nobody will join me, so I'll probably just stay in.

Добро Слово; a few other updates

2009-04-23T04:54:34Z

In February, the Russian department made everyone participate in a national competition that I affectionately refer to as the "Five-dollar Essay Contest." Well, the results are in, and, evidently, I am one of the non-heritage beginner winners. We had to write about our favorite place in the world. I could not write about the beach at the time because I did not know any vocabulary about the beach, including the word beach itself, so I had to go with plan D (I believe) and write about my room. It was the most pathetic paper I have ever written in English, Spanish, or Russian, and I was, quite frankly, embarrassed by my response's content. I guess the judges liked it, though. It will be read at a little ceremony tomorrow afternoon. Thankfully, I am sure they will read it before I get there, because I have to miss the first two-and-a-half hours of the three-hour ceremony for chemistry and calculus lectures.

In other news, this week has been the easiest of the semester so far. I have had only a minimum amount of work to do, so I have been able to relax quite a bit while still feeling active enough to deserve the relaxation. I received my chemistry midterm grade today: I surprisingly earned an A with a 74%. The grades were terrible; a couple of my friends both scored 44%. I guess I got kinda lucky that I studied the right things. Final exams begin in less than three weeks, so I am little nervous, but I am really excited about the end of the year.

Last Saturday, I took the train down to Princeton to see a girl I met at the 2008 Villanova Presidential Scholarship Candidates' Weekend. She was there visiting her best friend, who goes there. We met, had a little food in a Princeton dining hall, and spent the next three hours or so walking around the town of Princeton, which was old and beautiful. She is doing well at Olin, an engineering college outside Boston, and she seems very happy. I was really happy to see her, considering that it was the first time I had seen her in over a year and that I was nervous on the way down about not having anything interesting to say. We had a good time, though. On a side note, I finally visited the Princeton Record Exchange; it was an amazing store.

This coming Friday is my final chemistry lab, and I am thrilled about it. I am equally thrilled about the TA reviews that I, as his student, will have to fill out.

Hour two of Lyme disease paranoia in progress

2009-04-18T02:31:59Z

Today was the end of a long week that reached its ~~zenith~~ nadir with a chemistry exam yesterday. I cannot believe that I ever considered chemistry as a possible major. Yesterday's exam, combined with the entire semester's lab course have convinced me that that track would have been such a mistake. I would rather be an engineer.

At the very least, today's chemistry lab went well and ended fairly quickly, with over an hour to spare before the end of the three-hour class. I had two good partners who really sped things up, too, so I was pretty happy. It's always so pleasant to get out of lab early, head to the dining hall on College Avenue, and sit and eat lunch in peace, maybe over a newspaper (whether The Daily Targum, The Star-Ledger, The New York Times, or whatever else might be lying around). Although I had a few extra errands to run this afternoon, I still exercised my usual Friday afternoon schedule. Then I came back to the room and watched the 1966 version of Batman. I don't think a campier movie has ever been made, but you gotta love the '66 Batmobile.

Today was way too nice to spend entirely in the room, so I stepped out for a hike in the Rutgers Ecological Preserve. I went in the same way as I did when I explored it for the first time at the end of March, but this time I crossed a stream within it and hiked on some more isolated-looking trails. I spent forty-five minutes hiking and another forty-five attempting to get back to the exit. I got so lost, but it was nice. There's something about being lost in the woods--but realizing that civilization is not far away--that is somewhat exhilarating. Along the way, I managed to see some interesting sights, including very heavily-forested parts of the preserve and telegraph poles in the middle of the woods that must have lined a past railroad corridor. Hiking is the one outdoor thing that I can do all day; I never get bored with or tired of it.

I was supposed to go to Brighton Beach this afternoon, but it ended up getting canceled. I'm not upset about it, though; I know I'll get there soon enough. It might have been a blessing anyway, since I felt really tired this afternoon, and I am going to spend money tomorrow anyway when I go to Princeton to see a girl I met at the 2008 Villanova scholarship weekend who happens to be in the area. That should be fun, but I am nervous that I won't have much to say to her. She's very funny, though, as I remember.

Sunday should be nice and relaxing, since now I have no more exams until finals begin; my first is calculus, on May 8th.

Another ambition of mine

2009-04-12T18:54:15Z

I have a mental list of a few things that I would like to do before I die. It is not yet written, but I am starting it now by officially writing an entry about one of the things.

I want to hike the length of one of the great Siberian rivers, from its small source to its mouth on the Arctic Ocean. I can't really explain why; I guess it would just be an incredible challenge but also a chance to see some of the extremes of a such a huge country. Siberia is one of the few places in the world that is still, for the most part, untouched by humans, so hopefully I could see nothing but nature. Any of the hikes would probably be a month or two long, but I wouldn't have to do it all at once.

This is the source of the Lena River, about ten kilometers west of Lake Baikal. Two thousand, six hundred fifty miles later, the river empties into the Arctic Ocean. Wouldn't you want to see the entire course of this river? I bet that there are parts of the course that no person has ever seen.

Oh yeah, I went to Boston last weekend

2009-04-12T07:00:04Z

I finally got around to flying up to Boston last weekend! I had been planning it and planning it and trying to choose dates around exams and other problematic dates since last November, but I got there!

Last Friday started off well-enough, with chem lab, which went fine. I managed to get out of that class a little early. I was hoping the day before that an early departure from the three-hour weekly hell that is chemistry lab would make it easier for me to get to the airport on time, as I was expecting to go by train. Unfortunately for me, my reserved flight was canceled, and I was bumped to a flight that was delayed three additional hours. My father ended up giving me a ride to the airport late in the afternoon, and I left New Jersey at 11:30 PM, having lost six hours to a little rain.

I arrived in Boston at quarter past midnight, walked through the gate, and was greeted immediately by Steve and Julian. Since the T, the public transportation system in the Boston area, had shut down for the night, we had to go get a cab. Steve got angry on the way to the car and had an outburst that, as I recall, involved the F-word. At that moment, I felt right at school with the two of them.

The three of us spent the next day in Boston, mostly in the Museum of Science. We saw many interesting things, including a van der Graaf electricity generator, a triceratops skeleton, and a carton of milk suspended in midair, frozen in time pouring its contents into a bowl. We also saw an IMAX show called "Adrenaline Rush," which was pretty exciting. I would like to dive off fjords in Norway, or at least go skydiving somewhere. It's one of those things that I have to do before I die.

After we left the museum, we started walking over to the North End, the Italian neighborhood of Boston. We sauntered down Hanover Avenue to Fleet Street and into a restaurant called La Summa. If you ever go to the North End, be sure to stop in that restaurant for dinner, and follow it up with gelatto from a place on a corner a few blocks away. I have never been as blown away by a cup of lime ice as I was in Boston.

Once we were fed, we walked over to some of the landmarks of Boston. We saw the Holocaust memorial first; then we found the Freedom Trail, which we followed to Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market, and the famous Old North Church. A trip to Boston wouldn't have been a trip to Boston without a stop at the Church, which is today surrounded by small brick buildings in the North End. It was an interesting sight. We spent the rest of the night in their room, watching Apocalypto and Mean Girls. It was a great end to a great day.

On Sunday, we had breakfast, and I met Phil, their hilarious RA. He gave us a ride to the T station in Newton, from which we went to the airport once again. After only a couple more hours, I had to go beyond security and leave Steve and Julian. I was kinda sad to go because I feel like I wasn't there for very long, and I wouldn't have been even in ideal circumstances, but the Friday night delay really took a big bite out of the trip. I will do my best to go back at some point.

Being an imposing American fascist over here

2009-03-29T06:29:26Z

I was sitting in Russian class last week contemplating a noun declension, and I started thinking about the nature of linguistic syntax. It was the first time that I ever imagined language as having a syntax similar to mathematics or a computer language, with parentheses and other operators. Each operator marks certain words directly or groups them with other words into a set that has a specific role with regard to another word in the sentence, probably the verb. Every word has a marked role in a thought. What really struck me during this thought train was realizing just how differently languages encode meanings on specific words.

Russian marks essentially every word with some sort of morphological ending--even the lack of an ending constitutes a grammatically significant bit of information. For example, if a part of sentence is the indirect object with regard to the action, all adjectives take on endings specific to the gender of the noun they modify, and the noun takes on its own ending, also based on its gender. These heavily-marked words may or may not be accompanied by a specific preposition that clarifies the specific relationship between verb and argument.

A thousand years ago, English worked much more like Russian, but times have changed, and the language has become far more analytic. The modern tongue uses position or prepositions to express relationship; only pronouns decline for case. That said, case still exists on paper. Prepositions seem to function as case beginnings, but they do not even have to precede the noun or any of its adjectives specifically. There is no hard-and-fast rule about what type of word a preposition must immediately precede, so a preposition like to is not really a case marker, which must identify specifically a noun and its modifiers. What else could it, though? A preposition denotes the case of a phrase often labeled by intonation.

To think about language this way for the first time has changed my view of language quite a bit.

Russian on my mind, Russian on the side of the road

2009-03-26T06:50:43Z

I forgot to mention that, on a bike ride two Mondays ago, I found a little surprise at the side of the road. I was riding along a relatively isolated stretch of road--the road that I live on, actually, but about three miles away from my home. It was the middle of the afternoon, kinda cold, kinda breezy, very cloudy. Nobody was around. No cars were on the road. In short, all conditions were perfect for a bike ride.

I happened to be thinking about Russian as I was riding along this stretch, but my thought was interrupted by an object that looked like a book on the side of the road. I turned around and returned to it. The cover revealed the book to be, um, interesting:

The book was originally open to this page, which looks fascinating:

I thought for a few moments about taking it with me, but it was too big for my pockets, and I didn't know where it had been before. I preferred not to risk anything. Anyway, it was an interesting find, and it was random--not as random as this journal entry about it, but it was random.

Stilted economic thoughts

2009-03-24T18:09:30Z

Ultimately, the fact that you are even alive is a sort of slavery. You have no control over the fact that you are born, and, whether you live in a society or on a desert island by yourself, you need to work for your living.

My economic thoughts have been changing somewhat lately. I do think that the inequality of income distribution in this country is at a dangerous level. The extremely wealthy, maybe the top 2%, control way too many resources, I think more than the lowest 50% combined. The Gini coefficient of the United States is currently at its most unequal level since 1928. Income distribution here is more unequal than it is in much of the rest of the world--some countries with higher levels of economic equality include, for example, Russia, Benin, Laos, Mongolia, and Tanzania. This country could stand a little redistribution, just a little bit, and I am not understating myself here. Trickle-down concentrated too much at the top, but it would not take much to fix that issue. On this point, I am still on the left side of the spectrum, and I think that some redistribution of wealth is warranted and even a healthy thing for the economy.

March apathy

2009-03-24T06:12:47Z

I'm back at Rutgers now, probably for seven weeks straight, until summer vacation begins. Today I registered to take two courses during a summer session here, introduction to programming and mechanics, so hopefully I will now be on track for a switch to the School of Engineering. The more I think about it, the more I think I want to be a civil engineer and work with transportation. I like chemistry a lot, too, but I can't see myself working in a lab for the next sixty years, and chemical engineering sounds boring. Hopefully I'll make the right decision.

Regardless of my new intended major, I would still like to take a few liberal arts courses in my own interests if I get the chance. I will definitely continue in Russian, but I also want to take a course in Old English language and literature, and I'm sure I could find some other interesting courses in the catalog (maybe I will take some more Spanish, if for no reason other than to keep it from becoming rusty).

On a much more random note, the Monday teacher of my Russian section was talking with my sixty-year-old classmate before class started this morning. Evidently my teacher had never seen the ocean before this past spring break, when she took the train to Long Branch for the day. I found that so hard to believe, considering that she was born and raised in Russia. She said that she has flown over it but never seen it up close. I was really surprised.

Shockingly enough, I have only recently become convinced that the U.S. government is far too chummy with the big business establishment, particularly Wall Street, to accomplish any sort of meaningful "change" (a word I try to avoid in a political context now) or reform of the economy. Both the Democratic and the Republican parties are too influenced by business and lobbyists; Congress and the White House are equally guilty, as well. I understand the idea of bailing out businesses that are too big to fail, but the measures taken are by Wall Street bankers, for Wall Street bankers, from Lawrence Summers to Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner, and even Christopher Dodd, with his connections to the A.I.G. bonuses. Everyone is corrupt, and everyone has shady connections. Nobody in government is trustworthy. I am off the Obama bandwagon for sure now. I should have voted for Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney or some other perennial loser; at least I would have agreed with them on principles.

That said, government is like this all over the world. It is no better in Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, or anywhere, except maybe in an extraterrestrial. I hope the Turner Thesis gets another chance to prove itself.

From the anarcho-communist news aggregator that I frequent

2009-03-19T18:14:22Z

I found this message while reading the comments on a news story regarding the public's declining opinion that many of the wealthy really deserve their money.

"[Having good relationships with friends and family] does not necessarily result in [a successful life, not necessarily financially-speaking]. I am a loner and I get happiness out of the things that I do. Like working on the projects that I like, mountain biking, sailing, reading and working on projects that I like. I spend many hours 'working' but that actually makes me happy. I avoid my family like the plague (they are Republican loving pro-America hicks to put it very simply and I'm a 'librul America hater'). I have a few friends, but I prefer it that way.

"The point that I'm trying to make is that not everyone is that social and for some nerds like me, work can lead to happiness."

I found this statement very interesting. It backs up some thoughts I've had lately regarding friends and being very social. I was really happy to read that someone else in the world had a similar opinion in a like situation.

Скажите ,,сыр", Владимир!

2009-03-17T12:23:51Z

Take a look at this 1988 photo of Ronald Reagan visiting Moscow. See that guy with the camera? He's a tourist, right?

That tourist was actually a KGB agent and is now the prime minister of Russia. He looks like way too much of a tourist to have been a real tourist.

The big nineteenth

2009-03-10T05:52:08Z

So, Sunday was my nineteenth birthday. To celebrate, my parents came down and got me at ten o'clock to take me down the shore for the day.

In the car, soon after we left, they gave me a bag of M&M's and $100. I was really surprised by the gifts; I thought that the trip itself was the gift. The cards that I got--one from my parents, one from my grandma--were nice, too; I don't know why, but lately cards have made me so sentimental. I put them away before I let them get to me more.

We headed down the shore on a great day weather-wise, with very warm temperatures and cloudy but not rainy weather. We got to Holgate, on the southern tip of Long Beach Island, and took a walk on the beach. It was not quite as deserted as I would have liked, but it was still really nice. There is something about going down the shore during the winter. I would love to live in an oceanside town in February; it would be so peaceful.

During the course of the entire trip, the three of us looked at some houses that we were thinking about renting this summer. I don't know if we will actually rent, but I was happy to be doing it. It was good to get out for the day and do something that I like to do at my favorite place in the world. As we drove up toward the northern end of Long Beach Island, we passed my friend Paul's house, the house where I drove and stayed for a night last August. That was a good memory right there.

The next stop was Barnegat Light and the 150-year-old recently reactivated lighthouse there. I had last been there at age two, more or less, so it was a new experience for me. My father and I climbed to the top, like we do every time that we go to the Cape May Lighthouse. Say what you want, I guess, but it's something that my father and I just do. Lighthouses go with Lakehurst, coin shows, and bike trails as things that we have bonded over, I guess. It's awkward for me to think of it like that, but that's how it is.

From Barnegat Light, we headed back up the Parkway to take the scenic route to Point Pleasant Beach, by way of Seaside Heights, Normandy Beach, Mantoloking, and other towns, stopping to look at the two houses where I stayed with aunts and uncles in 2004 and '05. Both were pretty nice houses. Finally, we got to Point Pleasant and had lunch at one of my favorite restaurants. We closed the trip with a little walk on the boards.

It was really a nice day. I miss it already. Hopefully I'll be back there soon though. I might be heading there by train with one of my friends later this month.

Spring break starts on Friday, and I cannot wait for it. I want to relax and sleep in so badly. A whole week to myself would really hit the spot. Hopefully I can get out on my bike and go back to some of my favorite local spots. For some reason, I would like to return to Pleasant Hill Cemetery. I'm sure I'll get there.

Random thoughts for the first week of March

2009-03-04T05:55:32Z

I'm sitting here listening to my roommate and someone else from my floor talk about how difficult a certain paper is for their expository writing class. Let's just say that I'm thrilled that I got out of it.

Today in Russian class, we covered the verbs meaning "to call," what cases they take, phone numbers in Russian, and some common phone dialogue. For a discussion activity, my professor decided to pair us up, require us to take out our cell phones, and talk to each other and take down numbers. She got the ball rolling by writing her name and cell phone number in my notebook; not a single additional number was taken down by anybody in the room, including me. The whole exercise was, um, a little strange, and more than a little awkward, but also somewhat funny because she was clearly enjoying herself while the rest of us had an eyebrow raised.

Random question: if the Cyrillic alphabet is, for the most part, straight out of the Greek alphabet, then why isn't Russian written with Greek plus some additional Slavic characters?

Speaking of Greek, I've revisited the Modern Greek language, and a few problems of old, from the first time I tried to study it, have been cleared up by Russian grammar, which works similarly. Unfortunately, Modern Greek is like Icelandic for me: it's really interesting, and I would like to speak it, but it's not very useful. I'm still thinking that, if I want to try a third language (well, fourth, I guess), I should go for German. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Tomorrow I will probably get my chemistry and calculus exam grades. I am nervous, and I can feel myself holding it in. I just hope that things go OK tomorrow.

Another audio entry

2009-02-28T04:59:08Z

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[insert first line of "The Tell-Tale Heart" here]

2009-02-26T18:57:06Z

I need to vent to someone, so I might as well write an entry in this journal. I have neglected it for two weeks anyway.

Today, starting in about an hour and a half, I have two exams, chemistry and calculus. I feel simultaneously overstudied and understudied for them, maybe because I had to study for them both at more or less the same time. I have hated the past week with a passion; all I have wanted is for it to be 6:30 this evening because it will all be over at that time. Then I will be able to go to a concert at Mason Gross in which Cesar will be playing. That should be relaxing, until I come home, get a takeout meatball sub, and get ready for chem lab tomorrow.

The chemistry exam covers three and a half chapters, including entropy, equilibria, and acids and bases. I feel like my teacher, who happens to look a lot like Ron Paul, could ask anything about anything, and that he might and probably will catch me off guard on at least one thing. I much prefer chemistry to physics or pure math, for whatever reason, but that doesn't make exams any easier, really. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens this afternoon.

The calculus exam will follow the chemistry exam after a break of twenty minutes. I like calculus as a class. The topics are interesting and fairly realistic at this point, since we are currently working on functions with two variables in three dimensions, vectors, rates of change, and things like that. Unfortunately, math feels so much more difficult than chemistry because there is much more theory that cannot really be seen or proven but that might show up on an exam (for example, the delta-epsilon method of proving the existence of a limit of a multivariable function). My teacher also loves difficult problems; hopefully, if he catches me off guard, then the same problem will stop my classmates in their tracks. He is such a cool guy, partly because he's really young (and often wears Billabong hoodies to class) and French-Canadian (everything he says sounds French, especially French names like Lagrange with its nasal vowel, and he often misspells English words). His work is tough, though. I guess I'm more concerned with the math exam, but I can't be sure which will be more difficult.

At this point, though, I just want to get them done, because I'm sick of worrying about these tests for a week and a half.
.

Ooga booga booga

2009-02-17T06:41:20Z

I am in the middle of doing my Russian homework for tomorrow's class, and I sit here amazed at how complicated Russian is compared to English. Russian has six cases and four declension paradigms, such that there are twenty-four ways to say my; highly-inflected verb conjugations, including aspect, which means that a single verb in English often has two corresponding verbs in Russian; a complex system of grammatical reflection; a surprisingly small number of prepositions that can take multiple cases to change the meaning; palatalized consonants; and various other features that English does not have.

However, English is complex in its own ways, as many who do not speak it natively would point out. Our spelling system is stupidly idiosyncratic but uniquely "English." Syntax is defined so strongly by word order, and I think that, given a set of words that form a thought, most English speakers would agree that there are only one or two ways to put the words together correctly. English forms words very easily, and almost any noun can be coined as a verb on the spot. Its vocabulary is an odd combination of Latin roots from French and Germanic roots from Old English and Old Norse.

Despite the fact that I do not want to study linguistics for the rest of my life, I am really interested in it. I think the most amazing aspect of human language is the complexity of its syntax. It is unbelievable and another miracle of evolution that humans have developed systems of communication that mark words for distance relative to the speaker, animacy, inclusion, formality, time, concreteness, role in the thought, and other fairly specific categories. A hundred and fifty thousand years doesn't seem like that much time to turn grunts into any one of the world's modern languages.

An article that I read the other day stated that the Neanderthals might have had languages, but that they might have been more musical than modern language, or that language and music might not have emerged as separate forms of communication until later. I would love to know if they could speak, and how their languages differed from ours in terms of syntax and the available sound inventory. If a Neanderthal were ever cloned, such would be a valuable observation. It would be one way of finding out what the person in the photo from my previous entry might have thought had he been real.

Neanderthals, their genes, and their humanity

2009-02-14T06:06:18Z

There has been a pretty cool development in the past few days: the genome of Homo neanderthalensis, which probably went extinct 30,000 years ago, maybe a little more. Evidently, they share 99.5% of their genes in common with modern humans. I was really surprised by the number, actually. I thought that Neanderthals were a lot more ape-like, but this picture of a reconstruction in Zurich proves me wrong:

To be fair, it is a reconstruction, but look into those eyes and tell me that this kid is not a human. I always let things like this get to me--they make me emotional and nostalgic for a past that probably wasn't even all that good--but I get somewhat depressed thinking about the millions of individuals of the past who are now gone. These people had their own cultures, religions, and possibly languages that were probably pretty far from those of modern humans, but they were still human.

Evolution has always been one of those things in my life that I don't think I have ever really fully understood, but that continues to amaze me. It can be frightening to think about, like the origins of the universe, but it's more interesting because it keeps going today.

I read in an article today that, although this ancient genome has been mapped, it will be "impossible" to clone a Neanderthal. Then I imagined seeing the pictured Neanderthal in an artificial habitat at the Bronx Zoo (maybe with Ota Benga and an orangutan), and I thought it a real shame that this creature cannot be cloned. If a tadpole was cloned in the fifties (something else I read today that surprised me), and Dolly was brought to life in the nineties, and other species have been cloned in between and since, why can't a person be cloned?

Song Note: "Jumper" is a song that I rediscovered only the other day. For whatever reason, I remember it clearly from my late-nineties middle childhood, and it brings back some memories.

Another week concludes

2009-02-07T08:01:25Z

As I now think about how I went to New York with Tom a week ago tonight, I realize how quickly time flies. People don't live for long at all. Eighty years is nothing at all, a mere blade of grass on the Great Plains of time.

I really hope that the people down the hall shut the hell up at some point in the next half hour, as I come down from my caffeine high and fall asleep.

I don't know what I'm going to do for my room next year. One of my friends on my preferred campus is trying to get me into his six-person suite, but the arrangements sound a little weird, and the various scenarios he was telling me about regarding his current roommate's R.A. application make me think that a suite is not worth the trouble. At that rate, I might just go for a single, because I don't think I could get a roommate at this point (Rutgers doesn't assign roommates randomly after the first year, and most of the people I know already have an arrangement; at least I have a good lottery number).

I really don't know how the hell the people down the hall get off being obnoxiously loud at three o'clock in the morning. Oh, it sounds like my R.A. is in the room with them. Ah, my tax dollars at work.

I am good at book science, but in the lab, I just get nervous and screw things up.

The stimulus...scares me. I would still like to see the public debt reduced by some amount in the near future, but that more than likely won't happen.

I have a couple of more organized journal ideas for the near future. We shall see what becomes of those.

Washington stupidity

2009-01-20T02:57:53Z

Obama is being ~~coronated~~ inaugurated tomorrow. You would think that Jesus Christ were being crowned king of the world in Washington. He's a Messiah; he's a savior; he's the Democratic change that has been so long promised.

I don't get it. I was on that train last October and November; in retrospect, it seems so silly to think so highly of him or any politician. Given the choice between him and McCain, I would vote a million times for Obama, but I don't understand the mania. I think that he is already betraying his ideology and his far-left base. His inauguration is going to be the most expensive in history; right off the bat, it would have been much more effective at setting a "yes we can" tone for the new administration if the celebration were canceled or at least toned down. He deserves the day, but he can give a televised speech and have a slice of cake instead of having all the pomp and circumstance.

I don't feel good about the new administration. I don't think that the next New Deal is in the works. Even if it were, I think it will be much more difficult to work because of all of the nation's debt to foreign powers. Then again, maybe a gigantic stimulus will do the trick. The deficits are becoming scary, though. I can't imagine a collapse of the dollar.

I'm back at Rutgers now.