Planet Olin

I did it!  I took two steps in a handstand on Friday at parkour practice.  Wahoo!  New Year's resolution #1 mission complete.  Still working on New Year's resolution #2: more awkward.

In other news, Abu Dhabi is expanding its public transportation offerings.

This is great.  I came back from winter break to find two new bus routes that could get me all the way down town without taking a taxi.  Awesome.  I had silently, fervently hoped in my wildest dreams that this might happen sometime during my stay here, but never did I imagine it would happen so quickly.

Abu Dhabi is also installing a ton of air-conditioned bus stop booths.  Okay, fine, it jumps up to 50 C (122 F) in the summer here, air-conditioned bus stops are probably necessary.

BUT.

The weather here is lovely right now, 23 C (73 F).  I sat in one of those bus stops recently (the air conditioning was off) and it was SUPER HOT inside.  You know why?  The bus stops are big glass boxes, i.e. small green houses.  ARGH.  Perfect.  Trap heat inside a glass box and then air condition it cool again.  I bet any carbon saved by people riding the bus will be quickly gobbled up by the air-condition greenhouses scheme.  Did no one think of insulative glass?  Did no one test them out before they starting installing them everywhere?

"You have found this instructive," might be my new favorite valediction to use to close out my emails.

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The story about a prisoner deprived of his Dungeon Master's Guide and custom campaign world resonated. It sucks when the guards are all coming down on your shit, and, like, taking your stuff, but it also sucks pretty bad to be beaten to death with a sledgehammer, which is what this guy did to get in there. Tends to dilute the sympathy.

[via Penny Arcade]

 

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One of the things I’ve been starting to do while traveling is take a portable instrument with me. I’ve got two – a travel acoustic guitar and a travel 5-string fretless electric bass. And I’ve been teaching myself both. Slowly. From scratch. With no idea what I’m doing.

In the tradition of “release early release often,” I submit my first attempts at playing the guitar that resemble a recognizable song. Behold the crappiness! (If you actually like these songs and do not wish to see them butchered, do not play the videos below.)

The first song is “Blackbird,” by the Beatles.

And the second is “Diamonds and Rust,” by Joan Baez.

I learned both songs by watching the fingers of high school friends playing them, then eventually asking them to do portions of it slowly so I could watch, then hand me the guitar so I could imitate. Not long after this, they taught me to read tab notation. I memorized both songs, and then proceeded to go to college and not borrow a guitar for five years.

Every time I pick up my guitar, I try to get a little better at something. Maybe it’s just switching between the F and G7 chords. Maybe it’s having a less awkward pull-off in that one section of “Diamonds and Rust.” Maybe it won’t last into the next practice section, but maybe it will.

Learning is fun. Learning to learn is also fun. I’m context-switching between emails, guitar, and reading gstreamer tutorials tonight – and will continue to do so until interrupted by a trip to Waffle House. Life is good.

Katie pretty much said everything I wanted to say about Dr. M. Thank you, Dr. M, for the school I love.

So I’ve been thinking about mortality lately. More than usual, I mean. One of the things that frightens me most is this: that every teacher I’ve ever gotten close to, every mentor I’ve ever had, is probably going to die before I do. Yes, yes, I know it’s not a given, and that one does learn just as much from younger folks than older folks, but… still. Those Who Have Gone Before are going to… go before.

Not just with dying, either – stepping out, stepping down, from a project or a role, too. I haven’t hit this too much yet; I’ve still spent the majority of my time in a system where the model is that teachers stay behind and students graduate. And so far, when someone’s stepped out of certain shoes, and they or others have asked me to fill them, I’ve been able to grow into them fast enough to walk to wherever it was that needed walking-to (with many padded layers of socks, and many hands to hold as we stumbled along the way). But there’s usually a sense of please please come back take this back you do it so much better or at least a must pass this to somebody more competent in turn sort of thing going on. (Though I am getting better about this as I start internalizing the idea that I’m worth something nonzero.)

But. People leaving before me. In a way where I can’t call them back, or ask them for advice again. That scares me. Probably more than my own leaving-anything scares me, or even my own departure from something (including this world). It’s one of the reasons why I am so ridiculously concerned about my own transitions-out; I try to buffer as much potential suckiness for other people as I can. Because each leaving is also a time for others to do some stepping-in-and-flourishing – each goodbye brings with it the potential for multiple happy hellos. And it’s the latter that I want to look at, shepherd, watch – pre-emptively, if need be, if I can’t do it after the cutoff.

One of the reasons I live life so furiously, appreciate it so madly, is that I regard (and have as long as I can remember) everything I’ve gotten past the age of 3 to be Super Extra Mega Bonus Overtime Round. The constant drilling of “and when you were little you almost died!!!” accomplished not the intended instillation of caution in my early childhood head, but a sense of waking up each morning and going “Whoa, I’m still alive! That’s awesome! Fascinating. What shall we do with that today?”

It kinda puts things in perspective. Have a shitty day? But wait! I am alive! There are so many things that… well, I’m glad I’ve had the time I’ve had. I hope for more – much more – but don’t expect it. I build my life to pass the bus/raptor test because of that. I mean, the first time I ever wrote a will, it was in colored pencil and specified which of my stuffed animals should go to which cousins, and that my $100-something life savings at the time should go to my little brother for school. I build my life so that if I disappear, the things and people that I love don’t get screwed over.

And when I love, I love furiously. I care and care and care about that which I care about in a way I can only describe as very Fire Tiger. It’s fierce enough to stop itself from being fierce; sometimes I love things enough to not love them, to try and rein and temper the flames so that they don’t consume whatever it is that I love. It’s one of the hardest things I do. Learning how not to get angry, how not to lose my temper, how not to fight, how not to utterly destroy – that’s tough. Directing and tempering the flames is hard, but also very valuable.

When I leave this world, I will leave it as a fighter, and I will leave it gracefully.

It will be fun.

Got to Raleigh in time for an early dinner last night, and then a lovely 7.5 hours of sleep (since I hadn’t actually done that since I left on Saturday).

Point A: Home in Boston, departed approximately 2pm on Saturday after (finally) cleaning my room (which took a while – but now I have a floor!)

Point B: IKEA, where I pulled out my laptop and discovered the existence of…

Point C: …the Boilermaker Jazz Band playing at an all-night dance, which I proceeded to go to, drive all night, and then…

Point D: …go to 8:30am Mass on Sunday morning. It was very unintentional and unplanned – I passed the church just as the Mass was starting and thought “well, I should go.” I’m glad I did. That was a very different sort of Catholic mass than the ones I’m used to – it was definitely still a Mass (there was a bishop presiding, so it also took twice as long as usual) but it was an incredibly energetic one. The congregation was predominantly African-American, and such a singing at Catholic Mass I’ve never heard (accompanied by a very enthusiastic organ, drum, and bass, with the cantor doing a call-and-response) and during the Our Father people reached out to link the entire church into one giant long chain of people holding hands, and when we were doing the sign of peace people were almost literally leaping out of their rows to run across the church and hug each other (even to shake the hand of me, a stranger). Wow. Very different sort of energy than the services I’m used to.

And then I kept going until I hit…

Point E: Raleigh, whereupon I peeked in on some FAD hotel stuff, did some thinking, some eating, some more thinking, and then crashed hard for 7.5 hours of blissful unconsciousness until I couldn’t sleep any more.

All in all, a great trip – I’ve never done that long a solo drive by myself, but I’ve always wanted to, and I can now say that I really, really, really like it. Open road, middle of the night, nothing but you and your thoughts and the occasional passing truck. Passing trees and valleys and fascinating cities and small towns in broad daylight and being able to stop the car and just stare at a forest dripping with moss or a rock face shining with ice or to walk down a funny-looking street for a while without anyone thinking you’re weird. Being able to pop on IRC and say hello and talk a little when I feel the need for Peopleness (usually prompted by “my back is tense, I need to stop driving for a bit and stretch, how do I make myself not drive for a while? COMPUTER!”), and then pop off and drive again. Long stretch of time and space for me. About 30 hours – one of the longest uninterrupted stretches of time-for-me I’ve ever had.

The Mel likes. The Mel should possibly try long-distance biking at some point (or running, or some human-powered form of locomotion) so as to see if the same sort of experience can be had with, ah, less fossil fuel consumption.

I am now wide, wide awake and possibly overly excited about being in Raleigh this week – expense reports time, and then TO THE OFFICE! YAYYY!!!! (That’s really actually me being very very happy! This week is Edumacation Week, and it is going to totally rock.)

I started out for Raleigh this afternoon, alternating between driving and doing tiny worksprints (thank you, mobile broadband!) of the “send out these 3 overdue emails – ok, stretch and run around and drive some more” variety. This made progress wonderfully relaxed and slow – after a driving period spent listening and scatting along to the Boilermaker Jazz Band (and admiring the piano bits – particularly one song where it’s trading fours with the guitarist) I grabbed an early (cheap! yay!) dinner at the IKEA in New Haven and discovered that who should be playing in East Hartford tonight but… the Boilermaker Jazz Band.

15 minutes later I was in the car driving the 45 minutes back north to East Hartford, happy that I’d brought my dance shoes along for exactly such an occasion (I plan on looking for blues/swing dances in Raleigh this week). I’m writing this from the adjoining auditorium – after 3 solid hours of dancing, I’m drenched in sweat and need a break from the floor. It goes ’till 4am, and we shall see how long I last. (Cardiovascular fitness… does not haz. Gotta work on that endurance.)

I don’t know a single soul here, but that’s okay! I’m bolder now* – brave enough to ask the guys I want to dance with if they’d like to dance, fluent enough to mostly keep up with some of the faster dancers on the floor, quick enough a study to learn as I go. The Mel who learned to dance in high school would call my present self a “good dancer,” but I know the truth is closer to “I’ve begun to be able to learn.”

*than I was when I first started to dance in high school. Being bolder than my high school self is not particularly hard, to be quite honest; when you need to steel yourself to order a cheeseburger at the McDonald’s counter, you are shy. (In my defense, I hadn’t really done that by myself too many times before high school – I have gotten used to it by now. Heck, I can even talk to waiters at non-fast-food restaurants without looking awkwardly like a beet due to not knowing what to do. Yay!)

And I’ve begun to listen – thanks to studying with Kevin, I can pick out some elements of what the band is doing that I think I can practice replicating when I get to a keyboard again. While the band was taking a break, I got up the courage (after stalling three times by drinking glasses of water) to approach Mark Kotision, the band’s pianist. (”Aaah,” went Mel’s brain. “What are you doing? He is a really freakin’ good pianist – look at that fluent economy of motion, listen to the casual shuffle of that tricky series of syncopated chords as he simultaneously sings – and you’re about to ask some really stupid questions? RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!” “Be quiet, brain,” said Mel. “There are times where I choose to be Brave yet Stupid. Now… is one of those times.”)

Anyway. To my surprise, he not only answered my questions, he went “Oh! There’s a piano in the next room,” and so we went over and he showed me comping, and how you’d play differently if there’s a string player, and the difference between stride (in 2/4, with strong octaves in the left hand keeping time) and what I think was called “dance style” (in 4/4, what Mark mostly played – he switches between the two a lot), and generally was ridiculously awesome about answering my questions until his bandmates called him back up front to play the next round of songs. Wow. If I was a fan before… all I can say is that I aspire to be that gracious about teaching the things I know, now and in the future.

I do not know how long I’m going to last tonight – it’s not the sleep that worries me (I’m good for consciousness for a long, long time), it’s the “I am around a lot of strange people interacting intensely with them at a fast pace” bit, which tends to fill my introversion buffer pretty fast. I will need a long, long, long time of solo driving to unwind and decompress from The Peopleness – but long, long, long, long solo driving time is what I have to look forward to, so it’s all good.

They’re playing one of my favorite songs now – “The Nearness Of You.”
(I adore the Norah Jones cover of this song.) I’m going back in.

Jodie Wu and her team at Global Cycle Solutions are doing some pretty neat things in Arusha.  Jodie is a D-Lab alum who spearheaded the development of a mobile bicycle cornsheller for Tanzania, building from the work of Maya Pedal  in Guatemala. 

A couple of summers ago as a student volunteer in Tanzania, Jodie built a pedal-powered cornsheller, then made back the money spent on building materials in a week by renting out to people who biked it to farms to shell corn.  If you know D-lab, you've probably heard this story a thousand times, my apologies, skip the next paragraph.  If you don't know D-lab, you may be asking "What's corn shelling?"

Millions of people across the world eat maize as their primary staple food.  Usually, this maize is dried out in the sun, and then all the kernels are removed from the cob by hand. ("Shelling" is the process of removing corn from the cob.) It's a time-consuming, tough process.   Another common method is to put the corn in sacks on the ground and beat them with sticks until all the corn comes off.  Not very efficient. 

Turns out there's an antiquated and neat farm tool that uses rotational motion to shell maize pretty quickly.  It's super neat, I wish I had a video to show you.  At any rate, GCS is making it easy to power these shellers to normal bikes. It looks something like this:

Based on how popular the first one was, Jodie decided to move to Tanzania and start a business after she graduated from MIT. 

Another super awesome product GCS is developing is a cell phone charger, which Arusha resident inventor Bernard Kiwia designed completely from bike and radio parts.  (Well, in some models, he also uses part of a clothes hanger.)  It's a wicked elegant design, and it's meant to passively charge a cellphone while the rider is biking around.  Villagers are REALLY excited about this one.  (Mobile phones are a HUGE deal in emerging economies.)


New Year's in Tanzania was fun.  Jodie made a New Year's resolution to learn to drive the GCS pickup truck, A very stubborn, finicky manual truck with no power steering.  In the words of Woon, "That truck handles like a corpse."  And Arusha roads/traffic aren't exactly the friendliest of places to learn.

So we all jumped in the truck, Jodie took the wheel, and Woon coached her driving all the way to Shaibu's house for his New Year's party.  Jodie had completed her first resolution within a few hours of the New Year.    Jodie is basically a rock star. 

Whereas the Christmas party at Jodie's place had been full of kids, cooking women, Maasai grandmothers, and a few local police, the New Year's day party at Shaibu's place was basically just young Tanzanian males feasting on goat, beer, and dancing the day away to loud music.  I figure Tanzania's got to be the most awesome place for being a bachelor. 



Shaibu really knows how to throw a party.  And you know what? He's a rockstar, too.  He knew that Woon and I don't eat meat, and he made a veggie dish just for us.  I was so impressed.  What a bro.



Shaibu's also a manager at Tumaini Cycles.  That kid is going places, he's amazing.

We also attended the Mama Afrika circus in Arusha, it was outstanding.  Acrobats, contortionists, a polished female magician, it was all pretty nifty. The highlight was the last act: three young jugglers who did this mind-bending hip hop hat juggling routine.  I'm sure they broke several fundamental laws of physics. 

New Year's resolutions:  1) Be able take two steps in a handstand without falling down.  2) More awkward.

Resolution #1 is fairly self-explanatory.
Resolution #2 I've been thinking a lot about.

I ask a lot of people different types of questions.  One of my favorite is: "Would you rather know many languages or how to play many instruments?"

Originally, my own answer was many languages.  It just seemed so useful, I could travel more places, be eligible for more jobs, understand more people.  But then I thought about it some more, and realized that even in English-speaking places, I'm a pretty awkward person.  Knowing more languages would just enable me to be multi-culturally awkward in different dialects.  When I framed the options that way, it suddenly became much more appealing to know many instruments.

Several hundred turns of thought later, I believe that being comfortable with awkward is loads more useful than being multi-lingual.  In a way, being "awkwardable"  can be substituted for language fluency.  

And the more I travel, the more I realize that it's often not about language fluency, it's about being comfortable in awkward situations.  If I'm comfortable in awkward situations, then it doesn't matter if I need to make funny hand gestures to communicate what kind of food I want.  It doesn't matter if I don't immediately understand what's going on, as long as I can go with the flow. 

Yes, learning other languages is still very useful.  But actually, being awkwardable is a prerequisite to achieving language fluency.  It's fairly straightforward to learn a language in a classroom or from language tapes, but fluency doesn't come unless the learner practices a lot with native speakers.  This involves making all sorts of embarrassing mistakes over and over again.  The more open a person is to awkward situations, the easier it will be for her to practice, and thus the faster she'll learn a language.  (This is why it's easier for kids to pick up languages - the have a social pass to make mistakes, while making the same mistakes is much more embarrassing for adults.)

Easier said than done.  But at any rate, I think it's worth working on...