Shiny New Bracelet

                I’ve been contemplating my mortality recently.  The airplane thing just reminded me that I haven’t discussed it yet.

                Last summer I was seriously ill.  As in “I might theoretically die” ill.  Unfortunately I was taking classes over the summer as well.  My determination to continue impressing this professor who at that point held complete power over my career was such that even though I was sick enough for my grandmother to show up at one a.m. with a cooler of soup and orange juice I still went to class.  And very nearly passed out and was commanded to go to the health center forthwith.  After two hours of IVs and every test they could think of I was prescribed broad-spectrum antibiotics—the fancy new time-release kind—and sent home.  Three days later, once a critical dose of meds had built up, it turns out that I’m allergic to the antibiotics.  Which I found out via my hands stiffening up to the point where I couldn’t move my left at all and the right was barely functional by the time I got back to the doctor (which was super-scary as someone who occasionally relied on accompaniment gigs to pay her rent).  “Sign here, please.”  Not possible until after massive doses of prednisone, thanks very much. 

                Remember how I said these were the new fancy time-release antibiotics?  Yeah. 

                I ended up spending the next week in my bathtub to control the stiffness and itching, forbidden from attending class and really bored because obviously books and laptops (and pianos) do not belong near water. 

                But the point of this story is that I found out later that unlike, say, snake venom, it is not possible to build up a tolerance to an allergen.  Some people grow out of childhood allergies to a certain extent, but apparently not ones that started as bad as I’ve got this. Instead, they get progressively worse.   According to a paramedic, the next time I am exposed to this particular class of antibiotics, I will go into anaphylactic shock and be dead in less than five minutes.  Hence the bracelet.  But Mathematician, you’re saying, in a bit of Fridge Brilliance, antibiotics are not like peanuts.  You don’t randomly find them wandering about in the world, waiting to kill people with allergies.  You’d have to already be in some sort of medical environment, and surely you can just tell them not to give you those. 

                That’s what I thought too.  But the paramedic pointed out that the most likely scenario that would precede death by medicine would be some sort of car accident type thing, where if I was taken to the hospital I would automatically be put on antibiotics—and I’m allergic to the most popular class.  So get the damn bracelet and stop whining about it.

                I spent the week between that conversation and actually getting the thing freaking out every time I got into a car, on a train, or just left the house.  My new bracelet is very shiny and has the allergy, my name and a couple of phone numbers in a font that screams pay attention to this!  [A friend pointed out that it’s made out of surgical steel (as opposed to actual silver) and ‘really isn’t very pretty.’  No shit, the idea is that isn’t not supposed to be mistaken for jewelry.  I’m not the bracelet-wearing type, but unless you’re looking for the little red caduceus on it I can wear it with a proper suit and not have it look really out of place.] 

                Okay, so the actual point of the story is that now I have this thing on all the time, and I have to wear it for the rest of my life.  I am only twenty-two, so I hope that the rest of my life is still a long time.  That being said, I thought that I had my existential crisis in junior high, and that I had come to peace with the idea that my life could theoretically be cut short at any minute.  Provided that I don’t have to think about that possibility all the time.  After the shit-show that was my childhood, I finally got to a really good place in my life, and I’d like to keep it that way.  Or at least enjoy it while it lasts.  Except now every time I use a mouse or pick up a book, there’s a little jingling noise that reminds me that death is more imminent than I might like to think.

Airplanes

I recently had a little bit of a Fuck My Life moment last week when I realized that I had to get on three planes inside of eight days.  I don’t fly well (as in “I left letters for people I like before I got on that airborne deathtrap”), and I think I figured out why.

Let us contemplate for a moment exactly what an airplane is.  It is a bird made out of tinfoil which goes about 650 miles per hour several miles off the ground.  I think it’s the same problem I have with roller coasters—which are tiny carts often made out of wood, which go up to 65 miles per hour on tracks up to several hundred feet off the ground.  I understand the physics.  I trust the physics.  I do not trust engineers (sorry, Roomie).  One little thing goes wrong, and we crash into a mountain. 

As a secondary point, I don’t know who’s driving this thing!  Actually it’s probably a what.  This has nothing to do with my thesis that most people are idiots (surprising, no?).  Pilots know their shit, yo.  Except now planes are flown by autopilot most of the time.  And one thing I trust even less than engineering is computers.  So this gives us three Evil Computer possibilities:

1.       The computer fucks up, the pilot doesn’t notice, and we crash into a mountain.

2.       The computer fucks up, the pilot does notice, but since everything is flown by autopilot now he’s out of practice at actually flying the plane without a computer, and we crash into a mountain.

3.       The computer fucks up, but the pilot is Sully so we’re cool.

Notice that two out of the three involve crashing into mountains.

Now, I know perfectly well that airplanes are significantly safer than cars.  So are roller coasters, for that matter.  I freely admit that this is a rather irrational fear.  That said, I almost never contemplate my mortality upon getting into a car because they’re everywhere.  Also because I know how to drive one, so there’s at least an illusion of control.  If I crash a car, it’s at least partially my fault.  Sure, factors like weather or other people’s idiocy may play a role, but even if some drunk hits me, I would feel like I’m part idiot for not doing a better job of getting out of the way.

So in conclusion: steel box that better stay firmly on the ground at all times versus tinfoil bird several miles up in the air.  Too bad driving to Denver takes forever. 

Adventures in Commuting II

Due to construction on Jackson and Wacker, any bus that stops within a two-block radius of Union Station has been rerouted in some way. 

Any bus that stops within a two-block radius of Union Station. 

Translation...ALL OF THEM.

Adventures in Commuting

I am currently working for half the week at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, as a research intern with their education department.  (Today was data day, I was super excited this morning.)   Equally interesting for me, though, is that I now commute to Chicago three times a week. 

Which. Is. Awesome.      

The first day was a bit weird.  I love the train, I always have, but I've never used the bus system in Chicago before.  I assumed that I could figure it out of course, but I was surprised to find that it's actually pretty well set up, at least for where I want to go.  It has nothing on the Champaign system, of course, but in fairness Champaign has somewhere around 150,000 people while Chicago has 3 million.    The morning bus goes from Union Station to 11th and Columbus, where I get out and am privileged to take a nice little stroll on the museum campus on my way to the loading dock/staff entrance of the Shedd, which for some reason smells like chocolate chip cookies.    

Sorry, getting off track.   On my way back to Western Springs one day last week, I saw a man who knows how to commute like a boss.  He was heading for the same train as me--hurrying, but clearly he knew exactly how much time he had.  Then he kicked back on the top deck, proceeded to take a newspaper and a beer out of his briefcase, flicked the cap off the beer in a perfect parabolic arc into said briefcase, and kicked the case shut, all in one practiced motion.  Also, he had a gigantic white walrus moustache.  I do not know who he is, but I salute him.  Two people I met on the bus:  Week before last was Fiddling Dream Woman--she asked for directions, I had a map, we got to talking.  She had a violin case with her, so I asked if she played with an orchestra, thinking maybe I was about to get some magical connection to the CSO.  Turns out that she had just retired and was fulfilling her life-long dream of taking fiddle lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music.  She was tiny and adorable.  Yesterday was African-American Kirsten Chenowith.  Same cut of dress that Glinda wears in the Evita scene in Wicked, but more importantly the same voice.  Exactly the same.  Same pitch range, same tonal quality, identical inflection.    I love those little one-off things you see.  Maybe it's my inner sociologist, maybe it's the inner musician, but it's the fact that one doesn't have to be concerned with a distinct lack of social skills--after all, you meet someone and it turns out really well and you get a friend for life or a great thing for your career, or it goes really badly and you never have to see them again.  Maybe a little of all three.  My grandmother was asking me last year if I've lost my wonder.  Don't be ridiculous, I'm full of wonder, but most of it is tied up in what other people would categorize as Not Interesting.  Or, equally likely, Completely Opaque. 

ALSO: a public service announcement to rush hour drivers in the city.  1. There are lane lines for a reason.  Use them.  2. Idiots, do not go up against the bus.  The bus will pick its teeth with your little sedan.    

That is all.

--C.

Conducting is Officially the Best Class Ever

Well, it’s official.  Conducting is the Best Class Ever. 

Apparently none of us suck at fermatas, so we’ve jumped ahead to the constantly-changing-meter craziness that is “Carmina Burana.”  We all survived it quite well, actually.

On the minus side, we were supposed to do a harmonic analysis of a Bach chorale for today.  I tried, I really did.  Unfortunately, my one semester of “theory for non-majors” does not hold up that well.  For one thing, secondary dominants were vaguely mentioned toward the end of class, and modulation was one of those “you will learn this several semesters from now” things.  Unfortunately both modulation and secondary dominant chords feature rather heavily in Bach chorales.  As another point that is decidedly not in my favor, the non-major class incorporates neither part-writing practice nor any sort of aural skills.  I can name all the intervals after that class, and that’s about it. Yeah.  I gave my homework to a organ-major friend (who shall henceforth be known as James Bond the Fugue Master) who rightly declared my attempt a complete fail.  Professor Adorkable got in on it as well, which resulted in him and the Fugue Master leaning over the piano arguing about leading tones.  I think that one or both of them will teach me some theory if I ask nicely and/or bring them cookies.  Fugue Master has previously stated that it is nigh impossible to learn theory in the modern era without a teacher, and the Wise Man has neither the time nor the Skype skills to teach me (and I think it amuses him a little bit to see how frustrated I get trying to teach myself things.  But mostly the time thing).

Back to conducting class, though.  British Conducting Teacher was in a great mood today, which resulted in BCT telling stories about his British Conducting Teachers Many Years Ago, And Also Trains, and the entire class giggling constantly.  We had fun yelling “Bam!” and jumping up and down when the bass drum was supposed to come in, what can I say.  After the Chorale debacle, I’m just glad to have a class where everyone really cares about the music.

It’s also fun because BCT is a really good teacher who is actually proud of what we’ve accomplished so far.  He’s picky and very snarky (dude, he’s British, duh) but he does genuinely care about making us all better conductors.  And he's hilarious, so we love him. 

And, I've got people asking me for help now!  It makes for a nice confidence boost in a class where I know that everyone has much more background knowledge than I do.  Although, to be fair, this particular piece is all about meter changes. Sweeney Todd is the ultimate background reference.

It's just a fun piece to play, fun to conduct, great teacher and a great class.  I'm not sure if this qualifies as Best Monday Ever, but it certainly came pretty close.  And "  :D  "  does no justice to the massive grin I had on my face all day.

The Baton Returns!

My baton has come back to me!!!!

It was MIA since about last Friday, and after a week of me tearing around checking every lost and found on campus and announcing it to all my classes, someone in 314 found it somewhere and gave it to their TA, who made sure it got back to me. 

Thank you so much, whoever you are!

Roommate Rebuttal--Socialism

As usual, the only thing Roommate and I argue about is the viability of socialism and an egalitarian society.  She's in the ISO branch on campus, and really believes.  More power to her.  I think that the concept of a properly egalitarian society under the conditions proposed is completely nuts.

She's mad at me right now, mostly because I used the words "non-functional," "impractical," "illogical," and "idiocy" too many times.  But that's what the Internet is for.

I do agree with her on several points.  One, capitalism as it currently exists is flawed.  Economically, there is too much poverty, not enough proper education, and very little in the way of social mobility.  My work is in conflict theory, I get it.  I've read the statistics--hell, I myself am an anomaly in the statistics.  I understand how society works, from the bottom and the middle-ish.  (Just establishing my credentials to comment on this in the first place.)  Two, the political system is flawed.  Big business and obscure special interest groups have way too much influence.  Money buys power, and this ought to be unacceptable.  We don't hold our representatives nearly as accountable as we should.  In addition, they don't really do all that much.  Our system is deadlocked by political bickering. 

Three, I agree that socialism is a nice idea.  Everyone's needs are provided for (we have the technology to do it), everyone has equal rights and an equal say in decisions. It's lovely, in theory.

But that's just it--in theory.  My point is that it is not going to work.  Every part of the supposed path from capitalism to socialism is flawed.  There's a lot of hand-waving on how these transitions are supposed to happen.  Every time a supposed socialist (or communist, in this context it's sort of difficult to make the distinction) revolution happens, a single leader or a small cohort emerges and takes over.  And boom, dictatorship.  For example, everyone's been ecstatic over the Egyptian protests and recent revolution.  They got Mubarak out of the picture.  Awesome.  Now there's rumblings that the "transitional government" provided by the military is acting a lot less transitional than people thought it would.  Why, exactly, are we surprised by this?

Let's say that hypothetically we make it past the revolution stage.  At this point, as Roommate explained it to me, the collective resources are set up to provide for everyone's needs (and that's great) and rather than put all of their energies into the rat race, everyone can spend their not-at-work time into "exploring their humanity."  For now, I'll pass over my objection that that phrase doesn't actually mean anything. 

Supposedly, there will be no hierarchy. This is where I started using the above words that Roommate objected to.

Okay, issue number one: Roommate presented the idea that decisions would be made collectively after debate and discussion.  Sub-issue 1: debate and discussion implies that there will be people doing the debating and discussing.  Did you ever notice how there are some people who do the talking and others who don't?  This is how leaders emerge, political factions form, and hierarchies start to emerge.  It's basic theory.  Even in those hunter-gatherer societies that are held up as models of egalitarianism, there was group A who had one opinion and whose voting/whatever the equivalent may be coalesced around the ideas of one guy.  There was group B who did the same thing based on their guy.  Sub-issue 2: Most people are idiots.  [Okay, most people are average.  Same thing.]  Opinions are formed all the time based on things other than cold hard facts.  While I recognize that this is an unpopular line to take, the majority is not always right.  Because: you guessed it, the majority are idiots.  Combine "average" with "listens to someone who is not average and does what the not-average person wants" is a recipe for disaster.  It's exactly what we have right now, of course, but my point is that under the newly proposed system nothing actually changes. 

Issue number 2: there are reasons that hierarchies exist.  One of them is that most people are idiots (It's a popular theme with me, get used to it.  I object to fact that most of the population relies on emotion in any measure rather than 100% logic to make decisions.  It bothers me.).  Theoretically, by electing those who are not idiots, we protect ourselves from our own idiocy.  Again, this doesn't always work in reality.  See Issue 1, Sub-Issue 2.

Another reason why hierarchies exist is because we are not equipped to deal with everyone on an equal level.  Recent research has demonstrated that we are capable of maintaining a maximum of 150 relationships--that's family, friends, co-workers, teachers, people in the neighborhood, the bartender at the local pub, etc.  If you have more that 150 "friends" on Facebook, I suspect you know that you can't truly keep track of all of them.  This is supported by historical evidence as well--tribal groups in all parts of the globe have a carrying capacity of about 150 individuals.  Any larger than that and the group quickly splits apart because the members simply can't keep track of everyone else.  Military units, too, used to number between 100 and 150--technically a company is 100, but it actually varies more because of officers that aren't counted as soldiers in the company, extra non-combatants, what have you.  It's not just a nice number to use for organization--it's the largest number that we are neurologically capable of coping with.  Egalitarian societies are fine when we're below that number--but we're thousands of years of population expansion and urban migrations beyond that.  So let's say that we break Chicago down into little communities of 150 people each.  The population of the city proper--not including the 15-mile dense suburban ring around the city--is just under 3 million.  That's twenty thousand groups of 150 people each.  Let's assume that each group can get along.  What happens when groups come into conflict?  They can't be completely insular societies on their own, so when their interaction with another group turns sour, who mediates?  Socialism says that we can't have some sort of higher authority to deal with this.  Well, with our 20,000 mini-societies just in Chicago, that's 19,999! (that's factorial) potential conflicts.  And that's just two-way conflicts, let's not get into any other polygons.  You want them to work everything out for themselves?  Good luck with that. 

Issue 3 and then I promise I'll shut up: it is not in human nature to be satisfied.  We are competitive by nature.  I mean that literally: if we hadn't adapted to a changing environment and fought to survive--fought the elements, fought each other--the species would have died out long ago.  We are programmed to continually strive to better our lot--economically in particular.  Of course, this means something different than it did when we had only recently split off from apes.  Mazlow's hierarchy, anyone?  Hypothetically, society might change enough to where we can have our basic physical needs fulfilled and not continue to increase our future resources even though we don't need to.  Of course, we then have the issue of how do you control people's competitive urges until that point?  As a final note to back this point up: Roommate pointed out quite correctly that she's never been food insecure (that is, in fact, the politically correct term) and so doesn't know what it's like to have been treated so badly by capitalism that she can't be sure where her next meal is coming from.  I agree.  But having been there, done that (though not nearly as far as a lot of people) I can tell you this: it doesn't matter if today you have enough to eat and you've been promised that you don't have to worry about tomorrow because society will take care of you.  Promises mean nothing.  Having a quietly stockpiled reserve of cash means something.  People's need to compete for resources will never stop. 

To sum up: nice idea, not practical.  "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" (paraphrasing, shut up) is a great slogan.  When you come up with logistics for that and, oh, yeah, a way to circumvent basic biologically imposed (see forthcoming post on altruism as an evolutionary adaptation) "human nature," let me know.  Until then, I'm going to go think of possible solutions that might actually work.