I am doing pretty well with the whole hot summer thing, except on days when I get up early and go running. On these days I cannot convince my body to stop sweating until I get to my over-air-conditioned lab, which is sometimes 1.5-2 hours later. That is a lot of sweating, and it makes me cranky.

I got my jazz piano books, as well as a new book of Debussy. The jazz is fun but weird, since it's so against my training. It also doesn't help that I practically never learned music theory, I just play songs. The improv book is all, 'play the pentatonic scale in every key!', and I'm all, you can play it in different keys? And I'm bad at transposition and improv... I guess I play a lot by muscle memory. Well fine, to console myself I can play something from the Debussy book. Debussy is a composer that really resonates with me, and I find it much easier to know how his music should sound when I'm playing than with other composers. It has Jardins sous la pluie, La Cathédral Engloutie, and a lot of other pieces I've liked but haven't actually played (i.e., they aren't in my other Debussy book).

I urgently recommend the movie Amores Perros, which is like Pulp Fiction with characters you empathize with, sometimes funny but mostly brutal and tragic. It was so good, and really I spent the whole summer without Ben watching sad foreign movies. Strangely, I watched it in French despite its being a Mexican film, because the subtitles didn't work but I could change the audio language (from Spanish to French... no English). I watched Bande à Part and enjoyed it too, but in a very different way.

Franz pense à tout et à rien. Il ne sait pas si c'est le monde qui est en train de devenir rêve ou le rêve monde.

st paul's roses, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

"Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest. Have a nice time, people said to me at my send-off. It was not precisely what I had hoped for. I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude. This I thought mine be mine on that train to Limon."

--Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express

On the flight back to Philadelphia, I read the Feynman compilation The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, which was quite enjoyable. There were two quotes I really liked and wanted to share; the bolded part is something I agree with deeply.

"The guys at the graduate college were used to me looking like an idiot. On another occasion, for example, a guy came into my room--I had forgotten to lock the door during the 'experiment'--and found me in a chair chairs my heavy sheepskin coat, leaning out of the wide-open window in the dead of winter, holding a pot in one hand and stirring with the other. 'Don't bother me! Don't bother me!' I said. I was stirring Jell-O and watching it closely: I had gotten curious as to whether Jell-O would coagulate in the cold if you kept it moving all the time."

"Omni: As we came back to the office, you stopped to discuss a lecture on color vision you'll be giving. That's pretty far from fundamental physics, isn't it? Wouldn't a physiologist say you were 'poaching'?

Feynman: Physiology? It has to be physiology? Look, give me a little time and I'll give a lecture on anything in physiology. I'd be delighted to study it and find out all about it, because I can guarantee you it would be very interesting. I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

From The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, which I recently read.

'And a poet said, "Speak to us of Beauty."
Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she
herself be your way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?
The aggrieved and the injured say, "Beauty is kind and gentle.
Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us."
And the passionate say, "Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.
Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us."
The tired and the weary say, "beauty is of soft whisperings. She
speaks in our spirit.
Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in
fear of the shadow."
But the restless say, "We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings
and the roaring of lions."
At night the watchmen of the city say, "Beauty shall rise with the
dawn from the east."
And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, "we have seen her
leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset."
In winter say the snow-bound, "She shall come with the spring leaping
upon the hills."
And in the summer heat the reapers say, "We have seen her dancing with
the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair."

All these things have you said of beauty.
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you
hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.'

Recently juhi shared this quote with me, which I'd forgotten and which I desperately needed last year. Reading it now feels like patting myself on the back... I can't believe I'm getting everything I worked for.

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours."

-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged