Sometime probably today or tomorrow, this blog will go over the 1000-hit count. Yikes!
So, Apple just opened their new music-download store. $0.99 per song, from a 200,000 song catalog. Yours to keep, though there are limits on how you can move the files around. I think it's a good concept, but after I paid for a couple of songs I had never been able to find on P2P . . . I, uh, went back to piratin', and just used the apple music store to easily browse artists and albums (for insertion into limewire searches). Bad, I know. Hey, I'm easing into this "legal" thing.
Wow. Clicked through to this from Zen's blog. Bad mistake. I'm sitting in stats class (in a computer lab) and I started cracking up, uncontrollably. I'm sure the prof and TAs were lookin' at me funny.
got so much things to say
I'n'I nah come to fight flesh and blood
We hosted a party, Saturday night. It was a kickin' affair - thanks to everyone who came out and made it be. :-) I, in fact, had such a good time that I was in bed by about 12:30. Yee-ah.
I woke up at about 10:00 with an only mildly raging hangover, and was on a softball field by 11:00. Runnin' around and stuff. It was So Fun. It's definitely a far cry from real baseball, but we git old, we takes what we can gits, I guess. This was a try-out thing for a competitive fast-pitch league, and in a full scrimmage I went 5-6, with four singles and a HR. I was joking, before the Jack (n of t.v. [3]) that I was going to try to hit it into the soccer goal down the right field line. I hit the post.
I will light the match this mornin', so I won't be alone
Watch as she lies silent, for soon light will be gone . . .
How much difference does it make
How much difference does it make, yeah...
So, I fucked up last Thursday, in a bad way, work-wise. I no-showed on a 9:00 a.m. subject I was supposed to be running. In this lab, this is (very reasonably) a cardinal sin. I woke up, checked my voicemail, turned over in my bed and started pounding on it, cursing at myself. I was pissed off. I've always been a little disorganized and absent minded. Before this year, it never really caused too many problems. But it's making me feel shit about myself, lately - I've been missing important meetings, classes . . . and now this subject . . . and I feel like I'm establishing a terrible reputation as a flake. Which is eating me up. So, I'm trying to fix things - establish a routine that includes checking my iCal calendar daily, have it send me email reminders, have those forwarded to my cell phone (yay redundancy). Get to bed early, get enough sleep, get in to the office by 9:00, daily.
I'm unhappy with my disorganization, but I'm also unhappy, more generally, with my low productivity. I gave my first-year talk last week on the strength (heh) of 3 pilot subjects. My advisors didn't seem to voice too many concerns about this, and in general the talk seemed well recieved. But. Tanya followed me, presenting her first year project, which involved testing a total of 100+ subjects on like four different experiments in a sequence, digging deep into her subject. Adult subjects, a lot easier to get. But. Fuckin' A.
It bothers me that I'm not working up to my own standards, and yet I'm receiving very little outside criticism. It makes me wonder. It makes me feel insecure.
I love the playoffs. I mean that - this weekend - was just some incredible basketball. Allen Iverson went for 55 points last night. He's the quickest guy in the NBA, but last night, in the last six minutes, having played the entire game . . . he was quicker than quick, he was the god damn Flash, he was moving faster than anyone I've seen in my life. Bouncing, weaving, darting, exploding past defenders to the hole, juking guys literally off their feet to get free to . . . swoosh a three. He is so fun to watch.
I don't know how long this will be up, but check out the SportsCenter Highlights from the game ("video" link on the right side, a little ways down . . . I can't link to it directly.)
The only other bit I actually caught, this weekend, was then end of the Spurs-Suns game . . . Stoudemire banking in a three to send the game to overtime, then Marbury hitting a running, desperation bank-shot three as time expired in overtime, to win. That was just ridiculous.
. . .
I spent the weekend in states South with Jessica, visiting her sister, just outside of N.Y., and having Easter brunch with her slightly extended family. I really enjoyed our stay with her sister Jennifer and her boyfriend Greg - Jennifer made an amazing dinner, Greg made sure I got nicely toasted on a little bit of beer and a lot of great wine, and had me absolutely in hysterics over an old Richard Pryor DVD. I mean, that was some intensely funny shit. Anyway, I had a great time. Brunch was nice, too, on Sunday, though Jess and I both managed to not be feeling so great - her medicine was really getting to her, and my stomach was acting up. Spring was coming on in full force, in Montclaire, NJ - blossoming dogwoods and cherry trees, bright greens everywhere. It hasn't arrived yet, up here in Boston, but it was really nice to get a taste of it.
The other day, I'm driving around with a friend, looking for a place to play basketball. It's the first gorgeous day of the spring, so everyone's out, and the first three playgrounds we try, the courts are full. We go by the school at Prospect and Broadway, and that's crowded, so we cruise on down to Columbia, where there's a court about a block north of Main St. and the East end of Central Sq. Voila, there are two guys on one end of the court, and no-one at the other end - open court! As I'm slowing down, my friend says "Uhhhh . . . let's NOT play here." I'm incredulous. Why? He says it's because it doesn't seem like a safe neighborhood, that he'd be really uncomfortable. It's broad daylight. I've played there multiple times before, never had anything like a problem.
"Because there are black people?!?" I ask. He insists it's not because they're black, it's because of how they're dressed, how they seem to just be hanging out on the street with nothing to do.
This has happened before . . . it happened recently, in fact . . . I can't see any difference between neighborhoods, except in terms of the color of the people you see on the sidewalk, yet white friends of mine insist that one feels safe, the other doesn't, and adamantly deny that it has anything to do with race; they get offended and angry when I suggest that it must be.
The thing is, I get angry too. I get outraged. I don't get it, I despise it, I think it's idiotic and cowardly and lame . . . and wrong, too, but that's secondary.
My friends don't seem to think any of this is at all valid. They feel like they're simply making a rational judgement of risk, and avoiding dangerous situations, and they see nothing wrong with that.
Later, after an extended discussion, I ask my friend how likely he thinks it is that you/I/he (someone white) would be messed with, "going into a neighborhood like that".
"75%" he says.
That's either so wrong, by so many orders of magnitude, that it's ridiculous, or I'm so completely different from your average white person that all y'all who keep telling me I'm white should back down. I grew up in comparable neighborhoods (to Central Sq.) in Philadelphia (Germantown and Mt. Airy), meaning I spent about 16 years there, including lots of time in public places, on playgrounds, playing basketball, hanging around congregating, bored kids (of all colors) . . . and at night, too, plenty of times. On time, when I was about 9, some other kid (about the same age) pulled out a knife, and just kind of showed it to me. That was weird, but no harm and no threat. One other time, two black kids yelled at me and asked me what I was doing in their neighborhood. Okay, again, messed up but not a big deal. Plenty of times, I was verbally abused on the basketball court for being a "white boy", but that's just trash talk, there's nothing threatening at all about it.
I was never robbed.
I was never assaulted, in any way.
I was never so much as threatened.
"Black" neighborhoods are not THAT fucking dangerous. 16 years, zero incidents. Get over it, people.
It's been pointed out to me that getting angry about this - which I do - isn't very constructive, and isn't going to help anybody. I can acknowledge this. So I'm trying to figure out what I can do, what I can say, how I can make people see my point of view, and - as I see things - conquer their completely unreasonable fears.
I've made a few attempts to look up crime statistics neighborhood-by-neighborhood (in any city), to get a rational measure of relative danger. I haven't been succesful. If anyone feels like doing a superior job of web-data-mining, please help me out here. It would be hard, in any case, to extract a valid measure of "how likely a white person is to be messed with walking around a bad/black neighborhood for an hour" which is kind of the relevant psychological variable. Now, what I'm told is that this is obviously somewhat higher - and probably a lot higher - than "how likely the same person is to be messed with walking around a nice/white neighborhood" - and that as long as there's any difference, avoiding the bad/black neighborhoods is a rational choice. I disagree. I think it's a minimal, minimal risk, and that to live a full life, you have to just say fuck it, and take (ignore) all those little risks. Otherwise, you end up never driving, never riding a bike - hell, never walking, in downtown Boston - you end up never eating steak, never gambling, never having sex, living in a gated community and never getting the fuck out. You end up stagnating. You might as well end up dead.
But wait, I'm told, isn't it anyone's free will to choose not to do any one of those things? Isn't it possible to live a life of moderation, and still avoid certain small risks of our choosing? Aren't I going to ridiculous extremes, here?
Yes, I guess it is, and yes, I guess I am. The point is, I think white people, out of fear and ignorance bred of inexperience, vastly overestimate the "dangers"/risks of bad/black neighborhoods. They happily take big risks, with regards to their health and wealth (driving expensive cars fast and aggresively on crowded roads) while determinedly avoiding small risks (like playing ball for an hour, a block away from Central Sq.)
Even if it's irrational, though, is it wrong?
I can step down from my philosophical amoralist perch, here, and dig into this. I think it is. I think fear and ignorance about race and class perpetuate a damaging stratification. I think people discriminated against, even passively, through avoidance - feel the discrimination, and feel stigmatized. I wish I could make a stronger case than this, though, because it doesn't seem to have much of an effect. People don't seem to find it compelling; or, maybe, feel they have reasonable reasons for their behavior, and don't feel the moral downside is so great, by comparison.
And, people seem totally uninterested / unwilling to so much as attempt to learn how to behave so as to make what they feel to be a threatening environment less so. They claim that maybe there's just this huge gap, that I know what to do, how to act, and what to say, so I'm safe but they're not. But they, essentially, feel like they're stuck being white/susceptible, and since it's impossible for them to change, they feel justified in remaining scared and or ignorant - since so much as taking the time to gain experience hanging out in bad/black neighborhoods would be such a risk.
I don't know. It blows my mind. And to other people, it just seems totally insignificant / obviously reasonable.
Working late at night is peaceful. Reading Slater, Descartes, Berkeley, writing on Harris . . . cool old stuff. Too much of it, but Liz insists it's all absolutely canon, and we can't possibly become psychologists without reading it. Reasonable.
My brother turned 21 on Sunday. We're all completely grown-up adults, now. Legally.
. . .
Hmm. It's too bad my brain doesn't actually work that well at this time of night. I was just about to write something very cool, a minute ago, and I now have no idea what.
Whoa. Meta-funny. Apparently my brain doesn't even work well enough to hit the "post and publish" button. So it's now Tuesday morning. I slept well, anyway. :-)
In the city center this correspondent saw a youth wearing a red baseball cap back-to-front brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle and waiting for a passing car to hijack.
He let me go by but shot the driver of the next vehicle, dragged him out and drove away in the truck.
"Is this your liberation?" screamed one shopkeeper at the crew of a U.S. Abrams tank as youths helped themselves to everything in his small hardware store.
I guess, I'd been thinking about how fascinating it would be to go to Iraq, now, and observe the rebuilding.
Right.
Maybe these people, for whatever reason, are just so totally fucked, culturally, that there are no easy solutions, no easy fixes. This seems at the same time obvious, impossible, impolitic, and sad.
I wish it would stop raining, and stop being so cold.
I've been following the war with a mixture of depression and boredom. What, really, is there to be done. I've posted a few links to "alternative" views and information, and I've thought about posting more, but really, you can go out and find them if you like. People are dying. War is horrible. So, and so. I'm not the one to ask, really. There are other places to look.
My fantasy baseball team had the most points of any in the league, for the first week. That was very exciting for me, but of absolutely no interest to anyone else in the world. I hope. :-p
I found out somone I know is gay. That was interesting. Who? Come on, I'm not telling.
Arrest This Man, He Talks In Maths 
Wednesday, April 30, 2003