Categories
China General Swing

Experiences

I’ve had a wide variety of experiences over the last few days, so today’s entry will just be a random walk through where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.

Casting my vote

I voted today. Prime Minister of Canada, Paul Martin, announced an election last month scheduled for June 28. Since I’m in China at the moment, I get to vote by mail. So I faxed in a photocopy of my passport picture and signature pages, plus an application form. The ballot came in the mail last week. It’s an interesting system, really.

The ballot itself is just a piece of special paper with the following sentence (in English and French): “I vote for…” and then you fill in the candidate’s name. It was up to me to find out who is running in my riding and to fill in the full name of my choice. Once the name is filled in, the ballot goes inside an “inner envelope” which has no markings on it. Then the inner envelope goes inside an “outer envelope” which has my name, my riding, a bar code, and my signature. The signature must be there and must match the one I used to apply for the ballot.

The system insures that I don’t vote twice, that someone doesn’t use my ballot instead of me, and it preserves my anonymity. It works like this. When the mail-in votes are counted, the outer envelope information is checked against the registry. Then it is put with the other ballots from my riding. The outer envelopes are opened and the inner envelopes are all mixed together. This way, the ballot is no longer traceable to me. Then, the inner envelopes are opened and the ballots removed and counted.

I say I voted today because I went to the Embassy here in Beijing and turned in my set of nested envelopes. They will ship mine and everyone else’s ballots to Ottawa tomorrow. I doubt that my candidate will win, but that is not necessarily how I choose my candidate. In fact, all votes, even those for candidates that lose, are important because the number of votes that a given political party gets in this election will determine their status and funding from the government for the next election. Most people don’t realize that, figuring that their one vote doesn’t count for much. They are wrong.

Okay, enough preaching. But it was fun to vote from abroad.

No sleep

I didn’t sleep last night. Except for maybe 20 minutes of sleep when I first crawled into bed after midnight, I stayed awake the whole night. I eventually turned on the light at 03h30 or so and started to watch South Park on my computer. One of the problems with my insomnia here in Beijing is that sunrise right now is at 04h46 and it starts to get light at 04h13. (Hey! I just realized that it’s the Solstice today. I can’t believe I wasn’t paying attention.) Once it starts to get light, I find it almost impossible to initiate sleep. If I’ve already been sleeping, it’s no problem, but if I haven’t fallen asleep before 04h00, I’m screwed. I did laundry at 07h30, and then I started to fade waiting for it to finish the spin cycle. I made it to the end, hung up my shirts, and then went to bed at 08h00. I had no trouble sleeping then. I woke up four hours later in time for lunch. I’ll probably be tired again by supper time, but I should be able to readjust and fall asleep normally tonight. At least I hope so. As for the cause of this insomnia, I don’t really know. My suffering from Restless Legs Syndrome has a lot to do with it. I need to write about this topic sometime later cause I won’t attempt to fit it in here.

The latest Swing news

The weekend was pretty good. I got to go out with my Swing Dance friends (pretty much my primary social group now) on Friday and Saturday night. Since Zuma mysteriously disintegrated, we have no place to have our Swing parties on Saturday nights. This is a huge disappointment. Zuma wasn’t perfect, but it was a venue that we were quite happy with. The only thing really missing was a live band, but that takes more than just having a venue. Now we have neither.

This is a problem for this week especially. We have a guest dancer from California joining us tonight (don’t know how long he’ll be here) and another guest dancer, Amanda, from Texas coming this week as well. Amanda is working on her Masters research in cultural studies, and Swing Dancing in China is her topic. At least this is what I understand it to be. I’ll learn more when I meet her on Thursday. She’ll spend over a week with us and then move on to join our fellow “hats and cats” in Shanghai.

Update: You can read Amanda’s report of her trip here.

A private honour

I visited Qiao Ying in her teahouse yesterday. Aside from some guests, we were the only ones there, so we got to spend some quiet time together. It was good to feel her spirit again and leave behind the world of negative thought that I inhabit so much. As we were saying goodbye, Qiao Ying told me that her teahouse was “my place”. She wasn’t just saying, “make yourself at home”, but she really meant that I belonged in her teahouse and that it belonged in me. I could welcome no greater honour than this.

A needed vacation

I guess I could announce it here. I’m going back to Edmonton for a one-month vacation next month. I’ll leave for home on July 18. In fact, Michael, my German best friend, is also going home for his family visit at this time. Some projected highlights for my trip:

  • Blueberry Bluegrass Festival
  • Chris’ 30th birthday
  • Seeing my family: mom, sister, brother-in-law, and nieces
  • Being bathed in nature’s freshness
  • Swing Dancing
  • Hanging out with some local astrologers
  • Whatever else the Universe has in store…
Categories
Python

Pigs and Cows and a Tiny Little Server Farm

There’s a weblog that I like to read on a regular basis. It’s called Pork Tornado, and the guy, Dusty, is hilarious most of the time. Very dry humour.

But I’ve had lots of trouble connecting to the site, with the domain name system (DNS) unable to find the site all the time. I’ve tried from work, at home, and even from my computer in Canada. Sometimes I can load the site, sometimes I can’t. I honestly thought that their DNS entries were misconfigured and not refreshing themselves on the Internet properly. I wrote a Python script, even, to regularly look up the site’s DNS information to track the history of the intermittent problem. I had the script running on the above-mentioned three machines.

But just two days ago, I figured out the real problem: it was me all along. All this time I’ve been typing

http://porktornado.dairyland.com/

instead of

http://porktornado.diaryland.com/

Can you see the difference? Now try the links. The first one doesn’t work; the second one does. Now here’s my explanation.

I honestly thought that the site was related to dairies (cows) and it never crossed my mind that the key word was “diary” (writing in a journal). How dumb. Besides, the website is a bit cartoonish, so I just assumed “cows” again, cause cows are oftentimes drawn as cartoon characters. Furthermore, I had been really careful to spell “porktornado” correctly because it is a difficult word to type and I didn’t want to accidentally type “toronado”. There you have it.

Now that I’ve got it right, I really need to just make a bookmark of the dumb site.

Categories
China Swing

On the cover of the Rolling Stone

Well, it’s not quite Rolling Stone magazine, and certainly not the cover, but it’s still pretty cool. My swing dance group, Swing Beijing! and I are featured in a one-page article in Cosmopolitan magazine here in China. Page 130 of the June 2004 issue. I wonder if it’s available in Canada, perhaps in Vancouver or Toronto.

Follow this link or click on the cover to see a scan of the article. I’ll be bringing a copy home to Canada when I visit to show my friends and family.

Swing is a relatively new thing here in China. The media is getting a little tired of Salsa and other Latin dances, which are now quite popular after about four years of hard promotion by the original Salsa dancers. So Swing is appealing as a new thing, and we are quite glad of the publicity. We hope to grow the popularity of Swing so that there are more people to dance with and more events to dance at.

Swing Beijing! has been going well now that spring has arrived. We had a really good turnout at our Saturday night Swing party at Zuma. Perhaps 25–30 people, and many of our missing regulars decided to return. So we all had a great time dancing our hearts out to the great music. As heat and humidity continue to climb, we’re getting more of a workout, oftentimes with our faces drenched in sweat after a fast song. I love it!

We are considering holding a live-music event at the end of June, and an even larger event with a guest band from America sometime in the Fall. Things are looking good for Swing in Beijing.

Categories
Astro

Venus Transit on June 8 — You gotta see this!

I don’t have much time to write about this — I’m very busy — but check out the following link and do your own homework. It’ll be worth it, I promise.

A Venus transit is where the planet Venus travels across the disc of the Sun. So it’s like a solar eclipse, except that Venus is only a small disc and won’t cover the Sun at all. It will be visible to the naked eye, provided that one uses welding glass to cut down the brightness of the Sun as well as the infrared and ultraviolet radiation which can damage the eyes very quickly. I’ve personally waited for this event for over 7 years, having read about it in an astronomy book. The rest of the world has been waiting 120 years since the last Venus transit.

Because it is also an inner planet, Mercury can also transit the disc of the Sun. This is more common than a Venus transit, but it is still a rare enough event to be quite special. I hope you can find a local astronomy club or observatory (who will have the necessary equipment) that you can join to watch this event. It happens Tuesday, June 8 during the day (obviously). It lasts for over 6 hours.

2004 Transit of Venus

If you are in Beijing, contact me and I’ll bring you along on my journey to the stars.

Categories
General Swing

Longing

I’m sitting outside on the patio of my girlfriend’s teahouse. I’m waiting for her to come back. Her father is flying to Paris from Fujian via Beijing today and so he’s landed and making his way to join us for supper. I’m looking forward to meeting him. He’s a famous tea art man from Fujian. But at this moment I’m just sitting here by myself, drinking Jasmine tea, watching the girls go by, longing to see Qiao Ying again. Since I live in the North and since I’m swinging all the time, we only get to see each other a couple of times a week. It’s only Wednesday evening and we haven’t seen each other since Sunday. Sigh!

Categories
China General Music Swing

Party On, and other thoughts

Party On

Well, I’m having too much fun. I’ve been really busy these days. A little bit of work, a bit of play, and a whole hell of a lot of socializing. I was at a birthday party/get-together for my friend Allena last night. There must be live music at The Big Easy (a Cajun-style restaurant/bar in Beijing) every night because there was a live band there last night and we got up and danced Lindy Hop to a few numbers. They were playing blues, of course, but it worked well.

Right before that party, I was hosting two fellow Canadians who had just arrived in Beijing. Last week, at the Annual Canadian Charity Ball, I met and talked with the guest speaker, Canadian Astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason. We talked about the possibilities of space science research collaboration between Canada and China and getting Canadian payloads on Chinese recoverable satellites and manned missions. So he passed my name on to two of his colleagues (the two I met last night, Marcus and Catherine) so that they could hook up with me on their visit to Beijing. So this week, they’re visiting various institutes belonging to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (my employer). We had a great time last night, as they were very excited about being in China and experiencing everything they could in their week-long visit. I took them to a Guizhou-style restaurant, introduced them to whatever I could about the food, the beer, the culture. And I filled them in on things to do, things to avoid, and how to tell the difference between a 1.6 RMB and a 1.2 RMB taxi. Just so you know, the cheaper of the two taxis is smaller, especially the back seat, they don’t always have suspension, and they quite often carry a strong smell of gasoline in the interior. But hey, they’re cheaper, right? You will run the risk of a driver with bad B.O. and completely unbearable halitosis in either type of taxi. Welcome to China.

Why I haven’t written lately

I also have been avoiding computing tasks, including writing this blog. You see, I developed some extreme pain in the joints in my hand recently, and it seems to be related to typing at the computer. It was mostly aggravated by a recent assignment which involved editing on the computer for an entire week. I normally do my editing work on paper with a red and a black pen. That, and the weather changed extremely recently, with lots of low pressure and humidity. So I’ve been trying to rest my hands.

But that’s just a small excuse. I’ve also had lots of ideas of things to write about but I haven’t explored any of them, so none of them fully developed. My friend Jodi, a professional writer, suggested that I write out these ideas anyway so that I don’t lose them. Cause, yeah, she’s right. I’ve already lost them. My nighttime dreams overwhelm my daytime thoughts so much, and that’s another blockage to being able to think (and write) clearly.

SomaFM revisited

SomaFM kicks ass. I’m still listening. You’ll remember that I wrote about SomaFM in a previous entry. I’ve been listening a few times a week (for about an hour at a time) so I decided that I should send them a donation. So last month, I sent them $25 USD via PayPal. I think it’s well worth it. You should too. Or at least start listening first.

I’ve explored some of their other channels only a little bit, but by far I listen to “Boot Liquor” the most. American Roots music, lots of songs about drinking, some really funny shit sometimes, and a few token bluegrass songs. Keeps me happy. When I first started listening, Boot Liquor was offered as a 96-kbit MP3 feed, but now it’s 128-kbit MP3 and that’s pretty much CD quality. Sometimes the feed is choppy, so I switch to the 32-kbit mono feed, and it works well. Plus my sound card came with some DSP software that can enhance the mono to a pseudo-stereo image, and that makes it better.

Categories
Philosophy

William James

I’ve been studying the American philosopher William James (1842-1910) for some time now. I discovered him through the philosophy of Alan Watts (1915-1973), who helped guide the world during the Psychedelic Movement. [Watts decided to publish his cautionary The Joyous Cosmology on his clinical experiments with LSD-25 after Aldous Huxley had “let the cat out of the bag” by publishing his own tales in The Doors of Perception.]

Last month, I read James’ work Varieties of Religious Experience, a practical look at the phenomenon of religious belief and mysticism. It deepened my appreciation for pluralism and it strengthened my role as a religious philosopher. Then last night, I came across this article entitled “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher” by Dmitri Tymoczko, which gave me some background into James’ life and the origin and evolution of his philosophy. I found some comfort in learning that he too faced a severe depression at the age of 28. The experience contributed to the formation of his philosophy and helped him find a way out of the depression. For James, it was an overwhelming belief in the lack of free will that grew from the determinism of his materialist contemporaries. At a crisis point, he came to see that he could “generate” free will (whether it truly exist or not) by believing he had free will: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

In shifting to modern-day research relating to James’ views, the article had this to say:

Some remarkable work by psychologists has recently illuminated James’s position. Lyn Abramson, of the University of Wisconsin, and Lauren Alloy, of Temple University, have uncovered a number of “cognitive illusions” to which normal, healthy people are subject. Emotional health, they suggest, involves mildly overoptimistic presumptions and a corresponding insensitivity to failure, which result in a propensity to make straightforwardly false judgments. Perversely, the clinically depressed are often free of these cognitive illusions–they are, to use the subtitle of one of Abramson and Alloy’s best-known papers, “Sadder But Wiser.” Likewise, Shelley Taylor, a social psychologist, has studied the use of illusions by victims of trauma and illness. She found that like James’s mountaineer, those who are unjustifiably optimistic tend to live better-adjusted and happier lives than people faced with similar situations who are thoroughly realistic about their prospects. [Emphasis mine.]

So in this article about James’ story, I have found some clues that point toward my own healing. I am perpetually the “Sadder But Wiser” soul, the mad philosopher, but this need not be so. I will learn that I can control this by my own thinking.

In fact, this insight reminds me of the chapter in James’ Varieties that appealed to me the most—the chapter on Christian Science mind-cures and the phenomenon of the “once-borns” . These are people that James describes as being in no need of repentance or redemption, for from birth they remain deeply “at peace with God”. This is in contrast to the “twice-borns” who require some experience of conversion to feel this same peace with God. Before reading Varieties, I had no idea that the first kind of person could even exist. I was thus attracted to this revolutionary idea.

For now, at least, I need to contemplate my new-found knowledge, absorb it, learn more, and finally put it to good use. Here goes everything!

Categories
FreeBSD

Dodged a howitzer this time

We were lucky. Very lucky. Saturday morning (for me), I logged into madphilosopher.ca from my home in Beijing. Immediately, my friend Bruce, who was also logged in at the time, sent me a message saying that we had a serious problem: “The heads are banging.” I had to ask him what he meant by heads. I thought that perhaps he meant potheads were attacking the computer. Then without warning me, he rebooted the machine, which had the effect of booting me off. When I logged back in five minutes later, I was able to ask him what the problem was. The hard drive was making noise, a sign that it was about to die. Oh! So that’s what he meant by “the heads were banging.” (A little context goes a long way, in my book.)

The machine, madphilosopher.ca, is an old Pentium 100 running FreeBSD 4-STABLE. It’s been in the service of its current role for about three years now. Bruce added a second hard drive a few months ago to provide space for backup and archiving purposes. So it wasn’t clear in the present emergency whether the new or the old hard drive was about to die. (I suppose if he had a stethoscope handy, he could have determined the source of the noise.) Losing the old hard drive would have resulted in much downtime since it is the system drive. Losing the new drive would have wiped out backups, but the system could have carried on without it.

We make regular, automated backups of the system, but having fresh backups is prefered when you might have to rebuild the system. So Bruce and I spent the next two hours creating backups of various system and user files and transfering them off the machine before its impending doom. The noise kept coming and going, and that kept us even further in suspense.

We were communicating using a chat window running on the machine, but we agreed to meet on Yahoo chat in case the system went down and cut off our line of communication. That never happened. So after the backing up was done, Bruce went to watch the news on TV and I needed to leave the house and get on with my Saturday. I checked in with him much later to see what had happened with the hard drives. He was supposed to power down the machine and pull it apart to find the source of the noise. Well, it turned out not to be the hard drives at all. It was the CPU cooling fan dying a slow death. In an email, he said to me, “That was the closest I’ve come to witnessing a hard drive dying without it actually dying. We dodged a howitzer this time!”

Categories
General

Just waiting to die

Depression Sucks. I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Depression Sucks. I’ve been wanting to get over these feelings I’ve been having for quite some time now. I’ve upped my dose of Prozac to 40 mg daily from 20 mg daily, but it doesn’t seem to be any better than when I was taking 30 mg. I’ve been really searching for alternatives to taking this medication. I don’t like being on it. I’ve been on it since 2000. That’s four years of not being able to cry.

Of course, the reason I am on it is that the alternative situation is worse: sinking into severe depression. Typically, I just sleep a lot. That’s probably the major symptom for me. And it is related to another symptom: lack of motivation. At my worst, I feel so unmotivated and heavy in my chest that it seems that if I were to stop moving, I’d fall over and just lie on the ground till I expired. Happy thought, no?

But lately, over this last winter, I’ve been noticing other things about my state of mind. And these clue me in to the fact that the medication isn’t really helping, or at least it isn’t bringing me to the level of normal emotional functioning. Currently, I’m suffering from anhedonia—the inability to experience pleasure. Nothing excites me. And nothing looks appealing enough to pursue, either. In fact, I feel like an old person just waiting to die, like I’ve experienced all that life has to offer and that I, at some point, stumbled upon what I was supposed to do in this life, and now there’s nothing left to do or work towards. It’s not that I’ve lost hope. Life does seem like it’s worth living. I’ve just lost vision—there’s nothing to work towards.

It’s this last self-revelation that told me that I might not be normal. It’s hard to know what normal is, even for the healthy, but I can’t imagine that most people are walking around out there just waiting to die. So I must be an anomaly.

Yet, I’m not totally sick. I know this because I can still concentrate enough to read (and apparently write), I get my work done every week (editing research papers), and I manage (most of the time) to drag myself to Swing Dancing three times a week (which is where my friends are). But beyond that, my life is quite empty. I long for some happiness or passion.

Neither my mentor nor my girlfriend understand why I am taking this medication, perhaps because there is no concept of clinical depression in the Chinese mindspace, or perhaps because medicine isn’t something you take forever. I hope that this blog entry will at least help them to see that my depression is real and that (perhaps) the medication is keeping me afloat. I don’t really want to see how far I would sink if I were to stop taking it. But I do long for an alternative. In any case, I need to find something better.

Categories
Audio Swing

Teaching Swing last night

I taught Swing at Zuma last night. Adam had a special event to be at, so he asked me to take the Saturday night party. I was nervous for days leading up to it. I’m a good teacher one-on-one, but I have had trouble in the past whenever I try to teach dance to larger groups of people. I need to figure out how to keep the class focused while still trying to help out those who are struggling.

Well, I didn’t actually get any practice teaching with a large group last night because only one couple showed up. Despite the small numbers, we had fun together, learned lots, and they stayed to 23h30. So that made the night a success. It was their second time to learn Swing, and they were showing much improvement by the end of the night.

I also fixed the problem of the terrible quality we were getting out of the sound system. Following the pattern of the previous setup, Adam would plug his laptop (with all the tunes on it) into the mic input on the mixer/amplifier. So in getting ready for last night, I discovered that this was the case, and with a little searching, I found the amplifier indeed had line inputs. So then, switching to the appropriate pipes sure made a difference. The music wasn’t muddy or overdriven anymore. It just sounded right. Now we’re ready for more people to come and Swing with us. But where are they?