The Kindness of Strangers

1. I completed a Thursday NYTimes crossword puzzle unassisted, for the first time ever. Yay!

2. Richard Clarke is the man. I’ve seen him talk three times so far: twice on the Daily Show, and once in person during an hour-long debate he had at Berkeley earlier this month. Each time, he’s proven to be very intelligent, extremely well-informed, and quite funny, too. It’s too bad all his talents are being squandered now (although I hope he makes a pretty penny off of them, at least).

3. I love sports. Soccer and ultimate on the weekends are now being augmented by PE basketball during the week. It’s true that basketball is by far my lamest sport… you know all the bad guys in those movies where they shoot at the good guy a hundred times as he’s escaping but never hit him? Well, I’m a worse shooter than that. Anyway, though, playing is really fun. I’m hoping to rise from “pathetic” to just “incompetent” by the end of the semester.

That is all.

The Chicago trip was terrific. We had an awesome time exploring the city (so many beautiful buildings!), enjoying the great weather on the beach, eating lots of Chicago-style pizza, and even checking out the aquarium. And Ray was the perfect host. I think we went there during the best weather of the year — mid 70s all weekend — but I’m going to pretend that that’s what it’s always like there :).

Some pictures:

It’s concert season again: Paris Combo and Vienna Teng this past week, and then next weekend is the Pixies and Richard Shindell. On a related note, yesterday was horrible: I went all the way to the Fillmore to get tickets for three upcoming shows (The Tragically Hip, Gillian Welch, and Martin Sexton) since the Ticketmaster surcharge came out to a ridiculous $10 for each $25 ticket. The Fillmore’s box office is hardly ever open… just a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon, and then only when a show is actually going on. Anyway, traffic was bad and I made a wrong turn, and I finally got there in 45 minutes, at 4:02. Of course, the box office closed at 4pm. So the whole trip was worthless, and now I’m debating whether to suck up the TM charge, or try to go back next Sunday (and risk having one of the shows sell out).

Anyway, so then I came back home and found out that my laptop’s Linux partition was totally hosed. This is where I do all my research and stuff. So I freaked out for a while, and I’m still trying to fix it. On the plus side, it’s made me boot into Windows a lot more, so I’ve started recording this song I wrote this summer. It sounds pretty decent so far… definitely better than my last effort. Also on the plus side, it’s made me feel slightly less guilty about socializing and playing sports all weekend.

I better stop rambling.

I think a fundamental conflict that a shy or introverted person (I’m too lazy to figure out which I mean) has is between the feeling that other people don’t really appreciate what he is worth (and, oh, if only they would!), and the feeling that maybe instead he just isn’t worth much at all. It would be pretty amazing and educational if we could all see how other people perceive us. It would be a great tool to illustrate our real faults (rather than our perceived ones), and also to dispel unfounded insecurities. This could be done, of course — all you’d have to do is get someone to anonymously poll all your friends and acquaintances about you. (I feel like I’ve talked about this already…)

The current social networks (Friendster, Orkut, etc.), really only allow people to leave named, positive comments. I think I would equally prefer if people could also leave anonymous comments about things that I do wrong or that I could do better.

So I have my usual smorgasbord of comments for you to slog through. This is the price you pay for reading a journal that never veers too sharply towards the personal. Sorry…

I’ve been travelling all over the place: from Seattle to Boston to Connecticut to Montreal and back to Berkeley. Then at the end of this week I’m going to Chicago. Should be fun. Somehow in all that travelling I managed to watch a ton of Olympics. Good stuff. The best part is watching the awesome middle distance runners and trying to figure out exactly how much they’d cream me by if we raced head-to-head.

Something I marvel at, though, is just how incredibly consistent these world-class athletes are. For instance, if some dude posted the best time this year by .02 seconds, he’s “the favorite” to win. Now, you’d think that .02 seconds is really nothing considering how many factors are at play: the athlete’s mental state, how well he’s feeling (I’ve definitely had off-days, athletically), even how quickly he reacts to the starting gun. And yet so many of these people come through and win in the end, as expected. Not only can they do incredible things, they can do them incredibly consistently as well. That’s crazy.

You could imagine an athlete who just has a couple of freak performances: a guy who can run a 1:40 half-mile but usually comes in at 1:44. In track and cross country in high school, I came across a lot of runners who were wildly inconsistent (and occasionally whose best times were infuriatingly faster than mine, even though I could beat them most of the time). But these people don’t seem to exist at the highest level, or are at least very rare. I guess it must be in the training.

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The most impressive country by far at this year’s Olympics was Australia. Those guys seemed practically super-human. You’d think that the U.S. would have pretty much the best feeder and training programs in the country (as well as an incredibly diverse range of people from which to select Olympians), but somehow Australia manages to beat the pants off of us (and everyone else) in terms of medals per capita.

Country	Medals Won	Population	Medals per million
USA	103	288m	.36
Russia	92	143m	.64
China	63	1.3b	.05
Australia	49	19.6m	2.5
Germany	48	81.8m	.57
Japan	37	128m	.29

Rather than trying to discover a good explanation, I’m going to conclude that Australians are roughly seven times more athletic than we are. Ouch.

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The day after my two-year Verizon cell phone contract ran out, I switched to AT&T, because it’s cheaper. The service probably isn’t as good, which led to an interesting evaluation of how valuable my frustration is to me. That is, if I had some estimate of how much more often AT&T would drop my calls or give me bad reception than Verizon would, exactly how much of a price drop does there need to be to justify this? I’m used to making blunt evaluations of my time vs. money, but frustration is a trickier matter.

My parents are probably going to drop Sprint in favor of AT&T as soon as their contract is up, too, thus making family communication much cheaper. Also, Sprint has horrible service: “Sprint has the best reception, bar none”, jokes my dad. I like that joke :).

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I’ve been toying around with making NewsDog open for registration by anyone. Would this really induce more people to register? It’s hard to say.

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My sisters have complained that I don’t have many good (e.g. non-dorky) pictures of myself on here. There are two good reasons for that: 1. Most of the pictures are taken with my camera, and usually I’m the one taking the pictures, so the selection of shots of myself is small. 2. Let’s face it, I probably look like a dork most of the time.

Anyway, here’s a shot (har har) at remedying that, taken outside the cool new public library in Seattle. You’re lucky I didn’t post a picture of myself shirtless :). Notice the careful juxtaposition of ratty 6 year old Bob’s jeans with a nice shirt. It’s what I like to call “having no fashion sense”.

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One last bit about the electoral college. Here’s a table of how much your vote counts — what fraction of a representative in the electoral college that you control — in California and Massachusetts (the two states in which I’ve lived for most of the last decade), as well as Wyoming.

State	Population	EC Votes	Votes/Million People
California	35.5m	55	1.55
Massachusetts	6.43m	12	1.87
Wyoming	500k	3	6

Right, so this means that if you’re in California, your vote will literally count 1/4 as much in the upcoming election as the vote of a person in Wyoming. I’m feeling a bit disenfranchised.

Man, making these tables is so tedious. I’m definitely sticking to a lazier form of blogging from now on…

I heard the Smashing Pumpkins’ Muzzle for the first time in years on a mix tape of my sister’s last week when I was home. Then I heard it again earlier this week as I was ripping my copy of Mellon Collie for Manu. Then I started obsessing over it, since it’s such an amazingly good song.

Listen here.

Lyrics…

I was on AIM for a while a couple of days ago, talking with my brother about cell phone plans. At some point someone who wasn’t on my buddy list tried to send me an IM (I guess) and since AIM doesn’t have the greatest UI, the window that popped up asking whether I’d like to accept the message grabbed focus while I was typing a message to my brother. Of course, since I was typing so fast, I happened to hit ‘n’ and reject the request even before I could see who it was!

So first, if you’re that person — sorry! Send me an email or IM sometime and I promise I’ll accept :).

More interestingly, I thought a bit about why I felt so bad about it. You know the kind of person who hardly checks email, and when the phone rings waits for someone else to get it? Well, I’m definitely not that kind of person. I check email 5123145 times a day, answer the phone as soon as I can, and want to check snail mail every day just in case something is for me. Somehow I’m eager for contact. Maybe this makes me more accessible but less interesting. Or not. Who knows. Email me about it! (Just kidding.)

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You know how everyone kind of figures that the elevator “close door” button doesn’t really do anything, but hits it anyway, just in case? Well I want some concrete evidence about this. In the past week I’ve been observing the time-to-close figure as I ride the elevator in a variety of circumstances, and I’m quite confident that yes, the “close door” button does nothing at all. Now I can safely avoid pushing it and getting irritated because it doesn’t seem to work. Score.

Anyway, if you live or work in a building with an elevator and get the chance, try to figure out whether the button does anything for you. Maybe it’s a nationwide scam! The most widespread placebo out there! This is the kind of scandal that could make headlines, at least in the imaginary tabloid in my mind. Seriously, I’d be interested to hear about any findings!

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If you think about all the people you’ve known, it’s kind of crazy to recall the last time you’ve seen them, and try to guess at whether it’s the last time you’ll ever see them. (Hopefully most of them are still alive, and you probably are too, so there’s still a chance…)

I’ve been amazed at the people I was sure I’d never see again who keep turning up, and at others about whom I’ve experience the opposite. This latter category is the most distressing, of course: people whom you’re sure you’re going to see again, but who just disappear like that, leaving you mentally unprepared.

I wonder how our lives and interactions would change if we knew upon the last meeting that it was in fact the end. No more optimistic “see you later” or “keep in touch” — but also a chance to say things that you were unable to say before, for fear of embarrassment or some other unpleasant feeling in future interactions. It might be a very cathartic experience.

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I’ve always been annoyed at the the “small-state-bias” of the Senate — since each state has two senators, people living in less populous states have a disproportionate amount of power. The 500,000 people from Wyoming can negate the 34 million people from California. Manu’s friend Keunwoo quantified this very nicely in his blog [the entry]:

Second, defenders of disproportionate representation might say that giving a modest boost to the rights of states does little harm and much good. Let’s see how the Senate looks in practice. Did you know that the 26 less populated states have roughly 20% of the population? That’s right: on the floor of the Senate, 20% of Americans can dictate law to the other 80% of Americans.

20%! That’s insane. I did some further counting, and it turns out that the Red states outnumber the Blue 19-7 in that 26 state bloc. Terrific.

Of course, this bias also weighs in on presidential elections, as we saw in 2000…. just some food for thought here.

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Last item… the other day I was talking with some friends about art, and how I found it interesting that we take for granted that the process by which a piece of art (of any form) is created should be intrinsically factored into the valuation of the artwork as a whole. That is, the harder it is to do something, the more respect we give it.

You might argue that art should be valued of itself only, and that the process should be appreciated strictly independently. For instance, if you hear a saxophone solo, you should appreciate it only on the basis of how good it sounds, and totally ignore (for the sake of the quality of the solo) how hard it is to play. Or if you see a sculpture, even if it’s been painstakingly assembled by hand from a million toothpicks, you should judge it based on the finished product only, not on how it was made. Why should difficulty have anything to do with it? If it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful. Why should we fault the guy who finds an easier way of creating something of equal beauty? For instance, if someone uses a machine to assemble a million toothpicks into an identical sculpture, why should we value that sculpture, indistinguishable at face value, any less?

In fact, for a while I thought that the reason that I and many other people factor it in is that we take an intellectual approach to the art in the context of its chosen form (as we do with most things, given our analytical minds), and then just accidentally conflate the art with the process at the end.

But the more I think about it, I’m not so sure. Last year, I saw a Gerhard Richter exhibit at the SF MOMA (and wrote about it in one of my earliest entries). Richter paints amazingly realistic pictures, so perfect that from more than a few feet away they look like photographs. Now, by the above theory, if that’s the way they look, then they really should be evaluated no differently from, say, actual photographs that look the same. However, even though I was intellectually aware of this fact, I found this kind of evaluation impossible to do. The beauty of the painting was absolutely tied to the process.

So I don’t know what to think. Is art valid as a reflection of process? You’d think that it would be cool to strive for a kind of timelessness in your artwork, creating pieces that could be appreciated out of context, literally as they exist alone. A part of me feels that it is cheap to do it any other way. But what do I know?

(I’m sure art theorists have written hundreds of books about this subject, but I’m not about to start wading through them. I’d rather form my own bogus opinions than steal someone else’s, thankyouverymuch ;).

The DNC is in full swing, and for the first time I find myself actually getting caught up in it. I guess I never before felt the sense of urgency I do now. Barack Obama rules. Kerry’s speech tonight was better than I thought it would be.

I’ve been wondering about something related for a while now, actually. When Reagan died, a huge number of people grieved publicly, honoring him in their hometowns and in the capital. I was amazed (as I was with the Princess Di affair) that so many people cared enough to do such things. Did they really miss Reagan that much? Were they just caught up in the publicity? I couldn’t imagine myself doing that for any president. Then I realized that I couldn’t even think of any public figure at all whose death I’d honor in that way. Am I just apathetic? Or do we not have any great leaders at the moment? (I could see myself hitting the streets for Lincoln or Gandhi or King. Or maybe I’m just flattering myself.) I love music, but no musician I can think of would get me out of the house either.

This phenomenon has always been mysterious to me. I feel like I’m missing a big part of the human experience here — or maybe all these people are just insane. Whose public funeral would you attend?

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Here’s something I want to fix. Say I need to get LASIK surgery, or you need to get your wisdom teeth out, or need some kind of more serious surgery. Where do you go? Traditionally you’d talk to your doctor or a friend who’s had the procedure done before to get a referral. (“Yeah, Dr. Bongo did a great job with my eyes!”) For a health issue of significant magnitude, this approach is seriously flawed: you know there’s some amount of cronyism going on with the doctor-doctor referral, and your friend has a sample size of one in his or her experience with the procedure, and thus has no way to evaluate the quality of the job. (That “it worked” might be good, but I’d rather get the best than just good enough.)

The cost of a referral gone wrong could be a serious health defect. Who wants to risk that? So here’s my plan. I’m amazed that on eBay, even the pettiest of sellers hawking trinkets has an extensive feedback registry while doctors pulling in six figures and affecting your quality of life in a big way have none. Someone should start a site, say ratemd.com, that lets people rank doctors. Then when there’s enough data, you could make a more informed decision about who’s going to skewer your eyes.

Holy crap. I just checked ratemd.com and guess what — it exists, and does exactly what I said. Drat! There go my millions. Also there goes, in theory, the second half of this entry. But I’m going to keep this here since I spent the time to type it up and at least I thought it was original!

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Grr. I even though I had a good domain name for it. Too good, I guess.

We saw Bela Fleck and the Flecktones last night. It was a pretty cool show. We were too far back to really appreciate the first set, but then Manu and I moved up during the intermission, and the second set was much better. Bela was good, but I was really enjoying Victor Wooten, Bela’s absolutely insane bass player. I’ve been worshipping him since I got their live CD in college like six or seven years ago. He was just as incredible live, and the band had some good jams. After the Indigo Girls two weeks ago, this looks to be my last concert of the summer — next up is the Pixies and then Richard Shindell, both in September.

I don’t really want to write this entry now but I want to get it off my back.

First, here’s an interesting article to read. My brother and I have been harping on the vote-for-ideology phenomenon for a while — as a biased, condescending liberal, I feel that many people who vote Republican do so on the basis of three main issues: gay rights, abortion, and religion. Bush can do whatever crazy things he wants, but as long as he stands firm on these three issues, millions of voters will support him.

Not to say that this is a dumb strategy — if those three things (hating on gays, halting abortions, supporting religion) really mean more to you than anything else, by all means support the candidate that gets them done. The upshot is, as I said, that Bush can get away with a lot of insane stuff because many people simply Don’t Care. He’s even luckier, because he doesn’t even really have to support the big three issues; instead he just has to say he does. Everyone acknowledges that an amendment banning gay marriage will never pass, so Bush just has to say he supports it, and never has to worry about actually having to. Similar story with abortion and religion.

Democrats have a harder time converting voters, since they have to straddle the line on many issues, which is difficult to do and requires a more obvious kind of sleaze.

Anyway, this article confirms some of my suspicions. Some Bush supporters:

That same intensity was palpable the following day, in Beckley, W.Va., where thousands of people like Jim Farnsworth, a 32-year-old telephone technician holding his 1-month-old son, turned out for a rally with Mr. Bush. “Voted for him last time, will vote for him again, would even vote for him a third term if he would run,” Mr. Farnsworth said. “I like the convictions that he stands on. Abortion, family.”

His wife, Tina, chimed in, “His belief in God.”
…
I love George Bush,” Mr. McQuillen said. “He’s got the same convictions and principles that I have on a lot of things. Course, I don’t agree with everything he stands for, but most of the important things I do.”

Mr. McQuillen, wearing a sticker that declared he was a “Friend of Coal,” added of Mr. Bush, “He’s against big government, he’s against abortion, he’s against gay marriage.”

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So, the music thing. We all know the deal about how somewhere between being a kid and being a parent we lose our affinity for popular music (as defined by whatever’s playing on “cool” radio stations at the time). I’ve seen a variety stock explanations for this phenomenon, the most common of which is that we lose our sense of rebelliousness, and stop becoming open to new sounds.

I have an alternate explanation that sounds obvious (and, I guess, probably is), but relies on a couple of only semi-obvious claims.

Claim 1. Most music on the radio over the last 50 years is essentially the same.
Well, duh, you say. Agreed, I say. This one is pretty obvious. Songs still go verse-chorus-verse-chorus, rock relies on the major third all the time and the blues scale for solos, rap is just flow over different beats. This is not to say that there aren’t good songs and bad songs, given this formula — there certainly are. (Consider the amazing results given the classical symphony form.) There are many different kinds of music, but each kind has stayed pretty faithfully on course for years or decades now.

Claim 2. All things equal, you’ll like your first exposure to a new sound more than subsequent exposures.
This manifests itself in a small way all the time: assuming all the albums are of equal quality, you are going to like the first album you hear by a band more than the ones you get afterwards. After all, it’s the one that exposed you to the novelties of the band’s sound, and the one that made you a fan. Later albums also suffer from having to meet your raised expectations. I’ve found this to be true for myself numerous times. You may want to look at your CD collection and think about which albums by each band you like best, and try to remember the order in which you got them.

In a larger sense, Claim 2 is why people have an amazing soft spot for the music they listened to during junior high and the beginning of high school. That’s when you probably first started listening to music seriously, and so it was your first major exposure to lots of different genres. Again, all things equal, you’re just going to like that stuff more than the things you hear now that are in the same vein.

So what do we have here? As you grow older, you are exposed to more kinds of music. Each time you hear a new kind, you acquire a taste for it, usually in the form of CDs by bands that are popular at the time you hear it. Eventually (and this takes many years), you’ve “gotten” pretty much all the major kinds of music out there. This probably happens in your mid-to-late twenties. The stuff on the radio is, by Claim 1, similar enough, genre-by-genre, that, by Claim 2, you prefer your first taste of those genres rather than what’s new. So you “fall out of touch” with “the new generation”, or whatever they say. It’s not because you can’t get used to new music; it’s because you’ve heard it all before.

This process just happens to coincide with other forms of maturation, which is probably why its effects are usually explained by these other mechanisms.

Obviously, I have no evidence for this theory at all (but then again, does anyone about any of these theories? no.) except my own experience. Already when I listen to a new song on the radio I can predict with some success the right chord changes, loud-soft dynamic shifts, and even entire lines of lyrics. Why listen to Band 2004 when I can listen to my own CDs, which are in many cases not much better, but at least have some sentimental value and pseudo-novelty attached to them?

Well, it’s been ages since my last update.

Weekdays have become a blur of working and working out and playing guitar and cooking and chatting. Lather, rinse, repeat. I’ve started doing the NYTimes crossword puzzle, which to my surprise I’ve found is quite fun. Also, we’ve been watching this guy as much as possible. He just cracked a million dollars this week. Go Ken!

It’s weird that he’s making all these appearances on the Today Show and stuff now, even though the show was filmed in February. I guess he has to act like they’re being filmed now. I wonder if he’s slipped up at all.

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I love my new digital camera. My affair with cameras has been long and tortuous, and a little bit torturous too, I guess. (I just wrote a long blurb about it here, but then realized how boring it was and deleted it. Didn’t have a camera, had to mooch pictures, finally got one and then it got stolen, etc.) Anyway, here are some recent pictures:

A trip to Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. It’s a beautiful city.

Pictures from the (17 mile) hike we went on this past Saturday while camping at Mt. Hood.

My new haircut. I wasn’t a big fan of it first, but it’s growing on me (har har). Also the cast I had to wear after I sprained my knee playing soccer two weeks ago.

An intrepid dog at Snoqualmie Falls, and some of the intrepid players on my Ultimate team at Potlatch.

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I love estimating. I’ve found a partner in crime in N-d (for explanation of the d, see 20-Across in the 14 July NYTimes crossword puzzle). We must annoy the hell out of everyone else, but we just like doing it. Usually I’ll do it in my head, but now that he’s around, we follow a much more vocal process. We’ll estimate all kinds of stuff: how old the forest we’re hiking through is, how far we’ve really walked on the hike so far (and what techniques the cartographers might have used for their trail measurements), how long it took to build the bridge we’re driving over, how much a particular yacht or apartment costs, the number of people at the Pro Sports Club that are from Microsoft, the value of all the infrastructure in the U.S., the probability that a date will go well, whatever. We don’t have to know much about the subject, just enough to get started.

I think it’s a good mental exercise because even if you don’t know the specifics, it makes you think about how things work. A good estimate requires you to analyze the mechanisms underlying any process. For instance, estimating a forest’s age makes us think about the height of the trees, the rate of their growth, the historic weather and possible occurrence of forest fire that might influence that rate, and so on. Even if the numbers we make up for each of these factors are way off, at least we’ve gained an appreciation for the forest as a complex growing entity rather than some staid bunch of trees that we’re walking through.

In short, estimating prevents you from taking things for granted. Just about everything you use or see has a history or process behind it; I figure it’s good (and entertaining) to appreciate these things.

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This theory occurred to me recently about why people lose touch with popular music (and not because they stop being rebellious). I’ll write about it next time.

A while ago, I referenced some evidence that being sad is actually good for you, in that it increases your productivity. I also said that I personally liked being sad because I really felt like it made me think more clearly. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine has an article corroborating my anecdote: happy people are meaner than sad people. A nice tidbit:

There is one bit of the world that happy people do see in an irrationally rosy light: themselves. As the British psychologist Richard P. Bentall has observed, “There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others.”

Good stuff to know — I’m glad (happy, even :) that at least one of my theories finally has some evidence behind it!

The article also backs up another long-standing claim of mine, that religious people tend to be happier. You might be tempted to draw conclusions, in light of the above evidence, about what this says about religious people and their views towards themselves, others, and their perception of control over random events…

A more interesting conclusion is that being happy can be construed as a selfish act in itself. (The methods by which we attain happiness are usually less controversially selfish.) I need to think about this more — not that I’m going to stop trying to be happy, of course. I’m far too selfish to do that :).

Anyway, when I was young, I was a Boy Scout (I’m not a fan of its anti-secular and homophobic views; I just didn’t know any better). One of the perks was a subscription to this monthly magazine called Boy’s Life. The back page of each issue was filled with jokes, the most memorable of which were Tom Swifties — groan-inducing yet funny one-liners in which the way Tom says something relates to what exactly he’s saying. For instance,

“It’s where we store the hay,” Tom said loftily.
“We’ve taken over the government,” Tom cooed.
“My garden needs another layer of mulch,” Tom repeated.
“The girl’s been kidnapped,” said Tom mistakenly.
“What a charming doorway!” said Tom, entranced.
“I’m wearing my wedding ring,” said Tom with abandon.
“That little devil didn’t tell the truth,” Tom implied.
“Don’t let me drown in Paris!” pleaded Tom insanely.

I only mention this because after a recent conversation a new triply-referential Tom-ism popped into my head:

“I’ve a hunch: I look like Quasimodo,” Tom guessed archly.

Okay, maybe it’s not that funny. Then again, I wouldn’t want you to be too happy while reading this, anyway… you happiness-loving sicko you.

Things I’m learning about Seattle:

1. It’s more north than anywhere else I’ve ever lived, and the days are amazingly long in the summer. For instance, we went to see the Seattle Symphony* play Rite of Spring yesterday night and when we came out at 9:30 pm, it was still light outside. This is indescribably cool. I hear it’s correspondingly depressing during the winter, when the sun sets at 4:30 pm.
2. The people here are really, really friendly. When I moved out to the west coast, I was told that people in California are more friendly that people on the east coast, but I didn’t find that to be the case. Up here, though, it’s amazing.
3. The traffic is terrible, as bad as in the San Francisco area. Why are all the cool cities so crowded? :)
4. The weather here is mercurial. Windy and drizzly, then hot and cloudless. An upshot is that weird things happen, like this awesome lightning storm last night. Check out some pictures  (not taken by me):
5. Shoutout to my sister Meera.
6. I had forgotten what it’s like to go to venues where people smoke: it’s really annoying.
7. Watching the Lakers lose is just as fun up here as anywhere else.
8. All told, though, Berkeley is better. Going back should be fun :).

* What is it with orchestras calling themselves “symphonies”? For some reason this bothers me. It’s like calling a baseball team “The Oakland Baseball”. No, baseball is what they play. There’s a reason it’s called the House of Representatives, and not the House of Dumb and Bloated Laws: the House contains Representatives, and emits Dumb and Bloated Laws. So “Seattle Orchestra” would be just fine. (I realize there is precedent here, in that string quartets refer to both the music and the group, etc. Then again, language has never made any logical sense, and I still find myself caring about these things. Call me dumb.)