improbable events.

What are the odds, really?

1.

I ordered a looper pedal to use with my violin, an electronic device that records a segment of your playing, then repeats it in a loop (hence the name). They're typically operated by a footswitch (since you're usually using your hands to play) and they come in levels of complexity, from basic ones with no indicators and a single footswitch, to monsters a couple feet wide with four or five switches. Some will play your phrase at half speed, or reversed, or whatever. I did some research and ordered one at about 75% of maximum complication, figuring I won't use a lot of it, but it has some features that would make my life simpler.

It arrived yesterday, a day early! But DOA. It's brand new! So I had a very expensive paperweight, while we do the replacement shuffle. I may have rage-ordered a much simpler one-switch model in the meantime. Will I like either one? Not sure.

This is Zoë Keating, a cellist who started here in the Bay Area, and popularized the idea of looping performance, especially on a classical instrument. At 6:07 they show the MIDI footswitch panel she uses to manipulate looping software on her laptop. This is the level of complication I was hoping to avoid by using a dedicated looper pedal.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yYrcXX4nWOA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

But for all that, if I try looping for anything more than amusement or practice, I may well end up writing code.

2.

I got a bizarre thing in the mail: a deposit confirmation from the investment firm Charles Schwab, for a considerable sum of money, attached to 1099-R forms for my 2020 tax return. The only note says "benefit lump sum." I've never seen a 1099-R before, and the Internet tells me it's a "retirement distribution," which is all well and good except that I checked on all my retirement stuff that I know about, and none of it has changed. Also I don't have a Charles Schwab account––or maybe I do, now!

This is unsettling because, while I won't claim to be on top of my finances, this is not the kind of thing I usually forget about. And while receiving money is great, there's usually a tax on that money, which is hard to pay accurately if you don't know what the money is.

3.

It's been viciously hot here, so we've been running air conditioners. Naturally, we figured we don't want to trip our circuit breakers––which would require an excursion into said vicious heat––and 2/3 of the house (built in 1938) runs on a single 20 amp circuit. So I busted out the circuit map, but then realized I had no idea how much power the A/C units used, and obviously it's a lot. Easy enough, I have a gadget for measuring a device's power usage. I started with the window unit in our bedroom, running on the Eco-Cool setting...about 75 watts. Ooookay...how about full blast...85 watts.

What?

How about the rolling unit in the office?

45 watts.

I'm expecting a power draw more like our microwave's 1500 watts. I looked at the manuals. The window unit mentions "4 watts" and "4400 watts," neither of which makes a ton of sense: a 20A circuit at 110V can only handle 2200 watts.

(Circuit breakers and fuses are measured in amps, but because the voltage is constant-ish, we usually take a shortcut and just talk about watts.)

20A is a normal household circuit breaker, so no one's going to sell a window A/C that uses twice that. And we already know empirically that the A/Cs don't trip the breakers when not run on the same circuit.

The other A/C unit's manual doesn't mention its power draw at all. I measure the usage again. I check the manual for the meter to make sure I'm not measuring in kilowatts by accident. I check against a 38W incandescent light bulb lingering in a floor lamp: the meter says 35W. Pretty solid, definitely not the orders of magnitude error I was expecting.

So apparently conservation technology has brought us to the point where I can run 3 air conditioners for at most 245 watts, which is 2-4 of the incandescent light bulbs we all used 15 years ago? My co-workers don't believe it either. But this is what data is for: because our intuitions are so often wrong.

more bad translation: dukkha

Like many curious kids, I had a lot of almanacs: books of facts, and questions, and answers. My favorites were How Do They Do That? and How Did They Do That?, but there was also the World Almanac for Kids, which I think was my first introduction to Buddhism. Here's a paraphrase of what books like this will tell you about Buddhism:

Buddhists believe in the Four Noble Truths:

1. Life is suffering.
2. Desire/attachment is the cause of suffering.
3. Nirvana/Enlightenment is the letting go of all attachments.
4. The Eightfold Path is the way to Nirvana.

The Eightfold Path is:

1. Right View.
2. Right Resolve.
3. Right Speech
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Concentration

That's all familiar, right? There's some doctrines you can believe. There's some rules you can follow. It's just like Christianity/Islam/Judaism/Zoroastrianism, right?

That presentation doesn't make any sense. Look at it. Life obviously involves suffering, but it's pretty strong to say that life is suffering. There are a fair number of genuinely content people in the world. Even if you're not persistently content in general, we all experience times of genuine happiness and joy and peace. They're a part of our human experience.

Also, if the Eightfold Path is the way to Nirvana, why is it after Nirvana in the list?

Also, I'm kind of attached to Anna and J and my family and friends and teachers and aikido. Am I screwed on the whole "enlightenment" thing?

The reason the presentation above doesn't make sense is that it's crap. That's also why it falls apart under questioning.

There's a lot to be said about the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. You can read the Buddha's first teaching, which is pretty polished and accessible as the Pali Canon goes, and discover that he presents the Eightfold Path both first and last: both the means and the result of awakening to the nature of human life. For now, we'll stick to the First Noble Truth, and that word "suffering." Let's skip the English and change Thanissaro's translation to have the original Pali:

"Now this, monks, is the noble truth of dukkha: Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha, separation from the loved is dukkha, not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha."

The "five aggregates" are a way of categorizing our felt experience: thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, and consciousness. This does sort of ignore happiness and joy, but we don't really have problems with happiness and joy, do we? Most of us can handle being happy fairly well. We need help with the things we're unhappy about, and with the fact that happiness is a transient state.

I think it's pretty clear what dukkha covers, and "suffering" isn't it. Thanissaro uses "stress," which is pretty good. When I'm talking to people for whom Buddhist language is meaningless, I use "angst," which more closely resembles my experience of it. "Distress," "dis-ease," and "discomfort" also show up in translations. The etymology of dukkha means "wheel out of balance," which I find helpful. Our feelings of annoyance, irritation, heartbreak, anger, sadness, stress, disappointment, longing, dissatisfaction: all dukkha.

I often wonder about the experience of the first few generations of translators that led them into such error. Having grown up after the successive cultural chaos of the World Wars and its offspring of Dadaism, twelve-tone music, hippies, and especially postmodernism--I am essentially, if you will, of a post-postmodernist generation--it's a natural thing for me to look for a translator's biases, and baffling that the biases I find should be so overwhelming, so transforming of the original intent of the text. Patrick Kearney writes, of their choice of the word "enlightenment":

I have never been able to find any Pâli or Sanskrit word which corresponds to the English word "enlightenment." This word was selected some time late last century by English translators as a label for the goal of Buddhist practice because of its resonance with the 18th century ideal of the Enlightenment. The European Enlightenment was a movement which idealised progress, science and reason - the "light" in "Enlightenment" refers to the light of reason. In Victorian Britain, sympathetic English scholars wanted to present Buddhism in as favourable a light as possible, and they did so by portraying the Buddha as the perfect Victorian gentleman. He was presented as rejecting the priestly mumbo-jumbo of the brahmins (who for the Victorian English corresponded to the Roman Catholic clergy) in favour of a religion of reason and morality (Almond: 70-4). The only thing that spoiled this picture was undeniable evidence in the Buddhist texts that the Buddha taught and practiced some kind of bizarre self-hypnosis or cultivation of trance states - what we today call meditation. The word "enlightenment" referred to a state of enlightened reason attained by the Buddha which, however, existed only in the imagination of Victorian scholars. Unfortunately the word has stuck, and with it the confusion.

I take it as a reminder that we can mean well, and still screw up pretty royally. =)

teaching: day 3

I had two classes yesterday, cursos B and C, who are the most mellow, focused ones, and then I had the other half of C today. (Well, "half". Marcela divided the class into a group of 18 and a group of 26, though 26 is really too big for my classroom.)

It did suck less. I explained the rules first of all, using just a bit of Spanish to explain to them that I was about to lay out the rules, and they're important for making this class be different from their other classes, and maintaining the classroom as a place where we can learn. I really, really should have done that with G and H, the rowdy classes, but I was too much on edge. I'll start over with them next week.

(Actually, I'll be starting with an apology, both to the class and to one kid in particular. I live with the sub-director of the school, formerly the head of the inspectores who maintain discipline, and he asked if the kids behaved well. I said no, and unfortunately I named the one kid who got his name written on the board. Oscar, trying to help me and thinking that my class is like the other classes, hauled him in and scolded him: the consequence that should only have happened after repeated incidents. So I have a ruptured relationship with that kid, and a not-great relationship with the rest of the class. At least I didn't name the kids whose cell phones I took. I have some apologies to make, in Spanish, and then we'll talk about the rules, and then it'll just have to be how it'll be.)

It sucked less, but it still sucks. I'm still experiencing massive anxiety outside the classroom. I guess "anxiety" is the word. I'd label it more "ancient, paralyzing fear", probably left over from junior high school, which was pretty traumatic. It's the giant mound of emotional stuff that I've been able to feel around more and more over the past 3 years, but never been able to penetrate or unravel it. It's all fear and tension and...something. Old, old habits, things I've gotten so used to thinking of as a part of myself that I don't consciously recognize them, or think they can change or disappear. (Which they can. Don't ever imagine anything, inside or outside your head, is permanent.)

Of course, I'm a different person now, far more integrated and capable in every way. When the moment of crashing reality comes and students walk in the door, I seem to do okay. I spent so many years performing that I'm not really self-conscious about looking stupid; it's easy for me, and I look stupid and the kids laugh and get embarrassed, and I'm not embarrassed, so they eventually (mostly) go along with "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" or the Hokey Pokey, or making faces to express moods.

It's the in-between times that kill me. Waking up at 4 AM, wondering what to do for the next lesson to meaningfully follow up on this mediocre one, imagining that I'm doing this another 7 months. It's hard to stay in emotional contact with the situation when there are so many options for avoiding it: TV, Internet, 950 remaining pages of Don Quixote.

I'm extremely grateful my school's annual anniversary celebration has cut my first week in half. I don't know if that was intentional on Marcela's part or not; I know she is often looking out for my interests without telling me. (And occasionally she isn't, and she doesn't tell me that, either. It is a never-ending parade of surprises here.)

It's hard to remain convinced that the brute-force exposure route was the right one, but it's what I'm doing, so here we go.