March 350th, 2020.

 One of the many,

many,

many

irritating things about the violin is that your ear is a few inches away from the soundhole, unlike the more civilized 1-4 feet given by...every other instrument. Playing generates a lot of little sounds and obnoxious harmonics that just aren't perceptible unless you have your head practically inside the instrument. Imagine the worst violin noise you've ever heard, and have some empathy for the poor player, who has it much worse.

(Low frequencies travel farther, and the gnarliest bits of violin sound are high frequency and low amplitude.)

Singers have the same problem, for the same reasons. If you try to sing so it sounds unambiguously good to you, you're almost certainly just bottling your voice up inside your throat and head, which are all full of resonating cavities and highly conductive bones bringing the sound to your ears.

(There are actually bone-conduction headphones, the wired version of which I tried out many years ago, and they didn't solve my problems, but they're cool and the sound is decent.)

You have to let your voice come out with some balance of nose and mouth. You can make some recordings to learn how you sound, take some lessons from a good voice teacher, and eventually you redefine what "good" means, so you can make it sound good for the audience, and you just spend less time sounding pretty for yourself.

All this to say that as I've been exploring my 5-string violin's viola capabilities, I've been wondering how it actually sounds. Putting a low C string on a violin––or a high E on a viola, for that matter––involves some funky and obscure design tradeoffs, between playability and the physics of tone. Some excellent makers have jumped right into the problem, with pricing around $6,000 at the low end, and $15,000-ish at the top (Jonathan Cooper, for example). That's a good deal for a pro-quality instrument, even if it illustrates the old adage that violin prices are like guitar prices, with an extra zero at the end. Mine was mostly made in (probably) China, and shipped to Gary in Minneapolis in some form. He took it apart if it wasn't already, added the electronics he invented, put it back together, and did the final setup of all the hardware bits: tailpiece, bridge, nut, strings.

(Having spoken with him at length, I would not be at all surprised if he checked all the front and back plate thicknesses, and did some re-graduating on them, as long as he had the thing in pieces already.)

Violas have a certain kind of growly tone, and I talked to Gary about what I was looking for: the punch of the lower register, with a pure but not strident upper register, since violin high notes kinda bug me. It doesn't have to look like an ordinary violin: I don't need to impress anybody, I'm not joining competitions or orchestras. I'm pretty sure my violin owes its rounded lower corners to a viola design I haven't had any luck finding, even though it's clearly a thing:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1o8BXM3Wnbw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Although I guess I don't have any proof that Eric Benning didn't invent them.

Luckily, over the past year I've been accumulating the bits and pieces of a home recording setup: a couple of inexpensive microphones, a Scarlett 2i2 (a USB interface that connects microphones to a computer), and a pre-amp for the violin.

(I asked Gary the Violin Guy if I couldn't just plug the violin directly into the Scarlett like a microphone, and he said "Well, you can try it, but it's probably expecting an impedance like a microphone's, around 3,000 ohms, and the piezoelectric pickup's impedance is a few million ohms." So, right. Pre-amp it is.)

Maybe on a little bit of a lark, I bought another bow, nicer than my current ones. Bows and bow-making are far more arcane even than making instruments. For centuries the prized wood has been pernambuco, and I don't entirely understand why. Pernambuco is not doing better than every other tropical hardwood, and incredibly, it's even more wasteful than ebony, which is saying something. The primary replacement material is carbon fiber, which can certainly be achingly expensive, but for us mere mortals, you generally get a higher quality bow for the same money. I've been trying to not buy tropical hardwood stuff if I can avoid it, anyway. I got my other two bows re-haired so I could compare to the new one, and it's lovely, and I think quite suits my playing.

Attention Deficit HEY LOOK A SQUIRREL

Amidst the many-faced train wreck of the past few weeks, it emerged that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This came up because I had an adrenaline-filled day at the end of December, and once I started digging into the problem, I found the adrenaline was granting me a state of hyper-focus that I haven't experienced in a long while. If your thinking is scattered, and a stimulant un-scatters you, well. We don't quite know why that works, but there it is.

This explains many long-running mysteries of my life: Why were my grades erratic when they could have been perfect? Why do I fidget? Why do tasks like taxes or bills go un-done, even when I know exactly what to do?

How and why do I read books the way I do? In the days of paper books, I would be in the middle of six or more books at a time, switching between them in a single sitting. E-books have taught me how many books I can actually be in the middle of and still remember the context when I pick one up: 20-30. I read some pages, flip to a different book, read some pages, change book, etc.

Why did I take a semester of Mandarin Chinese in college? I needed the stimulation of learning something difficult. Why didn't I continue with it? Because memorizing is hard for me––because it's boring––and learning Chinese is an endless vast quantity of memorizing arbitrary pieces of information. (I cannot recommend highly enough the self-descriptive essay Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard.)

ADHD shows up a little differently in super-smart people, in ways that are still being refined for the next DSM. One challenge is that the diagnostic criteria up to this point have included "If it makes living a fairly standard life impossible," so they're adding refinements to include "Can hold down a job, but causes a lot of suffering." And it's masked by being super-smart, which has let me lurch through a college education (albeit finishing with a 3.2? 3.4? GPA) and out into a successful career. If I weren't super-smart, I would probably be living in a van down by the river. Most likely an unregistered van, having failed to file the paperwork.

The difficulty of task initiation explains another life oddity: I'm terrible at mathematical proofs. Learning how the math works, using it to solve problems, I'm fine with; but if I sit down to try even the most basic proof (proving that √2 is irrational is the usual introductory example), I just can't get started. It's not math anxiety, as usually thought of; I just have trouble getting started. But I can, even now, explain the basics of differential and integral calculus, and I promise I've had only basic use for differential, and zero use for integral, since I graduated. Would I have learned them on my own? No. Is it fun to know them? Well, yes. I like learning and knowing stuff, and I'm really good at it. I have a long list of hobbies and random stuff I've learned, to prove it.

(While I was in Chile, Anna was driving J someplace, and he asked a question about the moon. She said, "I don't know, but I bet Chris would." To which J replied, "Yeah! Chris is like a Google, but one you can Skype!", which I think says a lot of true and wonderful things about our relationship.)

Anyway, yeah. ADHD. Possibly the easiest thing I've dealt with this month.  I do love a good theory that fits the facts.

March 307th.

While 2020 can indeed fuck right off, I'll call it done when I feel safe hanging out inside a coffee shop for an hour, or if I ever see my violin teacher in person again (he's doing Zoom lessons from Puerto Vallarta).

We had a mellow Christmas here, as always. On Christmas Eve I was wondering why it didn't feel particularly Christmasy, and I realized that the distinguishing feature of my Christmasy feeling is of gathering around and spending quiet time...at home. Not exactly an unusual feeling for 2020. Next year, perhaps we'll spend Christmas someplace else.

I finished a paltry 52 books in 2020, even if 10 of them were the 3.2 million words of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Compare to 59 in 2019, and 97 in 2018. 2020 was a year for watching TV, of course, and I spent a lot of time playing my flotilla of musical instruments. I bought myself a lovely 5-string violin, which is sort of oriented towards folk music, but it humors me as I learned a piece by Couperin to start learning ornamentation, and a concerto by Vivaldi to start playing in the higher hand positions instead of just up by the head of the violin. I had never heard of Couperin, but I wanted to play this first Québecois tune with all the ornaments to make it sound right, and since Couperin wrote Baroque music you could describe frankly as "frilly" or "froofy," it's got ornaments every few notes (of which the grace-note is only the easiest and most familiar) and good for learning.

(Voices of Music is local here to the Bay Area, actually, and has dozens and dozens of these amazing videos, though I've yet to make it to a concert. They're doing "historically-informed performance," which is why the cello has 5 strings and no endpin, the violins have decorations on the fingerboards, and the whole ensemble is tuned a half-step down from the American standard A=440 Hz, which would be [looks it up] A=413.5 Hz.)

The dog groomer noticed a funky growth bleeding in between a couple of her two front toes, so somedog got to go to the vet. There turned out to be two of them, and the first had a bigger base than expected, so instead of just "skin glue" (medical-grade Superglue) she got a few sutures, and 10 days in a cone. It's her first cone since she was spayed maybe 5 years ago, and the pathos levels have been high.

She's not in pain, but in this time of trial, she gains even more succor from her true god, the heater vent. With a truly doggy grasp of cause and effect, she will sit in that spot multiple times per day until May or so, trying to get the heat to come on.

One thing that's been really striking is that without her customary cat-like grooming, she really does have a lot of crusty oozing around the eyes, that she takes care of herself; and without licking herself with her unstoppably disgusting breath, she smells better.

Except for one week over the summer when businesses boarded up their windows–the gun shop up the road decided to just leave theirs boarded–we've been free of the civil unrest of the larger cities nearby. You never know, though, and as I'm big on self-defense, I did some digging into projectile weapons.

(I have knives, and I know how to use them, but knife fighting is dangerous, and your only reasonable goal is to kill the other guy, and win or lose, you should expect to get cut up a bit. I definitely don't want to get cut up, and I definitely don't want to kill anybody, so I looked for other options.)

I don't really want a firearm in the house, even though less-lethal shotgun rounds are myriad: among other things, you need to practice with whatever device you get, which is a pain in the ass in normal times, and more so now.

From watching this veterinarian firearms aficionado testing less-lethal options with/on a friend, I learned about PepperBall, which is a paintball "marker" (the paintball industry wisely and studiously avoids saying "gun") where the balls are filled with OC (oleocapsaicin–pepper spray) instead of paint. In one of those unreasonable intersections of regulation that liberal states like California stumble through in the process of trying to do the right thing, chemical irritant projectiles are illegal outside of law enforcement. So guns are legal, but OC projectiles, which you might use to avoid killing people, are not.

(As an aside, California did a clever thing and instituted background checks for ammunition, mostly identical to the background checks required for guns. This means mail-order ammunition has to be sent to a licensed dealer, just like guns, instead of to your house. And many mail-order businesses around the country have just decided it's not worth the hassle, and don't ship to California any more. They also made it a felony to circumvent the system by shopping in our libertarian neighbor Nevada and bringing it back here. I assume catching people doing this is like shooting fish in a barrel for cops, just looking for California plates at gun shops and following them over the border. 

It's incredibly obnoxious if you're just a normal human who wants to buy ammunition, since this exacerbates the long-running ammunition shortage; but I appreciate the creativity, because the Second Amendment says nothing about a right to buy and own bullets...among other things, when the Second Amendment was written, people were still making their own musket balls at home.)

Given all those constraints, I finally found these guys, who take a paintball marker which is the platform for the Pepperball™ "launcher" (Pepperball™ also avoids "gun"), and work them up into something that is no doubt considerably more painful: the video shows a different model shooting through a cookie sheet. They're in Maine, with delightful accents to match. And I can practice in the Terrible Garage, for as long as it stands.

That's not even everything that happened this year. I don't know when March 2020 ends, but we all hope it's soon.

March 294th.

It's about time to pause my job search for a couple weeks, as the industry tends to just hibernate until the new year. New job openings will appear, as everyone finalizes their 2021 headcount. It'll be fine.

Last night the Shitgibbon and his pet lunatics sat down in the Oval Office and discussed how to stage a coup, by physical force, using the military and everything. Attorneys on Twitter are now (re-?)acquainting themselves with the dust-caked federal crime of "seditious conspiracy," which seems to mostly get pulled out for terrorists (even white ones) because, let's be honest: it exceeds the ambition of most criminals. Unlike every other conspiracy charge, seditious conspiracy doesn't require you to have gone as far as to start your overthrow of the government or its laws, so this seems to qualify. Good times!

This is the first winter I've had a violin nice enough to really feel affected by the weather. Higher-end violins are built more lightly, so they can resonate more, which makes them more sensitive and harder to play, and also makes them more likely to disintegrate when rented to students (who are mostly kids). I also haven't particularly liked my rental violins, so it's a treat to have one I really enjoy. It's still a stupid instrument.

My violin teacher, already working remotely, and with finances only somewhat better than you'd expect for a Millennial musician, went down to Puerto Vallarta a few weeks ago. My first question was "Are you coming back?" and the question is open, but he's certainly ripe for the expat life. Absent the ability of the Bay Area to put you in a room with the right people, you might as well go someplace else.

(There's a famous Scottish fiddler named Alasdair Fraser, who actually lives relatively nearby here, and whose son Galen is also a local musician. Alasdair wrote a pair of tunes I learned in simplified form, but my teacher described being out at a jam session, and "Galen's Arrival" came up, and Galen said, "That's me! I'm Galen!" and of course the song was written for his birth. But there are no jam sessions.)

We're staying home. We should walk the dog more. We're all healthy, for the moment, but the pandemic is looking grimmer than ever.

One nice feature of a new job will be that I'll have less time to read Twitter.

March 288th.

The fascist coup has failed, this time around. We get a short grace period before fighting the next one. The Democratic Party establishment has not been doing shining work since the election: Biden has already made some deeply ungood Cabinet choices, and Pelosi started working on strategies to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory even before the fascists started filing lawsuits. The pre-2004 Red Sox would have recognized fellow travelers.

This magnificent trio of Scandinavian women performed this at Fiddle Tunes last year, and I've been lusting after it ever since:

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It's written by Anna Lindblad (on the left there), inspired by the music and friendships she made at the Tønder Festival, but it's a Zydeco tune, like this one. It's on her album Med Vänner ("With Friends"), but the original is a complicated tapestry of many instruments, and I've wanted to pick apart this simpler version, but didn't have a good recording.

The job hunt is going well, I think. I'm grateful to not have to be in a rush. The downside is that I don't have a job, but I'm better situated for unemployment than at any other time in my life? It's worth it, to land in the right situation, and it will take a little time: one of my good friends said, "You're amazing at managing down and sideways, but not up. So if you're head of Engineering at a small company, that more or less takes managing up out of the equation." She's been in executive roles for a while now, and sure enough the one VP role I've been interviewing for so far is much more suited to me. So we'll see how that goes.

Eight months ago I would have said "Defund The Police" is a little extreme, but after seeing how thoroughly their only response to concerns about police violence is more violence, watching one after another police union president stand up and scream like an abusive alcoholic dad on a bender that we're all horrible people because we don't appreciate how much they do for us, hearing how they continue beating and killing citizens with impunity, well, sign me up.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">call me crazy but i&#39;m starting to think that it&#39;s bad that every city in america funds a small standing army of right-wing nutjobs that hates it</p>&mdash; Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li (@perdricof) <a href="https://twitter.com/perdricof/status/1322732916489756672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 1, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

The institution is rotten to the core, including liberal bastions like the Bay Area. Just dissolve every police department. I don't care if we have a replacement plan, although people do. We'll figure it out. It won't be worse than the status quo.

And that's our news, on this 288th day of March 2020. Good night, and good luck.

March 272th

We're all on the same calendar these days. 

Chris-Laptop :: ~ » march

Fri Mar 272 14:48:43 PST 2020

My job hunt continues. I'm learning a lot about interviewing for management roles, but haven't found the right match yet. I have good friends helping me out with the learned wisdom of their own careers. I'm watching slightly less TV, getting my head back into books. It's hard to get out of my head to connect with humans.

I can approximately measure my emotional bandwidth by how much I practice the violin. Centered, resilient, adaptable, able to cope with failure? Practice. Twitchy, frustrated, just want to hide under blankets until it's all over? The couch chains my soul.

(I can't play the violin while lounging. I know some people can, like Doug Kershaw, which boggles me every time I see it. Mark O'Connor, while an amazing musician, holds his violin the way the rest of us do.)

We're having a Thanksgiving so low-key as to be non-observant: Anna is recovering from eye surgery (it went fine, and her vision is already considerably better than mine), and we're not going anywhere, because it's still a pandemic and other people's behavior is terrifying. Even in California, where the liberal Democratic governor violated his own rules about gatherings, and now he and his family are dealing with possible COVID exposure. And San Mateo County is doing okayish. We have a large basket of privilege that we're exercising: extraordinarily good Internet connectivity actively monitored by a professional (me), jobs that let us stay home, solid finances, and the fact that most silly services like Instacart start here, so the coverage is good.

(Instacart has been one of the bizarre reversals this year, being one of those Silicon Valley things that targets young techies with the fawning idea that their time is far too valuable to be spent doing the few things Facebook or Google doesn't do for them, like grocery shopping or putting gas in the car–or, in the case of Soylent, eating. Now it's a very important tool for anyone eager to reduce their exposure to the outside world. Except it's part of the gig economy created by hollowing out of the middle class, so we're paying someone, who needs the money, to put their health on the line instead of ours. But would shopping ourselves change anything about the broader social situation we disagree with? There are no good answers, but in the meantime we tip heavily.)

I made bread again, using a recipe from Artisan Bread In 5 Minutes A Day, which I highly recommend. I was hoping to make something sandwich-friendly, but so far we've just been eating it by the slice.

I also made yogurt. We've been boycotting Trader Joe's, because they're aggressively anti-union, and failing to address constant COVID outbreaks on their staff. Unfortunately many of our favorite things are only available at Trader Joe's, including goat-milk yogurt, which our bodies are happier about, and has also been really good for the dog.

I didn't want to use the actual goat milk for it, but I do have powdered goat milk as part of the emergency rations, so I thought I'd give that a try. I ordered freeze-dried yogurt culture, but didn't want to wait, so I used some cow yogurt as an inoculant. I used our smaller Instant Pot: nearly all models have a Yogurt button, which doesn't pressurize, just keeps the milk at a constant temperature for the hours and hours needed.

It...mostly worked? The yogurt-ish end product is very liquid, but more noticeably, incredibly tart or tangy or sour. Maybe all three?

• Salt helps, but I dunno if we'll eat it.
• The dog doesn't care.
• It tastes like soup, because I didn't swap out the gasket for a clean one. Everyone always says that, but this is the first thing I've ever had absorb flavors. I guess I could have cleaned the Instant Pot itself more thoroughly.

And that's sort of it. We had mostly declined to participate in the reopening of everything, which turns out to have been wise, and now that everything is supposed to be shuttered again, we're...not changing anything, except to resume grocery delivery.

On we go, then.

less tentacles, more doom.

 I just finished Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, which is excellent, as is the TV series. (Ruff is a white man, and the series is done by a Black woman, and it shows.) The book ends with a delightful mini-interview.

What are your personal feelings about H. P. Lovecraft?

The story that best sums up Lovecraft for me is “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” It’s about a New England coastal town whose inhabitants have made an unholy alliance with aliens who live in the sea. A tourist comes to Innsmouth for the day, sees too much, and ends up running for his life.

All of Lovecraft’s worst traits are on display in the story: Besides the standard racist worldview, “Shadow” offers a thinly veiled allegory about the evils of miscegenation (the aliens are mating with the townspeople). But as a tale of steadily mounting dread, it works, and it’s one of the most effective portrayals of attempted lynching I’ve ever read. Lovecraft’s protagonist is white, but with just a few changes this could easily be the story of a black traveler caught in the wrong place after dark.

So for all his faults, Lovecraft was tapping into these universal themes of horror that resonate even if you’re not a white supremacist. I wish he’d been a better person, or blessed with better mentors. But as a storyteller, I can still learn from him.

There you go.