Lucy: I’m looking for my friends, there should be 3 of them here already.

Person at the counter: Are your friends Nate, Matt, and Mark?

Lucy: No, they’re Jarrod, Chris, and Sue.

Person at the counter: Oh, ok, Sue. I see here that there is a group with “Sue Me,” “Quit Your Job,” and “Rainbow Warrior.” That’s probably you.

Student: It’s amazing that the theory of spontaneous generation was disproven in only the last 150 years. That’s such a short time ago that people still believed inanimate matter could generate life. It must have caused all sorts of outcry – from spheres of science to religion to philosophy.

Teacher: (blank stare). Louis Pasteur. 1859. Meat broth. That’s what you need to know.

Here’s what the test looks like:

1. What is the theory of spontaneous generation?

2. What experiment in 1859 definitively disproved this theory? Who conducted the experiment?

Here are the kind of questions that I would like to have thought about growing up, instead:

Write an example of how the way of seeing the world is different between two people — one who lives just before and one who lives just after the theory of spontaneous generation is disproven. (10 pts: Demonstration of knowledge of what the theory is +3; Demonstration of knowledge of wider historical context during this period +2; Non-prosaic, well-narrated, and focused example +3 — if you don’t know what ‘prosaic’ means look it up; Using an actual historical figure from the period as one of the characters in your example, with relevant details indicating your knowledge of the person +2)

Bonus. Do you think this was Louis Pasteur’s most impressive work? His most important? Why or why not? (4 pts: Skillful use of details to indicate you understand what was hard or innovative — scientifically, politically, or otherwise — about several of Pasteur’s experiments +2; Making a compelling case +2)

Which classroom of students would emerge more edified, creative, stimulated, thoughtful, and making better observations about the world they live in?

The culture of what is promoted as important for students to achieve would have to change before questions of the latter sort could be effectively asked, but it’s nice to wish for.

Sam:  Chicken Fajita Burito with rice cheese, sour cream and corn salsa
me:  k

Cece: veggie bowl with the fajita veggie stuff, with tomato and corn salsa.. no cream or cheese, just lettuce and guac
me: k

adam: burrito: carnitas +extra rice +pinto beans +red hot salsa +cheese +sour cream +lettuce
me: k

sherry: burrito bowl steak no beans salsa: corn and mild
And no sour cream, sorry!
me: k

Andrew: !!! chicken burrito with mild salsa pleeeeeease !!!
me: ok, this isn’t helpful
please come to the conference room?

I’d like to see a radio station that eliminates technical arguments (the refutation to ‘wearing the burqa causes vitamin D deficiency’ is that the burqa also decreases the rate of skin cancer … ??!!! Why is this an important part of the conversation? Is this relevant to the most fundamental reasons people are compelled or not to wear one, or implement a ban?) and has their speakers structure debates in the following way:

1) State the reasons you believe that the current cultural norms have developed, and offer persuasive historical evidence that the causes you’re stating were major contributing factors. (Ex. Strict dress codes were developed as a way for societies in X geography to reduce climbing birth rates.)

2) State the way you believe society today should evolve, and the reasons why.

3) State the group of people today who agree with your values, and evidence (such as numbers) of their support. I.e., prove that you’re talking about a cultural paradigm struggle or shift (interesting to me) and not about your personal values and calculus (not interesting to me). In particular, eliminate discussion of weighing the relative morality of customs and cultures as an absolute concept of (usually your) human intuition.

At the FIRST robotics conference and it is awesome. The stadium came to a full stop when they blasted YMCA and 600 high school students started going nuts. I have decided that I am going to listen to more disco music from the 70s and 80s.

A coworker commented recently that he wasn’t sure whether biographies were a good thing. Some days I feel that all I want to do is understand how others see the world and live in it. I want a way to contextualize my independence, and, in fact, to be told that I am not an outlier.

A while ago, an old friend wrote to me that he was studying theories of aesthetics. I felt afraid that such a thing existed, the way I feel just before reading the last paragraph – the coup de grace – of a pop psychology article that has thus far admirably described my most destructive traits. Apparently, there is an academic field that has studied the way that others see the world and turned it into a science. Now the little signposts and scribbles I have created to anchor myself in my self-constructed theory of others seem flimsy.

That I want to discover but I rarely want to be shown is my inherent weakness. It takes so much to keep moving, to take crushing disappointments and elated highs and remain emotionally able to answer life’s daily questions about food and work and money and why the elevator isn’t working. It is obliterating, in a way, to then consume some fucker’s arm’s length monologue about what comes next, and how the future may unravel for those like myself if only we keep certain of life’s lessons in mind. I take this education in small doses. I read advice that others forward to me and agree that it’s good for me to be aware, that so-and-so said thus-and-such.

And yet, the pervasive theme seems to be about the choices you make, largely decoupled from the hand that you’re dealt. I am not sure if this implied and assumed freedom is part of a middle-class mentality, or cultural, or generational. But it is so much the context that colors the choices. It is context that gives the choices so much weight. To look for overarching meaning in choices is a non sequitur.

Context and sentimentality. They make a cup of chai weigh like a cup of gold, and consummate words as light as the integrity within them.

Waited a half hour to be let into the venue, and another half hour to use the bathroom. The crowd there did not look like the type that would humor somebody taking pictures for their blog. I also didn’t want to embarrass my friends, who seemed to know a lot of the people. I did get a picture of the bathroom (above).

Punk rock, or No Bunny, or some combination of the two has an ardent following. It was interesting to see that this genre of music that I care nothing about attracts such a large number of people to the shows that the band had to switch venues at the last minute to accommodate the crowd. No Bunny wore a black leather thong, a wig, and a mask onstage and not much else. (I was not appropriately dressed for this event.) He was backed up by The Yolks. They were headlining and didn’t start playing until around 12:30. At the start of the set, someone threw a can onstage and hit one of the The Yolks’ guitarists in the head. He was knocked down and did the rest of the show with a nasty goose egg on his forehead. Someone tried to pickpocket me and I had to give her the evil eye (and the “menacing face”). Pushed and pulled in the crowd, we all danced like crazy and left with beer spattered all over our clothes and hair. It was sweet catharsis following a long day.

After the show, I spotted No Bunny leaving the venue — a guy in a thong holding a guitar in the frigid night, walking around Logan Square.

I don’t particularly care for punk rock music, live or otherwise, but the show was a fun and worthwhile novelty.

Calvin: Send him a message proclaiming that there’s snow this weekend.

Me: Why’s that?

Calvin: Then you can ask him if there’s also going to be dinner this weekend.

Pretty cute, but I’m just not slick enough to pull that one off. Here’s how I probably would have played it:

Me: It’s snowing.

Him: Yeah?

Me: Is it also … hmm, wait. That’s not right. Shoot, can we do that over?

Waiting on my keyboard to arrive on Monday, and in the meanwhile was in the mood for piano bar hopping. Saw Damian Williams at Zebra Lounge. Apparently, most nights everybody wants to hear Piano Man and Brown-Eyed Girl, which must suck after a while for a guy playing six nights a week. He plays original stuff at Underground Wonder Bar on Sunday nights, and says he is followed by the best reggae band in Chicago. Damian @ Zebra Lounge hit the spot, but I ended up only briefly stopping into Underground Wonder Bar. The stage setup was great but the band wasn’t my taste.

I usually enjoy the commute, particularly watching the cars in the fast lane hurtle toward the city while waiting for the Garfield train, but having stayed up the previous night to complete a project, the trip back was pretty painful.

But still worth the effort. Before the invention of portable music devices, the culture of music was such that music was meant to be enjoyed in a moment. At live performances, most of  the audience were hearing the songs for the first time. Orchestra enthusiasts in the 18th century would be terrible at “name that Mozart piece” compared to your average classically-trained 8-year-old. We are becoming ever more musically literate, and with that literacy comes the price of reflection.

A couple years ago I read a modern philosopher, Adorno, who claimed that the way we listen to and appreciate music has changed, and that as a society we have mostly lost the capacity to truly enjoy music we hear for the first time. We have weakened that muscle that responds to the immediacy of participating in creative expression. It must be sad for the band when cover songs receive some of the loudest cheers and whistles, in contrast to new songs they reveal for the first time, which are met with lukewarm, uncertain applause. The literate audience wants and expects to hear what they already know. But live music, by its nature, is listened to for the first time, and that variability and spontaneously nuanced creation is (or should be) the enthralling piece of it, even if some of the songs are known. The Adorno essay lends itself to oft-repeated extrapolated theories about the increasing popularity of facile music and the usual criticisms that have now trickled down to music snobs everywhere, but at the time it was groundbreaking.

Being able to listen to favorite songs, perfected by the artist in the recording studio, is a mixed blessing. Indisputably, some bands sound much better on the recording than live, but another mixed blessing is repeatedly hearing what the song is “supposed to sound like”. The latter usually feels like more of a curse than a blessing.

The following only works in Firefox:

• Get the Greasemonkey addon. (requires browser restart)
• Then get the Loopy script. (does not require browser restart)

A “Loop” button now appears on the bottom right-hand corner of YouTube.com videos.