E tenebras, lux dormiens

I write too much. Is that even possible?

I've fixed some broken links that were causing people to travel to the lands of the 404.

I've also hidden with the comment tags some things from my earliest posts, so you won't see them at all. This is good for keeping from alienating new visitors (I hope).

I'm conflicted about all this, though. I simultaneously want to be famous, but want also to have some privacy. It is a paradox, I know. I want to be able to express the innermost part of myself to the world, but I don't want it to be brought up by people who read this blog and contact me about it. That doesn't mean, however, I don't want to talk about it. I do would like people to talk to me about what I've posted.

I suppose I would prefer a give/take relationship. Here I am revealing what is personal to me, but if some stranger simply show up and say, "I've read everything in your blog, and I know everything about you." Then, I feel violated. What do you know about me that I don't know about myself? After all, I very rarely read what I've posted, so I know that they've been posted when I'm at the "posting zone," a time when I feel the most desire to express something inside my head.

That means that I don't remember what I've written, even if I vaguely remember that I have posted something about it before.

If I have a blog that tells something about myself. I'd prefer that someone reading this also have his or her own blog that I can read, that reveals parts of themselves, whether personal or impersonal.

Otherwise, it is embarrassing.

This doesn't mean that I'll stop posting. As yet I do not know how to separate the private from the public, to post only links to other places, but nothing of myself. This means that in this journal, I'll have little bits of everything, some elements of a true blog (with links and all), and a simple journal for the publishing of my mind.

I suppose I should carry on.

The greatest problem is that I have not given the link to this site, https://luminus529.tripod.com/weblog, to any of my friends or family. As such, I receive no validations that my opinions are okay, no support that my feelings are legitimate, no words that make me feel a little less alone.

I am guessing that I don't feel comfortable letting people know that I keep a blog because I have never, under any circumstances, revealed myself to other people. I have kept myself in silence for so long that my hands and mouth can barely speak before an audience without croaking, without hurrying, without the sweet rhythms that drive charismatic oration.

I am still naive and arrogant, prideful and shy. I am an introspective introvert. I believe I think things to oblivion.

I still remember that moment when an English teacher said to another student who was dressed in Goth, "Do you feel like you're part of the existentialist belief?" I wished, and still wish, sincerely to have heard what she said in response to.

I believe that I have been in the existentialist category. I don't know, I haven't spoken with any existentialist, nor any other person who study philosophy, to see if my ideas follow the thoughts of existentialism.

I wish, also, that I could have perked up and raised my hand and say, "I am one of the existentialist/absurdist that believe in the meaninglessness of the world."

If I had, if I had interpreters, if I knew ASL, if, if, if, I would have been a smarter, more well-rounded person, fully enjoying the multi-splendored life. I wished then that I had the bravery to say things I would like to say, and I wish now that I could say the things I want to say.

This is my letter to the future that never lets me know.

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From www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish, a funny commencement speech from Jon Stewart.

Today is the day that we reminisce, mourn and honor the veterans of all the wars that they have served. War is indeed the terrible crucible that binds them. I stand in admiration at the bonds of friendship and loyalty that only they in the face of death could find. Few other groups of people can so claim such experiences as to assuage their buoyant adolescence as these veterans and to say, together as they might be, "We fought for the liberty; we fought for the justice; we fought for the inherent rights that we believed in, and incorporating them in our minds, we freed the world from the bondage of traditions, of old-school thoughts, of old beliefs, to find a new and sturdy foundations that we have brought forth to establish a way to suppress all the failings of humanity, and bring out all that which we admire of human virtues and of human actions, such as that of kindness, compassion, mercy, love, and acceptance. We may not be much different from the animals, save that we can think of death, life, love, save that we can write and save our messages as capsules for the time to come, but by God, we shall not be enslaved in fear, in the trappings that wrongful thinking perpetuates. We shall not be bound by race, by class, by intelligence, by thoughtless grouping that seeks to prove thoughtless supremacy, and using that to dissolve heretofore the rights we have worked so hard to gain, for ourselves and for others that come after us."

I can only do but to spend moments in silence, for those who to us eternal silence give. Their mouths speak nothing. Their hands move nothing. Their ears receive nothing. Their eyes see nothing.

So I mourn, and put the American flag out on the metal stand by the porch, and let these soldiers do ourselves the honor that we can do little honor to them, but pray in the diminutive sense, that they are accorded the rightful living in the hall of dignity, of valor, and of strength--that we may say to them, "Though our thanks are but breath and voice, though our signs are but handful movements, we owe to you the deepest gratitude and we owe to ourselves such virile passions the things for which you died that we will forget them none, that these memories will never fade."

I watched The Hours yesterday, a movie that is based on the book by Michael Cunningham.

It was a marvelous movie. What fully surprised me was that all the women were lesbians! It's great to see same-sex kiss not too overdone.

My mom watched it first, two nights ago. When I was watching it last night, she then proclaimed, "All the women are gay."

I said, "I know, I read something about it earlier." It's true that I heard about it, but I didn't realize it was going to be as extensively covered as this.

Also, I got the Virginia Woolf reference.

abc7news.com: Bay Area Couple Swindled By Nigerian Email Scam

The deaf couple was scammed by a close deaf friend, who believed in the aforementioned scam.

Blogged in Sept. 26, 2003, but hilarious now that I just found out about it: Luigi knows ASL, to which Nintendo replied. I learned about it through Daveynin's thing, his weblog.

It's awesome to see so many Deaf bloggers!

[Edited: Daveynin.]

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MTV Launches Gay TV Network from gamers experimentations's LOGO, the posted topic.

I have mixed feeling about this . . . as usual. Not only that, I don't have cable at home. Ha ha ahh.

Shirt, volunteer, and application are made by the same sign. This is probably the best example that I can find that has less needs for facial expression than other signs like miss/disappoint. Shirt needs the letter 't' to make sense, but volunteer needs a pronoun to explain who is volunteering, or the sign for 'form' to explain anything involving applying for school, work, etc. Sure, you can mouth the English word to clarify the meaning, which I've seen some Deaf people do to avoid fingerspelling the entire word.

I think overly mouthing a word intentionally is a mistake, used only for the benefits of hearing people. I've noticed, for example, how English-speaking people use the word "right" for so many meanings: the right to live, the act of turning right, and state of being right, as well as the rite of passage and the common punning of write.

They're all different signs, and in Spanish and other languages, essentially different words! Translated differently! You can't use the sign for "right" for the different meaning of a different "right."

Now, when you attempt to sign that sentence, the pun is lost in translation. It doesn't mean that ASL doesn't have pun, it's just different. T-ah!

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This is the 24th of May. The day
That I was born is coming soon, I am
Resigned, excited, troubled. Pushed to learn
That Time has little care for me. I hold
My hands, and see the wrinkles Time has made
For me, to Time's own glory. Line to line,
I write, halting and grasping, so, that each
Ending cannot pause but flow, gasping for
Breath.

That three pounds could hold
Secrets of self-awareness,
I poked with my toe.

If, let's say, I want to create an animating GIF for an avatar, I would really like to know how to make it.

First, I want to make GIF from pictures through the webcam, but the pics are taken in JPEG, so what should I do?

Complicated instructions here, a sample of the author's thinking:
1. Take pictures from webcam at public computer.
2. Send pictures through email.
3. Use GIMP to convert to GIF.
4. Make animation.

One problem: I have no idea how to use GIMP. ^_^

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Wko djifh, ex. #1: The Upper Left Corner: If A hates B's cooking, and B loves C's lasagna, and A is allergic to cheese, what wine should they serve?

{Warning! Bad poetry ahoy!}

Now that you are dead, and though unreal
The basis of your time was your self.
The ring turns, its never ending wheel

Flows enjambment, who for yourself
Gives uneven leave to say, and fire in hand
To one watcher's soul, that itself

Could a tremulous contradiction stand.
Here, now, you are dead, thy soul, bereft,
To go where that higher plane of it demand.

And what of this empty thing that is left?
Should it decay, itself recycled then to feed
The other living things that behind is cleft

Between those that great sunlight need
And those that feed on dead and living things?
What then, those still alive shall still fade.

Cycle old, itself unending, simply brings
The interface of empire new but real,
Dark, light, old, new, circle, like little rings.

{Thanks for reading! You've really suffered, haven't you?}

[updated 2004 05 25, mispelling of terza rima, previously terzet rima.]

I have too many things to do in the next week, so bear with me that I don't publish as often.

English: Write double-entry, write essay.
Political Science: Create outline and thesis.
Sell t-shirts.
Study Biology.
Study for Biology LAB, which I have to do a procedure for.

Would that I had more time!

[update: 5/19/04 I really should avoid cursing.]

The weather's changed again. Just yesterday, it was warm and pleasant, then today, it was cool and breezy and cloudy. Not necessarily bad, it's a change.

I'll have to figure out what kinds of fairy tale story I'm going to do for my ASL class. I really like Rumpelstiltskin, but there's also Snow White.

I'm going to try "The Three Feathers."

Oh, my God! Oh, my G-d! I'm squealing with delight! I just got a laptop for my birthday, which is about two weeks away! I'm squealing!

Ten times happy me! (temporarily.) Let me wait until the euphoria wears off . . . there, done!

Somebody asked me a funny question yesterday, before the IceWorm show. What does Deaf culture means to you?

I was at a loss to answer. First of all, I'm not really part of Deaf culture. Secondly, my experience as someone who grew up through the oralist method may contribute to the vitality of Deaf culture, but does nothing to make me comprehend its meaning.

Thirdly, the question is, in retrospect, stupid. That person who asked me said that her teacher told her to write a paper about interviewing deaf people and asking what it means to them.

After the IceWorm show, a guy came and joined us in our post-performance chatting. She asked the question again, which caused him to reply with a clever rejoinder, "What does hearing culture means to you?"

Precisely the point. When people say that their Chinese culture is important, or that their gay culture is important, among other things, it is difficult to say what you mean unless you make it concrete with a set of standards by which you can define a culture.

So the question should have been rephrased differently. I'm not saying that cultures shouldn't mean something, because to some people, they do. Deaf culture must obviously means something to that teacher who assigned the paper.

As for my answer to that question, I'm stuck saying, "No, it has little meaning to me beyond what I've read in books and the people I've met, and the performances I've watched. When I envision a Deaf world, I see a little house full of people who are signing to each other, the picture is not crystallized beyond that. I confess that I am still far more comfortable in the hearing world than the Deaf because I grew up in that world. Whether or not I missed out on a lot of things has no bearing on my perspective because I have not yet experienced them."

When I read about how people who grew up in oralist, mainstreamed school and finally find themselves in the world where they could see themselves on an equal level with their peers, they talked of the greatest gratitude for the experience of having the barriers toward connecting with another human being just melt away.

Although I've experienced good joy, I am still wallowed up in self doubt, uncertainty and fear that I cannot wholly join the Deaf community because of something that I feel they are missing that I truly love: music, conversational joy, freedom of the Internet, and middle-class living.

Although I was born with a hearing loss, I grew up watching the Sounds of Music and reading the captioning on the screen, and singing (to the hearing displeasure of my mom) to the words on the screen.

Conversational joy is difficult to define because I've not yet experienced it and have a idealized belief of what it is. Conversational joy is the capacity to talk politics, to be open about sex, to tell someone how cute 'ey is without "feeling weird inside my stomach." The weird feeling of which is, simply, in-'hi-bi-tion.

So far now, I've found few people who have produced a website or a forum for general discussion. There are two answers: Deaf people are full poor and few could afford or see the reason to afford the Internet; and, Deaf people are not necessarily comfortable with the English language as I am.

Some of you know that from the very beginning I have loved Shakespeare, and works that talk about Shakespeare, i.e. whether he was good or bad, whether he actually wrote the works that he's credited with. (The very beginning meaning starting in 5th grade.) I believe that it was from him and his extraordinary language that I acquired a certain degree of fluency in English, that has caused me to oscillate between speaking common-sense language, and speaking a language so wordy that even I don't know what I'm talking about. There's also Emily Dickinson, whose works I enjoy.

Codicils and endless sub-clauses menace me as do they menace the heralded Democratic candidate of 2004. Sometimes I regard a sentence that I write with much trepidation at the thought of it being published because I see something in it that tells the world, "This is I. This is me. This is who I am. This is how I write, the mish-mash of the dozens of authors (Shakespeare, Dickinson, J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkiens, Harold Bloom, etc.) that course through my veins. Their metaphors, their clauses, their languages are integrated into my own. It is because I do not read works of a less high-minded nature and by a less high-minded authors that I write sentences so elevated to such a point that all of them seem 'to shit marbles.'" Now I swing to a certain depravity.

Maybe it's because of my vocabulary. After reading that Shakespeare has a vocabular of 20,000 words or more, I seem compelled in my competitive desire to try to match him word for word, and also to compose words and phrases together that would make the most euphonic melody. I just did it. I used "compelled" and then used "competitive" to echo it. The sounds must seem the echo to the sense.

Middle-class living is just a way of saying that Deaf people aren't necessarily rich. Those that are, like my ASL professor, were just lucky to have written a gloriously good book that sells well and is consumed daily by thousands of students learning ASL for the first time.

Maybe I've set my expectations too high. And I've digressed from my original topic. What does being hearing mean to you? For those that have never seen a deaf person, it must seem like a quaint question to ask. I have the fortune of seeing both, and neither currently offers much hope for the future of humanity.

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CBS News | Crossing A Historic Threshhold | May 16, 2004?14:15:56

I've been posting so many things deaf-related that I feel it is time to change the subject a little.

There are three topics (that I can think of) involving my life: academics, relationship, and friendship.

There are many topics that isn't about me, but about the world, but after some wrangling of FUD, I've decided that marriage between two persons should be wholly legal. I've come in total favoring of that. It's just another step in the amorphous direction that we must go, for it represents the concerns and beliefs of our time.

I won't label it in such a way as to denigrate its meaning.

I just watched a performance by IceWorm, called the "Class (Clown) Act." The performance was very funny, though I wouldn't say hilarious, just very humorous. There were some elements about the differences between Deaf culture and hearing culture, but nicely, it wasn't overbearing, but fit the theme of the show very well. Although there were some things I've seen before, over and over again, I felt little need to gag.

I'm talking about how some performances can so over-emphasize the difference between Deaf and hearing worlds that I just can't stand it because they make it seem like some inexorable gap that nothing can overcome.

What about some similarities? All parents love their children (though some show it, some don't, and others are conditional). In every person is there a great desire to communicate, to talk about the day's events, to relax.

Anyway, what did suck about this performance was when Keith Wann, the CODA actor, talked to the audience, but didn't sign what he said. It seemed that the performance was geared more toward hearing people than deaf.

Other than that, the Class (Clown) Act fulfilled its theme of portraying hearing and deaf school from kindergarten to high school in a hilarious way. I could catch most of the allusions that they made. One was a spoof from "Carrie" where someone poured pig's blood on a girl, and that girl had incredible power of telekinesis, which she used to kill everybody in her path.

Overall, the IceWorm cast made me laugh so hard that I highly enjoy it and want to see it again. I missed some parts, especially the fingerspelling and some jokes that I didn't get, but most of the time I had the delicious sensation where I got the jokes before the hearing people did. I knew because I heard laughter after I already laughed. I knew it meant that the hearing people were waiting for the voice interpreter to tell the punchline.

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I am really disappointed that there are colleges that don't accept ASL as a language that fulfills the graduation requirement. The problem is that there will likely be a net proportion of students who don't take ASL in community college or in high school because they learned that the language that they take will not count.

I have to give several examples that interest me about ASL, which along with some elements of Chinese, Spanish, and English, will serve to illuminate sign language structure as a whole.

I am not a linguistic major, so I don't declare myself as qualified for analyzing any language. Also, linguist classes do not seem to be offered at my university. Actually, I can find some classes that teach phonetics, semantics, and other basic features of languages, but these classes are not part of a linguistics major, which is understandably not offered. Instead, these classes are subsumed under the major of either Anthropology, Speech Pathology and Audiology, and English.

I have to explain, to give a context, the basis of the extraordinary power of ASL for expression. Although, I consider myself just a student of ASL, who has not grown up in the language to be qualified to analyze it, I will present examples that I believe will support my cases. I will stand to be corrected if I am wrong.

This article was inspired by an LYD post. I will try to find a link to that post, but in summary, a girl had a tattoo on her back that said vegetable. It was supposed to mean "love," but it was not the character that Ernie was used to seeing. He suggested that the tattoo was in simplified Chinese, but a comment post from a sage explained the composite radicals of the Chinese character for love is different from the radicals for vegetable. (You may look for that comment by inputting "Sire" in your FIND dialog box.

The comment also explained that many Chinese words/characters have "weird" meanings when they are used by themselves. My mother has explained a lot about the two Chinese words that together means "crisis." I don't know how to put a Chinese character on the monitor (remind me to find out). Anyway, the Chinese words for "crisis" are two combining words that mean "danger" and "opportunity."

Danger opportunity. How fascinating that these words could combine to mean crisis. When I talked to my mom about it, she said that that was not the whole story. The word for danger does not really mean danger or dangerous as in English. It simply meant, if stood by itself, "to the point of danger." It is like a bookcase that is about to fall on you, but will not fall. The English idea of danger is that you will get hurt, but Chinese idea for that word is simply that it has the potential to be dangerous, but there is essentially no caution. You cannot, for example, use that one word to warn people of volatile chemical, of explosive mine, etc. To warn people, there must be another character that completes the meaning, clarify, crystallize it into "Caution! Falling Rocks"

The Chinese word for opportunity, just as well, does not quite mean opportunity because that word can be used, when part of a compound word, to mean fate, fortune, destiny, luck, potential, opportunity, etc. It is only when this character is placed next to the character for danger that the meaning is crystallized into crisis, which in turn, influences the meaning of the characters that are part of it.

Now, back to ASL. Although, ASL does not have such similar interlay of signs that together form different meanings, it does have a special syntax that changes meaning. The first example is the sign for miss/disappointed. This sign is made by pointing the index finger of the dominant hand at the center of the chin and pressing on the chin once.

If you choose to sign "I miss/disappointed," then it means "I am disappointed." Remember that ASL does not employ the usage of verbs for state of being, "to be." Although the signs for to be exist, they are not used. They may, however, be fingerspelled when necessary.

If you, however, choose to add an object that is receiving that sign for miss/disappointed, then the meaning changes, "I miss you."

This underlies a problem. How do you say, "I am disappointed in you"?

You can try to use the sign for "in," made by putting flattened "O" into a flattened "C." This could be glossed as "I disappointed in you."

But that's not American Sign Language. Rather, that is Signed English.

So how would you say "I am disappointed in you"?

You cannot.

ASL structure forbids it.

It is as wrong as saying in Spanish, "Doy a Mario el coche." It is missing "Le." You cannot skip the usage of le in Spanish, even if it seems redudant because that's part of the language. "Le doy a Mario el coche."

That does not mean, however, that there is no way to say "I am disappointed in you." There is a way to convey that meaning, even if the structure is decidedly un-English.

The structure would be glossed as, "I disappointed, You fail test." "I'm disappointed in you for failing the test."

What does it mean, then, that ASL does not allow certain sentence structure to exist? Absolutely nothing, unfortunately. There are people who sign in manually-coded English. There are people who sign ASL.

It still means something though, because ASL has its own way of communicating that, viewed from an English-speaking perspective, seems creative, but is actually quite normal in obeying its rules.

When you observe Chinese, you recognize that similarly to ASL, it has no past or future tense (English does not have a future tense, it needs will, i.e. will do, will go, to substitute). How would you convey future tense? Exactly, you use "tomorrow" or "yesterday" for such functions. Is it a limitation that conjugations don't exist? Apparently not, because languages can thrive without them.

I was also inspired to write this post from the book that explained the coinage of new words in English. Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success. It explained how words like hot dog, moonlighting, scofflaw, couch potato, big bang, O.K., brunch make it into the English language, while linner (cross between lunch and dinner), millennium bug (so 2000), jabberwocky simply are forgotten and never used.

One myth that the book debunked was that new words are coined to fill in missing gaps in the language.

It took me back to looking at English itself and how no matter what people do to try to add new words to the language, it fails miserably. My usage of "'ey" for example to substitute for he and she will never see the light of day beyond the archives in which it is written. The usage of the word chad to describe paper ballot has already been dropped from the national memory. The German "wunderkind" (wonderchild, an exceptionally bright child) has not become any more common as a substitution for saying that a child is extremely intelligent. Nor is it likely that metrosexual (straight guys fashionably dressed), Iraqnophobia (utter pretrification of Iraq), or second-hand speech (overheard cellphone conversation) will succeed, despite "gaps" they could fulfill or how clever they sound.

So therefore, ASL should be regarded as a language despite the seemingly perceived "gaps" that people see, only because they didn't grow up using ASL.

The Sapir-Whorf Theory is very applicable to this phenomenon. Language dictates our thought process. Tools shape the process. "To a person with only a hammer, every problem is a nail." Without exposure to outside cultures, we cannot think outside the box. Google Search on Sapir Whorf

Rounding out my rants, it is essentially unfair that colleges and universities don't accept ASL as a fulfillment of the foreign language requirement. They are essentially trapped inside their box, unable to open up their minds to new things.

That's my two cents. What's yours?

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BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Chechen president killed by bomb

Since my group partners and I are covering the Checheno-Russia conflict, it is a bittersweet happiness that the assassination occurred. It's horrible that so many people died, but it's nice to have something I can put on my paper.

There are many different spellings for Chechnya, which I've found in English and Spanish: Chechnya, Chechenia, Chechenya, Chechnia, Chechen, Checheno, etc.

Also, the pronunciation of "ch" in Chechnya is the same as "church," which is fortunate for being regular. I'd have thought it would be like "chek'-nia," or even "kek'-nia," but it's really "chech'-nia."

chiasmus.com

Word plays in which a a phrase might have two words reverse itself.

Examples:

"To comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." --motto of American journalism
"One for all and all for one we gage." --Shakespeare

Media Matters for America

A way to find out a position of one group of media views itself.

I have been given an unprecedented choice that has uplifted me from my latent depression, yet I still am apprehensive, without forms or goals in my life.

I have grown up a little more, but I am still childish, with strong lack of wisdom, strong lack of the ability to make rational decision.

As the TIME magazine article explained, the frontal lobe of my brain, one involved in future planning and decision making, is not well developed until I'm 25 years old.

The New York Times > Science > U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences

Sad.

The dominance in the sciences have been traveling from Greece to Roman, then to the Middle East, and then China, before returning to Russia, then France, then Germany, then United Kingdom, before finally the United States picked up the slack after the Cold War.

Not that it wanted to. I mean, my cynicism aside, Americans have always been behind in the sciences. What they're good at, of course, is the entrepreneurial spritis. When you think about it, the internal combustion engine wasn't invented in the United States, but Henry Ford was the one man who made good measure of it and mass produced it. Now it is the lifeblood of the American Spirit, it symbolizes mobility, restlessness, the love of national forgetfulness (did anybody get that reference?).

For all that Asia or Europe have invented, Americans are usually the one who see the potentials in it.

The unfortunate thing would be if all the entreprenurial spirit was jettisoned out into foreign countries, where they're more ruthless with greed than we are.

feeling: headache on the left-rear of my head, above my left eye, and to the rear of my left temple.

I'm unable to study because this aching is not letting me think clearly. Still, I should rest, let my body's defense work its course.

a cabinet: You open it up and find all the things that you use to keep food on to be eaten: plates, cups, bowls.

a door: You can open it or close it. And when you open it, you can choose to go through or just look around. But it's always there.

an old grandfather: He is a little lonely, a bit of a curmudgeon that sometimes you feel you have to humor.

a bird: it chirps in the morning, disappears in wintertime, and comes back with many newborns in the spring.

a flower: it blossoms, then wilts.

a car: you ride it in to get anywhere, and with patience it can take you there, but carefully, or you will crash.

a vacuum cleaner: it sucks up the dirt, the hair, the unsavory things so that you have a cleaner house.

a star: it always comes out at night, and it is always there, when you look up to see it, but when you live in the hurly-burly, with all the artificial light blocking it out, you can forget about it.

a desk: you write on it, do all the deskly things with it, then throw it away in exchange for a new one.

a checker board: you leap one marble over the other, but all the marbles must come home together.

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